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Read the room: The science of experiencing spaces and places

Penn Today spoke with neurologist Anjan Chatterjee of the Perelman School of Medicine about his research investigating the perception, emotion, and meaning of spaces.

Oct 22 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • penntoday.upenn.edu

Mixing Politics and Perceptions of AI and Data Centers: Results from the Gardner Food & Agricultural Policy Survey

With an eye towards the rapidly approaching 2026 midterm elections, this article further reviews survey results from the Gardner Food and Agricultural Policy Survey, but through the lens of political…

Oct 21 • 12:05 PM EDT • Politics • farmdocdaily.illinois.edu

Jay Z's past political statements won't help perception of NFL politicizing Super Bowl halftime

Jay Z reportedly chose himself to perform the 2027 Super Bowl halftime show, but his extensive political history could deepen a troubling viewership trend.

Oct 20 • 5:03 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Perceptions of science and scientists shape partisan views on common vaccines

How Americans view science and scientists is strongly associated with whether they think vaccines are safe and effective - and helps explain partisan differences in perceptions of some vaccines, according to a new study led by a team from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania.

Oct 20 • 9:30 AM EDT • Science • news-medical.net

A note to readers: Science, accountability and elections

Dear readers, As early voting begins, I wanted to share some news — and why it connects to the decisions we make at the ballot box. I’ve been selected for the inaugural cohort of the South Atlantic Climate Journalism Hub mentorship program, hosted by Covering Climate Now. I’m excited to join this group, learn from scientists and fellow journalists, and expand my science reporting. Science directly ties to governance. Local officials make decisions about where development goes, how infrastructure is maintained, what emergency preparations receive funding, and how communities rebuild after disasters. Understanding the evidence behind those decisions helps us evaluate whether our government is serving us well. Here in western North Carolina, those connections are all around us, in Lake Lure and beyond. Flood maps inform decisions about property and development. Engineering assessments help identify risks at dams and bridges. Rainfall forecasts guide emergency preparations. Geological information helps explain landslide hazards. Water testing gives communities information they need to assess conditions. Meteorologists’ knowledge and public perception of weather events shape public safety. Each involves scientific or technical knowledge. Each also raises questions about public responsibility: What did officials know? How did they use that information? What did they tell the public? What did taxpayers receive for their money? A study can identify a problem. Elected officials still have to decide what to do about it, how to pay for it, and how to explain their choices. Reporting should examine both the evidence and the response. That is where I want to strengthen my work. My reporting on Helene recovery, infrastructure, flooding, public safety, and public spending has repeatedly brought me to questions that require scientific expertise alongside public records. This mentorship may help me better understand the research, ask more precise questions, and explain the answers clearly. I also bring the perspective of someone living with these concerns. I live downstream of Lake Lure Dam, and landslides affected my property during Helene. Those experiences bring urgency to my questions. Careful reporting helps establish the answers. Readers deserve to know what the evidence shows, where uncertainty remains, and whether officials accurately describe the information guiding their decisions. You also deserve scrutiny of proposed solutions: what they cost, what they are expected to accomplish, and what risks remain. Access to that information matters. As a mostly deaf journalist who relies on written communication, I will continue pressing for written public warnings, records, and explanations that people can read and use in real time. As you consider the candidates seeking your vote, consider how they approach evidence, preparedness, and transparency. Do they support local journalism, even when it’s not parroting a press release? Do they explain weather events clearly in plain English and explain their decisions after them? Make supporting records available? Acknowledge uncertainty? Follow through when a report identifies a risk? Those are practical questions about governing. Thank you for supporting Cops & Congress and the work that makes these questions part of the public conversation. I’m grateful to David Dickson and the CC Now team for this opportunity, and I look forward to bringing what I learn back to you. Annie DanceEditor & Publisher, Cops & Congress — Learn more about this newsletter, ethics policy, how you can help shape this work, and support it. Follow on X and Facebook. Send constructive criticism, fan mail, and tips with public documents for future stories: CopsandCongress@gmail.com ICYMI: View the Cops & Congress archive — Annie Dance is the publisher of Cops & Congress, a newsletter that analyzes what happens when crime, courts, disaster, democracy, and small-town policies collide. Views expressed here are covered by the First Amendment. Dance has a Bachelor of Arts from Manhattan University in Communication with a focus in Journalism and Government. She has been a journalist for over 20 years. Share Upgrade now or give a gift subscription

Oct 20 • 6:56 AM EDT • Science • anniedance.substack.com

Oxford residents to vote on cannabis business cap Nov. 3

A number of Oxford residents are fed up with the perception that Main Street/Route 26 has become a cannabis corridor not reflective of the community's values.

Oct 18 • 4:00 AM EDT • Business • sunjournal.com

Colts Slide in Power Rankings After Another AFC Loss

Perception of the Indianapolis Colts is waning as they came up short in another AFC matchup.

Oct 16 • 6:26 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Americans think it takes $28,000 to start a business. Owners say it's less than half that.

Intuit QuickBooks reports Americans think starting a business costs $28,000, while actual owners spend about $12,000, highlighting perception barriers to entrepreneurship.

Oct 14 • 9:35 AM EDT • Business • boston25news.com

Amazon, data centers and the race for Oregon governor

Can a massive influx of money to political candidates and rural communities change public perception of Amazon’s data centers in Oregon?

Oct 13 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • opb.org

Ipsos Health Service Report 2026

Since 2018, Ipsos has been tracking perceptions of the quality of healthcare systems, the biggest health issues and the biggest public health problems.

Oct 8 • 3:00 AM EDT • Health • ipsos.com

What did people who went to Trump’s Nebraska rally have to say?

While the perception of Republicans seems gloomy ahead of the midterms, thousands came to see and support President Donald Trump at his rally.

Oct 6 • 4:51 PM EDT • Politics • nebraskaexaminer.com

American Journal Of Public Health Study Examines Political Differences In Perceptions Of Vaccine Safety And Effectiveness

Vaccine perceptions can influence acceptance and uptake. Dr. Dror Walter, with the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and colleagues examined these perceptions using data from a national probability sample of 1,763 US adults surveyed in November 2024.

Oct 6 • 7:22 AM EDT • Health • news-medical.net

How Americans’ Financial Health Is Faring In The “K-Shaped” Economy

Hey all, Jason here. Money20/20 is still two weeks away, but I’ve already started packing (not procrastinating for once!). My calendar is already filling up with various sessions I want to catch, meetings, and of course happy hours, dinners, and other side events. If you’ll be in Vegas and want to catch up, let me know by replying to this email, and we can try to find a time amidst the chaos of the Venetian. A big if not totally unexpected piece of news dropped on Friday: the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group that represents smaller U.S. banks, filed a lawsuit against the OCC and Comptroller Jonathan Gould, arguing that the regulator’s move to grant trust bank charters to firms seeking to use them to conduct substantial non-fiduciary activities exceeds the authorities granted to the OCC by Congress. I haven’t had time to fully digest the legal filing or speak to folks in my network about it, but you can expect to see coverage and analysis on it in next week’s newsletter. Subscribe or Support by Upgrading The NerdCon agenda just dropped. It’s stacked. Partner content: Nubank built an AI-first bank. Chime built its own banking core. Figure and Valon are rebuilding the mortgage stack. At NerdCon, you’ll hear from the people behind those bets: what they chose, what they learned, and what they’re still figuring out. The agenda is live, with leaders from Nubank, Chime, OpenAI, Remitly, Mercury, Figure, Valon and more. Follow the mainstage conversations, bring the problem your team is wrestling with to a hands-on workshop, or pull up a chair at a roundtable. Pick your quests. Meet us in San Diego, November 18–20. Fintech Business Weekly readers save 20% with code FBW20. Explore the Agenda Things To Know & Other Good Reads Federal Reserve Board finalizes changes to enhance the transparency and public accountability of its stress test and reduce volatility in its stress test-related capital requirements (Federal Reserve Board of Governors) FDIC Announces Conclusion of Independent Monitorship (FDIC) Modernizing Financial Regulation: Initial Observations from eSLR (Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman) The Data Version of Godzilla versus Kong: FRED Takes on AI (Fed Governor Christopher Waller) Financing the AI buildout (Brookings) Q3’26: Rules for Banks but Not for Crypto (Fintech Takes Banking) The Inevitability of Local Stablecoins (Lombard Notes) Delusions of AI Governance: The Human-in-the-Loop Comfort Blanket (Fintech Snark Tank) Stripe agrees to acquire Parafin to expand revenue opportunities for platforms and help small businesses grow (Stripe) Listen: Fighting Fraud in the Age of AI, with SEON’s Tamas Kadar (Fintech Business Weekly) How Americans’ Financial Health Is Faring In The “K-Shaped” Economy If there is one overarching theme across the economy and politics in the U.S. at the moment, it’s “affordability.” The term is vague enough to encompass a panoply of factors shaping Americans’ day-to-day lives: rising costs for the hallmarks of being “middle class,” including healthcare, housing, childcare, and education, inflation and rising interest rates, and a job market with the specter of AI hovering over it. At the same time, policy shifts under the Trump administration have resulted in reduced subsidies to those who get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and new restrictions on qualifying for Medicaid and SNAP, the impacts of which have yet to be fully felt. These factors are contributing to declining consumer confidence and general dissatisfaction with the economy, despite continuing GDP growth and stock market records. This divergence is encapsulated in the idea of the “K-shaped” economy, in which a small proportion of Americans have seen their wealth balloon, while the majority of American households struggle to preserve the lifestyle they have. Perhaps the greatest determinant of which branch of the “K” a household is on is whether their wealth and income are primarily derived from employment vs. from assets. Nearly two decades of low interest rates and, more recently, elevated rates of inflation have benefited asset owners, while those whose income is primarily or solely derived from labor have largely seen real purchasing power stagnate or decline. This is reflected in recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that labor share of U.S. GDP — the fraction of economic output that accrues to workers as compensation in exchange for their labor — dropped to just 52.8% in Q2 2026, the lowest since the BLS began keeping records. In 1947, approximately 2/3rds of economic output accrued to workers; even as recently as 2001, labor’s share of GDP was 64.1%. Against this backdrop, we’ve seen the rise of more credit and credit-like products: cash advance apps, “no-fee” overdraft, earned wage access, and buy now pay later, which are often used as small-dollar short-term borrowing mechanisms to meet immediate consumption needs or pay other bills (eg utilities, cell phone, other debt payments). With the markers of a middle class existence and, increasingly, basic financial stability seemingly out of reach for many, it should be no surprise there’s been an increase in “financial nihilism,” something industry peers like Alex Johnson and Frank Rotman have discussed and analyzed the roots of. The explosion of gambling and gambling-adjacent products and services — often marketed under the guise of being an “investment” — is inextricably intertwined with the rise of financial nihilism. Crypto, sports betting, and, more recently, prediction markets offer an escape or even hope of sorts, like a contemporary, digital version of a scratch-off lottery ticket, while leaving the overwhelming number of people who use such products worse off. Share of Households That Are Financially “Vulnerable” Ticks Up The Financial Health Network’s 2026 Financial Health Pulse® report adds context on how American households are faring. (I linked to this report in last week’s newsletter, but wanted to take time to further unpack the data in the report this week.) The Financial Health Network publishes the report annually, providing insight into how Americans’ financial circumstances are changing over time. The 2026 report is derived from a survey fielded in April and May 2026. The report leverages survey responses to assess indicators of financial health across spending, saving, borrowing, and planning/protecting and to determine a zero to 100 “FinHealth” score. Those with scores between 0 and 39 are considered “Financially Vulnerable,” consumers with scores ranging between 40 and 79 are defined as “Financially Coping,” and those with scores of 80 to 100 are “Financially Healthy.” The report found that moderate improvements in 2025 were reversed, with the share of respondents considered financially “vulnerable” rebounding to 17%. The longitudinal data reflect the impact of pandemic-era programs, like expanded unemployment, cash stimulus payments, and pauses of federal student loan payments. The positive impacts of those programs, as reflected in the Financial Health Pulse reports, had largely disappeared by 2023. While pandemic-era inflation — to be fair, in part caused by the various support and stimulus measures — had come down from as high as 9% in 2022, it has rebounded since the start of Trump’s second term, with tariffs and energy market disruptions owing to the war in Iran pushing prices back up. Specific indicators in the survey that deteriorated from 2025 to 2026 include the share of respondents spending less than their income over the past 12 months, the share paying all bills on time over the past 12 months, the share that have a manageable amount or no debt, the share that are “moderately” or “very” confident their insurance is adequate to cover them in an emergency, and the share that “somewhat” or “strongly” agree that their household plans ahead financially. Unsurprisingly, lower- and moderate-income households are more likely to struggle to pay their bills on time and have any funds leftover to save. The share of low-income households whose income exceeded their spending dropped from 35% in 2025 to 31% in 2026, while the share of upper-income households whose income exceeded expenses remained unchanged at 63%. Households with student loans or revolving credit card debt reported having “a bit more” or “far more” debt than was manageable at rates far higher than those not carrying these types of debts. The share of those with student loan debt indicating their debt load was too high to manage increased from 50% in 2025 to 55% in 2026, while the share of those with revolving credit card debt saying the same ticked up from 51% in 2025 to 54% in 2026. Households that had student loans were markedly more likely to be financially “coping” or “vulnerable” vs. those without student loans. In 2026, 27% of households with student loans were considered financially vulnerable, a jump of 6% points vs. 2025. Households without student loans saw just a 1% point increase (not statistically significant) in those considered financially vulnerable. Households’ perception of the affordability of categories of goods and services paints a stark picture, with less than one-fourth considering higher education affordable, about a third deeming childcare affordable, and less than half viewing healthcare as affordable. Fintech Business Weekly is made possible by the generous support of paying subscribers — bringing you independent analysis of banking, fintech, and crypto without fear or favor. You can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber if you aren’t already. Paying subscribers enjoy: access to the entire archive of nearly six years of newsletters extended versions of the weekly newsletter, with additional content and analysis and (for founding member tier) quarterly personal 1:1 fintech Q&A / strategy calls with me, tapping into my unparalleled knowledge of the intersection of banking and fintech and experience working in the sector, including helping to launch Goldman Sachs’ retail bank Marcus Support Fintech Business Weekly You can also support Fintech Business Weekly by sponsoring a newsletter or podcast, putting you in front of 93,000+ of the most influential decision makers in banking, fintech, and crypto. Learn more about sponsor opportunities or request a media kit by dropping me an email. Democratic Senate Report Highlights How Iran Uses Tether to Evade U.S. Sanctions Iran uses stablecoins, specifically Tether, to evade sanctions, fund regional proxies, and to purchase military drones, a report released last week by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations says. The report was authored by committee ranking member Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and the minority staff. Crypto and stablecoin proponents will often push back on criticism that criminals make use of these assets by arguing that, on an absolute dollar basis, far more illicit funds flow through traditional banking systems and payment rails than via crypto and stablecoins. And while that is likely true, it elides the reality presented in news story after news story: whether state actors — Russia, Iran, North Korea — or criminal groups, those looking to engage in illicit transactions increasingly favor stablecoins and, specifically, Tether (USDT). The report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released last week adds context to how Iran uses Tether has a lynchpin in its shadow banking system. The report analyzed 846 wallets that have been sanctioned or targeted for seizure, finding that 84% of them transacted exclusively or primarily in Tether. The ability to create near limitless, anonymous wallets and to move funds effectively instantaneously and irreversibly have made crypto a favored financial mechanism for bad actors. Stablecoins solved key drawbacks of bitcoin, namely, the original cryptocurrency’s highly volatile value in dollars. And while Tether (the company) has the technical ability to “freeze” or destroy funds, the company is often limited and reactive in its approach to doing so, the Senate report argues. Tether, which is nominally based in crypto-friendly El Salvador, “has stated that its compliance with OFAC sanctions is ‘voluntary’ and that it follows ‘OFAC guidelines,’” the Senate report says. Owing to these favorable attributes, Tether “became a primary cryptocurrency for Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Houthis beginning in 2023 and has expanded in scale since,” according to the report. Tether’s role in Iran’s shadow banking system, the report says, is enhanced by crypto exchanges like Bybit, Kyrrex, OKX, Gate, and Binance, and through “over the counter” exchanges and hawala networks. The consequences of these financial flows aren’t hypothetical. The Senate report links Tether as a funds transfer mechanism to Iranian proxies in the region, including Hizballah, the Houthis, and Hamas. Tether has also been used to make payments to secure components necessary to manufacture drones, the report says. The report concludes by arguing that “[s]tablecoin issuers with a significant nexus to the United States, particularly those that offer dollar-denominated stablecoins, should be subject to American sanctions law rather than being allowed to hide behind foreign jurisdictions.” Stablecoin issuers like Tether must be held accountable for repeated failures to prevent illicit finance and sanctions violations by law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and OFAC, the report argues. [Paying Subscriber Exclusive] OUSD Goes Live, Make Your Own Neobank, U.S. Sanctions Russia’s A7 Network As “Transnational Criminal Organization” OpenUSD, the stablecoin issued by the Open Standard consortium that includes Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, core providers, crypto firms, and numerous banks, went live last week. Social commerce platform Whop raised eyebrows in fintech by offering creators on its platform the ability to launch their own neobanks, which the company describes as “great businesses that are easy to run,” in just 15 minutes. And OFAC and FinCEN target Russia’s “shadow banking” A7 Network — more on these stories after the paywall.

Oct 4 • 8:59 AM EDT • Health • fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com

Time Mag reporter: ‘The Presidency and the perception of it are slipping from his grasp’

Oct 1 • 11:53 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Science of Perception Box Podcast Named Finalist in Four 2026 Signal Awards Categories

/PRNewswire/ -- Science of Perception Box™, the award-winning podcast produced by Unlikely Collaborators in partnership with Pod People, has been named a...

Oct 1 • 4:13 PM EDT • Science • prnewswire.com

Science of Perception Box Podcast Named Finalist in Four 2026 Signal Awards Categories

Science of Perception Box™, the award-winning podcast produced by Unlikely Collaborators in partnership with Pod People, has been named a finalist in four categories at the 2026 Signal Awards, which recognize excellence and innovation in podcasting.

Oct 1 • 4:13 PM EDT • Science • finance.yahoo.com

Rural MAHA followers say Trump hasn't improved health of their communities, an AP-KFF poll finds

The findings signal an apparent disconnect between the Trump administration’s MAHA-branded policy priorities and rural America’s perception of their reach and effectiveness.

Sep 30 • 11:48 AM EDT • Health • latimes.com

Meta’s Smart Glasses PR Cleanup Campaign Is in Full Swing

This year's Meta Connect was all about public perception.

Sep 28 • 2:20 PM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

9 Myths About Breast Cancer: What’s True and What’s Not

Increased awareness about breast health has also fueled some misperceptions about breast cancer. An oncologist dispels nine common myths.

Sep 28 • 12:02 AM EDT • Health • health.clevelandclinic.org

Many INW businesses report AI integration issues

Some Inland Northwest companies are facing security concerns and public perception issues as they integrate artificial intelligence tools into their operations. A new program at Gonzaga University, however, could help businesses address some of those challenges.

Sep 24 • 3:00 AM EDT • Business • spokanejournal.com

GOP senator calls for probe into Trump family business dealings

WASHINGTON >> A Republican U.S. senator today called for an investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s family is profiting from his time in office, saying any perception that family members are exploiting their position undermines trust in the government.

Sep 22 • 7:50 PM EDT • Business • staradvertiser.com

Republican senator calls for probe into Trump family's business dealings

A Republican US senator on Tuesday called for an investigation into the ​ways that President Donald Trump's family is profiting from his time in office, saying the perception that they are ‌exploiting their position is undermining trust in the government.

Sep 22 • 10:29 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Jiang Feng: The Unravelling of German & European Politics

A state election in eastern Germany has become a revealing test of the changing political landscapes of Germany and Europe, writes Jiang Feng, Professor and Chairman of the Council of the Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies (SAGGAS) at Shanghai International Studies University. His analysis follows the decisive victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) (which has been classified as right-wing extremist by German authorities)in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, in which it finished far ahead of its mainstream rivals. Jiang previously served as Minister-Counsellor at the Chinese Embassy in Berlin. The following article was published on 8 September 2026 on huanqiu.com, the online platform of the Global Times. On 6 September, the results of the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, were announced. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), classified as far-right by German authorities, made history by becoming the largest party in the state parliament, winning 43.8 per cent of the vote — twice its share in the previous election. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had governed the state continuously for 24 years, won just 17.2 per cent, its worst result ever in Saxony-Anhalt. On the night the results were announced, the atmosphere at the CDU gathering was unusually calm. There was neither shock nor argument, as if the defeat had long been expected. Several veteran party members who had spent years working in the state government said: “Defeat is not a bad thing. It is time to make changes.” This state election has not only upended Saxony-Anhalt’s political landscape, but also laid bare the deep tensions between Germany’s traditional party structure and model of governance, on the one hand, and an increasingly polarised society on the other. Its repercussions are already being felt at the federal level, making Saxony-Anhalt a useful case study of the broader trend towards political polarisation and realignment in Europe. Governing Difficulties after Electoral Victory The most immediate consequence of the election is a historic setback for the mainstream party order that took shape in post-war Germany. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has leapt from a peripheral party to the largest political force in the state. Its electoral base has expanded beyond the traditional category of “marginal protest voters” to take on the characteristics of a cross-class coalition. The party has not only consolidated its support in rural areas, but also attracted many middle-class voters and even members of the social elite with stable jobs, their own homes, and substantial incomes. It has thus evolved from a “protest party” into one with the potential to govern. Despite its commanding lead in the vote, however, the AfD faces an institutional obstacle to governing the state: the mainstream parties’ long-standing “firewall” against it. Neither of the two potential routes to forming a government appears likely to break the current political deadlock. The first would be a coalition of establishment parties, led by the CDU and bringing together the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens, the Left Party (Die Linke) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in a cross-camp government. In terms of parliamentary arithmetic, such a coalition could prevent the AfD from forming a government and preserve the outward stability of the traditional political order. Yet these parties are fundamentally divided over key issues including immigration, the energy transition, economic management, and cultural and education policy. Coalition negotiations would therefore be extremely difficult, and even if a government could be formed, it would most likely prove short-lived. More importantly, an alliance of establishment parties aimed at keeping the largest party out of government would play directly into the AfD’s narrative that “political elites are suppressing public opinion”. It could deepen perceptions of political unfairness, further strengthening the AfD’s political capital, and creating a dynamic in which “the more it is suppressed, the more people vote for it”. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate for state premier, has said that if efforts to form a government fail because other parties refuse to cooperate, the AfD will push for a fresh election, which he believes could deliver the party an absolute majority of seats. This points to more intense political battles ahead. The second option would be a coalition between the AfD and the BSW. Together, the two parties would command a simple majority in parliament, making this, on paper, the quickest route to forming a government. The BSW is the only elected party that has not ruled out cooperation with the AfD, and the two parties share some common ground, including on policy towards Russia. There is therefore a degree of political basis for cooperation. Were such a coalition to materialise, Germany would see its first state government jointly formed by a party defined as far-right and one with a far-left background, creating what might be called a “bipolar anti-establishment alliance”. Such an outcome would fundamentally break with the ideological boundaries of post-war German party politics. It is worth noting that even if the AfD ultimately fails to enter the state government, its roughly 47 per cent share of parliamentary seats would give it a powerful blocking minority. Without its consent, major decisions requiring a two-thirds majority — including constitutional amendments, significant budgetary adjustments, and state-level institutional reforms — would be extremely difficult to pass. Therefore, whoever ultimately forms the government, the AfD will be an unavoidable force in Saxony-Anhalt politics, with a direct influence on the state’s legislative process. Systemic Failures in Germany’s Governance Model The Saxony-Anhalt election result reflects a systemic failure of Germany’s post-war mainstream-party model of governance to adapt to rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions. It stems from multiple, mutually reinforcing structural tensions and highlights the existing political system’s difficulty in adapting to “an increasingly polarised society First, collective anxiety has replaced individual material hardship as a central driver of political mobilisation. The rise of the AfD can no longer be explained simply by poverty or social marginalisation. Its increasingly cross-class electoral base suggests that what is driving voters towards the party is, above all, concern about the broader direction of society. This anxiety about the future of the political community goes beyond individual gains and losses. In political discourse, economic anxiety has become closely intertwined with immigration, while immigration and refugee issues are, in essence, questions of social fairness. This perception turns conflicts over the distribution of social resources into negative assessments of governing parties, providing a broad social basis for far-right political narratives. Second, regional disparities and East German identity have undermined the strategy of addressing eastern Germany’s structural challenges at the regional level. More than three decades after German reunification, eastern states such as Saxony-Anhalt have experienced periods of economic growth, but their underlying economic structures remain weak, and household incomes and wealth remain significantly below those in western Germany. At the same time, they continue to face population outflow, an ageing population, labour shortages, and other structural challenges. At a deeper level, historical experiences — including the collapse of the former East German economic system, mass unemployment during the transition, and the westward shift of decision-making power over major issues — have left some residents with a sense of being “second-class citizens” and of being excluded. For years, the German government treated the “syndrome” of reunification as a regional problem to be gradually addressed at the local level. That approach is becoming increasingly unsustainable, as regional development disparities emerge as a core structural factor shaping national politics. Third, the erosion of institutional trust is perhaps the most decisive factor. AfD supporters tend to distrust establishment institutions, including parliament, government, and the mainstream media. Their concerns about economic security, pensions, and social fairness are significantly greater than the social average. Increasingly, their support for the AfD reflects not an expectation that the existing system can be improved, but a search for an alternative to the current political order. Such a systemic deficit of trust will be extremely difficult for the traditional parties to repair in the short term. Fourth, a generational shift in political mobilisation has amplified political polarisation. Unlike traditional parties, which rely heavily on offline rallies and mainstream media coverage, the AfD has developed a social-media mobilisation strategy built around “raising an issue — identifying who is responsible — offering a simplified solution — building a shared identity”. It turns complex social tensions into concise political narratives, rapidly channelling public sentiment into political support. The contrast on the eve of the election was particularly telling. The establishment parties, together with trade unions and churches, organised an offline march attended by more than 10,000 people, but its reach was largely confined to those present and to traditional media coverage. The AfD held a much smaller indoor event, yet livestreaming on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms, combined with the involvement of online influencers, gave it a reach and mobilising capacity far beyond that of the march. The contrast illustrates how the traditional parties’ methods of political mobilisation are increasingly struggling to keep pace with a political environment transformed by changes in media technology. A Microcosm of Structural Political Change in Europe The shockwaves from the Saxony-Anhalt election quickly travelled beyond the state to the federal level. Calls for political accountability followed immediately after the results were announced. The governing CDU and SPD are now under enormous pressure, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil face an unprecedented test. Political polarisation in Germany is no longer simply a regional phenomenon. The post-war model of multiparty government by establishment parties is breaking down and being reshaped. Viewed in a broader European context, the Saxony-Anhalt election is part of a continent-wide wave of party polarisation, mainstream-party decline, and rising right-wing forces. Far from an isolated phenomenon, it is a microcosm of the structural political changes unfolding across Europe. Weak economic growth, cultural tensions over immigration, and declining trust in institutions are fuelling the rise of right-wing forces in several countries, challenging the liberal internationalist order established in post-war Europe. As a core member state of the European Union, Germany’s ability to adapt its political system and the direction of its politics will have profound implications for both European integration and the evolution of the international order. Subscribe [ Pekingnology China’s Germany watchers take stock of Berlin’s uneasy turn On 7 December 2025, nearly 50 Chinese scholars and policy researchers gathered in Beijing for the 2025年德国形势年终研讨会 “2025 Year-End Seminar on the Situation in Germany… Read more 9 months ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · YIRUI LI and Yuxuan JIA ](https://www.pekingnology.com/p/chinas-germany-watchers-take-stock?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1151841) [ Jiang Feng on Germany's 2025 and beyond: no easy exit ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond) Yirui LI and Yuxuan JIA · Jan 24 The following is an op-ed by Jiang Feng, published on 29 December 2025 at Shanghai Observer 上观新闻, the digital platform of Jiefang Daily, the official newspaper of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC). [ Read full story ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond)

Sep 22 • 3:04 AM EDT • Politics • eastisread.com

Perception Gaps: Why Misjudging Our Political Opponents Is Damaging American Democracy

Perception gaps — misunderstandings about our fellow Americans across the political spectrum — are damaging the fabric of our country. Correcting these gaps is essential to preserving the kind of democracy that respects free speech, individual dignity, and civic responsibility.At their core, percept...

Sep 22 • 12:40 AM EDT • Politics • thefulcrum.us

The scientific reason why the days feel shorter as you age

Scientists have several theories for why our perception of time changes with age

Sep 21 • 12:33 PM EDT • Science • the-independent.com

Why politicians should pay more attention to the polls (reprise)

Welcome to the 231st edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), a polling newsletter that always welcomes new readers. So please don’t keep TWIP a secret; share it with your friends and colleagues: Share The Week in Polls With all the stories swirling around Reform, JL Partners and political polling, I am finally tearing myself away from talking about the regulation of polling this week - and instead re-running a previous piece reminding us why the solution to problems with polls isn’t simply to ban or ignore them. Rather, we need them to play a vital role in making our politics - and politicians - better. This is followed by summaries of the latest national voting intention polls, seat projections from MRPs and the most recent party leader ratings. Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polls and analyses, including: A trio of organisations and a pair of professors have been casting their eyes over the Liberal Democrats ahead of the party’s autumn conference; What impact did the summer heatwave have on views on climate change? and Which wins out between chocolate and cheese? If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now: Get FREE 7-day trial For more polling news as it comes in ahead of next week’s edition, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky. Picking up on my doubt last week about whether or not 35% of British train travellers have tried to order a takeaway for delivery to a railway station or carriage, thank you to reader Iain, who has been in touch to say he has done just that… in India. Another quick pair of updates, this time on the controversies around Reform and polling. Politico has a further scoop - “Farage aide caught in donor sting attended Egypt retreat with JL Partners” - and Ian Dunt has written about the problems with polling too: “Seeing the response of many polling experts in the last few weeks suggests that they are nervous about what is happening and keen to mitigate against it. Seeing the response of journalists, which has been basically non-existent, suggests the precise opposite.” My usual reminder as well: please do hit reply if you’ve spotted a poll, focus group or new piece of poll-based research that you think should be in contention for coverage in a future edition. Thank you! And with that, on with the show. How politicians get public opinion wrong I have written before about the benefits that come from widespread availability of high-quality political polling. We need more polls and more good coverage of polls. However, what I’ve not dug into before is the research into how accurately politicians estimate public opinion on issues. Thankfully we have academic research to tell us. First, the bad news: We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries.1 Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels of public support, we conclude that politicians are quite inaccurate estimators of people’s preferences. They make large errors and even regularly misperceive what a majority of the voters wants. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public preferences than ordinary citizens. Walgrave, S., Jansen, A., Sevenans, J., Soontjens, K., Pilet, J.B., Brack, N., Varone, F., Helfer, L., Vliegenthart, R., van der Meer, T., Breunig, C., Bailer, S., Sheffer, L. & Loewen, P.J. (2023a), “Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries”, The Journal of Politics, 85(1): 209-222. The bad news is not quite as bad as that makes it sound because, when asked whether the majority of public opinion was for or against various policies, politicians picked the wrong option ‘only’ 29% of the time. However, this included getting it wrong even when public opinion is far from evenly split on an issue: They do not only get it wrong when the public is divided and hard to read (e.g., when there is a 51%:49% distribution). Seventy percent of the misplacements occur for policies with a relatively clear distribution of at least 60% (dis)agreeing citizens. Moreover, the public scored only slightly worse than politicians, picking the wrong option 2.7 out of 8 times on average, compared with 2.3 times for politicians. Turning to the other measure of accuracy (not which side is in the lead but what the percentage support is for each side), politicians on average were 18 percentage points out in their guesses. Again, this was only slightly better than the public, whose error came in at 21 percentage points.2 Further research, using the same mix of countries, gives a little more comfort about how (in)accurate perceptions are: We show that politicians have a better understanding of public opinion when they think the issue matters to voters. Further, when an issue is personally important to politicians they more accurately estimate their party supporters’ opinions. The results confirm that politicians hold more accurate perceptions of voters’ preferences when they think it is important to do so but not necessarily when the issues actually are important to voters. Butler, C., Walgrave, S., Soontjens, K. & Loewen, P.J. (2024), “Politicians are better at estimating public opinion when they think it is more salient”, Party Politics: 1–13. Even so, it’s not a good picture. The remedy for this? Politicians should spend more time reading the polls. So forward this newsletter to someone you know… Share For a more general argument against banning polls, see my 2024 piece. Is “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” good advice or not? The latest episode of my Political Fictions podcast heads across the Atlantic for a dip into one of the political TV classics: Mark and Cory talk about a giant of American political drama for the first time this week, as they tackle The West Wing. They talk about Let Bartlet Be Bartlet, the nineteenth episode of series one. In it, Mark wonders if The West Wing is actually the epitome of the “Boris Johnson school of politics”, Cory outmanoeuvres Mark into confirming we will record a Christmas Special about Love, Actually and they debate whether the central message of this episode has been misunderstood. Cory’s email newsletter is Paperback Rioter and Mark has a family of email newsletters. Subscribe to our newsletter for some additional bonus content and to get alerted whenever a new episode comes out. Our theme tune is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod/incompetech.com and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. You can also listen to our episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the web or YouTube. Elsewhere from me… [ A Lord's Eye View How to fix the problem of money in our politics Welcome to my latest update on work in the House of Lords. This time I am taking a look at how our political system is regulated, and the protections we need to keep democracy safe from becoming simply a contest to see who has the biggest bank account… Read more 5 days ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Mark Pack ](https://lordseyeview.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-the-problem-of-money-in?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1269283) If you spot a factual error… Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a free 12-month subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify, but grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation do not, and my decision is final. Messages about both of those are always welcome, though. Voting intention and leadership ratings Here are the latest voting intention polls from different pollsters. It is all pretty static at the moment, with a small and consistent Labour lead in nearly all the polls. The table is also online here, along with explanations about what is included. It is updated regularly throughout the week as new polls are released. Next are the seat projections from MRPs, also sorted by fieldwork dates, listing those which are based on dedicated fieldwork (rather than models based on averages of other polls). Because such MRPs are published infrequently, some of the entries below are quite old. Finally, here is a summary of leadership ratings, with a graph from PollCheck: Detailed numbers from the latest polls are online here, and both that and the graph are updated regularly throughout the week as new data comes out. For historical figures on both voting intention and leader approval stretching back to the 1930s, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase. Catch up on the previous two editions [ ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ A crisis point for political polling Sep 13 ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ Read full story ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) [ Extra questions about the polls in Reform’s funding scandal Sep 6 ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) [ Read full story ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) My privacy policy and other legal information are available here. Links to purchase books or other items are usually affiliate links which pay a commission for each sale. Quotes from social media messages are occasionally lightly edited for punctuation and clarity. If you are subscribed to other email lists of mine, please note that unsubscribing from this one will not automatically remove you from the others. If you wish to be removed from all my lists, simply reply to this email to let me know. A quintet of Lib Dem polling analyses, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss The following ten findings from the most recent polls and analyses are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away. Ahead of the start of Liberal Democrat conference, we have a trio of organisations and a pair of professors with pieces out about Ed Davey’s party:

Sep 20 • 1:02 PM EDT • Politics • theweekinpolls.substack.com

Why the days feel shorter as you get older, according to science

Scientists have several theories for why our perception of time changes with age

Sep 19 • 7:43 AM EDT • Science • uk.style.yahoo.com

Why the days feel shorter as you get older, according to science

Scientists have several theories for why our perception of time changes with age

Sep 19 • 7:43 AM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

Liverpool make contact to sign phenomenal German super talent

Liverpool have made contact to sign an incredibly talented German player. When Jurgen Klopp took over a decade ago, there was this perception that he was going to bring in a lot of German players.Klop...

Sep 19 • 3:40 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Feel Like Time Is Speeding Up? Scientists Have Figured Out Why—and What to Do About It

Experts are beginning to unravel why modern life messes with our time perception, making you feel like life is passing in a blur.

Sep 17 • 4:00 AM EDT • Science • inc.com

Mastercard’s Dreamonomics Report Finds Small Business Owners Are Redefining Growth for a More Demanding Economy: 68% Prioritize Stability Over Speed, 89% Want More Digital Tools and 71% Say Cyber Protection Is a Priority

To support the needs of small businesses, Mastercard Collection for Business launches today bringing together business-focused benefits, protections and experiences Small businesses are looking ahead with ambition — but they are also preparing for the pressure that comes when opportunity arrives. Mastercard today introduced Dreamonomics, a new global view of the forces reshaping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) perceptions and approach to growth. The research shows that SMEs are redefining growth as controlled momentum: 68% prioritize stability and predictability over fast growth, 54% actively avoid unnecessary financial risk and 61% are focused on deepening customer relationships rather than reaching as many customers as possible. Studio Mouvoir Headline Findings from the new Dreamonomics Report Stability is overtaking speed: 68% of SMEs now prioritize stability and predictability over fast growth, while 54% say they actively avoid unnecessary financial risk. Customer depth

Sep 15 • 9:14 AM EDT • Business • investor.mastercard.com

Foden needs to be more composed

Manchester City captain Ruben Dias say Phil Foden needed to be "more controlled and composed" when provoked by Bruno Fernandes in Sunday's Manchester derby. Foden was sent off for violent conduct after kicking out at Fernandes on the floor after being fouled and kicked himself by the Manchester United skipper. "In the moment I felt it was a bit harsh because my perception was Bruno kicks Phil and then he has a rushed reaction and maybe kicks him back," Dias said.

Sep 14 • 2:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Boston University game measures visual perception deficits in autistic adolescents

Online GEODE touchscreen task links higher neural noise to slower learning in 212 ASD youths

Sep 14 • 3:00 AM EDT • Science • dongascience.com

Political Divide in Trust Toward Scientists Revealed by Survey

Political Divide in Trust Toward Scientists Revealed by Survey Left-wing respondents show 87% trust vs. right-wing 55%, reflecting identity over expertise in science perception

Sep 13 • 10:08 PM EDT • Science • chosun.com

Interim Report: Joint Committee on Health

The Joint Committee on Health met this evening. The Committee first heard from the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank interested in the benefits of psilocybin. Psilocybin is a naturally occurring compound found in some mushrooms that can enhance mood, thinking, and perception. It has a low potential for abuse…

Sep 13 • 6:34 PM EDT • Health • blog.wvlegislature.gov

Tampa General receives NRC Health Best in Brand recognition

Tampa General Hospital has been named a 2026 NRC Health Best in Brand winner. The national distinction, which recognizes brand perception and reputation, was awarded to only nine health systems across…

Sep 12 • 8:59 AM EDT • Health • stpetecatalyst.com

Arsenal's ambition matching Arteta's vision as new deal nears

The perception of Arsenal's transfer window varies depending on who you speak to - but there will be no disagreement from anyone at Emirates Stadium over how crucial their next expected signing will be. With the market closed until January, the club are now in the process of finalising an agreement with manager Mikel Arteta over his protracted new contract. Arteta moved unequivocally last month to remove any lingering doubt over his future: "Everybody feels comfortable that the timing of the contract is not going to be an issue because my will certainly is to be here and I'm very happy here."

Sep 10 • 12:18 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Oakland is borrowing SF’s playbook to revive struggling downtown

While perceptions around public safety have begun to shift in Oakland, organizers say the city has yet to see the rebound in activity that is taking place across the Bay.

Sep 10 • 11:00 AM EDT • Business • sfchronicle.com

Speak Up Moore Presents ‘Polls, Politics And Perceptions’ with Donald Bryson

Speak Up Moore will present “Polls, Politics and Perceptions: An Expert Provides Insight into the Minds of NC Voters” on Monday, Sept. 21, from 6-7:30 p.m. at Sandhills Community College,

Sep 8 • 11:41 AM EDT • Politics • thepilot.com

On campaign trail, Gavin Newsom leans into his California roots

The perception that California is a bad place to live is the result of lies, Gov. Gavin Newsom contends, peddled by right-wing media outlets.

Sep 7 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • sfchronicle.com

The FBI investigation of Mark Walter, no matter the outcome, will have a negative impact on the perception of the Dodgers

Sep 2 • 5:44 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Smelling test: children need education in sniffing aromas, scientist says

Exclusive: Dr Will Tullett says better understanding of scents can improve wellbeing and perception of the world

Aug 31 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • theguardian.com

Chicago Mayoral Candidate John Kelly on Experience, Ethics and Crime Perceptions

Aug 17 • 7:58 PM EDT • Politics • news.wttw.com

Everyday Injustice Podcast Episode 337: Marc Bookman Examines the Death Penalty’s Politics, Failures and Enduring Appeal

Marc Bookman, legal director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, recently discussed capital punishment on Episode 337 of 'Everyday Injustice.' Bookman challenged the perception of a national death penalty resurgence, asserting its continued application is increasingly confined to a limited number of states. He also critiqued public opinion polling on capital punishment, specifically a Pew poll, for failing to present alternatives such as life without parole. Additionally, Bookman previewed his forthcoming novel, 'Albert's Time,' which explores the ethical dimensions of capital punishment by confronting the execution of an undeniably guilty individual.

Aug 17 • 7:10 AM EDT • Politics • davisvanguard.org

Estée Lauder Companies (EL) Expands Color Science Research For Shade Matching

Estée Lauder Companies (NYSE: EL) announced a research collaboration with the University of Leeds and Dr. Kaida Xiao focused on advanced color science for complexion products. The partnership aims to improve shade matching accuracy in luxury foundations and related complexion lines using visual perception science. The work is expected to inform future formula development and product testing in the prestige cosmetics segment. For investors tracking how advanced data and perception science...

Aug 15 • 6:24 PM EDT • Science • simplywall.st

The science behind the feeling that childhood summers never end

Curiosity, emotion and paying attention shape our perception of time. This is why time flies as we grow older

Aug 15 • 12:00 AM EDT • Science • english.elpais.com

Cardinals may be shifting perception

The Cardinals played an enjoyable brand of football, and Carson Beck was a revelation in the Hall of Fame game. The combined effect was a game that shifted national and local perceptions.

Aug 12 • 4:30 PM EDT • Sports • arizonasports.com

Many Americans Underestimate Health Risks of Extreme Weather, New Study Finds

The research examines the “risk perception gap,” or the difference between climate-related mortality estimates and public perceptions of climate risk, across U.S. counties.

Aug 10 • 6:52 AM EDT • Health • eos.org

Texas Shows Strengths and Gaps in Multi-Metric Business Rankings

We are accustomed to Texas topping virtually every ranking relating to the economy—most major corporate locations and expansions, top CEO perceptions, highest investment, and many others.

Aug 5 • 11:07 AM EDT • Business • texasborderbusiness.com

Politics & Power: Scandals, splits, uncertain road to November mean midterms are still in flux

Scandals, ideological schisms, and foreign‑policy crises have blurred the midterm map. Candidate quality, outside spending, and voter perceptions of the economy — plus President Donald Trump’s outsized role — will determine control of Congress.

Aug 4 • 7:24 AM EDT • Politics • news4jax.com

How the brain finds order in visual chaos

Study of ensemble perception in mice finds that the early visual cortex does more than just relay information

Aug 3 • 1:03 AM EDT • Science • advancedsciencenews.com

Lights, Camera, Confidence: Exploring the Representation of Cutaneous Conditions in the Entertainment Industry and Its Impact on Children's Self-esteem

By Richard Moraga, BS, and Peter A. Lio, MD Stigmatization Of Skin Conditions In The Entertainment Industry Representation And Societal Impact of Specific Skin Conditions Missed Opportunities Longitudinal Psychological and Social Effects of Entertainment Influence Changing Perceptions of Skin in Recent Years The Role of Dermatology Call to Action The way that physical appearance […]

Jul 23 • 7:06 PM EDT • Entertainment • thedermdigest.com

Businesses worry about perception of Tucson mass shooting

The yellow police tape cordoning off East Congress Street Sunday didn’t come down until the better part of the day had passed.

Jul 20 • 5:08 PM EDT • Business • tucson.com

Can South Side residents and business owners shake negative perceptions of the neighborhood?

Steve Miklas jumped at the chance to move his music store from Squirrel Hill to the South Side last spring. The opportunity came when an old friend came...

Jul 20 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • post-gazette.com

Some Xbox studio leads reportedly "detest" Game Pass — so why did Xbox push ahead with it? "It felt like a race to zero."

In a new podcast, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier shared thoughts from Xbox Game Studios leaders, who reportedly "detest" Game Pass and its impact on perception of value.

Jul 19 • 7:23 AM EDT • Technology • windowscentral.com

A new piece of Democrats' midterm strategy: Being 'practical'

Candidates are betting on affordability as their winning midterm issue, aiming to shift a perception that Democrats deal in the abstract.

Jul 17 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • latimes.com

CGC hoping three iconic sports cards can shift perceptions in PSA-dominated grading landscape

As the last remaining sizable competitor to grading giant PSA, CGC is trying to make further inroads with sports card collectors.

Jul 16 • 11:31 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

Scientists’ credibility depends on audience and perceived motives

A new study from Virginia Tech found that scientists’ credibility often hinges on their perceived motivations. “Our study finds that perceptions of scientists’ motivation to serve the public good are the strongest predictor of whether Americans trust them, accept their information as credible, and support science-based policies,” said Dara Wald, associate professor in environmental policy and planning.

Jul 13 • 7:35 PM EDT • Science • newswise.com

Scientists' credibility depends on audience and perceived motives

A new study from Virginia Tech found that scientists' credibility often hinges on their perceived motivations. "Our study finds that perceptions of scientists' motivation to serve the public good are ...

Jul 13 • 10:00 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

Scientists’ credibility depends on audience and perceived motives

A new study identifies five audience "classes" based on people's perceptions of scientists’ credibility.

Jul 10 • 9:04 AM EDT • Science • news.vt.edu

The Science Behind Why Soccer Players at the 2026 World Cup Are Cutting Their Socks

Holes in socks have become a curious sight at this year’s World Cup. The reasons why are a weird mix of biomechanics, perception, and player habits.

Jul 6 • 10:50 AM EDT • Science • wired.com

AI Is Changing How Customers Choose Your Business

As AI increasingly mediates how customers research, evaluate, and choose suppliers, competitive advantage is shifting from direct customer understanding to managing AI-shaped interactions. Drawing on the experiences of three small-to-medium sized businesses they worked with, the authors show how firms can adapt. A manufacturer improved sales efficiency by screening AI-generated inquiries before investing engineering time in quotations. A boutique hotel learned to monitor how AI tools described its business and revised public content to improve accuracy and differentiation. A B2B software company replaced periodic customer reviews with continuous monitoring of customer feedback and AI-generated market perceptions. Across all three cases, the lesson is that firms must treat AI as a new intermediary in the customer relationship. Winning companies will not necessarily spend the most on technology; they will build systems for continuously listening, interpreting signals, and adapting strategy in markets where both customers and the information they rely on are increasingly AI-mediated.

Jul 6 • 8:25 AM EDT • Business • hbr.org

Round table: Manufacturing Revoultion

••• SPONSORED SECTION ••• Manufacturing historically has conjured a certain perception, one of low skills, low pay and low advancement. But times are changing, and they’re changing fast. Spurred by North Carolina’s often lauded economic environment, manufacturers from a variety of sectors are advancing, investing and expanding across the state. But those moves come with […]

Jun 30 • 8:26 AM EDT • Business • businessnc.com

New study: Americans’ perceptions of the health harms of climate change

Awareness of climate change as a health issue is increasing, but polarization on the topic is, too.

Jun 30 • 7:01 AM EDT • Health • climatecommunication.yale.edu

FIFA Let Politics Win Over Football, Iran Paid The Price For Political Hypocrisy

Football's governing body has long sold itself as apolitical - like the IOC - an organisation above borders, above diplomacy, above conflict. But this World Cup has challenged that idea and changed perceptions about FIFA.

Jun 29 • 3:33 AM EDT • Politics • ndtv.com

Commuity invited to Christian Science discussion on June 25

BRATTLEBORO — “How Spiritual Perception Brings Healing” is the focus of a Christian Science talk by Alexandre Fischer, CS, to be given at First Church of Christ, Scientist on Thursday,

Jun 19 • 3:17 PM EDT • Science • reformer.com

In Retrospect: Poland, Russia, Europe

In April I spent a few days with Zryw, a Polish non-profit organization that recruits young people to enter politics and public life. Their aim is to build a new generation of civic leaders in Poland. I’ve followed their evolution from the beginning; my son is one of the founders. (“Zryw” means “impulse” or “burst of speed” in Polish). Julie Chmielewska, one of Zryw’s leaders, interviewed me at the event. Here is the conversation, lightly edited for grammar and context: Julia Chmielewska: Assuming that culture shapes institutions, could we conclude that some cultures are more prone to authoritarianism? Anne Applebaum: I don’t think so. Every culture, every nation, and every country has the potential for change. When we look at history, we can see that nations do change. Poland has changed, for example, from the 1980s to today. There’s a completely different mentality here than the one I encountered when I first visited, in 1988. The current generation sees the world through a different frame. So no, I don’t believe that certain nations are doomed to authoritarianism, or to anything. Of course, there are political and cultural traditions, but they can always be challenged. JC: So do you think there’s something intrinsic in human nature that pushes people to democracy, freedom? AA: I think there is something in human nature, a deep instinct, that pushes people towards freedom, yes. People who live in authoritarian countries – and I’ve heard this from them over and over again – sooner or later find themselves angered by a feeling of helplessness. They can see the unfairness of crooked courts, irrational political decisions. They naturally dislike the fact that somebody has all the power while they have none. In those circumstances, people who have no political background at all sometimes are politicized just by that frustration. I’m thinking of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, for example, who was a Belarusian housewife, until the circumstances of her husband’s arrest forced her to become a politician. I met a woman who is a Uyghur from China, and who had come to live in Turkey. After several of her family members were arrested, she too was propelled into a political role. These kinds of experiences make people interested in democracy or political reform, even if they thought they didn’t care. I also think that the opposite is true: some people instinctively prefer homogeneity, order, hierarchy. They don’t like the confrontation of opinions or the noise of debate, and they lean towards a single leader or a unified regime. I think that most of modern history is shaped by the clash between those two different sides of human nature. JC: Which force do you find more powerful today? AA: I think they both have a lot of power and there’s no way of predicting who wins. Even in countries that seem very shut off or stuck in an authoritarian system can change. We’ve seen that happen. And vice versa, I think democracies can also begin to fail and slide into authoritarianism. So it’s very important not to be complacent in either direction. JC: I want to go into your history and your experiences. You’ve lived in Russia during a time of incredible change in the late 80s, and then you came back to do research in post-Soviet Russia. AA: I was a student in Russia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I then traveled and worked there extensively in the 1990s, and I met people who really were full of hope. They hoped that Russia could become a democracy, or at least a place that guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press. These weren’t ideas that came from Washington. Although now the narrative in the Kremlin is different, I met many people who were working towards exactly that kind of transformation. A friend of mine ran a series of seminars – once a year, and then later several times a year, in cities all over Russia – designed to get people to discuss politics in new ways. She invited young politicians and journalists, as well as foreigners. I went to many of them, in Moscow as well as Volgograd and Novosibirsk. Over two decades, hundreds of people came to these seminars, and all of them wanted Russia to be different. I remain convinced that many Russians still want Russia to be different. It’s just that the old system, in the form of Putin, a representative of that system, returned. The KGB reimposed their power. And this wasn’t because of something to do with culture, this was to do with money and politics, and who was in charge. JC: You’ve partially answered my question... I wanted to ask whether that excitement of the 1990s was an exception from the Russian historical norm which has been rather authoritarian? AA: Of course, if you look at the history of Russia since the 18th century, there have always been liberal groups, reformers and revolutionaries. There were the Decembrists, in the early 19th century, and the rural populists later on, who tried to organize the peasantry. A significant group of liberal Russians appeared at the turn of the 20th century, people like the father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was a Russian politician before the revolution. These groups were small in number, but sometimes had a broader significance. The Russian dissident movement in the 1950s and 1960s actually invented the modern human rights movement. It was their idea to hold the leaders of the Soviet Union accountable for the language they used, to remind them of the treaties they had signed and the promised they had made. They created the Helsinki group, for example, that held Soviet leadership to the language of the Helsinki Treaty, which formally ended the Second World War and which contained guarantees of human rights, at least on paper. That idea spread to Eastern Europe, and similar tactics were used here in Poland. (Benjamin Nathans recently wrote a great book about the Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause) JC: But seemingly, even if they do ever get power, they could never hold on to it. AA: We don’t know, because they have never really had power. But in any case, we also don’t know what will happen in the future. There is no reason to assume that Russia will forever be condemned to totalitarianism. Even during the first fifteen years of Putin’s regime there was some form of democratic politics. Only when the full-scale war began did he bring everything to an end: he shut down all remaining independent organizations and killed his most important opponent, Alexi Navalny. But does that mean he is popular, that he enjoys legitimacy? Even now, we don’t really know what Russians think about him, or about the war. There is no way of doing real polling in Russia because nobody will answer an independent pollster over the phone. JC: Do you think that the flock of young people, especially young men, who fled Russia after the start of the war represent a continuation of liberal movements that refuse to partake in the authoritarian state, or do you think they are moving for the sake of self-preservation – “I don’t want to go to the army, so I leave”? AA: I’m sure it’s both. I actually know many people who left Russia for political reasons either in the very last years before the war, or else just after the war began. JC: And do you see a change in the young generation versus the old one that have fled? AA: It’s hard for me to say because the people who I know were mostly already politicized. I do know some younger people who left, but most of them were already either active in the opposition, or working as journalists. Many of them very self-consciously think of themselves as maintaining Russian culture abroad, just as in the 20th century the Soviet dissidents or the anti-communist White Russians once thought of themselves as people who maintained the true Russian culture, outside of Bolshevik Russia. JC: Let’s move on to Poland. One of your first experiences with Poland was reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s first state visit, in the autumn of 1988. You followed her around the farmers’ market. AA: She was making a symbolic gesture. She wanted to welcome free markets, but the only one she could really visit was the farmers’ market at Hala Mirowska. JC: And I want to talk about this area because today you can look out of any window in that district, Mirów, and see rows and rows of skyscrapers. How does it feel to see a country built from the ground in such a short time, both politically and economically? AA: You know, when you’re living in a period of dramatic change, it’s always hard to know whether the change is positive or negative. The transformation in Poland created winners and losers, as well as new classes of people, new political movements of different kinds. At the time, it sometimes just felt like turbulence. Now, we can look back at the 1990s and early 2000s in Poland and see in retrospect that the country was headed in towards prosperity and European integration. In around 2009 or 2010, I remember speaking to a woman who worked cleaning government offices, and who asked me if her daughter should study in Amsterdam or in London. This seemed to me to be a real transformation, and it happened very fast: within a few years, Poles stopped feeling like second-class Europeans, and a generation of younger Poles appeared who had no qualms about crossing borders. JC: We again live in turbulent times. Do you think we’re heading towards positive outcomes? AA: I can’t make predictions, because everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today. Also, history doesn’t have a trajectory. It doesn’t move in a particular direction. You only think it does afterwards. As I said, you can look afterwards at Poland in the 1990s and you could say this was a period of great progress. But not everybody at the time saw that. Sometimes people are very wrong about a given country’s trajectory. I remember people writing about Ukraine in the 1990s, about how dangerous it was that Ukraine was independent, that this was going to be an anti-semitic state, that Ukrainian nationalism was going to come back... and although you can say many bad things about Ukraine, the country made many bad choices, actually it became a pretty tolerant state which now has a Jewish president and until recently a Muslim defense minister. JC: In the 1990s Poland’s and Ukraine’s GDP were roughly similar. Ukraine was even a bit richer. So the starting point was similar for both of these countries, but they’ve turned out very, very differently. Even if we stop in 2014. Why do you think Ukraine “chose East”? Was it external influence? AA: No, I think Ukraine was in a different position. First of all, central and eastern Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union since the 1920s, and had therefore experienced a longer period of occupation, repression, Sovietization and even Russification. Ukraine did not have, as Poland did, an alternative elite: a large cadre of economists and politicians, who already had some experience in opposition politics and in independent thinking. In Poland, the transformative finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had already thought about how an economy might be decentralized before he took office. We can argue about how successful he was, but at least he was prepared to try something new. In Ukraine, people weren’t prepared. For one, there hadn’t been much space even for an illegal opposition in the previous couple of decades. Ukraine was also in many ways still emerging from colonial occupation. For the previous couple of centuries, many of the most capable Ukrainians had moved to Russia, and the first generation of leaders in independent Ukraine tended to be former Soviet apparatchiks. They didn’t immediately seek to become closer to western Europe. Instead, they looked for some kind of economic and political “third way” and an accomodation with Russia. Ukraine became stuck in this position, half-in, half-out and became pretty profoundly corrupt. JC: The Polish alternative elite had a vision of where they wanted the country to go. I think the general perception now is that this vision ends with the next election, right? Is this a natural process of gaining power? AA: Their vision, and it was shared by the time by politicians who now call themselves both left and right, was that Poland should join the EU and NATO, as fast as possible. My husband (Radek Sikorski) was in the very first government that said it wanted to join NATO. At the time this was taken very badly in Washington: the demand for NATO membership absolutely came from Poland, not from the US. But even then, in the early 1990s, many Poles already understood that the Russian sphere of influence would grow once again, that it was important to become part of the transatlantic alliance and an integrated Europe as fast as possible: NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe, all of the trading and security alliances. That consensus lasted through several different governments and over many years, even governments containing former communists. For twenty years, right, left and center disagreed about many things, but they all agreed on the direction that the country should go. In retrospect, that consensus created the basis for prosperity in Poland. JC: And regarding the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We know that antagonisms, e.g. the myth of Wołyń [a massacre of Poles that took place in what is now Western Ukraine, in 1943] are increasingly used in Polish political discourse today. In Ukraine, nationalist historians make heroes out of UPA, the Ukrainian revolutionary army, which is held responsible for this tragedy. Where do you see a start for burying the hatchet? Is the reconciliation of our nations possible? AA: So here’s a strange thing: For more than a decade after they both gained independence, Poland and Ukraine participated in a number of projects that were designed to solve exactly these kinds of Polish-Ukrainian differences. Books were published that were jointly written by Polish and Ukrainian historians, monuments were built. These projects were successful: If you’d asked me this question in 2010, I would have said that there are no real historical issues between Poland and Ukraine, that the two countries had mostly reconciled. For a number of reasons, this began to shift. In Poland, children and grandchildren of victims of the Wołyń massacre felt their tragedy hadn’t been fully recognized. In Ukraine, nationalist groups wanted the UPA partisans who had fought against the Soviet Union recognized for their heroism, despite the fact that some in this broad and not well-defined group were also linked to Wołyń. In both eastern Poland and western Ukraine, the memory of the ethnic cleansing that took place there in the late 1940s - Poles were moved West, Ukrainians East - to accomodate new borders has left feelings of displacement and bitterness. The wave of Ukrainian immigration, which started before the war, may have provoked some of this. But don’t underestimate the role played by Russia, which has always wanted to create discord between Poland and Ukraine, and pumps out propaganda to that effect in both countries. Vandalism on both sides of the border, damage done to cemeteries and monuments, is sometimes carried out by provacateurs working for Russia, just to create bad feelings. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict also hides a different reality: although there are real grievances and bad memories, the truth is that the biggest tragedies both nations experienced in the twentieth century were inflicted by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That should unite these two countries, not divide them. JC: This week (19.04.2026 – Ed.) in Hungary we saw that using historical narratives to create grievance has no longer worked. Are you optimistic about the direction after Orban’s loss? AA: The Hungarian election was really important because it shows that people can actually resist powerful, dominant propaganda. The ruling party Fidesz controlled all of the TV, 90% of the newspapers, the constitutional court, the bureaucracy... and yet people had the nerve to vote against it and resist it. It’s also an important election because Hungary created a huge network of well-funded think tanks and foundations that were funding other far right groups and projects. So that loss is going to have a knock-on effect in other places too, maybe even in Poland. JC: What you’ve said about resisting propaganda reminds me of one of the interviews you did about talking to Russians in the post-Soviet era who claimed that people knew that the system was lying. Why do people choose to believe in these regimes anyway? AA: Because it’s useful. Stephen Kotkin, an American historian, once described how people would learn how to “speak Bolshevik”: It was just a language that you needed to use in order to get by in society. If you didn’t talk the way the regime wanted you to talk, then you might have problems, or lose your job, or your kids would not get into university. It was a way of getting along. Communist Poland was similar, at least in the early years. When I was writing a book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after World War II, I met a lot of people who wanted to talk a lot about the war, when many of them had done really heroic things. But almost nobody wanted to talk about the decade afterwards, between 1945 and 1956. This was when you had the short period of terror, violence and Polish Stalinism. To stay safe, people felt the need to just go along with what others were saying, or stay out of politics, or use communist jargon without necessarily believing it. I don’t judge them for it, and I wouldn’t describe all of those people as collaborators. It’s easy to feel moral certainty in retrospect, because we know that communism ended. But if you were living in 1949, it might not have been clear to you that communism was going to end. In very repressive societies, maybe about 10% of people who are really evil – collaborators, torturers. Maybe 10% of people are really brave and who find ways to resist. And then around 80% of people have kids, they have parents, they have to have jobs and they’ve had to get through it somehow. Strange though it may sound, I’ve found that the work I did on that book is now very useful in explaining some of what’s going on in the United States today. There are plenty of members of the Republican Party in Congress who know perfectly well that Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true. But they avoid criticizing him because it’s inconvenient, because they would get in trouble, because someone would attack them on the internet. So actually you don’t even need mass terror to get people to conform. JC: Is Gen Z reinventing agency? AA: We’ll see. In any generation you can find groups of people who want agency. If you live in a society that’s unfair, for example where a tiny number of people have captured most of the wealth, then at a certain point people rebel. This is always easier for younger people, who have you have less to lose. The question now is how the internet will affect the relationships between citizens and the state, and how it will change organizations. The “Twitter revolutions” people spoke about as early as 2008-9, mass protests organized online, have often proved to be very superficial. Although you can easily join something just by clicking, the work of creating a real movement requires physical participation. Successful mass movements of the past, for example the Civil Rights movement in the United States, were built by people who had spent many years together. They had participated in non-violent workshops together. They practiced and prepared. Just using the you can get everybody to show up at a certain moment, but then when the protest is broken up, nothing happens. It’s also true that the repressive regimes have more recently learned how to use the internet to undermine leaders and movements. Most of all, they now understand how to make people cynical. The form of propaganda that most modern authoritarians use - and I think the Russians really pioneered this - deploys sneering cynicism. Instead of praising the rulers, the regime propagandists mock the opposition movement leadership for being supposedly corrupt or sexually degenerate, with the goal of undermining any kind of idealism. JC: MAGA grew on the internet? AA: MAGA is a real grassroots movement. They had symbols, red hats, they showed up at rallies. But you’re right that the cynicism, the sarcasm and the distrust that the movement embodies came originally from the internet, and this is different. Fifty years ago, most European political parties had a social base in real organizations, in trade unions for Social Democrats, in church groups for Christian Democrats. As people stopped going to church and as the trade unions became smaller, the social base of these parties disappeared. Now people who wouldn’t have known one another in the past meet on the internet and create new movements, many of which don’t last. JC: Is history ending? Going in stale circles? AA: History never ends. In truth, human beings want contradictory things at the same time: order and freedom, stability and change. These things are never resolved, and when a society swings too far in one direction, people always push it the other way. But each time that happens, the result is different. Certainly it is true that we are now in a period when old philosophers and ideas from the 1930s are undergoing a revival. Carl Schmitt, who was a philosopher who was very influential on the Nazis, is back as an influence on both the far left and the far right, once again inspiring people to think that all politics has to be existential, that all politics is about defining and defeating enemies. In the US, some are also bringing back dominionism, the idea that we need a Christian and not a secular state. It’s also true that we are living through a more fundamental shift. The old left-right divide, which was mostly about the size of the state, is much less important now. Instead, we are arguing about more fundamental things: what are our rights, what protects our freedom. Or how much power do we want to give small elites, versus how much power to give ordinary people. In America a small group of very wealthy people now control information, because they control the social media platforms and AI, which means they determine what people will read and learn. Finding a way to preserve preserve zones of autonomy and independent thinking, this is going to be the main task for the next generation. JC: What is the one book that a person interested in Central Europe should read? AA: You could read my book “Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe” which tells the story of how the Soviet Union imposed its culture on the region. Or read Tim Snyder’s history of the region, “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999.” And everyone should read “The Captive Mind” by Czesław Miłosz, which describes exactly the phenomenon we were talking about: why do people collaborate? I joined Scott Galloway and the brilliant Fiona Hill in a discussion about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the future of global power, and what these conflicts reveal about America's role in the world. Scott told us that this was the 400th edition of his podcast, which is quite a number: My friend Francesco Chiamulera runs a brilliant series of literary events, Una Colline di Libri, A Hill of Books, in the Prosecco Hills, a region of vineyards and elegant hill towns in the Veneto, north of Venice. We did an event in Vittorio Veneto and also drove and biked around the countryside. Buy Autocracy Inc Buy Iron Curtain Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

Jun 13 • 4:15 AM EDT • Politics • anneapplebaum.substack.com

Texas Tech had the chance to become a great success story, but chose to be a victim instead

By throwing all its weight behind Brendan Sorsby, Texas Tech drastically altered its public perception

Jun 12 • 12:21 PM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com

Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski believes Xbox is "steering the 'ship' back in the right direction", as E-Day skips PS5

Gears of War creator Cliff 'CliffyB' Bleszinski says Xbox "hurt their loyal tribal fanbase's perception of the brand".

Jun 10 • 5:24 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

Scientists finally complete Schrödinger’s 100-year-old color theory

Researchers have finally resolved a key problem in a 100-year-old theory of color, showing that the qualities we perceive in colors are intrinsic to the mathematics of color space itself. The discovery sharpens our understanding of human vision and could lead to more precise color technologies and visualizations.

Jun 6 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Explore the science behind optical illusions at Orlando Science Center

Prepare to have your mind blown and your senses boggled with a dazzling new exhibit at Orlando Science Center. In "Phenomena: The Exhibition," visitors will gain a deeper understanding of the science behind illusions and the mechanisms that govern human perception. An interactive journey with over 20 stunning and immersive illusions, "Phenomena: The Exhibition" will

Jun 3 • 8:41 AM EDT • Science • yourcommunitypaper.com

The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • iai.tv

Colorado governor candidates confront business climate, housing affordability woes

Four of the five major-party candidates for Colorado governor share common ground on two big issues: they see the perception that Colorado has become less business‑friendly as a serious concern, and they view housing affordability as central to the state’s economic future. At a Thursday forum in Glendale, the two Democratic candidates — U.S. Sen. […]

May 28 • 5:47 PM EDT • Politics • coloradopolitics.com

SCI Lab: Finding common ground on divisive science - Morgridge Institute for Research

As a scholar on societal perceptions of scientific research, Dominique Brossard focuses a lot of energy on divisive, challenging and controversial topics. But her ultimate goal is to find the "rock" we all stand together on.

May 18 • 6:00 PM EDT • Science • morgridge.org

Inside the U’s baby science research lab, a look at how the world learns

The University of Minnesota Child Brain and Perception Lab explores how infants and toddlers make sense of the people around them. MPR News spent a day recently at the lab watching one of the “pilot babies” discover their world.

May 18 • 5:00 AM EDT • Science • mprnews.org

The cinema effect: Turning films into a gateway to science

The sci-fi film Project Hail Mary, currently in theaters, is capturing the attention of both audiences and the scientific community for its science-based content. It manages to engage viewers with complex, cutting-edge topics — from astrophysics to language — without sacrificing entertainment. Yet not all films strike this balance. Many, unlike this recent production, have promoted inaccurate or even misleading scientific ideas, and thanks to their wide reach, have contributed to shaping distorted public perceptions of science. Precisely by harnessing the power of cinematic storytelling, Hildrun Walter, Fritz Treiber and colleagues have used films as a tool to foster engagement and dialogue between scientists and the public. Their innovative format, Science & Cinema, described in a new paper published in JCOM, proves both effective and potentially easy to replicate.

May 12 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

Scientists Solve 100-Year-Old Schrödinger Mystery About Color Perception

Scientists have finally cracked the hidden geometry behind how humans perceive color.

May 10 • 8:32 PM EDT • Science • scitechdaily.com

How jellyfish bycatch could be valuable collagen source for cosmetics and biotech

Dr Ainara Ballesteros is a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environment and Marine Science Research at the Catholic University of Valencia, where she leads a research group focused on jellyfish biology, aquaculture, and the sustainable use of marine resources. Her work is centered on developing innovative solutions based on marine science, particularly through the study of underused organisms as sources of high-value compounds within circular bioeconomy and zero-waste strategies. She is joined in this work by Raquel Torres, a PhD student at the same institute, who is carrying out her doctoral thesis within this line of research, focused on jellyfish valorization, collaboration with the fishing sector, and the sustainable management of marine resources. They are co-authors on a new Frontiers in Marine Science article which investigated whether jellyfish accidentally caught by small-scale fishers in Spain could be transformed into a valuable resource instead of being treated as waste. The team worked side by side with fishers to better understand their perceptions of jellyfish bycatch, identify which species are most frequently caught, and evaluate whether one of them, Rhizostoma pulmo, could serve as a sustainable source of high-quality collagen.

May 10 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

Chief Justice laments perception of 'political' Supreme Court

Roberts seemed to acknowledge dimming public approval of the court, shown in recent polls, as conservative majority pushes law dramatically rightward.

May 7 • 11:29 AM EDT • Politics • usatoday.com

Chief Justice Roberts laments public perception of US Supreme Court as 'political actors'

U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concern on Wednesday about the public perception of the Supreme Court as an institution driven primarily by political outcomes rather than the law at a time when some prominent ​voices have raised questions about the top U.S. judicial body's legitimacy.

May 6 • 9:36 PM EDT • Politics • reuters.com

The dark side of weight loss drugs: Ozempic's surprising hidden cost

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are often celebrated as game-changing solutions—but new research reveals a surprising social twist. People who lose weight using these medications may actually face more judgment than those who lose weight through diet and exercise—or even those who don’t lose weight at all. The stigma seems rooted in a perception that these drugs are an “easy way out,” creating a double bind where individuals are judged both for their weight and for how they choose to manage it.

May 5 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Months after Potomac River sewage spill, businesses are still hurting

Most advisories against recreational activities in affected areas have been lifted, but perceptions about lingering waste continue to hurt local companies.

May 1 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • washingtonpost.com

After Another Attempt on Trump’s Life, Is Political Violence on the Rise in the U.S.?

A conversation with Sean Westwood, a professor at Dartmouth who tracks political violence and Americans’ perceptions of it.

Apr 28 • 12:48 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

A global survey on trust, digital health literacy and health information quality

Nature Health - An online cross-sectional survey across 30 countries, including 31,000 adults, explores perceptions of quality health information, with respect to source type and inclusion of...

Apr 27 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • nature.com

Physicist: I Believe You Can Enhance Your Consciousness—And Expand Your Perception Into a ‘Different Realm’

Quantum-enhanced humans could enter into an entirely “different realm.”

Apr 22 • 10:01 PM EDT • Science • popularmechanics.com

Showing Up, Still Misread: The Perception Gap Facing Black Men In Politics

Black men keep showing up in democracy, but media and politics misread their role—fueling disillusionment and opening space for alternatives.

Apr 22 • 11:21 AM EDT • Politics • forbes.com

Trump administration embraces quest to stamp out the events of Jan. 6

In his second term, the president has doubled down on efforts to reframe public perception of the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in court and beyond.

Apr 17 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

In the Katzmann Lecture, Senator Andy Kim takes aim at political corruption

Last year’s edition of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which gauges countries’ perceived resistance to corruption, gave the United States its lowest score since the index’s current scale debuted in 2012. That result likely would not surprise US Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, who focused on corruption in politics when he delivered the fifth annual Robert A. Katzmann Lecture on April 6. The event honors the career and impact of the late Judge Katzmann of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a professor of practice at NYU Law.

Apr 16 • 8:00 AM EDT • Politics • law.nyu.edu

Sony Pictures Entertainment frames layoffs as a reset; ProPublica union conducts 24-hour strike as organization asks to explore AI more

Plus, a study about RTO and employee perception.

Apr 10 • 6:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • ragan.com

Aetna Provider Survey Reveals Optimism and Opportunities to Simplify Health Care

Research findings from the inaugural Aetna Provider Survey, a quarterly study that polls a representative sample of the U.S. provider market to better understand their perceptions, opportunities, and challenges today and into the future.

Apr 8 • 3:00 AM EDT • Health • cvshealth.com

Human echolocation step echo by step

Experts in echolocation use multiple clicks and echoes to sense objects, offering insight into how the brain builds perception.

Apr 6 • 1:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencenews.org

How the US-Iran conflict impacts political opinion

Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Danielle Pletka discuss the political perception of the U.S.-Iran conflict on 'One Nation.'

Apr 6 • 5:12 AM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

When the story is the strategy: Memphis, misdirection, and the politics of perception

During a visit to Memphis on March 23, 2026, President Donald Trump credited the Memphis Safe Task Force for a decline in crime.

Apr 3 • 12:43 PM EDT • Politics • tennesseelookout.com

Navigating the social media minefield

Scientists and researchers seeking to announce promising findings, exchange ideas or contribute to policy discussions outside of academic circles may find social media an expedient tool.But increasingly, scientists and other professionals are discovering that online platforms can be a double-edged sword: while sharing their work and expertise is crucial for visibility and meeting funder expectations, it also exposes them to baseless criticism and even accusations of spreading false information."It is getting harder and harder for scientists, and researchers in general, to convey their findings without facing attacks on their legitimacy and accuracy of their research," says Valère Ndior, a professor of public law at the University of Western Brittany in Brest, France, who has spent more than a decade studying misinformation on social media. Researchers attempting to challenge deceptive online information may themselves be accused of political bias or not being objective in their research, he explains, adding that some scientists disengage because they feel overwhelmed and unable to sustain meaningful dialogue. "It is quite sad to see in some instances that researchers end up leaving social media altogether because they feel like the pressure is getting too intense or feel threatened," he says.Ndior, a past president of the Francophone Network of International Law, is also involved in European efforts to make science and research findings more accessible to the public. As an ambassador for the Science Comes to Town (SCTT) project, he has participated in recent discussions on public perceptions of science and online misinformation. The European Commission-funded initiative connects Brest and two other cities — Kiel in Germany and Split in Croatia — and aims to strengthen ties between communities, universities and research institutions to promote science awareness and cooperation across Europe.Coordinated campaigns around contentious topicsNdior draws a clear distinction between critical thinking and thoughtless criticism. Yet he sees online discussions being increasingly shaped by suspicious behaviour and coordinated information campaigns — including "raids" aimed at dominating discussions and "astroturfing," where small groups act as larger movements to sway debates. Tracking these patterns has become harder because some platforms have restricted data or charge for it, despite provisions of the European Union's Digital Securities Act aimed at ensuring researchers can have access to such data. According to Ndior, "platforms became more reluctant from the moment access to data became a legal requirement rather than a voluntary initiative."Unfounded claims and scepticism about science existed long before Internet chat groups. But the noticeable rise in online hostility has intensified around contentious topics, such as the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, alongside the weakening of gatekeepers to moderate content.For Ndior, dubious claims about pandemic countermeasures and vaccine safety highlighted the struggle between "balancing freedom of expression and the protection of public health and order." Efforts to remove social media content deemed false or risky for public health triggered accusations of censorship and the silencing of legitimate discussion, and in some cases, legal challenges.Concerns about attacks on the credibility of scientists and researchers have generated a flurry of academic papers in recent years and prompted professional communities to address ways to counter online attacks. Such unease extends to the generation that has grown up with digital media. Ndior points out that his students, some of whom research artificial intelligence regulation, hate speech, online surveillance and other controversial topics, hesitate to share their work or viewpoints online. "Many of them don't want to expose themselves too much because they don't feel ready to be faced with the backlash of other people criticising their research," he explains.Safer harbours for engagementLegal challenges against false or defamatory posts are not necessarily a solution — especially given the trans-jurisdictional nature of the Internet. Lawsuits also take time and money, and if they fail, can be counterproductive. Instead, Ndior advises scientists and researchers to be selective in how and where they communicate. Professional online platforms and moderated discussion spaces offer a better environment for engagement. He also highlights the value of more traditional formats, such as radio interviews and in-person discussions at schools, libraries and science fairs, which encourage dialogue with the public. "Personal contact makes a big difference," he says, while acknowledging that these approaches lack the global reach of social media.Ndior’s interest in digital law and online misinformation stems from his time as a doctoral student in international law in the early days of social media. He began analysing posts from governments and heads of state to determine if they could be considered official and thus used as evidence in litigation. His work attracted media attention and led to conference and speaking invitations. "This was not part of my plan," he says, "but this is what happens as a researcher — your interest is sparked by a certain event or phenomenon, and it suddenly becomes your focus."Ndior believes SCTT provides "a double benefit" for researchers, enabling them to connect with peers and interact with the public. "There is a wide community of people who are not in academia who are critical thinkers looking for opportunities to ask questions, to get information and contribute their ideas,” he says. "I really value that kind of feedback."Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.

Mar 29 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

Navigating the social media minefield

Scientists and researchers seeking to announce promising findings, exchange ideas or contribute to policy discussions outside of academic circles may find social media an expedient tool.But increasingly, scientists and other professionals are discovering that online platforms can be a double-edged sword: while sharing their work and expertise is crucial for visibility and meeting funder expectations, it also exposes them to baseless criticism and even accusations of spreading false information."It is getting harder and harder for scientists, and researchers in general, to convey their findings without facing attacks on their legitimacy and accuracy of their research," says Valère Ndior, a professor of public law at the University of Western Brittany in Brest, France, who has spent more than a decade studying misinformation on social media. Researchers attempting to challenge deceptive online information may themselves be accused of political bias or not being objective in their research, he explains, adding that some scientists disengage because they feel overwhelmed and unable to sustain meaningful dialogue. "It is quite sad to see in some instances that researchers end up leaving social media altogether because they feel like the pressure is getting too intense or feel threatened," he says.Ndior, a past president of the Francophone Network of International Law, is also involved in European efforts to make science and research findings more accessible to the public. As an ambassador for the Science Comes to Town (SCTT) project, he has participated in recent discussions on public perceptions of science and online misinformation. The European Commission-funded initiative connects Brest and two other cities — Kiel in Germany and Split in Croatia — and aims to strengthen ties between communities, universities and research institutions to promote science awareness and cooperation across Europe.Coordinated campaigns around contentious topicsNdior draws a clear distinction between critical thinking and thoughtless criticism. Yet he sees online discussions being increasingly shaped by suspicious behaviour and coordinated information campaigns — including "raids" aimed at dominating discussions and "astroturfing," where small groups act as larger movements to sway debates. Tracking these patterns has become harder because some platforms have restricted data or charge for it, despite provisions of the European Union's Digital Securities Act aimed at ensuring researchers can have access to such data. According to Ndior, "platforms became more reluctant from the moment access to data became a legal requirement rather than a voluntary initiative."Unfounded claims and scepticism about science existed long before Internet chat groups. But the noticeable rise in online hostility has intensified around contentious topics, such as the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, alongside the weakening of gatekeepers to moderate content.For Ndior, dubious claims about pandemic countermeasures and vaccine safety highlighted the struggle between "balancing freedom of expression and the protection of public health and order." Efforts to remove social media content deemed false or risky for public health triggered accusations of censorship and the silencing of legitimate discussion, and in some cases, legal challenges.Concerns about attacks on the credibility of scientists and researchers have generated a flurry of academic papers in recent years and prompted professional communities to address ways to counter online attacks. Such unease extends to the generation that has grown up with digital media. Ndior points out that his students, some of whom research artificial intelligence regulation, hate speech, online surveillance and other controversial topics, hesitate to share their work or viewpoints online. "Many of them don't want to expose themselves too much because they don't feel ready to be faced with the backlash of other people criticising their research," he explains.Safer harbours for engagementLegal challenges against false or defamatory posts are not necessarily a solution — especially given the trans-jurisdictional nature of the Internet. Lawsuits also take time and money, and if they fail, can be counterproductive. Instead, Ndior advises scientists and researchers to be selective in how and where they communicate. Professional online platforms and moderated discussion spaces offer a better environment for engagement. He also highlights the value of more traditional formats, such as radio interviews and in-person discussions at schools, libraries and science fairs, which encourage dialogue with the public. "Personal contact makes a big difference," he says, while acknowledging that these approaches lack the global reach of social media.Ndior’s interest in digital law and online misinformation stems from his time as a doctoral student in international law in the early days of social media. He began analysing posts from governments and heads of state to determine if they could be considered official and thus used as evidence in litigation. His work attracted media attention and led to conference and speaking invitations. "This was not part of my plan," he says, "but this is what happens as a researcher — your interest is sparked by a certain event or phenomenon, and it suddenly becomes your focus."Ndior believes SCTT provides "a double benefit" for researchers, enabling them to connect with peers and interact with the public. "There is a wide community of people who are not in academia who are critical thinkers looking for opportunities to ask questions, to get information and contribute their ideas,” he says. "I really value that kind of feedback."Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.

Mar 29 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

Business Briefs: Funding available for Rockwood storefronts

Rockwood storefront improvement grants Funds are available to freshen businesses across the Rockwood Urban Renewal Area. The storefront improvement grants aim to boost property values, improve perceptions of safety, increase […]

Mar 19 • 3:15 PM EDT • Business • theoutlookonline.com