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In the past 12 months, more than 1,300 people have died on Australia’s roads. In January alone, there were 114 road deaths in Australia – roughly 20% more than the average for that month over the previous five years.

Our new study projects these tragedies are set to continue over the next 25 years, despite a commitment by Australian governments to achieving zero deaths on the nation’s roads by 2050.

Published in the journal Injury, our study uses a modelling tool to forecast the number of road fatalities in 2030, 2040 and 2050. Importantly, it also identifies the people and regions at higher risks, which provides an opportunity for taking a more nuanced and targeted approach to road safety.

Clear trends

Improved vehicle safety technology, stricter traffic laws and public awareness campaigns have led to a significant drop in the number of road deaths over the past several decades in Australia. But tragically, the number of people dying on Australia’s roads is still high.

The data reveal some clear trends. For example, weekdays see fewer fatalities, likely due to routine commuting and lower-risk behaviours. On the other hand, weekends, particularly Saturdays, experience spikes linked to alcohol consumption and more social travel.

December emerges as the deadliest month. This is likely driven by holiday travel surges, with secondary peaks in March and October tied to school holidays and seasonal weather changes that affect road conditions.

Geographic disparities further complicate the picture. Urban centres in New South Wales and Victoria such as Sydney and Melbourne account for 35% to 40% of fatalities, in part because of dense traffic volumes, complex intersections and pedestrian-heavy zones.

In contrast, rural and remote areas, though less congested, have more severe road accidents because of inadequate road infrastructure and higher speed limits. For example, the Northern Territory, with vast stretches of high-speed highways, records the highest fatality rate, while the Australian Capital Territory, with its urban planning emphasis on safety, reports the lowest.

Speed zones of 51–80 km/h are particularly lethal for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. This underscores the crucial role of speed management in urban and rural areas alike.

Demographic risks also remain entrenched. For example, men constitute more than 70% of fatalities – in part because they are more likely to engage in risky behaviour such as speeding and drunk driving. Young drivers (17–25 years) and middle-aged adults (40–64 years) are also over-represented due to a combination of inexperience, overconfidence and high mileage.

In good news, child fatalities (0–16 years) have sharply declined. This reflects the success of targeted measures like child seat laws and school zone safety campaigns.

High speed limits increase the risk of severe road accidents.
BJP7images/Shutterstock

35 years of data

To forecast these trends over the next 25 years, our new study used a modelling tool called Prophet developed by tech company Meta.

We fed 35 years of road data – from 1989 to 2024 – into the model. This data came from Australia’s Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics. It incorporated variables such as road user type, age, gender, speed limits and geographic location.

To refine predictions, we also incorporated public holidays such as Christmas and Easter.

Prophet outperformed other models we tested, including SARIMA and ETS. It did a better job at modelling past changes in road safety. And it especially excelled at handling non-linear trends, multiple seasonal patterns (daily, weekly, yearly) and the effects of holiday periods.

An unmet target

The findings of the study are cause for some cautious optimism.

Overall, by 2050 fatalities are expected to decline. But Australia’s ambitious zero fatality target by the middle of the century will remain unmet.

The modelling indicates annual male fatalities will drop from 855 in 2030 to 798 in 2050, while female fatalities will plummet from 229 to 92.

There will also be a drop in the number of child fatalities – from 37 in 2030 to just two in 2050. But the model shows a troubling rise of the number of older drivers (over 65) dying on Australia’s roads – from 273 in 2030 to 301 in 2050. This reflects Australia’s ageing population, with more people expected to have both reduced mobility and reduced reflexes.

Motorcyclist fatalities buck the overall trend, rising from 229 in 2030 to 253 in 2050. This signals urgent needs for dedicated lanes and better rider education.

Regionally, Queensland and the Northern Territory lag due to rural road risks. Urban areas with speed limits lower than 80 km/h show steadier declines.

Motorcyclist fatalities are expected to rise from 229 in 2030 to 253 in 2050.
FotoDax/Shutterstock

A shared priority

Based on these findings, our study provides several recommendations to mitigate the risk of death on Australia’s roads.

Speed management: enforce dynamic speed limits in high-risk zones such as school areas and holiday corridors, and expand 80 km/h zones on rural highways.

Targeted campaigns: launch gender-specific safety initiatives for men (for example, anti-speeding programs) and age-focused interventions, such as mandatory refresher courses for drivers over 65.

Infrastructure upgrades: invest in rural road safety such as median barriers and better signage, as well as dedicated cyclist pathways.

Technology integration: accelerate the adoption of autonomous vehicles to reduce crashes caused by human error and risky behaviours, and pilot artificial intelligence-driven traffic systems for real-time hazard detection.

Expand public transport: subsidise off-peak travel and rural transit networks to reduce how much people – particularly high-risk groups – depend on car travel.

Better enforcement: strengthen weekend and nighttime policing of roads and deploy more mobile speed cameras during peak holiday periods.

By following these recommendations, Australia can move closer to its vision of safer roads. Our findings underscore that sustained progress demands not only rigorous policy, but also community engagement. Läs mer…

In 1987, UK researchers lamented how schools were organised “around the assumption that the nuclear family is the norm”. Families who did not fit this model were “either ignored (tactfully) or categorised as abnormal”.

Several generations have passed through schools since then. And as we know, it remains very common for parents to be separated or divorced. In Australia, about 28% of children under 14 have parents who are separated.

But in our new research, interviewees report surprisingly little has changed in schools’ interactions with separated parents in the past 40 years.

They say schools still treat the nuclear family as the default and assume students have a mum and dad who are together.

Schools are preoccupied with the ‘primary parent’

We interviewed 11 separated parents about their experiences with their children’s schools. These parents were a subgroup from our previous study, which found more than half of separated parents surveyed had negative experiences with their children’s teachers, principals and school administrators.

Our interviewees repeatedly talked about how school information systems (regardless of whether they were for private or public schools) required families to identify a “primary parent”.

This was the parent who the school contacted if the child was unwell or to discuss a school-related issue. This parent also received all school-related communications: newsletters, excursion notes, medical updates, report cards and invoices for school fees.

There seemed to be no way for school systems to accommodate diverse families for whom identifying a “primary parent” was more complicated.

A number of separated parents said they needed to “combat” the school to receive the same updates and information as the nominated primary parent. One father’s contact details had to be entered into the system’s allergy advice section to flag he should be contacted if his child became unwell.

Another father told us his child’s school insisted the primary parent “needs to be the mother”, even though he had majority care.

Separated parents in our study said they needed to ‘combat’ their child’s school to get important information.
Peopleimages.com/Shutterstock

Read more:
’The teacher returned the call to my ex’: how separated parents struggle to get information from their child’s school

Parents can be kept in the dark

The type, amount and timing of information non-primary parents received primarily depended on their relationship with their ex-partner. For amicably separated parents, the situation was difficult but workable. As Amanda told us:

[One of the biggest challenges] is trying to work out ‘Did you get this email?’, ‘Did you get that one?’, ‘What’s happened with this note?’, and then kind of working out amongst ourselves how to best manage that if only one of us is receiving information.

But parents in high-conflict situations sometimes found themselves shut out by the other parent or the school itself.

Even though there were no court orders in place, Michael reported his children’s mother excluded him from school communications and withheld information, which made it impossible for him to be actively involved in his children’s schooling.

When I contacted the school and said, you know, that I either wasn’t receiving any information or that all the notices suddenly weren’t coming to me, they said, ‘Oh, we’re not going to get involved’. And so, I was left completely out of it.

The ‘primary parent’ is contacted if a child is sick at school or if there is a school-related issue that needs to be discussed with the child’s family.
Chai Te/Shutterstock

Situations can be manipulated

Parents also reported the primary parent can manipulate school interactions. In high-conflict relationships, school information can be used to elevate one parent into a position of power.

Again, Michael explained how his children’s mother kept from him important information about school fees and homework. His ex-partner’s legal team then used his non-payment of fees and lack of signatures in a homework book to demonstrate Michael’s purported lack of engagement in his child’s schooling and to imply his negligence as a parent.

This is an extreme example. However, Michael’s situation speaks to the complex politics of parent–school engagement.

While some parents found teachers open and receptive to involving both parents, others reported some teachers “take sides” and can be unresponsive to parent requests for basic school-related information.

What about step-parents?

Some parents in our study had become step-parents after re-partnering. These parents explained they were heavily involved in the day-to-day lives of their step-children but the school did not recognise them as parental figures.

Step-parents didn’t have access to parent–teacher interviews and school reports, or even basic information about school activities. While acknowledging the primacy of the biological parent, step-parents wondered why the school could not include all parent figures in a child’s education.

As Michelle explained:

I guess it takes a while to be fully recognised as a parent or carer […] It’s just that it would have been nice if there was a little bit more of a conscious effort from the school.

The nuclear family is still seen as ‘normal’

While working with separated parents is not a new phenomenon for schools, it seems to be an area in which schools have made little progress.

Our research demonstrates schools need more effective policies and procedures so all parents can be included and involved. Schools also need improved support and education for staff in how to manage high-conflict co-parenting relationships.

Finally, school systems, including data infrastructures and software, must be able to accommodate and properly acknowledge diverse families.

As the 1987 study noted:

Until each school defines its philosophy of the family in a realistic way, teachers, parents, and pupils have no option other than to collude in maintaining the fiction that the nuclear family is normal.

Names have been changed. Läs mer…

Australian subscribers to the print edition of The New Yorker will know the feeling: it arrives once a week, or sometimes, as buses do, in pairs.

You may briefly regret the environmental impact of all that paper, but once it’s unwrapped it’s a source of anticipation. You check out the cover, read Shouts and Murmurs, and flip through the cartoons.

You might even tackle the book reviews or dive into an article. But most of all, you inhale the history of a century of brilliantly edited and stainlessly written essays.

The New Yorker will publish four issues to mark its centenary, including this one featuring the magazine’s mascot, Eustace Tilley.
The New Yorker

100 years, thousands of issues, countless stories

The New Yorker has evolved alongside a century of monumental change. From the roaring 20s to the age unfolding, it has been a steadfast investigator of history, covering wars, political upheavals, cultural shifts and social revolutions.

The magazine has published some of the most influential writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Jamaica Kincaid, Fiona McFarlane and Hiromi Kawakami – offering a platform for literary giants and fresh voices alike.

It has also fostered the growth of renowned editors such as William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown, all of whom helped shape it into an institution.

Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid has written dozens of New Yorker articles over the decades.
Wikimedia

When The New Yorker was founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, it was a lighthearted, satirical magazine designed for the city’s social elite. Early issues leaned into what articles editor Susan Morrison called a “fizziness and café society […] vibe.”

Originally focused on humour and satire, the magazine gradually developed into a serious publication known for long-form journalism, in-depth political analysis and high-calibre fiction.

World War II marked a turning point. The war demanded serious, in-depth reporting, and The New Yorker rose to the challenge.

As Morrison observes:

It was the war which really helped The New Yorker find its feet in terms of important non-fiction reporting […] with many more substantial writers on staff able to cover subjects at length and in detail and with authority.

The shift towards serious investigative journalism was evident in the groundbreaking 1946 publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which took up an entire issue. The approach of dedicating extensive space to a single subject was repeated at key historical moments, such as the death of Princess Diana and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

A special issue was released on September 15 1997 to memorialise Princess Diana.
The New Yorker

Compelling readers to slow down and engage

With some 47 issues delivered annually, The New Yorker demands readers carve out time to engage deeply with a range of hard-hitting topics. Its style of slow investigative journalism can’t be consumed in a few seconds while scrolling through social media.

Alongside its seriousness, it retains some of its effervescence through comics and extraordinary breadth, drawing readers into unexpected topics – neuroscience, fountains, squirrels – through meticulously crafted narratives.

The magazine continues in this dual function tradition, reflecting the nuance of the wider world within its covers. The tension between the immense depth and breadth of content and the finite time of readers adds to its allure. It’s a challenge for those willing to invest the time to peruse and digest its pages.

David Remnick, editor since 1998, has guided the magazine with a vision that blends tradition and innovation. In his own words, the goal is to

persist in our commitment to the joys of what Ross first envisaged as a comic weekly. But we are particularly committed to the far richer publication that emerged over time: a journal of record and imagination, reportage and poetry, words and art, commentary on the moment and reflections on the age.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick was named editor of the magazine on July 13 1998, succeeding Tina Brown.
AP/Mary Altaffer

The elegant trappings of a storied past

While the approach to content has evolved, some aspects of The New Yorker have remained consistent. Its visual identity, for instance, has been remarkably stable: famously done in an illustrative style, and unadorned by headlines or teasers.

The vintage aesthetic of the illustrative covers traces its origins back to 1925. The magazine employs a mix of in-house artists and freelance illustrators, with a history of collaboration with notable artists including Saul Steinberg and Art Spiegelman.

Art Spiegelman’s cover for the March 8 1999 issue of The New Yorker alludes to the controversial 1999 killing of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York City police officers.
AP/The New Yorker, Art Spiegelman

Over time, the cover art has maintained a focus on bold, thought-provoking imagery that addresses timely issues. Many covers have become cultural history, such as the black-on-black 9/11 cover.

Today, the New Yorker’s pared-back style conveys a quiet authority. It’s not swayed by fleeting trends, but remains steadfast in its dedication to art and culture, and its origins.

More than a magazine

Subscribing to The New Yorker isn’t just a matter of interest; it’s an act of intellectual self-definition. Our media choices are powerful tools in our process of self-creation.

Popular cultural and media theorists, such as John Fiske and John Hartley, to name a few, have explored how media shapes and reflects our sense of self.

The New Yorker has built an enviable devotion among its readers. Their homes are filled with stacks of old issues, unopened, standing as testament to their ongoing relationship with the publication.

To subscribe to the magazine is to participate in a cultural shorthand – an aspiration toward intellectual engagement.
Shutterstock

Owning the magazine also signals an affiliation with a specific reading class, regardless of whether the content is ever read. The very act of displaying The New Yorker fashions an image of sophistication, intellectualism and cultural awareness.

But the stacks come with a distinct kind of guilt, too. What does it say about you that you haven’t made time to stay up to date with one of the world’s most famous outlets for investigative journalism and cutting-edge fiction?

This tension speaks to the dual nature of The New Yorker experience: holding onto a subscription signals a commitment to personal growth, yet unread magazines reflect the complexity of modern life – where time for deep, reflective reading competes with daily obligations and the instant gratification offered by digital media.

The New Yorker’s significance isn’t just about the quality of its investigative journalism or the breadth of its storytelling; it’s about identity. To subscribe is to participate in a cultural shorthand – an aspiration toward intellectual engagement.

And who knows, if you hold onto your copies long enough, perhaps they’ll become valuable relics commanding prices in the thousands, much like the first issue does today. Läs mer…

Like many, I entered The New Yorker through the cartoon door. The first cartoon I loved, and remember to this day, featured a New Yorker staple – two guys sitting in a bar – with one saying to the other: “I wish just once someone would say to me, ‘I read your latest ad, and I loved it’.”

For someone whose first job after university was an unhappy stint in an advertising agency, the cartoon was a tonic. They are still the first thing I look at when the magazine arrives by mail or the daily newsletter by email, and the first thing shared with my family. There have been around 80,000 published since the magazine’s first issue on February 25 1925.

I had discovered The New Yorker while studying literature at Monash University and writing an honours thesis on the playwright Tom Stoppard. The English drama critic Kenneth Tynan had written a long profile of Stoppard for the magazine in 1977, combining sharp insights into the plays, behind-the-curtains material from Tynan’s time as literary manager at the National Theatre (he bought the rights to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1966) and slices of Stoppard’s life.

The most enticing of these was Tynan’s account of a Saturday afternoon cricket match between a team from The Guardian, comprising several no-nonsense typesetters and the paper’s industrial correspondent, and Harold Pinter’s XI, which was actually a IX owing to two late withdrawals, including the captain himself.

Stoppard arrived in dazzlingly white whites but didn’t seem to take the game seriously, inadvertently dropping a smouldering cigarette butt between kneepad and trousers as he took the field. “Playwright Bursts into Flames at Wicket,” he called back to Tynan standing on the boundary.

A younger Tom Stoppard.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Once the game began, though, Stoppard was a revelation, first as wicket-keeper where his “elastic leaps and hair-trigger reflexes” saw him dismiss four players, and then as a batsman, when he smoothly drove and cut his way to the winning score.

I had never read anything like this. It wasn’t academic literary criticism, which tended to assault the English language on a polysyllabic basis. It wasn’t the daily newspaper, which as Stoppard himself mocked, was terse, formal and leaned to the formulaic. It wasn’t a biography of someone long dead, but a “profile”, whatever that was, of a living, breathing person.

I wanted more and so began looking out for the magazine but read it only intermittently. Released from advertising, I began working in journalism in 1981. The 1980s coincided with the final years of William Shawn’s 35-year editorship when The New Yorker almost collapsed under the weight of very long articles about very slight subjects and Shawn’s legendary prudishness. (Tynan once referred to a “pissoir”, which Shawn changed to “circular curbside construction”.)

Shawn began working at The New Yorker as a fact-checker eight years after its founding in 1925 by Harold Ross, a former newspaperman, and his wife, reporter Jane Grant. Shawn took over as editor after Ross’s death in 1951, and was brilliant, encouraging writers such as Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt and Truman Capote to do work better than even they expected.

Truman Capote in 1959.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

More than 60 writers have dedicated books to Shawn that grew out of New Yorker articles, according to Ben Yagoda’s excellent 2000 history of the magazine.

In Shawn’s later years, though, the weaknesses of his approach became dominant, and he could not bear to let go of the editorship. As John Bennet, a staff member trying to decipher Shawn’s gnomic utterances, said:

Shawn ran the magazine the way Algerian terrorist cells were organised in the battle of Algiers – no one knew who anybody else was or what anybody else was doing.

Yagoda writes the cornerstones of the magazine were:

A belief in civility, a respect for privacy, a striving for clear and accurate prose, a determination to publish what one believes in, irrespective of public opinion and commercial concerns, and a sense that The New Yorker was something special, something other and somehow more important than just another magazine. These admirable values all had their origin in the Ross years. But under Shawn, such emotional energy was invested in each of them that they became obsessive and sometimes distorted and perverted, in the sense of being turned completely inward.

The 1980s may have been a difficult period for the magazine, but it still produced some outstanding journalism, and it was the journalism I increasingly turned to, particularly that of Janet Malcolm. Today, readers know of her work through books such as In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer and The Silent Woman, but all three, like most of her writing, originally appeared as long articles in the magazine.

I can still recall the jolt I felt reading the famous opening paragraph of The Journalist and the Murderer (published in the magazine in 1989):

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Malcolm’s dissection of the relationship between Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, and Joe McGinniss, a journalist convicted by her ice-cold, surgically precise prose, is by turns brilliant, thought-provoking, infuriating and incomplete. Well over three decades later, Malcolm’s book is one all journalists should read.

Janet Malcolm pictured in 1993.
George Nikitin/AAP

To Malcolm, the relationship between journalists and their subjects was the “canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism”, which could not be rooted out. Hers was a long overdue wake-up call for an industry allergic to reflection and self-criticism. But in the end, for all the brilliance with which she opened up a difficult topic, Malcolm packed the journalist–subject relationship in too small a box.

Among her colleagues at the magazine were many who carefully and ethically navigated the challenges of gaining a subject’s trust, then writing about them honestly, as I learnt when researching a PhD which became a book, Telling True Stories.

One example is Lawrence Wright’s work for the magazine on the rise of Al-Qaeda, and the subsequent book The Loooming Tower. In a note on sources, Wright reflects on the questions of trust and friendship that haunt the journalist–subject relationship.

Knowledge is seductive; the reporter wants to know, and the more he knows, the more interesting he becomes to the source. There are few forces in human nature more powerful than the desire to be understood; journalism couldn’t exist without it.

By conspicuously placing a tape recorder between him and his interviewee, Wright tries to remind both parties “that there is a third party in the room, the eventual reader”.

Outstanding journalists

When I began teaching journalism, especially feature writing, at RMIT in the 1990s, I found myself drawn more and more to The New Yorker and to its history. The “comic paper” Ross originally envisaged had travelled a long way since 1925. The second world war impelled Ross and Shawn, then his deputy, to broaden and deepen the scope of their reporting.

Most famously, after the dropping of two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the Japanese to surrender in 1945, they commissioned John Hersey to return to Japan, interview survivors and, as Hersey later put it, write about “what happened not to buildings but to human beings”. Ross set aside the cartoons and devoted the entire issue of August 31 1946 to Hersey’s 31,000-word article simply headlined “Hiroshima”.

The mushroom cloud photographed from the ground during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum

I still remember being deeply moved by “Hiroshima”, which I first read half a century after publication and half a world away while on a summer holiday in the bush. The backstory behind the article (ranked number one on the Best American Journalism of the 20th Century list), and its impact on journalism and the world, is well told in Lesley Blume’s 2020 book, Fallout.

By the 1990s, when Tina Brown became the first woman to edit The New Yorker, it definitely needed a makeover. It still did not have a table of contents, nor run photographs. And, beyond a headline, it gave readers little idea what a story was about! She eased up on the copy editors’ notorious fussiness. As E.B. White, a longtime contributor, once said: “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”

Brown lasted only marginally longer than her predecessor, Robert Gottlieb. Her editorship has been given a bad rap by New Yorker traditionalists, but she gave the magazine a much-needed electric shock, injecting fresh blood.

A list of outstanding journalists she hired who remain at the magazine three decades later is illuminating: David Remnick (who followed her as editor, in 1998), Malcolm Gladwell, Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright, Anthony Lane and John Lahr, among others.

There’s going to be a lot of celebrating of the magazine’s 100th anniversary, including a Netflix documentary scheduled for release later in the year.

Not many magazines reach such a milestone. One of The New Yorker’s early competitors, Time, which began two years before, was for many years one of the most widely read and respected magazines in the world. It continues today but has a thinner print product and a barely noticed online presence. (I say that as someone who once worked for three years in Time’s Australian office.)

Time is far from alone in this. Magazines, like newspapers, have struggled to adapt to the digital world as the advertising revenue that once afforded them plump profits was funnelled into the big online technology companies, Google and Facebook.

Yet The New Yorker has not only adapted to the digital age but thrived in it. It is one of few legacy media outlets whose prestige and influence have actually grown in the past two decades.

As the internet arrived, the New Yorker’s paid circulation was 900,000. It exceeded a million, for the first time in the magazine’s history, in 2004. As of October last year it was 1,161,064 (for both the print and electronic edition). Subscribers to the magazine’s electronic edition have increased five-fold since it began in 2016 and now stand at 534,287. Yes, advertising revenue remains challenged, recently forcing some redundancies at the magazine, but nothing compared to other parts of the media industry.

Apart from the weekly edition, a daily newsletter was introduced around 2015. The magazine has also expanded into audio, podcasting and documentary film, runs a well-attended annual festival, invites readers to try their hand at devising captions for cartoons and does a line of merchandising. All the astute branding on the part of the magazine and its owners, Condé Nast, would have Shawn rolling in his grave, but the core of the magazine’s editorial mission remains true.

Why it succeeds

The key reasons behind The New Yorker’s current success, in my view, are twofold. First, as the internet made a cornucopia of information available instantly anywhere, the magazine continued to produce material, especially journalism, that was distinctive and different.

Journalist Jane Mayer.
goodreads

Think, for example, of the extraordinary disclosures made by Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer during George W. Bush’s administration (2001–2009) about the torture by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and how rules about what constituted torture were changed to make almost anything short of death permissible.

Both journalists later published their work in books: Hersh’s Chain of Command: the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004) and Mayer’s The Dark Side: the inside story on how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals (2008).

A detainee in an outdoor solitary confinement cell talks with a military policeman at the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, in 2004.
John Moore/AAP

Alongside the investigative journalism have been many examples of deep, productive dives into seemingly unpromising topics such as the packaged ice cube business (Peter Boyer, The Emperor of Ice, February 12 2001) and a movie dog (Susan Orlean, The Dog Star: the life and times of Rin Tin Tin, August 29 2011).

In a world of information abundance, what remained scarce was the ability to make sense of chaotic events, knotty issues and complicated people, in prose that is almost always clear, alive to irony, elegant and sometimes profound. In other words, while most of the legacy media was dumbing down, The New Yorker was dumbing up.

The second reason for the magazine’s continued success is that even as the internet’s information abundance has curdled into the chaos and cruelty of social media’s algorithm-driven world, The New Yorker has not wavered in its editorial mission.

Just as Donald Trump doubled down on the Big Lie surrounding the 2020 election result and the January 6 2021 riots at the Capitol, so the magazine doubled down on reporting his actions since then and into his second presidency.

Other media outlets, even The Washington Post, which did so much excellent reporting during the first Trump presidency, have kowtowed to Trump, or at least its proprietor appears to have. Jeff Bezos decided the newspaper should not run a pre-election endorsement editorial last year. The Amazon owner was placed front and centre with other heads of the big tech companies at Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

Guests including (from left to right), Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th presidential inauguration in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool/AAP

By contrast, The New Yorker has published a steady stream of reporting and commentary about the outrageous and shocking actions of the Trump administration in its first month.

The new administration has moved so quickly and on so many fronts that the import of its actions have overwhelmed the media, making it hard to keep up with reporting every development in the detail it might deserve.

To take one example, The Washington Post reported that candidates for senior posts in intelligence and law enforcement were being asked so-called loyalty questions about whether the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” and the January 6 Capitol riots an “inside job”.

Two individuals being considered for positions in intelligence “who did not give the desired straight ”yes” answers, were not selected. It is not clear whether other factors contributed to the decision”.

The report prompted media commentary, but not enough of it recognised the gravity of an attempt to rewrite history every bit as egregious as Stalinist Russia.

The New Yorker has made its own statement, in response, by reprinting Luke Mogelson’s remarkable reporting from January 6 2021, with photography by Balasz Gardi and alarming footage from inside the capitol with the rioters.

David Remnick, now in his 27th year as editor, was among ten media figures asked recently by The Washington Post how the second Trump administration should be reported. He said:

To some degree, we should be self-critical, but we should stop apologizing for everything we do. I think that journalism during the first Trump administration achieved an enormous amount in terms of its investigative reporting. And if we’re going to go into a mode where we’re doing nothing but apologizing and falling into a faint and accepting a false picture of reality because we think that’s what fairness demands, then I think we’re making an enormous mistake. I just don’t think we should throw up our hands and accede to reality as it is seen through the lens of Donald Trump.

Remnick’s argument is clear-eyed and courageous. You would hope it is heard by other parts of the news media that have long ceded editorial leadership to what was for many years categorised simply as a “general interest magazine”.

Failing that, they could look at the cartoons. On February 14, the magazine published one by Brendan Loper featuring a drawing of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster standing outside the Cookie Company factory where a spokesman said,

Let me assure you that as an unpaid “special factory employee” Mr. Monster stands to personally gain nothing from this work.

Here’s looking at you, Elon. Läs mer…

You probably know what an “influencer” is — people with large, highly engaged social media followings who have the power to sway beliefs and purchasing decisions.

But you might not have yet heard of virtual influencers.

They’re like human influencers … but they’re not human. They’re characters brought to life by CGI and AI, designed to target demographic groups from a first-person perspective.

Virtual influencers are becoming more popular and prevalent every day. A full-blown industry has sprung up around them — an industry with agencies and companies dedicated to creating and managing them, with some of the top personas earning millions annually.

But our guest today has noticed a troubling pattern — many virtual influencers are crafted as young women of colour. And their creators are often men with different racial identities who work at marketing agencies.

Jul Parke is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information specializing in social media platforms, digital racism, virtual influencers and AI phenomena. She is currently a visiting scholar at New York University.

Parke’s doctoral research explores what motivates companies and creators to produce these virtual, racialized women, which she says is a new form of commercializing gender and racial identity in digital spaces.

As we enter the era of AI proliferation, it seems virtual influencers are here to stay. There are at least 200 digital personalities out there today, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are rolling out new tools that will enable everyday users to craft their own virtual personas.

Given the absence of laws for non-humans, the rise of virtual influencers on social media raises a whole host of urgent ethical questions about authenticity online.

[embedded content]

Resources

Virtual influencers mentioned in this episode include: Miquela, Shudu, Rozy, imma and Bermuda

Virtual Influencers – Identity and Digitality in The Age of Multiple Realities by Esperanza Miyake (Routledge, 2024)

Instagram Visual Social Media Cultures by Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield, Crystal Abidin (Polity Press, 2020)

The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media by Emily Hund (Princeton University Press, 2023)

“Racial Plagiarism and Fashion” by Minh-Ha T. Pham (QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Fall 2017)

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
by Ruha Benjamin (Polity, 2019)

When Chatbots Play Human, NPR (February 9, 2025)

Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell (Verso, 2020) Läs mer…

Browse through Donald Trump’s ghostwritten memoir, The Art of the Deal, and you’ll come across an aphorism which will go some way to explaining the US president’s approach to negotiating. Having established that he would do nearly anything within legal bounds to win, Trump adds that: “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

It’s an idea which makes a lot of sense when you consider Trump’s record. We saw it time and again on the campaign trail, as he sought to seal the deal with the US public by repeatedly denigrating first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Which begs the question, in seeking to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine, exactly who he sees as the competition he needs to denigrate: Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelensky?

Trump has certainly gone out of his way to excoriate the Ukrainian president over the past day or two, both in public and on his TruthSocial platform. He has variously blamed Zelensky for starting the war, called him a “dictator without elections” and a “modestly successful comedian … very low in Ukrainian polls” who “has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died”.

Putin, meanwhile, takes a rather different view of how to seal a deal with the US president. Far from denigrating Trump, he has set out to charm the flattery-loving president with a view to driving a wedge between the US and Europe, claiming that EU leaders had “insulted” Trump during his election campaign and insisting that “they are themselves at fault for what is happening”.

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The Russian president will be well pleased with the events of the past week or so. After three years of increasing isolation under the Biden presidency, he’s now back at the top table with the US president – two powerful men discussing the future of Europe.

For the man who, in 2005, complained that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, to be back deciding the fate of nations is a dream come true, writes James Rodgers of City St George’s, University of London.

Rodgers, a former BBC Moscow correspondent, observes that Putin has fulfilled this mission having “conceded not an inch of occupied Ukrainian territory to get there. Nor has he even undertaken to give back any of what Russian forces have seized since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.”

Not only that, but Putin also appears to have enlisted US support for one of the key objectives that encouraged him to invade Ukraine in the first place: preventing Ukraine from joining Nato. That much was clear from the US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to European defence officials last week. The views of Washington’s European allies (and of the Biden administration) – that Ukraine’s membership of Nato is a matter for the alliance members to decide with Ukraine as a sovereign state in control of its own foreign policy – don’t appear to matter to Trump and his team.

Read more:
Ukraine peace talks: Trump is bringing Russia back in from the cold and ticking off items on Putin’s wish list

Meanwhile, Trump’s policy volte-face over Ukraine and, more broadly, European security in general has driven a dangerous wedge between the US and its allies in Europe. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, responded by convening a meeting on Monday of the leaders of what the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, described as “the main European countries”. This turned out to include Germany, the UK, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as the Nato secretary-general and the presidents of the European Council and European Commission.

Passing over the question of how the leaders of the Baltic states felt about this, given they all share a border with Russia (as does Finland) and presumably are well aware of the vulnerability of their position, the fact is Europe is deeply divided over its response to the situation.

As Stefan Wolff observes, the Weimar+ group of countries that met in Paris only represent one shade of opinion within the EU. Meanwhile, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is openly scathing about European efforts to support Ukraine, posting on X: “While President @realDonaldTrump and President Putin negotiate on peace, EU officials issue worthless statements.”

Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham, notes that disrupting European unity is a stated aim of the Project 2025 initiative which has guided, if not Trump himself, many of his close advisers. The past week, taking into account both Hegseth’s meeting with European defence ministers and the subsequent appearance by the US vice-president, J.D. Vance, at the Munich Security Conference, has gone a fair way down the path towards achieving that disruption.

At the same time, Vance’s lecture to the conference – during which he was heavily critical of Europe as “the enemy within” which was undermining democracy and threatening free speech – will have united most of those present in anger and dismay at his remarks.

Read more:
Europe left scrambling in face of wavering US security guarantees

Constitutional matters

Trump has declared that Zelensky is a “dictator” because he cancelled last year’s election in Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine’s constitution provides that elections are prohibited during periods of martial law. And martial law has been in force since the day of the invasion on February 24 2022.

Bleak prospects: Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.
EPA-EFE/presidential press service

Lena Surzhko Harned, a professor of political science at Penn State University, writes that the delegitimisation of Zelensky is a tactic Putin has been striving for from the very start. The Kremlin has pushed the narrative that there is no legitimate authority with which to negotiate a peace deal, and that Zelensky’s government is “illegitimate”.

“What Putin needs for this plan to work is a willing partner to help get the message out that Zelensky and the current Ukraine government are not legitimate representatives of their country,” writes Harned. “And into this gap the new US administration appears to have stepped.”

Despite Zelensky still enjoying relatively strong support in recent opinion polls, an election campaign in the middle of this conflict would be a needlessly divisive exercise. And that’s before you consider the potential for Russian interference, which would be seriously debilitating for a country fighting for its survival.

Putin knows all this – and he also knows by framing the issue in a way that suggests Ukraine is dragging its feet over peace, he will enjoy a propaganda coup. And that’s what he is doing, with the apparent support of the US president.

Read more:
In pushing for Ukraine elections, Trump is falling into Putin-laid trap to delegitimize Zelenskyy

Another way Putin hopes to discredit the Ukrainian leadership is by deliberately excluding it from the talks – at least for the present. Zelensky has said, with the support of his European allies, that there can be no deal without Ukrainian participation.

It’s easy to see why Zelensky and his allies are so adamant that they should be involved, writes Matt Fitzpatrick, a professor of international history at Flinders University. History is littered with examples of large powers getting together to decide the fate of smaller nations that have no agency in the division.

Three such shameful debacles determined the history of much of the 20th century – and not in a good way. The Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Middle East between British and French spheres of influence, and sowed the seed for discord which continues to this day. The Munich conference of 1938, at which the fate of Czechoslovakia was decided without any Czech input, showed Adolf Hitler that naked aggression really does pay. And having failed to learn from either of these, in 1945 the Big Three (Russia, the US and Britain) got together at Yalta to carve up Germany, thereby setting the scene for the cold war.

Read more:
Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating

Deal or no deal

One of Trump’s assertions this week has been that Zelensky had his chance to strike a deal and avoid all the bloodshed and much of the territorial loss suffered by Ukraine in the three years of war. Reacting to questions about why Zelensky or any Ukrainian diplomats hadn’t been involved in the talks, he scoffed: “Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

Stephen Hall, who specialises in Russian and post-Soviet politics at the University of Bath, recalls the early talks in the spring of 2022. He says that the idea – also floated in the press by several commentators – that Ukraine should have concluded a peace deal in March or April of 2022 after talks in Istanbul is absurd.

While there was momentum for peace, particularly on Kyiv’s part, the two sides were a long way apart on issues such as the size of Ukraine’s military and the fate of territories such as Crimea. “Had Ukraine done a deal based on the Istanbul communique, it would have essentially led to the country becoming a virtual province of Russia – led by a pro-Russian government and banned from seeking alliances with western countries,” Hall writes.

Read more:
Ukraine war: the idea that Kyiv should have signed a peace deal in 2022 is flawed – here’s why

And in any case, back then there was scant support among Ukraine’s allies in Europe and the Biden White House for appeasing Putin by offering him concessions in return for aggression. But that’s now history. Trump and his team appear to have already granted the Russian president some of his dearest wishes before the negotiations proper have even started.

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When I first arrived at the top secret Porton Down laboratory, I was aware of very little about its activities. I knew it was the UK’s chemical defence research centre and that over the years it had conducted tests with chemical agents on humans.

But what really happened there was shrouded in mystery. This made it a place which was by turns fascinating and scary. Its association with the cold war, reinforced by images of gas mask-wearing soldiers and reports of dangerous (and in one case fatal) experiments, also made it seem a little sinister.

The shroud of secrecy resulted in it being the subject of some lively fiction, such as The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean, which revolves around the theft of two deadly germ warfare agents from a secret research facility and in the “Hounds of Baskerville” episode of the BBC drama Sherlock in which the hero uncovers a sinister plot involving animals experiments.

Even Porton’s own publicity material recognises that where secrecy exists imagination can take flight, and attests:

No aliens, either alive or dead have ever been taken to Porton Down or any other Dstl [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory] site.

But it’s also the place where in recent years scientists analysed samples confirming that a Novichok nerve agent had been used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter (coincidentally, just a few miles away). And where an active research programme on Ebola played an important role in the UK’s support to Sierra Leone during the 2014 outbreak.

So what is the truth? Over three years my research took me into the heart of the mystery, as I studied its extensive historical archive. The reality was not as I expected. I came across no aliens, but I did discover records of experiments that ran from the ordinary, through to the bizarre. And sadly, in one isolated case, the lethal.

Arriving at Porton Down, for example, was unexpectedly low key. The main gate is located off a public road on an otherwise quiet stretch between Porton Down village and the A30. It is in many ways visually similar to the entrance to Lancaster University in the north of England where I work as a lecturer in epidemiology.

Bar some signs announcing it as the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (dstl) of the Ministry of Defence, the road is devoid of obvious security. No barriers block entry. This sense of the extraordinary hiding behind the ordinary was reinforced by the undistinguished visitor car park from where it is a short walk to the nondescript single story reception building.

There is also (perhaps unusually for a government chemical weapons research centre) a bus stop next to the main gate, from where you can get the number 66 to Salisbury.

Sgt Gordon Heard in the latest clothing for protection against toxic gasses and using a Risdual Vapour Detector in Porton Down in 1969.
Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo

So on my first visit in 2002 I made that short walk from the visitor car park to the reception and announced myself. I was pleased to find I was expected and looked into the security camera as bidden. After a hard stare from the receptionist I was issued, on that my first day, with a temporary pass. On it was written: “MUST BE ACCOMPANIED AT ALL TIMES” in bright red.

My contact, Dawn, arrived and led me through the main gate where security started to become more obvious. An armed policeman gave us a small nod as we passed through, his hands staying firmly on the machine gun strapped to his chest. Dawn paid little attention other than a brief hello and we were inside, heading to the headquarters.

It was from here that the management of Porton Down organised the programmes of testing which had ultimately resulted in my presence there – to research the health effects of chemical experiments on humans.

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Since its inception in 1916 it has researched chemical weapons, protective measures against chemical weapons, and has recruited over 20,000 volunteers to participate in tests in its research programmes.

Hut 42 – opening the archive

This archive was opened to my colleagues and I after previously being firmly hidden from public view. This shift in approach was the result of government approval for a study into the long-term health of the human volunteers. The action was triggered by complaints from a group of people who had been tested on and who claimed their health had been damaged as a result.

The government was also keen to ward off accusations of cover ups. In 1953 Ronald Maddison, a young RAF volunteer, died in a nerve agent experiment at the site. The original inquest was held in secret and returned a verdict of misadventure. But in 2004 the government ordered a second, public, inquest.

This, along with a police investigation into the behaviour of some of the Porton Down scientists persuaded the government to fund independent research into the health effect of the experiments.

A research group from the department of public health at the University of Oxford won IS WON RIGHT WORD? sk I was part of that group. Porton participated fully and opened its doors and archive to the project. I went ahead of the research team to deal with the practicalities of gaining access. My first task was to set up an office. So Dawn led me onwards to the building that had been put aside for our use.

We passed into the inner, more secure, area. This part of Porton Down was where the main scientific work was carried out. This inner secure area was surrounded by a high chain link fence and there was one principal entry point, next to a guard room.

Inspecting our passes was another armed MoD police officer. Alerted by my red pass he was all for barring my way until Dawn stepped in. Now vouched for, we were waved through and passed onwards to the building that would become my home for the best part of three years – hut 42.

‘People had neat handwriting then’

Hut 42 was a nondescript redbrick, single-story building, which sits next to the main library and information centre and from the outside could be mistaken for a school boiler room. In it were five desks and several metal filing cabinets closed with combination locks.

Our purpose there was to study the historical archive, including the handwritten books of experiment data. We then transferred that material into a database for later analysis. This process took four people two years of hard work, but we were lucky.

Porton Down’s record keeping was excellent. Early on I had worried that handwritten records would be hard to decipher and had asked a Porton Down librarian whether they would be legible. “Definitely”, was the reply. “People had neat handwriting then. It’s the records from the 1970s you’ll have to watch. They’re dreadfully scrappy,” he said.

And so it was proved. The records of tests from an era before computers, carried out with substances such as mustard gas, were routinely neatly and clearly documented.

Porton Down experiment book, showing drop tests to the arms during one of the first nerve agent tests.

A picture of a page in one of the experiment books on which is recorded the first nerve agent test for Tabun on April 10, 1945.
Thomas Keegan

I met Porton Down’s resident medical doctor in the archive to start discussing the nature of the experiments. Simon (not his real name) was in his mid-thirties with boyish curly hair and an anorak. “You’ll find everything you’ll need in here, in these cupboards,” he said. “First, I’ll show you how to open the cupboard. It’s like this”, he said. “A five number combination. Five times anticlockwise to reach the first number, four times clockwise for the second, three times anticlockwise for the third and so on.”

There was a pause while he demonstrated. “Sometimes they can be a bit sticky”, he said after the first attempt. He got the cupboard open on the second try.

The archive was a mixture of handwritten experimental and administrative records. The administrative records were essentially lists of attendees with dates and personal characteristics such as age. The experimental records reported the results of the tests with people in a variety of ways. Some were in the form of descriptive text, others used pictograms to record the site visually, for example where a drop of mustard gas was placed on the skin. Many contained tables of data, all hand drawn and as legible as if they had been printed. Our cupboards contained around 140 such books spanning a period from the start of the second world war to the end of the 1980s.

The story the records told was a fascinating one.

In the 50 years following the outbreak of the second world war, Porton Down encouraged over 20,000 men, nearly all members of the UK armed forces, to take part in experiments at the site.

These men (the regular armed forces had yet to admit women) took part in a programme of tests that ran from experiments using liquid mustard “gas” dropped onto bare skin to inhalation of nerve agents. There were also tests with antidotes and other gasses and liquids too.

Chemical experiments

The records show that between 1939 and 1989, over 400 different substances were tested at Porton. Mustard gas, sarin, and nitrogen mustard were frequently tested. These chemicals are known as “vesicants” for their ability to cause fluid filled blisters (or vesicles) on the skin or any other site of contact. First world war soldiers were familiar with the horrors of this gas, which was first used by Germany at the Battle of Ypres in 1915. John Singer Sergeant’s powerful painting Gassed expressed the effect of mustard gas on soldiers exposed in the trenches.

Other major chemical tests were riot control agents, such as CS and CR, these being the only chemicals tested that have been used by UK forces in peacetime, their purpose being crowd control.

Mostly, we were kept far away from anything other than paper records. As Britain had given up its chemical arsenal and any offensive capability in the 1950s, there was, as Simon had explained, no stores of chemical agents at Porton Down, except of course, small amounts of those that were needed to test human defences. By a circuitous route however, I came nearer to some than I was expecting.

‘Would you like a sniff?’

Hut 42, was not, it turned out, wholly for our use. While some Porton staff shared access to the archive and popped in now and then to examine records and take photocopies, the building had one other permanent resident – Porton Down’s in-house historian Gradon Carter. Carter was in his late 70s and had worked at Porton Down as an archivist for more than 20 years. He prided himself on knowing more than anyone alive about the history and administration of the institution.

He wore tweed and had the air of a world weary Latin master, but rather than the accoutrements of his trade being Latin textbooks, his were the paraphernalia of chemical warfare. Around his desk were examples of gas masks from various periods of history, and on the wall, posters inviting people to “always carry your gas mask”.

Gas attack: British information poster from the 1940s.
Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo

One of his exhibits was a box, about the size of a packet of breakfast cereal, which contained glass phials, each carefully labelled with the contents. These included mustard gas, lewsite and phosgene.

The box was from the 1940s. It was a training tool to help troops recognise different gasses on the battlefield. “Would you like a sniff of mustard?”, he offered. It so happened I did. Nearly 60 years after it was first bottled, I can report that Carter’s mustard gas had very little smell, but I was reluctant to get close to test any of its other properties. He re-corked it. “Some lewisite?” he suggested.

Lewisite was produced in 1918 for use in the first world war but its production was too late for it to be used. Another vesicant, it causes blistering of the skin and mucous membranes (eyes, nose, throat) on contact.

I declined Carter’s kind offer.

Other chemicals appeared in the records less frequently. There were the lovely vomiting agents, which are designed to winkle their way under your gas mask to make you sick, which will make you take off your gas mask making you vulnerable to the next wave of attack by, for example, nerve agents.

These agents were relatively standard members of a chemical arsenal. In an effort to expand its horizons, Porton Down opened its collective mind in the early 1960s to the usefulness of psychedelics in warfare and tested LSD for its potential as a disruptor of enemy military discipline.

The tests showed that troops became unable to put up much of a fight, but ultimately the chemicals were rejected as means of mass disruption. You can see a video of a test at Porton Down with LSD below.

In the video, a troop of Royal Marines can be seen taking part in an exercise during which they are given LSD. Not long afterwards the men become barely capable of military action and seem to find almost everything funny. One man seems not to know which end of a bazooka to point at the enemy.

The most commonly tested substances at Porton, according to our data, were mustard gas, lewisite and pyridostigmine (more of which later) with thousands of tests undertaken. Less frequently tested were a basket of chemicals including sodium amytal (a barbiturate) and more strangely perhaps, 49 tests with pastinacea sativa – the irritant wild parsnip.

Not all men who took part in tests did so with chemical agents. Many visited Porton Down and were “tested” with substances that were not intended to be harmful but which must have been providing useful information of some kind. Some people were tested with “lubricating oil” (498 people) and “ethanol” (204 people). Many tests were with protective equipment such as materials for protective suits and with respirators.

Nerve agent tests

Around 3,000 people were tested with nerve agents. The number of nerve agents tested was not extensive, with six principal agents recorded. These were tabun, (known as GA), soman (GD), sarin (GB), cyclo sarin (GF), and methylphosphonothioic acid (VX).

The period of nerve agent research ran from the early postwar period to the late 1980s, and coincided with the cold war, when military tension between the Nato countries and the USSR was high.

The archive was rich in information on these tests. The records included detail of the time and place of each test along with details of who took part, noting both staff and volunteer participants. Records on the early tests are especially revealing.

Chambers like this were used to carry out tests on nerve agents.
Thomas Keegan

For example, in 1945 nerve agents were not yet known to Porton Down scientists. They had come close to discovering nerve agents when they had worked on PF-3, a chemical of the same organophosphate type as the nerve agents, but they had not thought it sufficiently toxic.

However, these agents were well known to German scientists, and to the German military who weaponised them during the second world war. Despite fears to the contrary, gas was not used in the fighting, though Germany had clearly prepared for chemical warfare.

Nazi agents and gin and tonic

Advancing US forces moving through Germany came across stockpiles of artillery shells in a railway marshalling yard near Osnabrück that contained suspicious liquids. The markings on the shells – a white ring on one type and green and yellow rings on the other – were new to the Americans. The shells were sent to the US and Porton Down for investigation.

After initial analysis, Porton scientists found that the shells with the white ring contained tear gas. The other contained an unknown substance (later it would be named tabun).

Tabun is one of the extremely toxic organophosphate nerve agents. It has a fruity odour reminiscent of bitter almonds. Exposure can cause death in minutes. Between 1 and 10 mL of tabun on the skin can be fatal.

On April 10 1945, after some laboratory tests, the scientists decided to test the new chemical on people. In fact, as Carter pointed out to me, disaster could have struck immediately as the first nerve agent to arrive at Porton for testing was transported to the lab in a test tube stoppered only with cotton wool.

Thinking this was a new variety of mustard gas, they placed drops on the participants’ skin. The scientists also placed drops in the eyes of some rabbits. The records show that before any serious effect to the humans could be noted one of the rabbits died, giving the scientists running the tests a fright.

The chemical was quickly wiped off the men’s arms and the test ended there. According to a brief memoir supplied by Carter, Dr Ainsworth (who was involved in the tests) said that Captain Fairly (the Porton scientist being tested on) had been shaken by the experience but recovered “after a stiff gin and tonic in his office”.

This sporting attitude to self-testing was not uncommon among scientists, however. Dr Ainsworth later tested a method for reducing the effect of a splash of nerve agent on the skin which involved a tourniquet and opening a vein – something he thought worked well.

But he was used to the pioneering methods of the day. “Taste this,” the pharmacologist John (later Sir John) Gaddum had ordered on one previous occasion. Dr Ainsworth sipped the liquid offered and reported that it tasted a little like gin. “That’s strange”, Professor Gaddum said. “I can’t taste anything. It’s diluted lewisite and the rats simply won’t drink it.”

Back at the wartime testing lab they were keen to find out more about what was now understood to be a new type of chemical agent developed by German scientists and weaponsied by their armed forces. The following week, ten people were exposed in a chamber, at the higher concentration of 1 in 5 million. In the pioneering spirit not uncommon at Porton, four of the subjects: Commandant Notley, Major Sadd, Mr Wheeler and Major Curten were Porton staff. Major Curten reported having a tightness of chest, and a slight contraction of the pupils, unlike the commandant who had no reaction but thought the gas smelled of boiled sweets.

An undated photograph of the southern end of the Porton Down campus showing the bus stop outside. The grey building is thought to be one of the exposure chambers.
Thomas Keegan

Later that morning the scientists had another go, this time at a higher concentration, 1 in 1 million. The symptoms were now more noticeable, with more than one person vomiting and others needing treatment the following day for the persistent symptoms of headaches and eye pain.

Given what we have since learned about tabun, it seems at the very least cavalier of the scientists to conduct these tests on themselves and others. They were were lucky not to have been seriously injured or even killed, but those were the risks they seemed willing to take.

Fatal consequences

The last entries in the archive for nerve agent tests were for 1989 so newer compounds such as novichok, used in an attempted assassination in nearby Salisbury, were not included. One later nerve agent tested in the 1960s was VX, then a scarily potent new nerve agent.

According to the Centers for Disease Control in the US, VX is one of the most toxic of the known chemical warfare agents. It is tasteless and odourless and exposure can cause death in minutes. As little as one drop of VX on the skin can be fatal.

It was not developed into a weapon by the UK, as by then it had abandoned an offensive capability, but tests were carried out on a relatively small number of volunteers. I mentioned VX to Carter. He recalled that the first sample of VX was first discovered, accidentally, at an ICI chemical factory in the UK and sent to Porton in the regular post. Luckily, nobody was exposed.

In one notorious episode however, the tests of nerve agents on humans did not go as expected.

Ronald Maddison, 20, died after being exposed to a nerve agent at Porton Down.
PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo

As I referred to earlier, in 1953, during an early nerve agent experiment, the young airman, Ronald Maddison died. Testing was paused at Porton after an inquiry by the eminent Cambridge academic Lord Adrian and limits on exposures were set after resumption in 1954. A second inquest into the death returned a verdict of unlawful killing in 2004.

While no charges were made against the scientists involved, the Ministry of Defence agreed to pay Maddison’s family £100,000 in compensation.

One of the founders of the Porton Down Veterans Group, Ken Earl was in the same experiment. He remembered vividly being in the same chamber as Maddison, and while not affected seriously at the time, felt his health issues later in life were directly related to the test. In an interview with the BBC, he attributed the many health problems he suffered through his life, including skin conditions, depression and a heart irregularity, to his experience at Porton Down.

Our research could not establish a direct link to the kind of ill health Earl suffered. But our data on the short-term effects did show a good deal about the immediate aftermath of a nerve agent exposure, similar to the type Earl experienced.

The physiological effect of exposure to nerve agents varies greatly between individuals as our previous research has shown. The strength of symptoms varies too. Five of the six participants in the same test as Maddison did not report adverse effects other than feeling a bit cold.

However, tests before this had shown that certain effects were consistently seen with nerve agent exposures. In July 1951 six people participated in a test with soman. The lab book notes:

5/5 experienced pain in eyes, blinker effect and blurred vision 30 minutes after exposure (these symptoms continued for 24 hours). 1 participant vomited 4 hours after exposure. 2 participants vomited 24 hours after exposure. Eye pain and vision improved after 48 hours but not normal – return to normal after 5 days. 4/5 given multiple doses of atropine.

While these effects must have been unpleasant, it is also shown that participants in nerve agent tests had between one and two “exposures”. Those in tests with other chemicals such as mustard gas may have had many.

To further regulate exposures, strict limits on the amount of nerve agent allowed in tests were imposed after Maddison died. The levels of exposure typically experienced by servicemen induced: pinpoint pupils (miosis), headaches, a tightness in the chest and vomiting. These symptoms recur many times in the records, as does documentation of the drugs used to treat them, typically atropine and pralidoxime.

A new era

Despite the range of agents which have been developed, chemical weapons have rarely been used by states in conflict, perhaps held back by adherence to the Chemical Weapons Convention or by their difficulty of use.

Despite this they were used by Iraq (not then bound by the CWC) in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), who used mustard gas and tabun against Iranian troops. They have also been used by states against civilians – for example by Iraq against its Kurdish population and more than once by Syria against its civilian population between 2014 and 2020.

In 2017, North Korean agents used VX to assassinate Kim Jong-nam, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s half-brother in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And more recently the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent. He later recovered only to die in a Russian prison in early 2024.

These are not just remote threats. As I previously noted, a particularly high-profile example of a state using a chemical weapon to kill someone took place in the UK in 2018 when it is alleged that the Russian state tried to kill an ex-KGB spy using small quantities of the then new and especially toxic nerve agent Novichok.

Sergei Skripal, the intended victim, and his daughter Yulia survived the attack.

A public inquiry heard how the Skripals were found slumped in a park in Salisbury. While the presence of nerve agents was not at first suspected, the emergency services noted how the Skripals suffered from a range of symptoms including pinprick pupils, muscle spasms and vomiting. For those experienced with nerve agents these symptoms are typical.

But these symptoms were not known to Nick Bailey, a detective sergeant who had been assigned to check over a house in Salisbury, home to the two people that had recently been found collapsed. This should have been routine but the first indication to DS Bailey that something was amiss was when he looked in the mirror.

His pupils, normally wide open at this time of night, had shrunk into pinpricks. He was also beginning to feel very strange. But it was when Bailey’s vision fractured and he vomited that he knew something was seriously wrong.

It would later become clear that the agents sent to kill Skripal had sprayed the liquid nerve agent onto the door handle of the Skripal house. Sergei and his daughter both used the handle and were poisoned. So was Bailey, who had closed the door and locked it after his checks on the house later that evening.

Four months later, the boyfriend of Dawn Sturgess found a discarded perfume bottle in nearby Amesbury, picked it up and then later gave it to her as a present. Neither could have imagined it had been used to bring Novichok to Salisbury and left behind by the attackers. Sturgess died after spraying the contents onto her skin. Her boyfriend survived.

It was in partnership with experts at Porton Down that the local health services were able to treat the victims. According to the inquiry, a key challenge was for the hospital to work out what had poisoned the Skripals so they could treat them effectively. Porton Down worked nonstop to determine what type of nerve agent had been used. Once the cause was known the hospital was able to save the Skripals’ lives.

That Porton Down is situated just a few miles from Salisbury where the Novichok attack took place was probably useful to those treating victims. The Russian state however, used this proximity to try to muddy the waters of accountability for the poisoning, but there seems little doubt that blame for the nerve agent poisoning lies with Russia.

Despite the efforts of those agents, five out six people poisoned with Novichok survived, not unscathed perhaps, but alive. That they did so is in some way the result of the expertise and knowledge gained over years of nerve agent research at Porton Down.

It seems clear that the more information about the effects of nerve agent exposure that are known outside specialist research circles the better. Though nerve agent attack is extremely rare the events in Salisbury and Amesbury have shown they are not impossible.

For you: more from our Insights series:

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The capture of Damascus by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad last December sent shockwaves through Syria’s political landscape, heralding an unprecedented shift in power. The rise to power of HTS, formerly the Al-Nusra Front, is a litmus test for assessing whether militant Islamist organisations can evolve through state-building.

At the heart of transforming Syria must be the development and safeguarding of women’s rights. This will prove a revealing lens through which to measure the sincerity of HTS’s professed reforms.

But so far a stark disparity has emerged between their rhetoric of inclusivity and reality. This appears to involve perpetuating entrenched institutional practices of patriarchal conservatism.

After seizing Damascus, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa took pains to project an image of inclusive governance. He claimed: “Syria is a nation of many identities and beliefs, and our duty is to ensure they coexist peacefully within a just system.” He highlighted that 60% of university students in the city of Idlib are women, and portrayed HTS as a moderate force that values women’s roles in society.

Yet interviews with senior regime figures as well as policy decisions and governance practices expose these statements as hollow. Instead they suggest a deep-seated commitment to hardline religious conservatism.

The new administration’s official spokesperson, Obaida Arnaout, said recently that appointing a woman to a role in the ministry of defence would not “align with her essence, her biological and psychological nature”. This was framed as acknowledging women’s suitability for other roles, but it ultimately reflects a deeply conservative, patriarchal attitude.

Likewise, the appointment of Aisha al-Dibs to lead the office for women’s affairs initially appeared to signal progress. But her first few statements suggested a regressive agenda.

Blaming civil society organisations for “rising divorce rates”, she vowed that “the constitution will be based on Islamic Sharia”. She added that she would “not allow space for those who disagree with my ideology”.

Al-Dibs’s vision of empowerment appears to be rigidly conservative. It effectively reduces women’s roles to family, husband and domestic priorities.

These two examples highlight in HTS what appears to be a strategy of commandeering state institutions to enforce a radicalised version of Islam, a key trait of political Jihadism.

The new HTS-backed justice minister, Shadi al-Waisi epitomises this trend. In 2015, as a judge in the northern city of Idlib – at the time under the control of the Al-Nusra Front – he was recorded on video ordering women to be executed for adultery. An HTS representative has since dismissed this as “a phase we have surpassed”. But Al-Waisi still argues that since most people in Syria are Muslim, religious Sharia law should take priority.

As far as women’s role in the judiciary is concerned, a statement from Arnaout casts doubt on whether they will be allowed to continue to act as judges, a hard-won right under the Assad regime. In 2017, 30% of judicial posts were occupied by women.

But in an interview with Lebanese TV channel Al-Jadeed in December 2024, Arnaout said: “Certainly, women have the right to learn and be educated in any field, whether in education, law, the judiciary, or other fields, but the job has to suit her nature.” She added: “For a woman to assume a judicial position, this could be examined by experts, and it is too early to talk about it.”

Education policy has also become a key battleground. The new administration has introduced sweeping reforms. These include dropping evolution and big bang theory from science and changing the history curriculum to reflect a more Islamic slant.

Education minister, Nazir Al-Qadri, has downplayed these revisions as “small deletions and corrections”. But the changes reveal a deliberate effort to embed conservative radical Salafi ideology.

Beyond the classroom, HTS’s hardline policies pervade public life. Women are segregated on buses, strict dress codes are heavily propagated. Meanwhile building new mosques is taking precedence over rebuilding war-torn infrastructure.

HTS’s unwillingness to embrace genuine pluralism suggest the regime is more interested in rebranding its ideology than in reforming it.

Paris conference on Syria: delegates called an ‘inclusive transition’ to democracy.
Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs/UPI Credit: UPI/Alamy Live News

Diplomatic promises and realities on the ground

While determining how to engage with the HTS regime, other countries need to be aware of this. They must act in the knowledge that rhetoric of inclusivity appears – at present at least – to be simply that: rhetoric. Firm pressure from international stakeholders such as the United Nations will be needed to hold HTS accountable to a transition to a fully inclusive new system of government.

A conference held in Paris on February 13 and attended by representatives of a broad range of Arab and European countries underscored the international commitment to this principle. Delegates produced a joint statement that called for: “A peaceful, credible, orderly and swift inclusive transition … so that a representative and inclusive governance that represents all components of Syrian society and includes women from the onset can be formed.”

The explicit mention of women and inclusive representation in this statement stands in stark contrast to the reality of the transitional process. Just a day earlier, on February 12, the appointed preparatory committee for the upcoming National Dialogue Conference, which will thrash out a new “political identity” for Syria, revealed the limitations of this commitment.

While the seven-member committee includes two women, five members have strong ties to Islamist movements and three of the seven are directly linked to HTS.

The committee’s composition notably fails to represent Syria’s diverse ethnic and religious communities, with no Kurdish, Alawite, or Druze representatives. This raises questions about the genuine commitment to inclusive governance in the transition process.

The contradiction between HTS rhetoric and its actions on diversity and inclusivity, especially when it comes to respecting women’s rights, is not just a domestic issue but a critical test of its global standing.

The new regime’s treatment of women and its enforcement of conservative ideology in violation of legal and human rights expose its broader intentions. Failing to address these signs risks condemning Syria to a repressive future. Läs mer…

Ahead of the election on February 23, many German voters are deeply concerned about the economy – and for good reason. The German economy is in a recession and has been shrinking for two consecutive years. In fact, it is now about the same size as it was in 2019, even as some of its peers among the world’s advanced economies have experienced solid growth (on the left of the chart below).

This matters for voters, who have experienced stagnating real incomes and remain pessimistic – expecting real incomes to decline further.

GDP and productivity growth of Germany, UK and US:

Real economic growth in Germany, the UK and the US, 2019 to 2023 (constant prices). Sources: World Bank and OECD. Author provided.

There could be several reasons for Germany’s economic malaise. First, fiscal policy in Germany is tighter than in other countries, meaning higher taxes and lower public spending. Due to the “debt brake” enshrined in its constitution, Germany is severely restricted in running budget deficits, except when the government declares an emergency, as it did due to COVID.

The last coalition government collapsed over a dispute about whether to declare another emergency over the war in Ukraine in order to increase borrowing capacity. This did not happen, and as a result Germany’s fiscal deficit has remained relatively moderate. The argument goes that a larger deficit might have boosted economic growth.

Second, for decades, Germany has relied on foreign demand to sustain economic growth at home. During the first two decades of the 21st century, it benefited greatly from China’s integration into the world economy.

To build up its productive capacity, China relied heavily on machinery produced in Germany and it purchased a significant number of German cars. However, this is no longer the case. As China has moved to the technology frontier, it no longer depends as much on German cars or machinery.

However, both factors only go so far in accounting for the stagnating German economy. For if demand – domestic or foreign – is too weak to sustain growth, this should be reflected in falling prices.

Yet prices have been rising strongly. Inflation in Germany has been running high over the last couple of years.

And it has not been systematically lower than in, say, the US or the rest of the euro area. Over the next 12 months, households expect inflation to be above 3% – well above the European Central Bank’s 2% target.

Another relevant indicator also suggests that lack of demand is unlikely to be the main reason for Germany’s stagnation. Unemployment is low in Germany, lower than in most European countries and hardly higher than in 2019.

Instead, adverse supply conditions are key, as reflected in households’ expectations of falling incomes and higher inflation.

Overall, supply is simply the combination of labour and capital inputs (for example, the size of the workforce and the machinery or premises available to them) along with productivity or technology, which tells us how much output we get from the labour and capital inputs. Germany is facing a triple crisis in this regard – expensive energy, weak labour supply and low productivity growth.

First, there are energy prices, which have been pushed up everywhere by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, the effect has been particularly strong in Germany due to its direct dependency on Russian gas.

The outgoing government, in which the Greens have been a key player, is widely credited with trying to accelerate Germany’s green transition. This raised the costs of the transition above those caused by the European Emissions Trading System, whereby polluters pay for their emissions.

While it is difficult to determine the exact contributions of the war and the green transition to the rise in energy prices, both clearly act as a drag on growth, particularly on the supply side (that is to say, production potential).

The productivity problem

But Germany faces more fundamental supply-side challenges. The second issue becomes apparent when comparing GDP per hour worked (a measure of a country’s productivity, as seen on the right of the chart above).

Here, the trends in Germany and the UK are quite similar, implying that Germany’s lower economic growth relative to the UK is primarily due to people working fewer hours. This, in turn, may reflect demographic changes, migration that does not contribute to the labour force or shifting preferences in the wake of COVID.

The third issue is productivity growth. Consider the increase in GDP per hour worked in the US, which has risen by more than 10% as shown in the chart above, dwarfing the developments in both Germany and the UK. Common causes of weak productivity growth include ageing infrastructure, low private sector investment, a lack of start-ups and fewer new companies growing into multinational leaders.

A turnaround requires far-reaching improvements in supply conditions. In terms of energy, Germany should avoid measures such as introducing more regulation on the heating or insulation of new and existing homes, and instead rely on the EU-wide emissions trading scheme to curb emissions.

In the labour market, increased participation or skilled migration is needed, supported by policies that encourage people to retire later and entice more women into the workforce.

Increasing defence spending could be a way to boost German productivity.
Ryan Nash Photography/Shutterstock

Productivity growth remains the most challenging issue. A good start would be increased funding for universities and reduced regulation, particularly for AI technology.

Deepening the EU’s single market, for example by removing restrictions on cross-border energy trade to allow firms to access cheaper electricity, would enhance competition and drive productivity growth. This way, companies could expand and create well-paying jobs.

Finally, an additional boost may come from higher defence spending, not only to address the much-needed improvement of Germany’s external security but also because it has been shown to increase productivity.

While immigration may be a major talking point for the German electorate in the coming vote, the economy – as ever – will be an important factor in measuring the mood of the country. Läs mer…