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Kamala Harris was a candidate of many firsts, including the first Black and South Asian woman to run for president as the Democratic nominee.

Her resounding, swift loss in the presidential race to Republican Donald Trump on Nov. 5, 2024, means many things to different people, including the fact that American voters are unable to break the glass ceiling and elect a woman as president.

Amy Lieberman, a politics and society editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Farida Jalalzai, a scholar of women political leaders and gender in politics, to better understand the significance of Harris’ defeat – and how the U.S. stands apart from other countries that have had female leaders.

Kamala Harris supporters react to the election results on Nov. 5, 2024.
Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

How important was Kamala Harris’ gender in her loss?

I can’t say it was a main reason she lost. But what I can say is it was a factor that contributed to her lack of support, especially when you compare her performance with Joe Biden’s in the same places and with almost all of the same voting groups he won in 2020. Gender was part of the campaign landscape in many different ways this election. Trump and his supporters used insulting tropes about what a woman leader would look like on the world stage. He used a lot of misogynistic and racist appeals in his campaign and tried to mobilize voters in ways that aimed to reinforce patriarchy.

What does Harris’ loss say about where gender equality stands in the country?

I am not surprised that the glass ceiling for women in politics is still super durable in the U.S. This is an example of the country’s limits of making true progress on women’s empowerment and equality. Of course, the fact that Harris was a woman of color vying to be the first woman president of the U.S. is pertinent.

Trump asserted that the country needs a strong man to lead. He portrayed Harris as a liberal extremist and generally got the message through that a woman would not be up to the job of president.

When Geraldine Ferraro ran as the first female vice presidential candidate nominated by a major party in 1984, there were a lot of questions about whether she would be tough enough on the world stage. Now, there are still questions about whether a woman would be tough enough to lead.

How does this election compare with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump?

In 2016, Hillary Clinton highlighted the historic nature of a woman running for president of the U.S. – and, of course, she received nearly 3 million votes more than he did, though she still lost the election. Harris was reluctant to mention the historic nature of her candidacy. She did not mention this when she gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024. She recently explained this by saying, “Well, I’m clearly a woman. The point that most people really care about is can you do the job and do you have a plan to actually focus on them.”

Another important factor is Trump’s political trajectory. In 2016, Trump was still seen as an outlier and an extremist. Many political scientists – including myself – did not think he would receive the nomination, let alone win the general election that year. We see now that Trump is the new normal of the Republican Party. More moderate Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, are also not in power anymore. The party has become more extreme.

Is the country moving backward on gender equality, or is it stuck in neutral?

A few months ago, I would have said that the country is moving forward, but I feel like it’s moving backward now. That Trump’s sexist and racist messages resonated with a substantial number of people – or at least did not bother some enough – is a concern. Trump also said extreme things about women in 2016, including calling Hillary Clinton “a nasty woman.” This time around, these attacks seemed more normalized, saying that Harris was in a powerful political position only because she traded sexual favors, for example.

A cardboard cutout of Kamala Harris stands in a bar in Philadelphia, Pa., in the early hours of Nov. 6, 2024.
Matthew Hatcher/AFP via Getty Images

Women have led other countries. What makes the U.S. different?

The U.S. is a nuclear power and a major military and economic force. These realms are typically stereotyped by some as masculine. The president stands atop the U.S. political system and is directly elected. Women leaders often ascend through appointment as prime ministers in parliamentary systems. One of the vulnerabilities of prime ministers is that their terms in office are less secure. The traits deemed fitting for these roles – seeking compromise, for example – may prove less of a challenge to women than they would if they were seeking to be president of a powerful country like the U.S. on the world stage.

Only two women presidents in power in presidential systems were directly elected, and they are in Honduras and Mexico. The former is a former first lady, and the latter has strong ties to her predecessor. While women have been presidents of countries, several, such as the current presidents of Ethiopia, India and Greece, are essentially symbolic. Those positions are very different from the U.S. presidency, which has a more dominant role.

It is also pretty uncommon for a woman to be elected president in a presidential system without being a member of a powerful political family or without being supported by a male predecessor. When you look at Laura Chinchilla, the former president of Costa Rica, or former president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff, what connected a lot of these female politicians is that they were very much aided by male predecessors.

Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner, the former president of Argentina, had a wealth of political experience before she came to office in 2007, but she served immediately after her husband, Néstor Kirchner, was president.

There is a complexity to these cases, and a lot of these women brought in their own political credentials and experience. But there is still a tendency to have the additional demand that women in politics have these connections. Läs mer…

As the world absorbed news of Donald Trump’s comeback victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential race, concern in Iran turned to the impact of the election on its own economy amid escalating regional tensions.

Iran’s currency, the rial, fell to an all-time low on Nov. 6. 2024 – trading at above 700,000 rials to the dollar.

But how are Trump’s win and Iran’s economic woes related? The Conversation U.S. turned to Nader Habibi, an expert on the Iranian economy at Brandeis University, to explain.

What has happened to Iran’s currency?

The rial fell to a fresh record low as Donald Trump was claiming victory – trading above the symbolic marker of 700,000 rials to the dollar, according to traders in Tehran, just as results of the U.S. election were coming in.

But it is important to note that Iran’s currency has been losing value steadily in recent months. This has mainly been because of high inflation in the country, which throughout 2024 has been above 30% on a year-to-year basis, and because the government has had to run large budget deficits. It has also been caused by the recent escalation of tensions – and a fresh round of missile exchanges – between Iran and Israel.

As a result of these concerns, Iranians have increasingly been converting most of their savings into U.S. dollars or gold. This, in turn, has led to a depreciation of the rial.

So this trend predated Trump’s win?

Yes. The Iranian economy was already in a perilous state due in large part to the ongoing impact of U.S.-led sanctions on Tehran and ongoing anxiety over the conflict in the Middle East. In fact, the rial hit an earlier low a few days before the election.

In addition, Iran’s leaders have been directing more and more of the country’s oil revenue toward defense. They recently announced a planned increase in military expenditure of 200%, and some members of the ruling elite have called for setting the defense budget as a fixed share of gross domestic product to ensure adequate funding for military priorities. This proposal has added to the private sector’s anxiety about the budget deficit for other government expenditures, which can result in more inflation.

Iranian money changers swap dollars for rials.
Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

How did Trump’s victory further this currency tumble?

Geopolitical experts expect that a second Trump administration might lead to a shift in U.S. policy on Iran and a return to a “maximum pressure” strategy that included punishing economic sanctions and threats of military action to force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

While the Biden administration certainly kept the sanctions placed on Iran under Trump – and have even added to them – Washington also engaged in back-channel negotiations with Tehran, which pointed to a diplomatic solution and potentially an agreement that would, one day, ease those sanctions.

And even though the sanctions have remained in place, the Biden administration partially rolled back the enforcement of some of those prohibitions as an incentive for Iran during these back-channel negotiations. Washington, for example, has not prevented Iran’s ongoing indirect oil exports to China in recent years.

Biden’s looser approach to sanction enforcement saw Iranian oil exports increase to 2 million barrels a day, with most of that oil going to China. Under Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, Iranian oil exports were down to 100,000-150,000 barrels a day.

How does Trump’s relationship with Israel factor in?

Iranians are divided on how the second Trump presidency will affect the Iran-Israel conflict. Some are worried that it will relax any pressure the U.S. has on Israel in trying to contain the current conflict in the Middle East.

The concern is that without this pressure from Washington, Israel will carry out more military operation in Iran. In addition, many Iranians are worried that Trump may give Israel a green light to attack oil assets and Iranian infrastructure – and that would be even more costly to Iran’s economy.

These fears were heightened by the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was among the first world leaders to congratulate Trump, noting that the victory represented “a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”

Many Iranians are also worried that Trump’s victory may worsen relations between Washington and Tehran. While the U.S. and Iran don’t have direct diplomatic ties, it has been widely reported that under Biden there have been indirect and secret negotiations. The concern is that Trump, who is perceived in Tehran as more unpredictable than Biden, will not pursue the same strategy.

At the same time, some Iranians believe that Trump might try to de-escalate the war in Gaza, and this will also reduce tensions between Iran and Israel. This group points to Trump’s repeated expressions of interest in ending both the Ukraine war and the Middle East conflict. If the sentiments of this group of Iranians prevail, the anxiety that has triggered a new decline in the rial’s value might be temporary.

What has Tehran said about Trump’s victory?

Iran has downplayed any impact of the U.S. election on its economy. Fatemeh Mohajerani, a spokeswoman for Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s administration, said on Nov. 6, 2024, that the election of a U.S. president “doesn’t have anything specifically to do with us,” adding that the “major policies of America and the Islamic Republic are fixed, and they won’t heavily change by people replacing others.”

But this appears to be posturing by Iran’s leaders. They want to minimize the impact that Trump’s victory may have on their economy and are trying to reassure the domestic market.

But this might not prove effective – and we might see even more devaluation of Iranian currency in the coming weeks. Läs mer…

Over the past 15 years, the Housing First approach has gained traction as an evidence-based solution to tackling homelessness in many developed countries, including Canada.

The idea is simple: people experiencing homelessness should be given access to housing without any conditions.

Numerous studies have shown its effectiveness in reducing homelessness and providing long-term housing stability, especially for people experiencing chronic homelessness. Yet, many countries still see rising levels of homelessness despite claiming to implement the approach.

Data from Statistics Canada indicates that between 2018 and 2022 homelessness across the country increased by around 20 per cent. The biggest contributor to that rise was unsheltered homelessness — people sleeping in streets, vehicles or encampments. In the United States, the number of people experiencing homelessness jumped 12 per cent between 2022 and 2023.

This raises important questions about the limitations of this globally popular homelessness approach.

A video explainer on Housing First.

What is Housing First?

The idea emerged from the Pathways to Housing program founded in New York City in 1992. The program provided immediate housing through rental subsidies along with voluntary support services.

It emerged as an alternative to Treatment First approaches which require people to abstain from drugs and alcohol and adhere to treatment programs to become eligible for independent housing. That approach has generally failed because it is extremely difficult for people to get treatment and recover from addiction if they don’t have stable housing. Many people also refuse to participate in treatment programs which make them ineligible for obtaining housing.

Housing First is seen as a better alternative because having a safe and permanent home provides a necessary foundation for addressing other needs. Rather than compelling people to treatment services, Housing First provides housing as quickly as possible and the choice to avail of supportive services.

Housing First has significantly evolved throughout the decades. It has received extensive evidence-based program evaluations, including the large $110 million cross-national Health Canada research project “At Home/Chez Soi.”

The current Canadian federal government homelessness strategy claims to follow the principles of Housing First. Yet, despite its apparent success and global appeal, Housing First has not solved our national homelessness crisis.

In our recently published paper, sociology professor Andrew Clarke and I identified three key reasons the approach has struggled to fulfil its promise of ending homelessness.

Elevating Housing First beyond a ‘program’

Housing First is popular because it is seen as a ready-made program that can be adopted by non-profits or government agencies. But treating it merely as a program overlooks whether there are the resources and political will to achieve its core principle — providing unhoused people with housing.

In both Canada and the U.S., Housing First programs often rely on the private rental market. This creates challenges, as the rental subsidies provided typically do not cover high rent costs, and affordable housing is limited and often in poor condition.

For Housing First to truly succeed, governments must recognize housing as a human right. It must be accompanied by investments in safe and stable affordable housing. It also requires tackling other systemic issues such as low social assistance rates, unlivable minimum wages and inadequate mental health resources.

Eviction notices on tents at a homeless encampment in Halifax on Feb. 7, 2024 after the Halifax Regional Municipality said it was ‘de-designating’ five of the 11 sites it had previously established as approved locations for homeless encampments and is asking unhoused residents to leave.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lyndsay Armstrong

Housing for all

Housing First is often promoted as a cost-effective solution by targeting chronically homeless individuals who rely heavily on public services. A survey called the Vulnerability Index – Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool is frequently used to identify and prioritize people for Housing First services. This survey asks people personal questions about their traumas, coping methods, fears, health issues, substance use and criminal justice involvement.

Critics argue that this approach ranks people experiencing homelessness by their perceived cost to taxpayer dollars. This is evaluated by how often they have interacted with public services such as homeless shelters, hospitals, paramedics as well as the police.

This raises ethical concerns because access to housing is conditional on only those who incur the most cost to public dollars rather than housing being recognized as a basic human right for all.

Removing disciplinary measures

Although Housing First is supposed to give people a choice over the housing and support they receive, critics argue that it can be coercive. Many people living in homeless encampments face pressure to enroll in Housing First programs, sometimes under police threats of eviction, arrest and dispossession of property.

Housing First assumes that everyone will prefer stable housing over life on the streets. However, this neglects the sense of community and security people might have developed after living with other unhoused people. Moving into housing could mean separation from one’s community and being isolated in a new living environment. For Housing First to be successful, it should resemble the sense of community and strong social relations that people forge living with others on the streets.

For those that do move into housing, they work with caseworkers who make routine home visits. In an effort to reduce potential tensions with landlords, caseworkers mentor tenants on how to take care of their new home. When issues arise such as property damage or noise complaints, caseworkers use the threat of eviction as a tactic to get tenants to comply with the rental agreement.

Since many Housing First programs operate within a private rental market, the key role of caseworkers is to ensure landlord satisfaction to retain them as housing providers. Providing genuine support to tenants becomes secondary. Governments must provide non-market housing options for Housing First to reach its potential.

Finland’s experience with Housing First

Despite shortcomings, the principle behind Housing First (housing as a human right) remains vital. This principle can still be realized through thoughtful reforms. Studies on Housing First provide a useful framework for addressing the systemic barriers that hinder its success.

Finland’s experience offers valuable lessons. Rather than treating Housing First as a standalone program, Finland has focused on ensuring a robust supply of secure, affordable housing. The government converted temporary shelters into long-term homes and made significant investments in social housing. In Helsinki, this led to a remarkable 72 per cent reduction in people sleeping rough and in temporary accommodation.

Canada can draw from Finland’s example. Broadening the target population for Housing First beyond those chronically homeless and investing in social and supportive housing, rather than merely subsidizing market rents, is essential.

Furthermore, coercive tactics should not be used to compel people to live independently. Instead, service providers should meaningfully interact with the unhoused to create housing that suits their needs.

While Finland’s model is not without flaws, it demonstrates that tackling systemic issues is crucial for transforming homelessness policy. Housing First can still achieve its promise, but it requires a deeper commitment to social change. Läs mer…

The Canadian government recently announced that it is making significant cuts to the number of immigrants admitted into Canada. The number of new permanent residents is expected to be cut by nearly 20 per cent next year, while fewer temporary foreign workers will be allowed to come to Canada.

The government says the cuts would result in a 0.2 per cent decline in Canada’s population and alleviate “pressures on housing, infrastructure and social services.”

The cuts come as Canada’s political leaders are increasingly blaming immigrants for the country’s housing and health-care problems. Political discourse from both Conservatives and Liberals routinely casts increased migration as the primary cause of Canada’s housing and health-care crises.

The government’s announcement of cuts further plays into this narrative and is already being used by anti-immigrant politicians, like Donald Trump, who said “even Justin Trudeau wants to close Canada’s borders.”

Read more:
What does Donald Trump’s win mean for his brand of populist authoritarianism?

The broader societal fallout of this anti-immigrant discourse is the further normalization of everyday hate and animosity toward migrants, especially those who are racialized.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing the government’s plan to cut immigration.

What is everyday hate?

In a recent incident in Waterloo, Ont., a South Asian man was verbally assaulted and given the middle finger by a white woman. After he confronted her to ask what he had done, she told him “Indians are taking over Canada” and that he should “go back to India.”

This kind of everyday hate manifests during banal encounters between the victim and the perpetrators in the “everyday” of daily life. Hate constitutes violence and violent acts — covert and overt — targeted at people or groups “because of who they are, [rather] than because of what they do.”

Race, skin colour, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender and disability are categories for hate that can range from discrimination, threats and slurs, to assaults and exclusionary policies.

In Canada, anti-immigrant and anti-newcomer hate often revolves around race, with racialized and ethno-religious groups, such as Sikhs and Muslims, becoming easy targets.

In 2023, 44.5 per cent of hate incidents in Canada were motivated by race or ethnicity with South Asian and Black people facing higher rates of hate threats and assaults. Between 2022 and 2023, there was a significant increase in reported hate crimes against Muslims.

Institutionalized hate takes the form of exclusionary policies like travel bans, while rhetoric from government officials influences public perception about targeted groups. This, in turn, filters into the larger society to legitimize discrimination, prejudice, hate and exclusionary practices by ordinary folks against those who are singled out as “the other.”

Hatred resulted in the stabbing death of a South Asian cab driver in Winnipeg in 2020 by a man who admitted that it was precipitated by animosity towards South Asian people.

In 2021, a man in London, Ont. killed a Pakistani Canadian family, running them over with his truck. Islamophobic hate and the online radicalization by racist content contributed to the attack which a judge described as white nationalist terrorism.

The 2017 Québec City mosque killings too illustrate what can happen when beliefs translate into violence, and the haunting impact on people’s pysche.

The trauma is long-lasting and felt both by the victimized individual and the community to which they belong.

Fueling ‘Great Replacement’ theories

Since Spring 2024, I have been conducting a study on the online spread of centre-right populism and white supremacist ideology in Canada and Southern Europe that specifically targets racialized male migrants.

Both regions have witnessed a rise in far right, nativist and Islamophobic beliefs, with political leaders and populist discourses scapegoating recent migrants for societal crises.

I am examining how the ratchetting-up of anti-immigrant discourse by the political elites translates into racialized abuse and attacks on migrants engaged in gig economy jobs like ride-hailing and food delivery.

According to my preliminary findings, the far-right online narrative both in Canada and across Southern Europe is increasingly using the Great Replacement Theory to stir up racial hate against migrants, especially against racialized male migrants.

A recent study by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism revealed a sharp rise in online racism against South Asians. In Canada and elsewhere, online posts fueling Great Replacement Theory push the narrative that increased South Asian migrants will transform Canada into a nation with a non-white majority. This normalization of white nationalism and white Canadians as “exalted subjects” is exhibited when ordinary folks accost racialized people in the streets.

As Peter Smith, a researcher with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, notes:

“There is definitely a trend within the far-right spaces, particularly in Canada, of targeting South Asian communities and individuals for derision…They are making them the focus of a lot of anti-immigrant narratives and we’re seeing the phrase, ‘they have to go back’ being deployed a lot.”

The socialization of a culture of hate through diverse media and the role of state policies and state actors in shaping hate discourse reveals a correlation between increased hate crimes against specific groups and/or people with the rise of far-right discourses.

White Canadian young men are being drawn to white supremacist ideology through movements like the neo-Nazi Active Club network. Online hate is particularly worrisome as it not only creates echo chambers easily across social media networks, it also gets diffused offline.

With racialized migrants often occupying hypervisible jobs in the gig economy and service sector, my study seeks to understand how their labour exposes them to a higher risk of racial abuse, and violence.

The trauma of hate

“Hate crimes are preceded by hate speech… We have to bear in mind that words kill. Words kill as bullets.” These words by Adama Dieng, former United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, remind us how politically expedient discourse about groups of people can easily translate into targeted violence against those who are not seen as “one of us.”

Anti-immigrant rhetoric makes racism and hate seem banal and everyday. It negatively influences the lived experiences of racialized people as they navigate public spaces where they are forced into face-to-face interactions with potential perpetrators of hate.

What makes these more traumatic to the individual psyche is that they occur in the everyday of daily life, are often unrecognized by the dominant society, and thus harder to prove by the victims. This hate results in racialized victims experiencing racial trauma, stress, depression and anxiety. In the everyday, the psychological impact is profound.

Hate crimes will only increase in Canada as anti-immigrant rhetoric is pushed and normalized by politicians. Governments need to see random acts of hate as part of a larger structural violence against racialized people in Canada. And they need to consider how their rhetoric might fuel that violence. Instead of waiting for the next targeted killing or attack, they need to stop scapegoating immigrants for political gains. Läs mer…

Central to Australia’s cultural and political identity is the notion of a “fair go”. But recent elections, including in the United States, have highlighted the challenge of maintaining shared norms and support for institutions when many voters don’t believe they’re getting a “fair go”.

Australia has maintained a reasonably high satisfaction with democracy. However, this satisfaction is slipping.

Our study, published by the Australian National University in partnership with the Department of Home Affairs Strengthening Democracy Taskforce, explored this issue further. We analysed how perceptions of income inequality relate to satisfaction with democracy.

We found concerns about income inequality in Australia are strongly related to dissatisfaction with democracy. This suggests Australia’s satisfaction with democracy is at risk. It may erode further if voters think the major parties aren’t sufficiently responsive to the economic pressures they are under.

What we did and what we found

We analysed results of two large, broadly nationally representative surveys undertaken online:

These datasets allowed us to make comparisons through time, and with other countries in the region and globally.

Data from one of our surveys – the Asian Barometer Survey – suggests Australians are quite likely to think levels of income inequality are too high.

In both 2018 and 2023, respondents were asked:

How fair do you think income distribution is in Australia?

More Australians think income distribution in Australia is unfair or very unfair (60.5%) than think it is fair or very fair.

This gap has widened slightly since 2018, particularly in terms of those who think the distribution is very unfair (as opposed to just unfair).

Over a number of years, we asked respondents to both surveys:

On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in Australia?

From March 2008 to January 2023, satisfaction with democracy was quite stable.

Between January and October 2023, however, there was a more than doubling in the proportion of Australians who were not at all satisfied in democracy.

There was also:

a smaller increase in those who were not very satisfied
a small decline in those who were fairly satisfied, and
a large decline in those who were very satisfied.

This is likely to be, at least in part, related to the Voice referendum.

Over much of 2023, the share of Australians not at all satisfied in democracy soared. This was likely related to the Voice referendum.
AAP Image/Con Chronis

In the three months that followed the referendum, there was a partial return to the levels of satisfaction with democracy observed over the longer-term.

Combined, 30.3% of Australians were not at all or not very satisfied with democracy in January 2024 (compared to 34.2% in October 2023).

This is still well above the January 2023 levels of dissatisfaction (22.9%) and even more so the March 2008 levels (18.6%).

How people see inequality affects their view of democracy

The Department of Home Affairs’ 2024 Strengthening Democracy report describes Australia’s democratic resilience as “strong, but vulnerable”. It states that

community concerns about economic inequality are connected to a waning sense of national belonging.

Our paper found strong empirical support for this statement.

There is a very strong relationship between views on income inequality in Australia and views on democracy.

In the Asian Barometer Survey, only 51.2% of Australians who think the distribution of income is very unfair are satisfied or very satisfied with democracy in Australia.

This increases to 77.8% of those that think it is unfair, 87.1% of those that think it is fair, and 95.8% of the very small share of Australians that think the distribution of income is very fair.

In other words: the more fair you think Australia is, the more likely you are to be satisfied with democracy in Australia.

We also found those who support an expansive role for the government, particularly in reducing income gaps, tend to be more dissatisfied with how democracy functions in Australia.

Implications for Australian policy

Overall, we found the Australian population has identified the income distribution in Australia as being unfair, and this appears to be affecting people’s views on democracy.

There are many potential reasons to reduce inequality, including the negative impact inequality has on people’s health, wellbeing, and development.

Inequality could be reduced through progressive taxation, increased or better targeted social welfare spending, and targeted economic support for disadvantaged groups.

Reducing inequality could also help improve people’s satisfaction with democracy.
AAP Image/Toby Zerna

Our paper highlights reducing inequality could also help improve people’s satisfaction with democracy.

Income inequality in Australia has not risen as fast as in some other countries. And by some measures, it is relatively low.

Nonetheless, a majority of Australians think the current income distribution is unfair. In other words, that the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor.

There is an opportunity for governments and political leaders that care about maintaining confidence in institutions to do things differently.

They could improve transparency and communication regarding their efforts to reduce income inequality.

As our analysis shows, public perception plays a critical role in democratic satisfaction.

Perceptions of inequality in a country can easily flow into perceptions of democratic institutions. It can affect people’s overall satisfaction with the system. Läs mer…

The brain is a marvel of efficiency, honed by thousands of years of evolution so it can adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Yet, despite decades of research, the mystery of how the brain achieves this has remained elusive.

Our new research, published in the journal Cell, reveals how neurons – the cells responsible for your childhood memories, thoughts and emotions – coordinate their activity.

It’s a bit like being a worker in a high-performing business. Balancing individual skills with teamwork is key to success, but how do you achieve the balance?

As it turns out, the brain’s secret is surprisingly simple: devote no more than half (and no less than 40%) of each cell’s effort to individual tasks. Where does the rest of the effort go? Towards scalable teamwork.

And here’s the kicker: we found the exact same organisational structure across the brains of five species – from fruit flies and nematodes to zebrafish, mice and monkeys.

These species come from different branches of the tree of life that are separated by more than a billion years of evolution, suggesting we may have uncovered a fundamental principle for optimised information processing. It also offers powerful lessons for any complex system today.

The critical middle ground

Our discovery addresses a long-standing debate about the brain: do neurons act like star players (each highly specialised and efficient) or do they prioritise teamwork (ensuring the whole system works even when some elements falter)?

Answering this question has been challenging. Until recently, neuroscience tools were limited to either recording the activity of a few cells, or of several million.

It would be like trying to understand a massive company by either interviewing a handful of employees or by only receiving high-level department summaries. The critical middle ground was missing.

However, with advances in calcium imaging, we can now record signals from tens of thousands of cells simultaneously. Calcium imaging is a method that lets us watch neural activity in real time by using fluorescent sensors that light up according to calcium levels in the cell.

An example of calcium imaging shows neuron activity in a zebrafish brain.

Applying insights from my physics training to analyse large-scale datasets, we found that brain activity unfolds according to a fractal hierarchy. Cells work together to build larger, coordinated networks, creating an organisation with each scale mirroring those above and below.

This structure answered the debate: the brain actually does both. It balances individuality and teamwork, and does so in a clever way. Roughly half of the effort goes to “personal” performance as neurons collaborate within increasingly larger networks.

The Sierpiński triangle is an example of a fractal, where the same pattern repeats at infinite scales.
Beojan Stanislaus/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The brain can rapidly adapt to change

To test whether the brain’s structure had unique advantages, we ran computational simulations, revealing that this fractal hierarchy optimises information flow across the brain.

It allows the brain to do something crucial: adapt to change. It ensures the brain operates efficiently, accomplishing tasks with minimal resources while staying resilient by maintaining function even when neurons misfire.

Whether you are navigating unfamiliar terrain or reacting to a sudden threat, your brain processes and acts on new information rapidly. Neurons continuously adjust their coordination, keeping the brain stable enough for deep thought, yet agile enough to respond to new challenges.

The multiscale organisation we found allows different strategies – or “neural codes” – to function at different scales. For instance, we found that zebrafish movement relies on many neurons working in unison. This resilient design ensures swimming continues smoothly, even in fast-changing environments.

By contrast, mouse vision adapts at the cellular scale, permitting the precision required to extract fine details from a scene. Here, if a few neurons miss key pieces of information, the entire perception can shift – like when an optical illusion tricks your brain.

Evolutionary tree of species analysed in our study, each displaying a fractal neural organisation that balances efficiency and resilience. (MYA: million years ago; BYA: billion years ago)
Brandon Munn

Our findings reveal that this fractal coordination of neuron activity occurs across a vast evolutionary span: from vertebrates, whose last common ancestor lived 450 million years ago, to invertebrates, dating back a billion years.

This suggests brains have evolved to balance efficiency with resilience, allowing for optimised information processing and adaptability to new behavioural demands. The evolutionary persistence hints that we’ve uncovered a fundamental design principle.

A fundamental principle?

These are exciting times, as physics and neuroscience continue interacting to uncover the universal laws of the brain, crafted over aeons of natural selection. Future work will be needed to see how these principles might play out in the human brain.

Our findings also hint at something bigger: this simple rule of individual focus and scalable teamwork might not just be a solution for the brain.

When elements are organised into tiered networks, resources can be shared efficiently, and the system becomes robust against disruptions.

The best businesses operate in the same way — when a new challenge arises, individuals can react without waiting for instructions from their manager, allowing them to solve the problem while remaining supported by the organisation rapidly.

It may be a universal principle to achieve resilience and efficiency in complex systems. It appears basketball legend Michael Jordan was right when he said: “talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships”. Läs mer…

What makes a good retirement? I’ve been researching the lives of “silver backpackers”: Japanese seniors who embark on a later-life journey of self-discovery.

Many experienced Japan’s high-growth economy, characterised by rigid gender roles. For many men who worked as iconic cultural figures of sarariiman (white collar workers), excessive working hours were normalised and expected. Their absence from home was compensated by their female partners, many full-time stay-at-home mothers.

Entering their 60s meant either retirement from work, or children leaving home. For men and women, retirement is understood as an opportunity to live a life for themselves, leading to a journey of self-discovery.

Dedicating life to work

I interviewed more than 100 older Japanese women and men and found a significant disparity in the quality of life between them.

Japanese retired men who led a work-oriented life struggled to find meaning at the initial stages of retirement.

One man I spoke to retired at the age of 60 from a large trading company. He was a successful businessman, having travelled the world and held various managerial positions in the company. His wife looked after the children most of the time.

They bought a house with a yard in a suburb so the children could attend a good school. It significantly increased his commute, and further reduced his time with children. He also worked on weekends. He barely had time to develop his hobbies or get to know his neighbours.

Men I spoke to found it difficult to make new friends after retirement.
Roméo A./Unsplash

He idealised his retirement as a time to finally spend with his family and develop his own hobbies. When he retired, however, he realised that he and his family didn’t have any common topics of conversation.

Through decades of excessive hours spent at work away from home, the rest of the family established a routine that did not include him. Taking up new hobbies at the age of 60 was not as easy as he thought, nor was making new friends at this age.

“I became a nureochiba,” he lamented. Nureochiba refers to the wet fallen leaves that linger and are difficult to get rid of. The term is commonly used to describe retired men with no friends or hobbies who constantly accompany their wives.

The retirement for many former sarariiman was characterised by boredom – having nowhere to go to or having nothing to do. The sense of boredom led to a sense of isolation and low confidence in old age. Many older Japanese men I spoke to lament not having built a connection with their children or communities at a younger age.

Dedicating life to family and community

Older Japanese women I spoke with were more well-connected with their children and local communities in later life. Many were in regular contact with their children through visits, phone calls and messages. Some continued to care for them by providing food or by looking after grandchildren. Children very much appreciated them.

Many older women who had been full-time stay-at-home mothers had already taken up hobbies or volunteering activities at community organisations, and they could accelerate these involvements in their old age.

Even women who worked full-time seemed to maintain better connections with their family members because working excessively away from home was simply not possible for them.

Many women were in regular contact with their children and grandchildren.
kapinon.stuio/Shutterstock

Older men relied on these women’s networks and activities conducted at the scales of home and communities – from caring for others to pursuing hobbies – to enact a meaningful retirement. The sense of connection with family and communities, not to mention their husbands’ reliance on them, led to a high confidence and wellbeing among older women.

I saw many instances where older women preferred spending time with their female friends than their retired husbands and embarked on adventurous trips alone. One woman went on a three-month cruise alone. Feeling liberated, she sent a fax message to her husband from the ship: “When I get off this ship, I will devote the rest of my life to myself. You will have to take care of your own mother.”

Upon disembarking, she moved to Malaysia to start her second life.

The silver backpackers

Malaysia has become a popular destination for silver backpackers looking to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Some travel as couples, while others go alone, regardless of their marital status.

For many male silver backpackers I spoke to, moving to Malaysia offers a second chance at life to make new friends, find hobbies and, most importantly, start anew with their partners.

For many female silver backpackers, visiting Malaysia means being able to enjoy an independent lifestyle while having the security of friends and family in Malaysia and Japan.

Many older Japanese people went to Malaysia for a journey of self-discovery.
Job Savelsberg/Unsplash

The experiences of older Japanese men and women can be translated into the experiences of anyone who spent excessive hours at work and those who spent more time cultivating relationships outside of work. The activities of the latter group are not as valued in a society that narrowly defines productivity. However, my research shows that it is their activities that carry more value in old age.

Are you under pressure to work long hours? If you can, turn off your phone and computer. Instead of organising events for work, organise a dinner with your family and friends. Take up a new hobby in your local community centres. You can change how you work and live now for a better old age. Läs mer…

Gideon Haigh’s brother Jasper – “Jaz” – was 17 when he was killed in a car accident. Decades later, Haigh picked up a pen and, in a 72 hour span, wrote about the night Jaz died, all that led up to it, and all that he has lived since.

Haigh is a prolific writer. You may know him from his cricket writing, but also his investigative journalism about crime, trauma and the law. Sometimes he writes about all of these things at once.

To borrow a term from writer Anna Jurecic, Haigh is an “essayistic mourner”: someone who draws on his writing ability to investigate his loss. As Jurecic notes, literary grief memoirs “provide vivid evidence that mourning is more complicated than formulaic accounts of bereavement acknowledge”.

This is undoubtedly the case for Haigh, who expresses a complex (overwhelmingly negative) relationship to memoir, yet turns to the form to explore and explain this event and its reverberations.

Review: My Brother Jaz – Gideon Haigh (Melbourne University Publishing)

The book as document

In My Brother Jaz, Haigh’s working life is a rushing train, fuelled by loss, emitting fumes of memory as it thunders along. We get the sense that writing is at times a sort of self-punishment, and at other times an escape.

It is especially interesting that this is such a slim book, given Haigh’s glut of work on other topics. As one friend put it, when I asked if he had read it: “Nope, it’d only take me about ten minutes though, right?”

The book is palm-sized – a tight 86 pages – and feels like a document or passport. Haigh uses the word “documenting” to describe his approach. He variously refers to police reports and medical documentation. But he has an uneasy relationship to these documents, skimming them at times, reading them in depth at others, taking away different meanings at different points in time.

Archivists Jennifer Douglas and Allison Mills have observed that “bureaucratic records, written from a particular viewpoint, for a particular purpose, and in specialized language, are full of silences, places where we know there is more to the story.”

Grief memoirists are driven to fill these spaces, narrowing the distance between official documentation and emotional truth to combat the “alienation” that records can inspire. They attempt to mediate and remake records through their own written testimony.

My Brother Jaz opens at one such moment. Haigh interprets details from official documentation describing his brother’s last moments alive from his perspective as a brother. His observations and journalistic sensibility mingle with poetic description in a disarmingly heart-wrenching fashion:

As respirators and intravenous lines suspended him between life and death, other observations were made, including that his hair was light brown tinged blond and that his fingernails were short. But he was already more dead than alive. At 3.15am, the resident medical officer declared extinct the life of Jasper Haigh. He was my brother.

When he first receives the 41-page document these details are presumably pulled from – titled the “Jasper Haigh Reports” – Haigh cannot read it properly:

My eyes glanced off the pages; it was as if the paper and ink would not yield to my eye […] it seemed like my attention could make no indentation; I felt the decades-long habit of rendering the facts an unthreatening fuzz against which it was not too painful to brush.

Haigh reflects, somewhat flippantly, on the decision to write the story himself:

Document versus memory of traumatic event? Sure, whatever. On this subject where it related to my brother, after all, I was the world’s number one authority.

In writing his own swelling and frantic “truth”, Haigh reclaims the documentation – but now his book is also part of the archive of Jaz’s life and death.

Grief and time

Despite its brevity and its 72-hour writing time, My Brother Jaz covers a lot of ground. Familial tensions roused by grief are examined well. There are memories of the expected death-related events, like the lead up to the funeral and the funeral itself. Here Haigh encounters his estranged father, with whom he lays a portion of blame, at least at the moment of Jaz’s death.

Haigh also turns a light on his later life, through stark and loving examinations of relationships and their breakdowns, a life of writing, snippets of parenthood. In this way, grief is shown as something that permeates life, both slowly and in a flurry. It ebbs and flows across a lifetime, as well as in painfully concentrated pockets.

Gideon and Jaz.
Courtesy of Melbourne University Publishing.

Readers are drip-fed information, emulating Haigh’s experience of loss over time. There is the moment his mother reveals that she has never forgotten the name of the child of the other driver in the car accident. There is the moment he reveals that Jaz died in the hospital he was born in. There is the moment he allows himself to realise something others had suggested previously: that Jaz’s death may have been less of an accident than he once considered.

Haigh intersperses photos throughout the memoir, stamping moments in time, but not chronologically. We see flashes of Jaz and Haigh’s faces – young, then older, then young again – exemplifying memory’s fragmented and often non-linear form. The photos are sometimes explained or gestured to, but most are offered with no context beyond what can be gleaned from the image.

We are invited to read Jaz’s physical presence – his youthful smiles, the set of his jaw, a denim vest, a sweatshirt with “Jasper” emblazoned on the front, floppy hair – as remains of the lost boy.

Of course, time moves chronologically in reality. Haigh ages while Jaz can never can be older than 17. The loss of a sibling can be the loss of a parallel self; ageing brings this into sharp relief. “I am now fifty-eight,” Haigh writes:

Jasper would now be fifty-four. The former I can deal with; the latter is beyond my comprehension […] the sense of Jasper is always there, out of sight, but bulking darkly like a submerged continent.

Grief is self-absorbed

Though a well-established nonfiction writer, Haigh professes a vehement dislike of memoir – and autobiography more broadly – at several points. “Friends know of my pronounced, and frankly unreasonable, aversion to autobiographical writings,” he states. “The sentimental gush of life tales. The sickly sweetness of memoir […] Autofiction – kill me now.”

Gideon Haigh.
Melbourne University Publishing

This may be the reason for an underlying hum of paradoxically unabashed self-consciousness. Haigh acknowledges this at times – “I almost cannot get over how ridiculous this makes me sound” – yet he does get over it: the particular anecdote is shared.

Although Haigh seems set on the low-hanging accusation that memoirists are often narcissists, the most memoir-like moments – the moments where Haigh situates himself, his identity and his loss in relation to one another – are the ones that reverberate.

Accusations of naval-gazing neglect the fact that grief is self-absorbed by necessity, in order to help us understand ourselves and acknowledge the ties that bind us. There are several moments in My Brother Jaz which speak of the embodiment of grief, the way it haunts our cells, how loss literally becomes a part of us. Haigh writes,

what I chose in my campaign of renunciation was itself a slow kind of suicide: I took my brother’s eating disorder and cubed it […] my weight plunged to 42 kilos […] I did suspect that there had been a degree of volition in my brother’s death, and perhaps I did fear the tendency was in me also.

These words are accompanied by a startlingly thin profile image.

The scene that has stuck with me since reading My Brother Jaz is one where Haigh, a non-driver, reluctantly gains his L plates and attempts to get behind the wheel of a car. He becomes “trapped”, “plagued by pedals”. He is “genuinely transported back to that police lot”. This moment, in which Jaz’s traumatic death and Haigh’s attempts to grow collide, is heartfelt and heartbreaking.

Haigh’s identity as a journalist and writer is central to his approach. He may laments the move into memoir at times, but it allows him to grieve for Jaz using the tools he has at hand. “My brother died in the week my first book was published,” he writes,

to him my second book was dedicated. But in forty-nine subsequent books I’ve never been able to do better, never felt up to the task of addressing my life’s gravest loss.

It is somehow proper that Haigh confesses this in a book that rises to the task. Läs mer…

For millennia, humans had one obvious and reliable source of light – the Sun – and we knew the Sun was essential for our survival.

This might be why ancient religions – such as those in Egypt, Greece, the Middle East, India, Asia, and Central and South America – involved Sun worship.

Sun worship – such as to the Greek god Helios – was common to many cultures.
Neoclassicism Enthusiast/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

Early religions were also often tied up with healing. Sick people would turn to the shaman, priest or priestess for help.

While ancient peoples used the Sun to heal, this might not be how you think.

Since then, we’ve used light to heal in a number of ways. Some you might recognise today, others sound more like magic.

From warming ointments to sunbaking

There’s not much evidence around today that ancient peoples believed sunlight itself could cure illness. Instead, there’s more evidence they used the warmth of the Sun to heal.

The Ebers Papyrus, from ancient Egypt, had recipes for ointments that needed to be warmed by the Sun.
Wellcome Collection

The Ebers Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical scroll from around 1500 BCE. It contains a recipe for an ointment to “make the sinews […] flexible”. The ointment was made of wine, onion, soot, fruit and the tree extracts frankincense and myrrh. Once it was applied, the person was “put in sunlight”.

Other recipes, to treat coughs for example, involved putting ingredients in a vessel and letting it stand in sunlight. This is presumably to warm it up and help it infuse more strongly. The same technique is in the medical writings attributed to Greek physician Hippocrates who lived around 450-380 BCE.

The physician Aretaeus, who was active around 150 CE in what is now modern Turkey, wrote that sunlight could cure chronic cases of what he called “lethargy” but we’d recognise today as depression:

Lethargics are to be laid in the light, and exposed to the rays of the Sun (for the disease is gloom); and in a rather warm place, for the cause is a congelation of the innate heat.

Classical Islamic scholar Ibn Sina (980-1037 CE) described the health effects of sunbathing (at a time where we didn’t know about the link to skin cancer). In Book I of The Canon of Medicine he said the hot Sun helped everything from flatulence and asthma to hysteria. He also said the Sun “invigorates the brain” and is beneficial for “clearing the uterus”.

It was sometimes hard to tell science from magic

All the ways of curing described so far depend more on the Sun’s heat rather than its light. But what about curing with light itself?

German mystic and visionary Jakob Lorber believed sunlight cured pretty much anything.
Merkur Pub Co/Biblio

English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) knew you could “split” sunlight into a rainbow spectrum of colours.

This and many other discoveries radically changed ideas about healing in the next 200 years.

But as new ideas flourished, it was sometimes hard to tell science from magic.

For example, German mystic and visionary Jakob Lorber (1800-1864) believed sunlight was the best cure for pretty much anything. His 1851 book The Healing Power of Sunlight was still in print in 1997.

Public health reformer Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) also believed in the power of sunlight. In her famous book Notes on Nursing, she said of her patients:

second only to their need of fresh air is their need for light […] not only light but direct sunlight.

Nightingale also believed sunlight was the natural enemy of bacteria and viruses. She seems at least partially right. Sunlight can kill some, but not all, bacteria and viruses.

Chromotherapy – a way of healing based on colours and light – emerged in this period. While some of its supporters claim using coloured light for healing dates back to ancient Egypt, it’s hard to find evidence of this now.

The 1878 book The Principles of Light and Color paved the way for people to heal with different coloured light.
Getty Research Institute/Internet Archive Book Images/flickr

Modern chromotherapy owes a lot to the fertile mind of physician Edwin Babbitt (1828-1905) from the United States. Babbitt’s 1878 book The Principles of Light and Color was based on experiments with coloured light and his own visions and clairvoyant insights. It’s still in print.

Babbitt invented a portable stained-glass window called the Chromolume, designed to restore the balance of the body’s natural coloured energy. Sitting for set periods under the coloured lights from the window was said to restore your health.

The Spectro-Chrome made one entrepreneur a lot of money.
Daderot/Wikimedia Commons

Indian entrepreneur Dinshah Ghadiali (1873-1966) read about this, moved to the US and invented his own instrument, the Spectro-Chrome, in 1920.

The theory behind the Spectro-Chrome was that the human body was made up of four elements – oxygen (blue), hydrogen (red), nitrogen (green) and carbon (yellow). When these colours were out of balance, it caused sickness.

Some hour-long sessions with the Spectro-Chrome would restore balance and health. By using its green light, for example, you could reportedly aid your pituitary gland, while yellow light helped your digestion.

By 1946 Ghadiali had made around a million dollars from sales of this device in the US.

And today?

While some of these treatments sound bizarre, we now know certain coloured lights treat some illnesses and disorders.

Phototherapy with blue light is used to treat newborn babies with jaundice in hospital. People with seasonal affective disorder (sometimes known as winter depression) can be treated with regular exposure to white or blue light. And ultraviolet light is used to treat skin conditions, such as psoriasis.

Today, light therapy has even found its way into the beauty industry. LED face masks, with celebrity endorsements, promise to fight acne and reduce signs of ageing.

But like all forms of light, exposure to it has both risks and benefits. In the case of these LED face masks, they could disrupt your sleep.

This is the final article in our ‘Light and health’ series, where we look at how light affects our physical and mental health in sometimes surprising ways. Read other articles in the series. Läs mer…

The voters have cast their ballots, and after those ballots have been counted, and a winner has been projected by news organizations, that’s not the conclusion of the election. The actual outcome of the 2024 presidential election will be determined by the Electoral College.

The Conversation U.S. has had several articles explaining the history and effects of the United States’ curious method of choosing a president, not with one national election but with 51 smaller elections, in each state and Washington, D.C. Here are the highlights of that coverage.

1. A safeguard for democracy

The Electoral College was the result of a compromise devised among 11 men at the Constitutional Convention in the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. It was meant as a protective measure against rule by an uninformed mob, as Purdue University social studies education professor Phillip J. VanFossen explains. He describes how electors came to cast the decisive votes for president, writing:

“(The) founders were reassured that with this compromise system, neither public ignorance nor outside influence would affect the choice of a nation’s leader. They believed that the electors would ensure that only a qualified person became president. And they thought the Electoral College would serve as a check on a public who might be easily misled, especially by foreign governments.”

Read more:
Who invented the Electoral College?

These 11 delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 agreed on a compromise that created the Electoral College.
The Conversation, from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-ND

2. Creating new danger

By contrast, though, Barry C. Burden, a political science scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that rather than protecting American democracy, the Electoral College system created a new risk:

“Someone who wants to infiltrate the election system would have difficulty causing problems in a national popular vote because it is decided by thousands of disconnected local jurisdictions. In contrast, the Electoral College makes it convenient to sow mischief by only meddling in a few states widely seen as decisive.”

Read more:
An unseen problem with the Electoral College – it tells bad guys where to target their efforts

3. Protecting the popular vote?

A news item published Aug. 19, 1868, in South Carolina provides insight about the contemporaneous understanding of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment.
The Anderson Intelligencer via newspapers.com

There may be limits to that meddling, though. The Constitution allows state legislatures to choose the electors – which Donald Trump and his supporters tried to exploit in 2020 by asking Republican state legislators to appoint fake electors to confuse matters.

However, as Eric Eisner, a history Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, and David B. Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, explain, that would have run afoul not only of those states’ laws but also of another provision of the Constitution: The 14th Amendment says that if a state disenfranchises any of its voters, that state loses a proportional amount of its seats in the House of Representatives.

So, Eisner and Froomkin explain:

“(I)f a state legislature were to directly choose electors, that would disenfranchise all of the state’s voters. The right to vote, after all, is the right to have one’s vote counted, not the right to have one’s preferred candidate win. If all of a state’s voters have their right to vote taken away, Section 2 requires that the state’s House representation immediately and automatically be reduced to zero.”

That, in turn, means the state would only have two electors – and would no longer be a factor in the election.

Read more:
How the 14th Amendment prevents state legislatures from subverting popular presidential elections

4. Why does the US still have an Electoral College?

Other nations took a lead from the U.S. creation of the Electoral College, creating their own versions. But they didn’t last, as Westminster College political scientist Joshua Holzer explained:

“None have been satisfied with the results. And except for the U.S., all have found other ways to choose their leaders.”

Many people in the U.S. also have problems with the Electoral College, and Holzer identifies one effort underway to replace it without amending the Constitution. But even that wouldn’t ensure that the person who becomes president would be supported by at least half of the people who cast ballots.

Read more:
No country still uses an electoral college − except the US Läs mer…