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Since Election Day, President-elect Donald Trump has moved quickly to name his picks for key cabinet posts such as attorney general and the secretaries of defense, health and human services, and state.

Reaction to these nominees ranges from excitement to shock, but one thing is clear: Trump seeks a cabinet filled with staunch allies, even if those allies have little experience in government.

The Constitution requires the Senate to confirm each of these nominations.

History shows that, even when the Senate majority and the president are from the same party, the nomination process does not always go according to presidential plan.

The spoils system

When contemplating appointments, the Framers of the Constitution largely focused on the potential for abuse of government power. During the debates over ratification, some raised concerns that the president’s ability to appoint people to executive positions could lead to a dictatorship supported by officials who owed their allegiance to the president.

To address that concern, the Framers designed the appointments clause of the Constitution to require all officers of the United States appointed by the president to be subject to the “advice and consent” of the Senate. The Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to require Senate confirmation of any appointee exercising significant executive authority.

Roger Taney was the first cabinet nominee to be rejected by the Senate. President Andrew Jackson then named him to the Supreme Court.
Fotosearch/Getty Images

The first cabinet official was confirmed in 1789 when the Senate unanimously approved President George Washington’s nomination of Alexander Hamilton to be treasury secretary. Shortly thereafter, the Senate confirmed Washington’s picks for attorney general and the secretaries of war and state.

Before making these nominations, Washington consulted senators to gain their approval.

The tradition of informal consultation with Congress during the nomination process continued for some time but led to controversy as presidents and senators met behind closed doors to trade favors and use appointments for political gain.

This “spoils system” rewarded political loyalists and punished enemies. As New York Sen. William L. Marcy famously declared after Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election, “to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”

Battles over confirmation

But soon the tide turned against Jackson. The Senate became increasingly uncomfortable with political patronage when Jackson used his constitutional authority to make appointments during a Senate recess to avoid confrontations with Congress over the Second Bank of the United States. Specifically, Jackson appointed Roger Taney, who was outspoken against the bank and vowed to work to destroy it, as treasury secretary in 1833. When the recess appointment ended in 1834 and Taney was up for reappointment, the Senate rejected the nomination, making Taney the first cabinet nominee not to be confirmed.

Jackson then nominated, and the Senate ultimately confirmed, Taney to the Supreme Court. Taney went on to write the majority opinion in the 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which held that enslaved people were property who had no constitutional rights.

Battles over cabinet nominations have only increased since then.

One notable confirmation battle occurred over President Dwight Eisenhower’s nomination of Lewis Strauss to be commerce secretary. As depicted in the blockbuster movie “Oppenheimer,” Senate Commerce Committee hearings over the nomination lasted two months and included allegations of government-wide political corruption, antisemitism and questions over the role of science in government. Ultimately, the Senate refused to confirm Strauss.

The last rejection of a president’s nomination was in 1989 when President George H.W. Bush nominated John Tower as secretary of defense. Allegations involving Tower’s alcohol abuse, sex life and financial conflicts of interest led to an FBI investigation that ended without any formal charges. But the inquiry also led to five weeks’ worth of Senate confirmation hearings followed by a 53-47 vote to reject Tower’s nomination.

Getting through the process

Today, rather than face such public scrutiny, presidents are much more likely to withdraw nominations that provoke conflict.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump all withdrew nominations of cabinet officials when it became clear that the nominations would likely fail.

These withdrawals have been the result of a nomination and confirmation process designed to unearth national security, financial and political concerns over nominees.

After the president identifies the person he would like to serve in a particular position, that person typically goes through a formal investigation by the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics.

The FBI’s investigation usually goes back at least 15 years, depending on the position and extent to which the person will deal with classified information. The findings go directly to the president, but the Senate may request a report summarizing the FBI’s investigation.

Traditionally, these checks are used to vet nominees’ eligibility for a security clearance. However, Trump ignored FBI security concerns about certain nominees in his first administration, and his current transition team is, in some cases, bypassing FBI background checks in favor of vetting by private companies.

A nominee’s financial affairs are reviewed by the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency designed to prevent and resolve conflicts of interest in government. This process is so complex and time-consuming that most nominees retain lawyers and accountants to help them navigate the process.

During the investigation, nominees may have to sell assets or rearrange their finances to comply with federal laws that govern financial conflicts of interest. At the conclusion of its review of and negotiations with the nominee, the Office of Government Ethics provides the Senate with a report detailing its investigation, negotiations and findings.

However, a year into his first term, at least three of Trump’s cabinet officials refused to fully disclose their assets to the Office of Government Ethics, and one investigative story revealed that more than half of his cabinet allegedly engaged in “questionable or unethical conduct” while in office.

The FBI has historically conducted background investigations of presidential nominees.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Once a president officially sends a nomination to the Senate, it goes to the committee that has primary oversight jurisdiction over the department the person would lead. While each committee has its own standards and procedures for processing these nominations, the vetting process is the same.

Committees require the nominee to provide information about their background, as well as some sort of financial statement. Committees then use this information to launch their own investigations. During this process, most cabinet nominees will meet with committee staff and privately with individual senators.

Some committees are renowned for their thoroughness. The Senate Judiciary Committee has staff devoted exclusively to investigation of nominees, and the Senate Finance Committee is known for tracking down inconsistencies in decades’ worth of tax records.

Most cabinet nominees will also face a public hearing where senators will ask about their qualifications, question the nominees’ plans for the agency and highlight any concerns raised by constituents or the media.

What is a recess appointment?

During the constitutional debates in 1787, some were concerned that the need for Senate confirmation would require the Senate to be perpetually in session in order to receive appointments. Given the time and resources required for senators in the 18th century to work in their home states and also conduct business as a group, regular meetings were not feasible.

So the Framers placed a clause in the Constitution that allows presidents to appoint officials when the Senate is in recess. That appointment expires at the end of the Senate’s next session.

Presidents have historically exploited this constitutional loophole. They have used this “recess appointments” power for political gain and to temporarily install people in office who would not otherwise be confirmed by the Senate. However, there is some evidence that the uncertainty and partisan conflict that result from such appointments leads to administration problems.

The Supreme Court reviewed this practice in 2014, when Obama appointed three members of the National Labor Relations Board without Senate confirmation.

The court held the president lacked the power to make such appointments and that a Senate recess has to be at least 10 days long before a president can bypass confirmation. As a result, the Senate now holds pro forma sessions where no business is conducted but the chamber is technically open to prevent a recess appointment.

President-elect Trump has called on the Senate to stop this practice and allow him to make recess appointments. Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune has not ruled that out, stating that “all options are on the table, including recess appointments.” Läs mer…

It’s never easy to create a successful business, but it’s a lot harder if you’re Black.

Research shows that Black startup founders face significant, racially specific hurdles, including limited access to entrepreneurship training programs and challenges accessing predominantly white networking and mentorship opportunities.

It’s harder for Black founders to raise money, too. Recent TechCrunch data shows Black business founders received less than half of 1% of total startup capital in 2023. And, to date in 2024, there’s only continued stagnation.

Tope Awotona, founder of Calendly, a free online appointment-scheduling platform, experienced this struggle.

“Everyone said no,” he told NPR in 2020. “Meanwhile, I watched other people who fit a different profile get money thrown at them. Those VCs were ignorant and short-sighted … the only thing I could attribute it to was that I was Black.”

Yet there are high-profile Black entrepreneurship success stories. They include Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson, Daymond John, an investor on the reality TV series Shark Tank, and the thousands of Black startup founders running innovative businesses across the United States right now.

To better understand the intersection of race and entrepreneurship, we studied the experiences of successful Black entrepreneurs in the U.S., as shared on NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast. The challenges Black entrepreneurs face are well documented, so we focused our research on a different question: How does someone’s identity as an entrepreneur intersect with their racial identity?

Two key insights emerged.

A step toward equality

We found that while race can be a liability in some respects, some successful entrepreneurs have found ways to capitalize on race in their startups.

Most Black entrepreneurs, for example, understand their communities much better than outsiders typically do. This understanding lets them better and more quickly see opportunities in their respective communities.

That’s the competitive advantage John leveraged in 1992 when he founded the clothing company FUBU, which stands for, “For Us, By Us.” As he said on “How I Built This” in 2019, “I wanted to create a brand that loved and respected the people who love and respect hip-hop.”

John knew the market he wanted to serve better than most because he was a part of it. He recognized the opportunity when outsiders could not.

Other business founders echo John’s sentiment.

Tristan Walker, founder of Walker & Company, a personal grooming products company focused on Black men, said his purpose is “to create a health and beauty products company for people who look like me.”

And the McBride sisters, in naming their flagship wine Black Girl Magic, told “How I Built This”: “If there’s like a moment for Black women in which they can celebrate … whatever it is … we just wanted to be able to be there to celebrate with her with just like beautiful, high-quality wines.”

FUBU clothing brand co-founders Carlton Brown and Daymond John greet the crowd at the Actively Black fashion brand’s The Black Mixtape 2 runway show at Sony Hall on Sept. 8, 2023, in New York City.
Shannon Finney/Getty Images

In this sense, some Black entrepreneurs find themselves uniquely positioned to create products others would never think of. And, our research found, they are better positioned to sell to a community eager to support them.

A recent study from Pew Research Center found the majority of Black adults believe that purchasing from Black businesses is a step toward racial equality.

Meaning as mission

Our study also found that many Black entrepreneurs care about creating a company with meaning. That’s especially true when it can help lift up others in their race. For them, giving back to – and inspiring – their communities matters.

In other words, Black startup founders frequently build businesses that reflect their racial identity. It’s part of their purpose in becoming an entrepreneur.

“I’ve always felt that my company’s mission had to be of service to my community,” Cathy Hughes, founder of Radio One, a station focused on Black culture, told “How I Built This” in 2017. “Being the first African American woman (in charge) of a publicly traded corporation … my whole purpose for being in business was to be a voice, and an assistant to my community,” she said.

Many other people in our study mirrored this sentiment, identifying role modeling, racial pride and the empowerment of future generations as a deliberate part of their mission as Black business owners.

Role models matter

Communities benefit from homegrown entrepreneurs. These are people who demonstrate the power of entrepreneurship and show that a career as an entrepreneur is possible.

Yet many minority communities lack such success stories. Just 3% of U.S. businesses were Black-owned in 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

That’s one reason we wanted to document Black success stories in the first place. We believe they have the potential to be transformational. Each new success shows others in those communities that it’s possible, and that entrepreneurship can provide a pathway to a more prosperous future. Läs mer…

Despite recent efforts to restrict them, diversity training programs have become as ubiquitous in American offices as the water cooler. They’re everywhere.

But our recent update on the state of diversity training research confirms that these programs have different levels of effectiveness and widely varying results.

In our prior work, published in 2016, we found that diversity training programs strive to foster understanding and appreciation of differences among people. This message, however, was often misunderstood or overlooked in American workplaces.

Alarmed by growing polarization and unequal treatment that have become serious public and social concerns in America and abroad, we updated our prior findings to see what has changed.

We did so because these divisions contribute to toxic relationships, dysfunctional organizations and fragmented societies — the same things diversity training is supposed to address.

Some of the research we studied found that diversity training had a limited positive impact on workplace demographics. And in some cases, these programs also created resistance and backlash.

Often, underperforming programs focus exclusively on a specific marginalized group — African Americans or the LGBTQ+ community, for example — rather than educating people about the value of our differences.

Effective programs, in this sense, are measured by participants’ cognitive learning and affective learning, or how they perceive others. Behavioral learning — how well participants interact with different people — represents another standard of success.

In our study, other underachieving programs struggled to get participants to change how they judge people who are different. Most of these programs were online or conducted over a brief period of time.

On the other hand, diversity training programs that had better results often implemented skills training and role-playing. These include role-playing simulations of business negotiations. They also featured conflict management courses where participants interact with diverse counterparts.

Some of these programs also emphasize training earlier in grade school, before people enter the workforce. These programs include, for example, activities like playing soccer with kids from varying ethnic backgrounds.

Successful programs were also more effective when they formed part of a broader, ongoing company effort against intolerance. Positive examples include retention and recruitment efforts, affinity clubs and mentorship programs.

The research on some of these successful programs showed that diversity training led to better productivity and organizational commitment. They also resulted in less harassment. Läs mer…

Under pressure from customers and investors, many U.S. companies have pledged to voluntarily reduce their impact on the climate. But that doesn’t always mean they’re cutting their own greenhouse gas emissions.

A large number of companies are instead paying others to reduce carbon emissions on their behalf through projects that generate carbon offsets.

There are reasons for skepticism about this practice. Chief among them is that projects developed for carbon offsets have a history of taking up land in poorer countries, displacing small-scale farmers and threatening livelihoods in the process. The quality of some globally traded voluntary offsets has also proven challenging to verify. Investigations of forest-offset projects, for example, have suggested that many aren’t as effective at sequestering carbon as they claim.

We think there is a better solution: Companies could spend some of their carbon-offset money on climate-friendly projects that don’t just cut emissions but also improve people’s lives in the U.S. communities where these companies operate.

Our team at the Climate, Health and Energy Equity Lab at Vanderbilt University has been exploring the possibility of corporate offset dollars paying to improve energy efficiency in low-income housing, starting with a pilot study in our hometown of Nashville. Efficiency upgrades can save energy and money and reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, they reduce some of the many health risks created or elevated by living in a home that is hard to properly heat and cool.

Such upgrades can be financed by selling carbon offsets on the “social carbon” segment of the voluntary carbon market. The combined economic, health and climate benefits of low-income energy upgrades could make these projects attractive for companies seeking to fulfill their climate commitments and earn positive attention in the local community.

Energy efficiency pays off in many ways

On average, low-income households in the U.S. spend 6% to 10% of their income on energy costs. Often, these renters and homeowners are struggling to keep aging, poorly insulated homes at healthy temperatures.

For some people, the cost of heating a home can get so high it becomes a choice of “heat or eat,” which can take a physical and mental health toll.

In Nashville, we looked at implementing four key types of energy efficiency upgrades in low-income housing. Together, they can reduce energy use and energy-related carbon emissions while also earning offset credits on the voluntary carbon market.

We calculated that the combination of upgrading the windows, refrigerator and heating and cooling system and also insulating the attic in a two-bedroom Nashville rental unit could reduce its carbon emissions from home energy use by an estimated 592 tons over the 25-year life of the upgrades.

If carbon reductions from upgrades to that Nashville home were packaged as carbon offsets and sold on the voluntary carbon market at US$30 to $45 per ton, the money earned could cover the substantial material costs for the energy efficiency upgrades. This pricing is consistent with prices commanded by other carbon offsets with significant and meaningful social benefits. It is also quite possible that the community health benefits would be more attractive to some corporate buyers than the carbon reductions themselves. The offset transactions can be facilitated by nonprofits, social enterprises or local governments.

Many of these upgrades are prohibitively expensive for low-income households without outside financial help. They also tend to be avoided by landlords, since it is tenants, not landlords, who pay the utility bills.

Lessons from Maine and the Southeast

Projects are already mobilizing carbon-offset funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency in the U.S.

One of the early innovators was the Maine State Housing Authority. The agency piloted financing residential energy efficiency upgrades with the sale of carbon offsets in the early 2000s and discovered how complicated the process can be.

Chevrolet’s $750,000 purchase of carbon credits from the Maine project in 2012 enabled efficiency upgrades to about 170 homes. The project revealed some important lessons, including the need for a large number of homes and a high carbon price for the project to pay off. A 2012 review of the program noted that, while each house could generate hundreds of dollars in carbon credits, setting up the project, measuring and validating the value, and selling this type of offset can cost tens of thousands of dollars before the work on homes begins.

To lower that cost, Maya Maciel-Seidman, a member of our team, developed a way to quantify carbon reductions from home energy upgrades. She was able to reduce the time and cost by relying on publicly available utility and government data combined with easy to perform on-the-ground measurements.

Insulating attics can save hundreds of dollars a year on energy bills and pay off quickly.
Ashley Cooper/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images

Another challenge this type of carbon offset – and offsets that support clean energy geneartion – can run into is the question of additionality: Would low-income energy upgrades happen anyway, without funding from carbon offsets?

We don’t think so. There are federal programs that provide funding for energy efficiency upgrades in low-income housing. However, the 40-plus-year track record of the federal Weatherization Assistance Program and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program suggests the vast majority of eligible low-income households aren’t reached by these programs.

A solar startup in the U.S. Southeast offers another example of carbon offsets with environmental and economic co-benefits close to home. Clearloop generates carbon offsets by building utility-scale solar farms in the dirtiest parts of the U.S. electric grid, regions with little renewable energy and highly polluting power plants. The company finances solar developments through the up-front sale of carbon offsets representing the emissions saved during the lifetime operation of each solar farm.

Companies and residents benefit

Using carbon offsets isn’t a substitute for reducing emissions, or for public policies and funding aimed at eradicating energy poverty and insecurity. But we believe that mobilizing the voluntary carbon market to finance energy efficiency upgrades in low-income homes could offer meaningful relief to many households.

The physical proximity to corporate supporters of such projects should also allow for greater transparency and accountability. When companies purchase carbon offsets that are locally generated and bring additional benefits to their host communities, they bolster their social license to operate while making progress toward meeting climate commitments. Läs mer…

How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?

Fiction writers have explored some possibilities.

In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable.

Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.

The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.

To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

Stephenson’s record as a prognosticator has been impressive – he anticipated the metaverse in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and a key plot element of his “Diamond Age,” released in 1995, is an interactive primer that functions much like a chatbot.

On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. By dispensing factual content, chatbots could supply alternative sources of high-quality information that aren’t cordoned off by paywalls.

Ironically, however, the output of these chatbots may represent the greatest danger to the future of the web – one that was hinted at decades earlier by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The rise of the chatbots

Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content, such as articles and books that have been peer-reviewed, fact-checked or vetted in some way.

The developers of large language models, or LLMs – the engines that power bots like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini – have taken advantage of this resource.

To perform their magic, however, these models must ingest immense quantities of high-quality text for training purposes. A vast amount of verbiage has already been scraped from online sources and fed to the fledgling LLMs.

The problem is that the web, enormous as it is, is a finite resource. High-quality text that hasn’t already been strip-mined is becoming scarce, leading to what The New York Times called an “emerging crisis in content.”

This has forced companies like OpenAI to enter into agreements with publishers to obtain even more raw material for their ravenous bots. But according to one prediction, a shortage of additional high-quality training data may strike as early as 2026.

As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.

And if a chatbot hangs out with the wrong sort of people online, it can pick up their repellent views. Microsoft discovered this the hard way in 2016, when it had to pull the plug on Tay, a bot that started repeating racist and sexist content.

Over time, all of these issues could make online content even less trustworthy and less useful than it is today. In addition, LLMs that are fed a diet of low-calorie content may produce even more problematic output that also ends up on the web.

An infinite − and useless − library

It’s not hard to imagine a feedback loop that results in a continuous process of degradation as the bots feed on their own imperfect output.

A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way – much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.

How bad might this get?

Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

In Borges’ imaginary, endlessly expansive library of content, finding something meaningful is like finding a needle in a haystack.
aire images/Moment via Getty Images

Initially, this realization sparks joy: By definition, there must exist books that detail the future of humanity and the meaning of life.

The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there –but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.

Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.

Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?

The internet is often described as one of humanity’s great achievements. But like any other resource, it’s important to give serious thought to how it is maintained and managed – lest we end up confronting the dystopian vision imagined by Borges. Läs mer…

Horror films draw us into a world where our deepest anxieties are laid bare. They illuminate the darker recesses of the human psyche – ones that we often prefer to ignore.

And some of the most unsettling things we can imagine, it seems, are not zombies or aliens or demons, but ones that are closer to home: mothers. Bad ones.

The ‘Death Mother’

Psychologist Carl Jung spent a lifetime studying dreams, myths, fairy tales and religious symbols from around the world, attempting to boil them down to what he called “the collective unconscious.” At the heart of the collective unconscious, he believed, was a set of primal symbols, or archetypes, that speak to fundamental aspects of human experience: the father, the hero and the trickster, for example.

Of all these archetypes, Jung considered one the most significant: the mother.

The mother symbolizes the origin of our being; our existence is inextricably linked to hers. The Latin word for mother, “mater,” is the root of the word “matter” – the fundamental substance of our physical world.

At times, she is the “Great Mother”: a life-giving, nurturing figure. However, like all archetypes, she also has a shadow side: the “Terrible Mother,” characterized by coldness and destructiveness.

‘The Evil Mothers,’ by Giovanni Segantini (1894).
Belvedere Palace via Wikimedia Commons

Building on Jung’s work, psychoanalyst Marion Woodman introduced the idea of the “Death Mother.” While the Terrible Mother attacks her child’s mind and erodes their confidence, the Death Mother threatens her child’s body, even their life.

The Death Mother is so terrifying, Jungian scholar Daniela Sieff notes, because she makes people confront a disturbing idea: that “the belief that biology has programmed mothers to love and nurture every child they give birth to is a fantasy.” She is relegated to the deepest recesses of the collective unconscious – and horror films provide one of the few spaces where this ultimate taboo can be explored.

As a film scholar, I’ve noticed the prevalence of the Death Mother archetype in recent horror films. Like Woodman and Sieff, I believe she reflects one of the darkest elements of the collective psyche. I also believe that it can be productive to engage with her – that she can be transformed by bringing her to light.

A mother’s shadow

“Hereditary,” released in 2018, begins at the funeral of Annie’s domineering mother, Ellen, the leader of a satanic cult. In order to conjure Paimon, the demon she worshipped, Ellen needed a male host, which she tried to procure through her own son – leading to his suicide, her husband’s death and Annie’s mental illness.

Annie, an artist who makes dollhouses and miniatures, strives to be the best mom she can be to her two kids. Yet she is continually thwarted by the morbid grip of her mother’s shadow. The family home feels dark and cavernous, with each member isolated in their own space.

A miniature house of horror.
Reid Chavis via IMDB

Their grief escalates when Annie’s son, Peter, accidentally kills his sister, Charlie. As the family’s horrors escalate, Annie begins to replicate traumatic events within a diorama that she’s built of their own home, highlighting her desperate need to construct and control her reality.

It’s not enough to hold her demons at bay. While sleepwalking, Annie recalls, she once woke up covered in lighter fluid, about to torch both herself and her children.

This lack of maternal bond – a violation of the most basic societal expectations – lends the film its most profound sense of foreboding. While some of the terrors are supernatural, those elements only escalate toward the end. Before that, the horror emanates from severed maternal bonds. Annie reveals to her son, Peter, that she tried to miscarry him. And when her daughter, Charlie, was born, it was Annie’s mother who breastfed the infant: transmitting the spirit of the demon to her, and ultimately leading to her death.

Yet even as Annie tries to harm her children, she loves them, until she no longer can – setting up some of the film’s most disturbing scenes.

Nurturing revenge

The 2022 film “Hatching” is a Finnish horror-fairy tale exploring the devastating effects of a mother’s conformity to societal norms and its destructive consequences for her daughter. What should be maternal love becomes an unconscious quest for power.

The film centers on Tinja, a 12-year-old girl trapped in the highly controlled world of her mother, who is obsessed with showcasing their family’s seeming perfection on her video blog. A former figure skater who never fulfilled her dreams due to an injury, the mother fixates on Tinja’s career as a gymnast, cutting her off from friends and demanding constant perfection.

In the opening scene, a bird flies through the shimmering living room window, shattering the glass. Tinja attempts to nurse the injured bird back to health, but her mother coldly snaps its neck and instructs Tinja to bury it. In a moment of conflicted emotion, the child bludgeons the bird, supposedly to end its suffering.

Tinja becomes both daughter and mother in ‘Hatching.’
IMDB

She later discovers an egg in a nest and brings it back to her bedroom to incubate. Nourished by her tears, it hatches into a monstrous creature, Alli, who believes Tinja is its mother. Gradually, as the girl nurtures the hatchling, it starts to resemble Tinja, acting out her darkest desires – and eventually, it will subsume her.

“Hatching” illustrates the crux of the Death Mother figure: how mothering and nurturing can become enmeshed with violence and vengeance. As Woodman explains, a Death Mother compels her child to live out her own unfulfilled dreams, while the daughter’s own self is obliterated. Unable to bear the pressure, the child projects these repressed feelings onto others, including her own offspring – a manifestation of the unacceptable emotions she must hide from her mother’s scrutiny.

‘Be My Baby’

At first, motherhood seems far from “Barbarian,” a 2022 film set in a derelict Detroit neighborhood. The story unfolds in the only habitable house, purchased by a group of white finance bros who rent it out as an Airbnb.

Tess, a young filmmaker, is sharing the space with another tenant due to a booking mistake. Yet she becomes trapped – and he is devoured – by a bare-chested female monster in the basement.

Soon AJ, one of the house’s owners, shows up. A Hollywood actor who has been blacklisted by the film industry for accusations of sexual assault, he and Tess fight off the monster – credited as “the Mother” – who is now intent on nursing them.

Eventually, Tess learns that the home was once owned by a serial killer and rapist who kidnapped women, impregnated them and has been impregnating their offspring ever since, taking advantage of how the police have abandoned the area due to white flight. The maternal demon in the basement is the sole survivor.

After escaping, Tess walks off into the distance – to the Ronettes’ tune “Be My Baby.”

As much as the monster terrifies Tess in ‘Barbarian,’ she’s not the root of the problem.
IMDB

This house of horrors is where the violent legacies of patriarchy, misogyny, capitalism and gentrification all converge. The feral figure in the basement, the Death Mother, is not the true terror. Her evil emerges from a long history of cruelty against women, and of motherhood being both forced and oppressed.

Pressure valve

Actresses Toni Collette, who stars in “Hereditary,” and Sophia Heikkilä, in “Hatching,” have spoken positively about bringing their characters to light – and with them, the pressures that can make mothers “monstrous”.

Collette noted that drawing empathy for her character, the miniature artist Annie, was a healthy process, one that helped her connect more deeply to herself. Heikkilä recognized aspects of the perfectionist vlogger mother in herself, finding it a valuable cautionary tale.

Their insights suggest elements of the Death Mother are more prevalent than we want to admit, relegating her to the basement of our collective psyche. Horror can help us confront these shadows – potentially leading to catharsis. Läs mer…

In an era where digital devices are everywhere, the term “screen time” has become a buzz phrase in discussions about technology’s impact on people’s lives. Parents are concerned about their children’s screen habits. But what if this entire approach to screen time is fundamentally flawed?

While researchers have made advances in measuring screen use, a detailed critique of the research in 2020 revealed major issues in how screen time is conceptualized, measured and studied. I study how digital technology affects human cognition and emotions. My ongoing research with cognitive psychologist Nelson Roque builds on that critique’s findings.

We categorized existing screen-time measures, mapping them to attributes like whether they are duration-based or context-specific, and are studying how they relate to health outcomes such as anxiety, stress, depression, loneliness, mood and sleep quality, creating a clearer framework for understanding screen time. We believe that grouping all digital activities together misses how different types of screen use affect people.

By applying this framework, researchers can better identify which digital activities are beneficial or potentially harmful, allowing people to adopt more intentional screen habits that support well-being and reduce negative mental and emotional health effects.

Screen time isn’t one thing

Screen time, at first glance, seems easy to understand: It’s simply the time spent on devices with screens such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs. But this basic definition hides the variety within people’s digital activities. To truly understand screen time’s impact, you need to look closer at specific digital activities and how each affects cognitive function and mental health.

In our research, we divide screen time into four broad categories: educational use, work-related use, social interaction and entertainment.

For education, activities like online classes and reading articles can improve cognitive skills like problem-solving and critical thinking. Digital tools like mobile apps can support learning by boosting motivation, self-regulation and self-control.

But these tools also pose challenges, such as distracting learners and contributing to poorer recall compared with traditional learning methods. For young users, screen-based learning may even have negative impacts on development and their social environment.

Screen time for work, like writing reports or attending virtual meetings, is a central part of modern life. It can improve productivity and enable remote work. However, prolonged screen exposure and multitasking may also lead to stress, anxiety and cognitive fatigue.

Screen use for social connection helps people interact with others through video chats, social media or online communities. These interactions can promote social connectedness and even improve health outcomes such as decreased depressive symptoms and improved glycemic control for people with chronic conditions. But passive screen use, like endless social media scrolling, can lead to negative experiences such as cyberbullying, social comparison and loneliness, especially for teens.

Screen use for entertainment provides relaxation and stress relief. Mindfulness apps or meditation tools, for example, can reduce anxiety and improve emotional regulation. Creative digital activities, like graphic design and music production, can reduce stress and improve mental health. However, too much screen use may reduce well-being by limiting physical activity and time for other rewarding pursuits.

Context matters

Screen time affects people differently based on factors like mood, social setting, age and family environment. Your emotions before and during screen use can shape your experience. Positive interactions can lift your mood, while loneliness might deepen with certain online activities. For example, we found that differences in age and stress levels affect how readily people become distracted on their devices. Alerts and other changes distract users, which makes it more challenging to focus on tasks.

The social context of screen use also matters. Watching a movie with family can strengthen bonds, while using screens alone can increase feelings of isolation, especially when it replaces face-to-face interactions.

Family influence plays a role, too. For example, parents’ screen habits affect their children’s screen behavior, and structured parental involvement can help reduce excessive use. It highlights the positive effect of structured parental involvement, along with mindful social contexts, in managing screen time for healthier digital interactions.

Shared screen time with family and friends can boost well-being.
kate_sept2004/E+ via Getty Images

Consistency and nuance

Technology now lets researchers track screen use accurately, but simply counting hours doesn’t give us the full picture. Even when we measure specific activities, like social media or gaming, studies don’t often capture engagement level or intent. For example, someone might use social media to stay informed or to procrastinate.

Studies on screen time often vary in how they define and categorize it. Some focus on total screen exposure without differentiating between activities. Others examine specific types of use but may not account for the content or context. This lack of consistency in defining screen time makes it hard to compare studies or generalize findings.

Understanding screen use requires a more nuanced approach than tracking the amount of time people spend on their screens. Recognizing the different effects of specific digital activities and distinguishing between active and passive use are crucial steps. Using standardized definitions and combining quantitative data with personal insights would provide a fuller picture. Researchers can also study how screen use affects people over time.

For policymakers, this means developing guidelines that move beyond one-size-fits-all limits by focusing on recommendations suited to specific activities and individual needs. For the rest of us, this awareness encourages a balanced digital diet that blends enriching online and offline activities for better well-being. Läs mer…

Everyone knows that climate change has consequences, such as a higher likelihood of severe floods, hurricanes and droughts. But here’s a lesser-known problem: Climate change makes toilets more likely to break, which leaves people more likely to “go” outside.

That’s what colleagues and I found when we studied households across six rural Cambodian provinces, focusing on their access to proper toilets and when people decide to abandon sanitary systems in favor of open defecation, or “going” outside.

We analyzed sanitation behavior surveys that were given to about 200,000 households every two years from 2013 to 2020. These questionnaires looked into how households maintained access to sanitary toilet systems, when these facilities were abandoned, and why. It also inquired about the poverty status of the households.

A second survey of 1,472 households that owned a pour-flush latrine purchased through local sanitation businesses supported by the nonprofit organization iDE looked at how well these toilets functioned, as well as attitudes toward waste management. In this case, waste management refers to how often and when latrine pits are emptied and whether the waste is contained in a safe and hygienic way.

Our goal was to establish how living in regions vulnerable to the effects of climate change affects how well sanitary toilets function, and the impact that has on households’ sanitation practices and perceptions.

The key result of our study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment, Development and Sustainability, was clear: In regions where climate change makes heavy storms and floods more common, households more frequently stop using and maintaining their toilets.

Toilet dysfunction, which temporarily prevents a toilet from flushing or from keeping human waste from entering the environment, is more frequent among households living in flood-prone regions during the rainy season. We found that for every point increase in the composite climate vulnerability index, toilet abandonment went up by 4%.

Unsurprisingly, we found that the poorest households were hit hardest. For every percentage point increase in the number of households living in poverty for any one district, toilet abandonment went up by 1.2%.

Why it matters

Going to the toilet is a basic human necessity, yet more than half the world’s population uses toilets that do not treat human waste before it reenters the environment, typically into rivers.

Moreover, a 2021 report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF found that about 673 million people have no toilets at all and are forced to defecate out in the open.

This is a huge source of pollution and a major risk to human health. Poor sanitation also drastically increases the burden on water treatment systems.

Nonprofits such as iDE, which I consult with and was a partner on this study, are working to improve toilet access and safe practices. In Cambodia, iDE has facilitated the sale of more than 411,000 pour-flush latrines across nine provinces since 2009, contributing to five of these provinces being declared “open defecation free,” meaning that people no longer go to the bathroom outside. Because people pay for their own toilets, they tend to maintain and use them, promoting long-term sustainability to sanitation access.

But this improvement is at risk of being reversed through the increased frequency of climate change-related weather events. In lower-income countries such as Cambodia, seasonal flooding, which is becoming more severe, threatens to disable and damage sanitation infrastructure.

Without improvements to strategies, products and services that mitigate and adapt to climate shocks, people are likely to unsafely dispose of their human waste or be forced to return to open defecation. This is a major contamination risk to water sources and the environment, increasing the risk of sickness.

What isn’t known

We are keen to form more partnerships to continue to study what difference other factors make when it comes to encouraging safe and sanitary toilet practices. This includes looking at the impact of the gender of household purchasers and users, and the proximity of communities to cities and transport links, as well as wastewater treatment options, the density of populations and political will to improve the sanitation of rural communities.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Läs mer…

This November, Bob Dylan performed the final concerts of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The tour picked up where Dylan left off just before the COVID pandemic – endlessly on the road since 1988. But now at the age of 83, the concerts might well be Dylan’s last.

The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was billed as running from 2021 to 2024, but at the time of publication, there seem to be no future tour dates on the horizon. As Dylan himself wondered on his most recent album: How much longer can it last? How long can this go on?

Dylan has diced with death more than once – think of his infamous motorcycle crash in 1966, or his serious heart ailment in 1997 – and death has preoccupied his songs increasingly in recent years. Throughout this tour, Dylan’s thoughts have been heavily focused on his own mortality and his own legacy.

If the Albert Hall concerts this year are to be his last on the road, then it’s a fitting venue at which to bow out, having first played it nearly 60 years ago. Back then, Dylan was a restless, hungry artist, reinventing his sound, his image, his voice with every album – sometimes, within months of release.

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Between 1962 and 1966, Dylan went from being a Midwest folk singer to the voice of his generation beatnik, via civil rights firebrand, rewriting the popular music songbook as he went.

With each successive regeneration, he seemed determined not only to redefine rock and popular music, but to alienate his audience in the process as well. He was an artist in search of answers, who didn’t give those in his wake time to catch their breath. Sixty years on, and now well into his ninth decade, things haven’t changed.

His own version

Dylan’s final night at the Albert Hall was a summation of how he remains a defiant artist still forging new ideas. The performance contained highlights from his entire career. Eight of the 17 songs were written and released before the 1990s, while everything else was from the 2020 album after which the tour is named. But each song was radically reinvented, reworked to Dylan’s ever-changing vision, with some of the songs even being rearranged during his three-day residency at the Albert Hall.

Take My Own Version of You (2020), Dylan’s late masterpiece about the process of creation. In the song, the narrator – a modern-day Prometheus, maybe even Dylan himself – tells of his efforts to construct his vision from “limbs and livers and brains and hearts”.

Dylan in 2019.
Raph_PH/Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA

The song’s arrangement at the start of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was as a brooding, Tex-Mex noir. But by the tour’s end, Dylan had stripped his ode to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to its essentials, until all that was left by the final Royal Albert Hall concert was Dylan’s voice.

He rapped the lyrics, accompanied by his own sparse piano backing and the occasional guitar flourish. It was a performance that evoked similarities to Dylan’s rapid-style solo delivery of songs like It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (1965) on the same stage in the 1960s.

My Own Version of You is a song in which Dylan reflects on his own artistic and creative processes. And in its radical and stark new arrangement in this final concert, Dylan was returning to how he started: as an artist whose main tools have always been his voice and his words. It’s the reason he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2016, after all.

Read more:
Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize – and what really defines literature

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that the entire concert was a reflection on the process of creation. Dylan’s process is to reshape, disassemble, reassemble and strip back. While the process is undoubtedly frustrating for some in the audience, as they struggle to guess what song Dylan is performing, it is also exhilarating to watch an artist reinventing himself and his songs in real time.

They become assemblages of the old and the new, the found and the borrowed. When I Paint My Masterpiece (1971) is no longer an elegiac sing-along song, but instead a reggae-influenced tune via Dylan’s own down-and-dirty blues of the Time Out of Mind album (1997), with a bit of his born-again gospel thrown in for good measure.

Dylan and singer Joan Baez during the civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28 1963.
National Archives at College Park

All Along the Watchtower (1968) is no longer Dylan’s homage to Jimi Hendrix’s career-defining cover version, but a fable of hell trapped on a loop from which the narrator seeks escape, with echoes of T.V. Talkin’ Song (1990). And Every Grain of Sand (1981) becomes a melancholic requiem by an old man with no regrets, determined to rage against time. It conjures memories of Dylan’s version of Tangled Up In Blue, performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2013.

If this was to be Dylan’s last ever live performance, then what does it say about him and his place in music history? Well, that he remains as vital an artist as he was in the 1960s, one who continues to reinvent himself, who continues to chase that restless, hungry feeling and who doesn’t look back, but constantly forward.

Dylan would leave behind an expansive body of work – both studio albums and live recordings – for scholars, critics and audiences alike to rediscover for decades, if not centuries to come. And in that rediscovery, they will learn much about what it means to be an artist. Läs mer…

Imagine getting a live art class from Leonardo da Vinci, or having a fully interactive discussion about the meaning of life with Socrates. You can now do this in your living room with a laptop and headset through startups like Ireland’s Engage XR and Sweden’s Hello History, combining the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

Tradition and technology have often been seen as distinct and even counterfactual, but clearly these technologies are now blurring the lines in ways that can alter how humans engage with cultural heritage.

Here are four emerging trends in this space:

1. New kinds of restoration

Many ancient texts are hard to access because they are close to crumbling or have parts missing, but AI is changing this using machine-learning algorithms to help make sense of fragments that are illegible to the human eye. For instance, this has been used to reveal the contents of papyrus that was charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

There’s similar potential with ancient sites that have been damaged, whether through neglect or military conflict. Some are now being “restored” by metaverse companies 3D-modelling spaces from digital images which have been created from descriptions in old texts.

Indian startup Who VR, for example, has made a virtual-reality recreation of Sharda Peeth, a ruined Hindu temple and ancient centre of learning. Similarly, Legends of Amsterdam, uses AI to create photo-realistic videos and art prints depicting the Dutch capital and its culture hundreds of years ago.

Legends of Amsterdam uses AI to reimagine stills and videos from the Dutch capital.
Legends of Amsterdam, CC BY-SA

There are also AI companies teaching younger people how to use this technology to make recreations of their own. For example, Brhat, another Indian company, conducts workshops in creating AI visual content rooted in local cultural heritage.

2. Demystifying ancient langauges

Many old texts are written in languages known only to a limited number of people, such as Latin or Sanskrit. This poses barriers to accessing and understanding these historical works and their heritage.

The easiest solution is obviously just to use software that can translate the scripts, but AI offers much more interesting possibilities. For instance, an Indian startup called Mokx has built a chatbot called Arya with which you can discuss at length the Hindu Vedic scriptures. Similarly, there are AI assistants that have been trained on the Latin teachings and traditions of the Catholic church and the Hebrew equivalent for the Jewish Torah.

3. Virtual religion

Young people are engaging with cultural heritage in new ways thanks to these technologies. They are role-playing Indian demigods in a heritage game in the Sandbox metaverse, as well as Catholic clergy on the Roblox gaming platform.

The latter example comes from the Philippines. It involves hundreds of youngsters represented as avatars, attending a Sunday service in a virtual Quiapo Church – a popular Filipino Catholic place of worship. They listen to a sermon from a priest who is being role-played by another member of their Roblox group.

Similar Roblox Catholic services take place in other countries, including Poland and Vietnam. These both help to secure the future of such traditions, and gives youngsters from different parts of the world an easy opportunity to experience one another’s religious cultures.

Coming at spiritual experience from a different angle is Chakra VR, an app on Metaquest in which users meditate in the metaverse and learn about the seven chakras in the body.

4. Anthropomorphism

In some cases, we’re seeing AI combining with heritage in ways in which they take on human characteristics. AskMona is a good example, an AI chatbot deployed in places like the Colosseum Park in Rome and art exhibitions by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Visitors can ask “Mona” whatever they like about what they are seeing, and it can begin to seem as if they are dealing with a human.

More exotic examples include the Impossible Torah, a series of written commentaries of the Jewish religious text by AI versions of famous authors such as William Shakespeare and René Descartes. Trained on the life and works of the character in question, this goes way beyond simple mimicry.

They each aim to talk about the Torah in the way that the character would have done, had they been available to write a submission in person. The examples of Da Vinci and Socrates at the beginning of the article fall into a similar category.

Also intriguing was an AI-powered church service held by the German Evangelical Church Congress in 2023. The pastor got Chat-GPT to write a sermon which was then delivered to the congregation by a photorealistic AI-created human.

This all demonstrates how technology is quickly changing the ways in which we interact with heritage and religion. As AI-driven chatbots and characters become increasingly common and take on a life of their own in the metaverse, these worlds will become ever more vivid and accessible.

And that level of immersion is nothing compared to what could be coming if brain-computer interfaces such as Neuralink become commonplace in years to come. No doubt they’ll be able to stimulate the right brain in ways which create deeply spiritual and lifelike experiences with limited distractions. It could lead us to hidden realms of spirituality and connections with the ancients that might lead to more evolved humans. For all the fears about technological advancement, it’s also fascinating to reflect on the huge potential benefits. Läs mer…