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The FBI and police in several states are investigating a wave of hateful texts and emails apparently targeting minorities across the United States following the presidential election.

The anonymously sent messages, which may have numbered up to 500,000, varied in their specific language but had similarly menacing themes. Some referred to recipients as “selected for slavery” and ordered them to a plantation to pick cotton. Others said they’d be picked up for deportation or sent to a reeducation camp.

The threats lacked details on timing, location and the like. Some addressed recipients by name, while others contained no greeting or personal identifier. They seemed to be targeting Black people, immigrants and LGBTQ people but may have been dispatched indiscriminately to a wide swath of Americans.

Information technology experts have expressed confidence that the perpetrators will be identified. Yet it’s not clear to me as a professor of constitutional and criminal law that they can be prosecuted. The First Amendment generally protects free speech, even when it’s heinous.

Free expression rules supreme

Several Supreme Court decisions have established that speech may not be punished just because it is offensive or hateful.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” the justices wrote in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 case that affirmed flag burning is protected expression.

Joey Johnson, center, burned an American flag at the 1984 Republican National Convention. The Supreme Court agreed with his attorney, William Kunstler, right, that it was protected speech.
AP Photo/Bob Daugherty

Snyder v. Phelps, a 2010 case involving anti-LGBTQ protesters who carried hateful signs at the funerals of fallen soldiers, strengthened that precedent.

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and – as it did here – inflict great pain,” the justices wrote. Nonetheless, they concluded, “We cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech.”

Limits to free speech

The Supreme Court has been cautious in recognizing exceptions to the freedom of speech because of its importance to democracy and individual autonomy. Under special circumstances, however, some types of speech can be illegal.

One recognized exception is a “true threat.”

In the 2023 case Counterman v. Colorado, the Supreme Court held that for speech to cross over the true threat line, the speaker must both express an intent to commit violence and recklessly disregard “a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.”

An example of a true threat under the Counterman case would be for a scorned lover to barrage their ex with messages promising to kill or maim them.

This standard is so new that it has not been tested thoroughly in the lower courts, making predictions risky at best. In my analysis, however, a message mass distributed to thousands of recipients indicating that they had been “selected” to be a slave might not meet the Counterman standard.

Additionally, “slave” is a legal status that hasn’t existed for over 150 years, so the threat to force someone into enslaved labor likely lacks both the peril of physical harm and the plausibility of harmful action. The anonymity of the senders may add to this implausibility.

Courts may also find that the communications didn’t create a “significant” risk that a “reasonable” recipient would feel threatened. An anonymous mass message may be interpreted as spam, or trolling.

Accordingly, the messages probably would not rise to the level of “true threat” exceptions to First Amendment protections.

Other exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court are speech that incites others to imminent lawlessness and “fighting words.”

Yet the November messages didn’t call others to violence, nor were their words likely to provoke it – the two hallmarks of incitement. “Fighting words,” meanwhile, require face-to-face communication that is likely to incite a violent reaction. This did not happen in the November messages, either.

So were any laws broken?

There’s another problem with any legal case against the culprits behind the November messages: What crime would they even be charged with?

The law enforcement officials who’ve pledged to get to the bottom of the matter have expressed outrage and concern, but they have not identified what law they believe was broken.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is an exception.

“Other people have no First Amendment right to your phone, and free speech doesn’t protect telephone harassment,” Yost said in a post on X on Nov. 7 when he opened an inquiry into the hateful texts received by an an unspecified number of Ohioans.

Yost was likely referring to a 2011 Ohio statute that criminalizes telecommunications that are “threatening, intimidating, menacing, coercive, or obscene with the intent to abuse, threaten, or harass the recipient.”

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost says his office is ‘looking into’ the racist texts.
AP Photo/Paul Vernon

The intersection of telephone harassment and the First Amendment is less clear, in my analysis. Laws vary by state, but illegal harassment and stalking typically involves physical conduct, which is not protected by the First Amendment – for example, repeated unwanted visits to someone’s home or workplace. Continually following someone in a manner intended to cause fear – or which recklessly causes fear or emotional distress – would be another example.

Could a text or email be characterized as conduct rather than speech? That is unsettled law. And where the law is unclear, novel legal strategies can set a new precedent.

If a court were to decide that the act of sending the November messages was “pure conduct,” rather than protected speech, then anti-harassment laws might be used to prosecute the senders.

Private action

Criminal law aside, people are not powerless against vile communications.

Telecommunications companies are free to block messages, both before they are received and in response to customer requests. After the wave of hateful texts in November, many did just that by closing accounts identified as sources of those messages.

If a blocked sender continues to send similar communications to a target, the elements of harassment would be met. A court could determine that to be expressive conduct or simply speech not protected by the First Amendment.

The U.S. draws the boundary widely around free speech because it enables wide, controversial discussions of politics, law and society. In this case, the senders ran up to the line of protected speech but quite possibility didn’t cross it.

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels,” the author H.L. Mencken once said. “For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” Läs mer…

If you talked to friends or family about politics over Thanksgiving, you might not have changed each other’s minds. But don’t be discouraged – and consider talking with them again as the holiday season continues.

As a scholar of political dialogue, for the past decade I have been studying conversations between people who disagree about politics. What I have found is that people rarely change their minds about political issues as a direct result of these discussions. But they frequently feel much better about the people with whom they disagree.

But it’s important how those conversations go. Confrontations and arguments are not as productive as inquiry and honest curiosity.

Conversations that make a difference

When people sense that others are sincerely curious about what they think, asking calmly posed, respectful questions, they tend to drop their defenses. Instead of being argumentative in response to an aggressive question, they try to mirror the sincerity they perceive.

In addition to asking why someone voted as they did, you might ask about what they fear and what they hope for, what they believe creates a good society, and, importantly, about the personal experiences that have given rise to these fears, hopes and beliefs.

This curiosity-based approach has important effects on both the listener and the speaker. I have found that the listener may come to understand how the speaker could make a choice that the listener considers to be a bad one yet still think of the speaker as a decent person. The speaker becomes more relatable, and often their intentions are revealed to be well-meaning – or even ethically sound. A listener can begin to see how, given different circumstances or different ethical convictions, that person’s vote could make sense.

The speaker, too, stands to have a positive experience.

When I followed up with college students years after they participated in a dialogue session modeling curiosity-based listening, what they remembered best was their conversation partner. Students remembered that a peer they expected to attack them instead asked sincere, respectful questions and listened intently to the answers. They remembered feeling good in the person’s presence and liking them for it.

Even amid disagreements, there can be mutual recognition of humanity.
Carol Yepes/Moment via Getty Images

Benefits to democracy

This type of exchange between Americans of different political stripes can provide several important benefits to democracy.

First, these conversations can help ward off the worst dangers springing from hatred and fear. I expect that gaining some understanding of others’ reasons for their vote, as well as seeing their decency, may reduce people’s support for those conspiracy theories about election results that are based on the assumption that nobody could actually endorse the opposing candidate. Such understanding could also reduce support for policies that dehumanize and disenfranchise the other side and politicians who incite violence. In short, I believe these conversations can reduce the sense that the other side is so evil or stupid that it must be stopped at any cost.

Second, these conversations can help promote the best of what democracy promises. In an ideal democracy, people do not only fight for their own freedoms but also seek to understand their fellow citizens’ concerns.
People cannot create a society that supports everyone flourishing without knowing what others’ lives are like and without understanding the experiences, interests and convictions that drive them.

Finally, in the rare cases that people do change their minds about politics, I have found that it is not because they were argued into a different point of view. Instead, when someone is asked sincere, reflective questions, they sometimes begin to ask themselves those questions. And sometimes, over the years, they find their way into different answers.

For example, one college student told me in a follow-up interview years after she attended a dialogue session that she had been asked, “If you say you believe this, then why did you vote like that?”

“It wasn’t an attacking question,” she recalled. “They really wanted to know.”

As a result, she confided, “I have been asking myself that question ever since.”

Listening with curiosity and genuine interest can help build bridges despite disagreements.
Martin Barraud/Stone via Getty Images

A shared connection

Dialogue alone does not sustain a healthy democracy. Citizen actions, not words, protect democratic institutions, our own rights and the rights of others.

But open, curious conversations among people who disagree keep alive the ideas and practices that remind us that we are all humans together, sharing a world – and in the U.S., sharing a nation that’s worth protecting.

This holiday season, let’s all commit to continuing to engage with the people with whom we most sharply disagree, with respect and dignity. Läs mer…

A surprising buzzword in the U.S. Congress these days is “biological.”

In a now viral video, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina was filmed taping a piece of paper with the word “biological” on it above a women’s restroom sign inside the Capitol building. This followed Mace’s introduction of two bills to limit the use of single-sex women’s facilities – first in the Capitol then on all federal properties – to members of the corresponding “biological sex.”

Mace’s Capitol bill claims that the presence of “biological males” in “restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms designed for women jeopardizes the safety and dignity” of “female” House members and employees.

What prompted this legislation, as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made clear, is just one person.

“Sarah McBride,” Greene told reporters, “is a biological man.”

But is she?

McBride, the representative-elect from Delaware, is the first out transgender person elected to Congress.

Neither Mace nor Greene offered any evidence for their claim that McBride is male. In fact, opponents of transgender rights in the United States are not really in agreement on what they even mean by “biological sex.”

And the world’s scientists aren’t either.

As a scholar of transgender history, I have written about the long history of gender-affirming care in the U.S. and the equally long history of backlash against it. Debates over trans rights frequently hinge on a central question about bodies: Is a transgender woman who has medically transformed her body still a “man,” or has her biological sex changed?

The answer is complicated.

Sarah McBride stated that she intends to focus on bringing down costs for families during her tenure in Congress.

A history of changing sex

In the modern era, the scientific concept of transgender – that there could be a perceived or felt difference between one’s psychological sex and their biological sex – dates back to at least the late 19th century. At that time, the very definition of sex itself was changing.

For centuries prior, sex was commonly determined through a simple visual inspection of anatomy: does a person have a penis or a vulva?

By the 1870s, however, scientific advancements in dissection and the study of intersex conditions led some researchers to posit a new definition of biological sex: one based on gonads – internal reproductive anatomy such as testes or ovaries – rather than external genitalia.

Herculine Barbin is an example of this shift. Assigned female at birth, Barbin was raised in 19th-century France as a girl. In her teenage years, a doctor discovered hidden testicles adjacent to her vaginal canal. Based on this internal anatomy, a court ruled Barbin’s sex must be reassigned to male. Her “true sex,” the court resolved, was gonadal.

As transgender medicine emerged as a field of study in the 1920s and 1930s, the gonadal view of sex reigned. Eugen Steinach, an Austrian scientist, conducted studies demonstrating that a guinea pig’s sex could be changed by removing its gonads and replacing them with the gonads of the opposite sex.

Transgender advocates such as the German physician Magnus Hirschfeld realized that human sex functioned in a similar way to Steinach’s guinea pigs. If the hormonally induced characteristics many people consider “male” and “female” –such as facial hair, breast growth or the pitch of one’s voice – are largely determined by gonads, then a person can change their sex by changing gonads. Therefore, the most common surgeries for trans women at this time consisted of orchiectomies – the removal of testes.

The sexual revolution

By the 1960s and 1970s – the era of second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution – the debate over biological sex was as unclear as ever.

In competitive athletics, there was a shift away from genital inspections to the Barr body test, which determines sex based on chromosomes. But at the same time, with advancements in plastic surgery, leading clinicians in transgender medicine believed they were able to change a trans woman’s sex by transforming her penis into a vagina.

As an example of this era’s complexity, when Renee Richards, a transgender women’s tennis player, was forced to take a chromosomal test to qualify for the 1976 U.S. Open, she challenged the policy as discriminatory. The New York State Supreme Court agreed, with the judge declaring that there is “overwhelming medical evidence that (Richards) is now female.”

The New York State Supreme Court ruled that trans tennis player Renee Richards had medically changed her sex.
Focus on Sport/Getty Images

How had Richards changed sex? The answer, she said, was gynecological. “Have a gynecologist examine” me, she proposed in a 1976 television interview, “and then you’ll have your answer, ‘Is this person a man or a woman?’”

By the late 1970s, definitions of biological sex were so contested that even Janice Raymond, the 20th century’s most influential anti-transgender theorist, affirmed that scientists understood there to be at least six different types of sex: chromosomal, anatomical, gonadal, hormonal, legal and psychological.

For Raymond, a committed lesbian feminist who believed that even transgender women without testes or penises were still a threat to women-only spaces, it was ultimately their socialization as boys and as young men, she reasoned, that made transgender women “male” – not a biological argument at all.

Bathroom panic

In response to Mace’s bill, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York asked whether women will have to “drop trou” and let a government agent “inspect her genitals” in order to use the Capitol’s restrooms.

Her comment was meant to be provocative, but there is no way for the House sergeant-at-arms to enforce a rule on biological sex when there is no commonly understood definition of that term.

Which brings us back to McBride.

In public comments, Mace claims she wants to keep “junk” (genitals) and “balls” (gonads) out of women’s restrooms. Of course, many transgender women do not possess these characteristics. If, for Nancy Mace, genitals and gonads make someone “biologically male,” then not all transgender women are the threat to women’s “safety and dignity” that she fears.

But Mace’s Republican colleagues are pushing a stricter definition of sex. Some legislators want to rewrite federal law to declare that sex is the “body structures (phenotypes) that, in normal development, correspond to one or the other gamete – sperm for males and ova for females.”

If that sentence seems strange, perhaps it is because the majority of Americans understand that “male” and “female” are defined by “sex assigned at birth,” which commonly occurs through genital inspection – not based on one’s hidden internal ability to produce eggs or sperm.

Most Americans define ‘male’ and ‘female’ based on sex assigned at birth.
Petri Oeschger/Moment via Getty Images

So why are Republicans seeking to rewrite “sex” in federal law to refer to gamete production, rather than maintain familiar notions of sex that have endured for centuries, such as genitals or gonads?

For once, the answer isn’t complicated: The gamete definition of “sex” will ensure that transgender women are always classified as “male” no matter how much they change their bodies. Federal bills defining sex do this by declaring that a woman is someone “who naturally has, had, will have, or would have” the reproductive capacity to produce eggs – something a transgender woman can never do.

But what do sperm and ova have to do with using the bathroom?

For most of modern history, scientists, doctors and judges have agreed that humans can change sex – they just haven’t agreed on how it can be accomplished. To change the definition now is to invite heightened government scrutiny into the private medical records of all women. It remains to be seen whether most Americans will agree with this new definition. Läs mer…

Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most famous and respected intellectuals, will be 96 years old on Dec. 7, 2024. For more than half a century, multitudes of people have read his works in a variety of languages, and many people have relied on his commentaries and interviews for insights about intellectual debates and current events.

Chomsky suffered a stroke in June 2023 that has severely limited his movement, impaired his speech and impeded his ability to travel. His birthday provides an occasion to consider the tremendous corpus of works that he created over the years and to reflect on the many ways that his texts and recordings still critically engage with contemporary discussions all across disciplines and realms.

Chomsky’s vast body of work includes scientific research focused on language, human nature and the mind, and political writings about U.S. imperialism, Israel and Palestine, Central America, the Vietnam War, coercive institutions, the media and the many ways in which people’s needs are subjugated in the interest of profit and control.

As a scholar of humanities and law, I’ve engaged with Chomsky’s work from an array of perspectives and authored a biography called “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent” and a book on Chomsky’s influence called “The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower.” One important theme in his broad corpus is his lifelong fascination with human creativity, which helps explain his vociferous attacks on those who seek to keep the rabble in line.

Early days

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on Dec. 7, 1928, in Philadelphia. He and his younger brother, David Chomsky, were raised in a lively household by Elsie Simonofsky and William (Zev) Chomsky, progressive educators who were deeply immersed in wide-ranging Jewish and Zionist cultural activities.

Chomsky often dates his own interest in teaching and learning to his close readings of Hebrew works with his parents and to the lively educational experiences he enjoyed at the Oak Lane County Day School, an experimental school that subscribed to John Dewey’s approach to immersive learning and promoted individual creativity over competition with other students.

A precocious learner, Chomsky at 12 years old read the proofs for his father’s book about a 13th-century Hebrew grammarian named David Kimhi. It was an auspicious beginning to a life immersed in philology, philosophy and the study of language and the mind. From very early on, he sought to understand innate human propensities for freedom, dignity and creativity, which inspired his interest in fostering those properties of human nature.

While Chomsky’s parents were what he called normal Roosevelt Democrats, he was drawn to more radical approaches to society and to the promotion of noncoercive social structures. At age 10, he read about the Spanish Civil War, which inspired him to write an editorial about the fall of Barcelona for his school’s newspaper. This was an early harbinger of his public intellectual work and his vociferous challenges to systems of oppression and illegitimate authority.

As a young man, Chomsky joined a socialist wing of the Zionist youth movement that opposed a Jewish state, and from his readings and discussions he came to favor Arab-Jewish class cooperation in a socialist Palestine. His deep knowledge of Palestine and Israel, bolstered by his ability to read and speak Arabic and Hebrew, helped inform his many vehement critiques of Israeli state power.

Chomsky on John Dewey’s approach to education: how to produce free, creative, independent human beings.

Radical pedagogy

After an early education focused on self-discovery and free-ranging exploration, Chomsky was introduced in high school to rote learning, competition with other students and a mainstream system of values. In reaction, he began to make regular trips to New York City, where he explored bookstores. He also made regular visits with a relative who ran a newsstand on 72nd Street that served as a lively intellectual center for emigrés interested in more radical approaches to society.

In 1944, Chomsky completed high school and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. Although he has expressed some dismay about the structures of conformity and status quo thinking he encountered there, he did find inspiration in courses with philosopher C. West Churchman, linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida and, moreover, linguist Zellig Harris. Chomsky knew members of the Harris family because Zellig Harris’ father hosted Jewish services in the Harris home that the Chomsky family occasionally attended.

Chomsky’s father’s approach to the study of language bore similarities to Zellig Harris’ work in Semitics, the study of Arabic, Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Harris invited Noam to read the proofs of his “Methods in Structural Linguistics.” This highly anticipated book was rooted in the idea that the function and the meaning of linguistic elements are determined by their their relationship to other components that make up sentences. After working hard to understand Harris’ linguistics paradigm, Chomsky eventually abandoned it, but he remained fascinated by Harris’ political views and by the unstructured, lively and creative debates that he promoted.

Chomsky met Carol Doris Schatz at the Hebrew School where her mother taught and Chomsky’s father was principal. Years later, when they were both students at the University of Pennsylvania, they started dating. They were married in 1949, and four years later they decided to move to an Israeli kibbutz, or communal agricultural settlement. They had expected to find a culture of creative free thinking there. Instead, they were deeply disappointed to find what Chomsky described as ideological conformity to Stalinist ideology. They returned to the U.S. after only six weeks.

The young couple settled in Boston and started a family. Noam pursued graduate work, while Carol paused her own studies to raise the children. She later returned to research on language acquisition, which she eventually taught and researched at MIT and Harvard. Carol Chomsky died in 2008. Noam remarried in 2014, to the Brazilian translator Valeria Wasserman Chomsky.

Chomskian revolution

When Chomsky was a student, most academic psychologists described human language as a system of habits, skills or dispositions to act that are acquired through extensive training, induction, generalization and association. By this account, language grows incrementally with experience, reinforced by a system of rewards and punishments.

This framework was at the heart of a structuralist paradigm, which analyzed the form and meaning of texts as different parts of the same thing. Any language, from this standpoint, restricts how phonemes and morphemes – the smallest units of sound and meaning in language – and other constituents are assembled and distributed. By this view, humans have the capacity to learn language in ways akin to how they acquire other kinds of knowledge.

Chomsky’s Ph.D. work, the resulting 1957 book “Syntactic Structures” and his New York Review of Books review of B.F. Skinner’s “Verbal Behaviour” challenged this paradigm and heralded the Chomskian linguistics revolution.

Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar in the history of how philosophers have viewed the human mind and language acquisition.

Chomsky’s starting point was that humans are endowed with universal grammar, which is activated by exposure to natural language. Children gain proficiency in a language by building on innate knowledge. This means that the capacity for language quite literally grows in the mind in a manner akin to how organs develop in the body.

Chomsky’s interest in innate human abilities draws in part from a range of philosophical treatises penned in the 17th and 18th centuries and associated with the Port Royal system of logic and Enlightenment philosophy, which emphasized science, individual liberty and the rule of law. He developed these ideas in a book called “Cartesian Linguistics,” which outlined his intellectual debt to the writings of, among others, Descartes, Kant, Rousseau and Wilhelm von Humboldt.

By the early 1960s, Chomsky’s work had gained him recognition in linguistics, philosophy and psychology. His own research, and that conducted by the growing number of linguists who adopted his approach, led to significant advances in the study of syntax, generative grammar, language and the mind, semantics, form and the interpretation of language.

His political engagement was documented in what I believe is a remarkable collection of interviews and books about U.S. imperialism, the Cold War, the Middle East, Central America and Southeast Asia, including “Problems of Knowledge and Freedom” and “For Reasons of State.” Puzzled by Americans’ spirit of resigned consensus, he began to collaborate with Edward S. Herman on books including “Counter-Revolutionary Violence,” “The Political Economy of Human Rights” and “Manufacturing Consent,” which was turned into a popular film by the same name.

Common thread

The common thread connecting Chomsky’s many intellectual projects are four “problems” that were the focus of much of his life’s work. One is Plato’s problem, which considers why it is that humans, whose contact with the world is brief and limited, can come to know so much. The second is Orwell’s complementary problem, which asks how is it that human beings know so little given the amount of information to which they have access. The third is Descartes’ problem, which pertains to the human capacity to freely express thoughts in constantly novel ways over an infinite range by means that are appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them. Finally, there’s Humboldt’s problem, which focuses on what constitutes language.

These problems are connected in different ways to how people learn, what impedes human development, and to speculations about the initial state of the language faculty, which he outlined in a range of texts, including “Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use,” “Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures,” “The Minimalist Program” and “Why Only Us? Language and Evolution,” with Robert C. Berwick.

Chomsky’s legacy

‘Manufacturing Consent’ is one of Noam Chomsky’s best-known political works.
courtesy Penguin Random House

Remarkably tenacious and active, Chomsky continued to publish and to speak out on contemporary issues into his mid-90s. His ideas evolved but were rooted in a series of deeply seated ideas about the nature of the human mind. He is one of the most cited intellectuals in history, and he was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. Millions of people have watched his debates and discussions with William F. Buckley, Angela Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Michel Foucault, Howard Gardner, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Perle, Jean Piaget, Briahna Joy Gray and even Ali G.

As the figure widely viewed as the founder of cognitive sciences, Chomsky has been critical of the hype surrounding big data, artificial intelligence and ChatGPT.

As a voice for the downtrodden and the oppressed, he has spoken from the perspective of human rights, intellectual self-defense and the popular struggle through independent thinking against structures of power and subjugation.

Chomsky’s extraordinary achievements resonate far and wide – and are likely to continue to do so into the future. Läs mer…

The NASA project NEOWISE, which has given astronomers a detailed view of near-Earth objects – some of which could strike the Earth – ended its mission and burned on reentering the atmosphere after over a decade.

On a clear night, the sky is full of bright objects – from stars, large planets and galaxies to tiny asteroids flying near Earth. These asteroids are commonly known as near-Earth objects, and they come in a wide variety of sizes. Some are tens of kilometers across or larger, while others are only tens of meters or smaller.

On occasion, near-Earth objects smash into Earth at a high speed – roughly 10 miles per second (16 kilometers per second) or faster. That’s about 15 times as fast as a rifle’s muzzle speed. An impact at that speed can easily damage the planet’s surface and anything on it.

Impacts from large near-Earth objects are generally rare over a typical human lifetime. But they’re more frequent on a geological timescale of millions to billions of years. The best example may be a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) asteroid that crashed into Earth, killed the dinosaurs and created Chicxulub crater about 65 million years ago.

Smaller impacts are very common on Earth, as there are more small near-Earth objects. An international community effort called planetary defense protects humans from these space intruders by cataloging and monitoring as many near-Earth objects as possible, including those closely approaching Earth. Researchers call the near-Earth objects that could collide with the surface potentially hazardous objects.

NASA began its NEOWISE mission in December 2013. This mission’s primary focus was to use the space telescope from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to closely detect and characterize near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets.

NEOWISE contributed to planetary defense efforts with its research to catalog near-Earth objects. Over the past decade, it helped planetary defenders like us and our colleagues study near-Earth objects.

NASA’s NEOWISE mission, the spacecraft for which is shown here, surveyed for near-Earth objects.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Detecting near-Earth objects

NEOWISE was a game-changing mission, as it revolutionized how to survey near-Earth objects.

The NEOWISE mission continued to use the spacecraft from NASA’s WISE mission, which ran from late 2009 to 2011 and conducted an all-sky infrared survey to detect not only near-Earth objects but also distant objects such as galaxies.

The spacecraft orbited Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and it was in a Sun-synchronous orbit, where it could see the Sun in the same direction over time. This position allowed it to scan all of the sky efficiently.

The spacecraft could survey astronomical and planetary objects by detecting the signatures they emitted in the mid-infrared range.

Humans’ eyes can sense visible light, which is electromagnetic radiation between 400 and 700 nanometers. When we look at stars in the sky with the naked eye, we see their visible light components.

However, mid-infrared light contains waves between 3 and 30 micrometers and is invisible to human eyes.

When heated, an object stores that heat as thermal energy. Unless the object is thermally insulated, it releases that energy continuously as electromagnetic energy, in the mid-infrared range.

This process, known as thermal emission, happens to near-Earth objects after the Sun heats them up. The smaller an asteroid, the fainter its thermal emission. The NEOWISE spacecraft could sense thermal emissions from near-Earth objects at a high level of sensitivity – meaning it could detect small asteroids.

But asteroids aren’t the only objects that emit heat. The spacecraft’s sensors could pick up heat emissions from other sources too – including the spacecraft itself.

To make sure heat from the spacecraft wasn’t hindering the search, the WISE/NEOWISE spacecraft was designed so that it could actively cool itself using then-state-of-the-art solid hydrogen cryogenic cooling systems.

Operation phases

Since the spacecraft’s equipment needed to be very sensitive to detect faraway objects for WISE, it used solid hydrogen, which is extremely cold, to cool itself down and avoid any noise that could mess with the instruments’ sensitivity. Eventually the coolant ran out, but not until WISE had successfully completed its science goals.

During the cryogenic phase when it was actively cooling itself, the spacecraft operated at a temperature of about -447 degrees Fahrenheit (-266 degrees Celsius), slightly higher than the universe’s temperature, which is about -454 degrees Fahrenheit (-270 degrees Celsius).

The cryogenic phase lasted from 2009 to 2011, until the spacecraft went into hibernation in 2011.

Following the hibernation period, NASA decided to reactivate the WISE spacecraft under the NEOWISE mission, with a more specialized focus on detecting near-Earth objects, which was still feasible even without the cryogenic cooling.

During this reactivation phase, the detectors didn’t need to be quite as sensitive, nor the spacecraft kept as cold as it was during the cryogenic cooling phase, since near-Earth objects are closer than WISE’s faraway targets.

The consequence of losing the active cooling was that two long-wave detectors out of the four on board became so hot that they could no longer function, limiting the craft’s capability.

Nevertheless, NEOWISE used its two operational detectors to continuously monitor both previously and newly detected near-Earth objects in detail.

NEOWISE’s legacy

As of February 2024, NEOWISE had taken more than 1.5 million infrared measurements of about 44,000 different objects in the solar system. These included about 1,600 discoveries of near-Earth objects. NEOWISE also provided detailed size estimates for more than 1,800 near-Earth objects.

Despite the mission’s contributions to science and planetary defense, it was decommissioned in August 2024. The spacecraft eventually started to fall toward Earth’s surface, until it reentered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up on Nov. 1, 2024.

NEOWISE’s contributions to hunting near-Earth objects gave scientists much deeper insights into the asteroids around Earth. It also gave scientists a better idea of what challenges they’ll need to overcome to detect faint objects.

So, did NEOWISE find all the near-Earth objects? The answer is no. Most scientists still believe that there are far more near-Earth objects out there that still need to be identified, particularly smaller ones.

An illustration of NEO Surveyor, which will continue to detect and catalog near-Earth objects once it is launched into space.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

To carry on NEOWISE’s legacy, NASA is planning a mission called NEO Surveyor. NEO Surveyor will be a next-generation space telescope that can study small near-Earth asteroids in more detail, mainly to contribute to NASA’s planetary defense efforts. It will identify hundreds of thousands of near-Earth objects that are as small as about 33 feet (10 meters) across. The spacecraft’s launch is scheduled for 2027. Läs mer…

The Internal Revenue Service has ramped up its efforts to recover unpaid taxes from millionaires. It collected more than US$1.1 billion from 1,600 wealthy Americans with known but unpaid tax debts in the 2024 fiscal year, up from just $38 million a year earlier.

This boost in tax revenue occurred because of the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. It originally allocated $80 billion in new funding for the IRS over 10 years. Congress later reduced that sum to $60 billion.

The goal of this funding was twofold: to boost enforcement efforts and to improve the taxpayer experience by modernizing outdated systems and hiring additional staff. The IRS, which processes 267 million tax returns and collects $5.1 trillion in tax revenues annually, had long been operating with limited resources.

This new funding was a chance to change that.

Will I be audited?

The increased enforcement efforts raised concerns from members of Congress that the IRS might conduct more audits of middle-class taxpayers.

However, the IRS has emphasized that these efforts are aimed at people making over $400,000 per year. The reality is that, for most Americans, the likelihood of an audit remains unchanged at about 0.3% for taxpayers earning below $400,000.

Audits are an important tool because some people don’t pay their taxes. In 2022, for example, Americans collectively owed about $696 billion in unpaid taxes. This “tax gap” is a key concern for the IRS and budget experts. Reducing it could help fund government programs without raising taxes, increasing deficits or cutting services.

To address this gap between taxes owed and taxes paid, the IRS used part of its new funding to triple the audit rates on large corporations and increase audits on partnerships with more than $10 million in assets.

Additionally, the funding was used to invest in advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to make enforcement activities more efficient and successful.

Overall, with the additional funding, the IRS made remarkable progress in the 2024 fiscal year, securing nearly $100 billion through its audits of filed tax returns. This represented an additional $25 billion in revenue from audits when compared with the year prior to the agency’s budget boost.

Notably, the IRS spent only 34 cents for every $100 collected through audits.

The IRS piloted its free Direct File app in 2024 in several states.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Economic Security Project

Improving service for taxpayers

The extra funding wasn’t just for enforcement.

The additional money was also for improving service for regular taxpayers who file on time and comply with tax laws. The IRS used $3.2 billion to improve its customer services, offering more pre-filing assistance, expanding its education, filing and account services, and stepping up taxpayer advocacy efforts.

Another $4.8 billion went toward modernizing the IRS’ outdated computer systems, making way for upgrades like callback technology for customer service lines and online platforms for uploading documents and responding to notices electronically.

With these extra resources, the IRS hired 5,000 additional customer service representatives, dramatically increasing the success rate of phone calls being answered during the tax season from just 15% to 87%.

The IRS also invested in improving its online services. Taxpayers can now create online accounts to make payments, view transactions and upload documents, while new tools like the “Where’s My Refund?” tracker make it easier to follow up on refunds.

The extra money helped the IRS tackle the enormous backlog that had caused so many taxpayer delays. The IRS hired more staff to address the backlog of unprocessed returns. Taxpayer Assistance Centers across the country were able to increase their staffing and extend their hours, making in-person assistance more accessible for those who need it.

To make filing taxes even easier, the IRS piloted its “Direct File” system in select states, allowing some taxpayers to file federal returns directly with the IRS for free. Overall, for most Americans, these investments mean shorter wait times, easier access to information, and a more streamlined tax filing process.

What’s next?

The future of IRS funding and priorities is uncertain under President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s control of Congress. As noted by James Creech, an executive at a large accounting firm, “The IRS makes a great political target because it’s one of the agencies that people love to hate,” making the funding a potential target in the next administration.

Furthermore, some Republicans campaigned in 2024 on reducing IRS funding. They expressed concerns that expanded audits could disproportionately impact middle-class taxpayers and small businesses, and voiced fears of government overreach and privacy violations. This concern is likely related to accusations made a decade ago that the IRS unfairly targeted conservative nonprofits. As it turned out, the IRS subjected conservative and progressive groups alike to heightened scrutiny.

However, during his first term, Trump actually proposed increasing the IRS enforcement budget. In 2019, his first administration called for $362 million in additional IRS enforcement funding, accurately arguing that tax enforcement brings in more revenue than it costs.

Like other accounting scholars, I’ll be watching to see whether the new administration will push for increased enforcement funding again, reverse the boost the IRS got during Biden’s presidency, or take a different path. Regardless of what the second Trump administration does, the increased funding of the IRS has already had a significant impact.

Targeted enforcement efforts have increased revenue and narrowed the tax gap, while investments in taxpayer services have made it easier for people to get the help they need. Additionally, I believe that the increase in trained agents and modernized systems have improved efficiency and laid the groundwork for a more effective IRS in the years to come. Läs mer…

Americans spent more than US$850 billion on domestic leisure travel in 2023, a sum that looks likely to rise in future years. Whether it’s a weekend getaway to a Taylor Swift concert, a long-anticipated holiday visit with family, or a monthlong tour of national parks, travel can leave a lasting impact on how we see ourselves.

In the age of social media, platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Reddit have become outlets for travelers to share their experiences and connect with others. Our recent research suggests that this online engagement plays an underappreciated role in how much people enjoy their vacations.

We found that trip satisfaction isn’t just about the core event — the concert, gathering or sightseeing tour. Instead, the entire journey matters, from the anticipation beforehand to the joy of sharing stories afterward.

This might sound intuitive to avid travelers. But as marketing professors, we believe the tourism industry could better harness this insight.

The power of ‘mental time travel’

Even before a traveler sets foot at a destination, what we call “mental time travel” begins shaping their experience.

Picture this: You’re planning to take your teenage niece to her first Taylor Swift concert. The planning process itself is exciting: You might research airline options, compare seating arrangements and debate the best airport. Next comes the hotel search — ideally close to the venue, but near shopping, dining and other entertainment.

With tickets secured, planning for the concert itself begins. You might search for concert tips, from what time to arrive to bracelet-making guides, or even the expected setlist. Social media and forums become invaluable tools for gathering advice, imagining the event and building anticipation — a satisfaction booster in itself.

Even the airport experience can be fun with a little planning ahead, as these Taylor Swift fans in New Orleans show.

Most of this mental time travel takes the form of noodling online. For service providers, engaging consumers during this phase can drive greater satisfaction and loyalty. After all, while a concert may last only three hours, the connections made during months of planning can last far longer. And when an experience is over, people often return to online communities to share their stories, continuing the cycle of excitement and engagement.

When vacation starts before you leave home

To understand the value of mental time travel, we conducted two studies. The first involved people on an online cruise forum who had booked their first cruise but hadn’t yet sailed. These travelers, already active in the forum, imagined their upcoming experiences and reported stronger expected loyalty before even boarding the ship.

To confirm this wasn’t limited to first-timers, our second study surveyed recent vacationers. They recalled how pre-trip activities shaped their experience, reporting that they felt more satisfied and loyal, and sharing their positive views with others.

These findings suggest that companies should actively encourage social media participation and create online communities to enhance the preexperience phase of travel. Hotels, airlines and event organizers could share planning tips, highlight customer stories and foster connections that turn anticipation into a memorable part of the journey.

Offering incentives to top contributors, encouraging photo and video sharing, and engaging with customer posts can make the journey as enjoyable as the destination itself. By embracing every stage — from planning to reminiscing — companies can create a memorable experience from start to finish. Läs mer…

As cool weather arrives and the number of U.S. wildfires declines, wildland firefighters who have spent months working in the heat and smoke are able to take a much-needed break. But for many of them, the stress of the job isn’t going away.

Continued uncertainty regarding federal pay and benefits, coupled with mental health risks and seasonal financial strain, make this a precarious time for wildland firefighters.

I study the environmental and occupational health of wildland firefighters as a professor. I’m also married to a wildland firefighter, and we have two children. His work is unpredictable and dangerous. For him and many wildland firefighters like him, the stress is compounded by the uncertainty surrounding the future of wildland firefighter pay.

In 2021, Congress approved a temporary retention bonus of US$20,000 a year or 50% of the firefighter’s base pay, whichever amount was smaller. However, wildland firefighters are still waiting for that raise to be codified three years later.

Firefighting is a dangerous occupation, yet starting pay is as low as $15 an hour.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

This means that thousands of families are living in a constant state of financial insecurity across the country. If that pay raise expires, many firefighters will lose large percentages of their income. For many, these aren’t high-paying jobs. The starting pay is as low as $15 per hour.

The federal continuing resolution that has been keeping the government operational – and the pay increase temporarily in place – is set to expire on Dec. 20, 2024. Congress is likely to extend it one more time. But if the new budget Congress eventually passes fails to address wildland firefighter pay, firefighters risk losing this raise altogether.

With seasonal contracts wrapping up, many wildland firefighters are at a crossroads.

Surveys reflect mental and physical health strain

In 2022 and 2023, my research team and I conducted national-scale surveys of wildland firefighters and the dispatchers who work with them. We wanted to understand how the high health risk factors, work-life balance and morale affect their well-being and future in the field.

Working in wildland firefighting is an unpredictable and often emotionally challenging job. Wildland firefighters work in tight-knit crews that depend on one another for physical safety, and they are the front-line defense for homes and communities threatened by fire. On average, about 17 U.S. wildland firefighters are killed in the line of duty each year.

Wildland firefighters and wildland fire dispatchers report widespread struggles with mental health, including high rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal thoughts or ideations.

One in three wildland fire dispatchers said they had had suicidal thoughts or ideations, and half know a wildland firefighter who has died by suicide.

Pay policies encourage overwork, risky choices

The federal wildland fire system also incentivizes overworking and risky behaviors that put firefighters at greater risk of physical harm.

With starting pay so low, many wildland firefighters end up working an average of over 600 hours of overtime annually to pay their bills. This is the equivalent of working 15 additional 40-hour weeks per year.

A typical wildland fire deployment lasts 14 consecutive days, averaging 16 hours per day. Often, they sleep in rugged conditions, in tents and on the ground.

To do the job safely, wildland firefighters must be aware of their surroundings at all times, and they must be able to rely on their equipment.
AP Photo/John Bazemore

Further, there is incentive pay for working in hazardous conditions. This means that, as a deployment progresses, wildland firefighters are working more dangerous jobs, more hours and are increasingly physically and mentally exhausted, leaving them vulnerable to costly errors that could impede their safety.

Our studies have found that 67% of wildland firefighters have been injured or had an illness related to their work. Smoke inhalation, living in close quarters and the daily physical stress can all create health risks. Additionally, over three-quarters of the respondents report unsafe working conditions, ranging from substandard housing to equipment failures to violent interpersonal interactions.

These issues need long-term proactive solutions, but currently few exist. The U.S. Forest Service offers mental health counseling, but until 2023, temporary seasonal employees, including over one-third of wildland firefighters, weren’t eligible for federal health benefits.

Federal hiring system adds more stress

A career in wildland firefighting can be a tough sell – long hours, months away from home, grueling physical labor, health and safety hazards, and low starting pay.

Surveys of wildland firefighters’ spouses and partners found high levels of family conflict and poor work-life balance. Most wildland firefighters said that they were unable to attend important family and life events during fire season, and most wildland fire dispatchers reported that they did not spend adequate time outdoors or with family.

Wildland firefighters said that they love the challenge of the job, and they felt like their work makes a difference. Crews must rely on one another for their safety, and this builds deep bonds and loyalty to their organization.

Given the need for more firefighters and the intense demands of the job, it may come as a surprise that one of the top obstacles wildland firefighters report facing is successfully navigating the gauntlet of federal hiring.

A crew leader, center left, talks to his firefighters about their plans to attack a fire burning nearby on Aug. 20, 2015, in Twisp, Wash., a day after three firefighters were killed fighting a wildfire near the town.
AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Many federal firefighters are temporary seasonal employees, so they need to reapply for positions every year. Even for full-time employees, career progression frequently requires moving among different positions or locations to accumulate experience necessary for promotions.

Stories of monthslong delays in start dates are not uncommon: One firefighter we spoke with had received a job offer in November but did not start the position until May of the following year. At no point during this six- to seven-month window did he have a clear indication of when he would start and was consistently told it would be “soon.” This job paid approximately $38,000 per year.

What Congress can do to retain firefighters

My husband loves his job. He is proud of the work he does and the difference he makes by protecting lives and communities from wildfires. However, the risks to his health and well-being, the low pay and the pervasive stressful uncertainty of the future of the profession mean that exploring alternatives is a necessity.

Over the past three years, 45% of the U.S. Forest Service’s wildland firefighting workforce has quit, something my research team sounded the warning bell on in 2022. That loss of experience matters.

Retaining experienced firefighters amid longer and worsening fire seasons will require policymakers to improve health care, pay and the organizational structure itself, including how firefighters are hired and retained. Yet, the federal government continues to delay taking action, leaving our nation’s fire-prone communities and wildland firefighters in a precarious and uncertain position. Läs mer…

Who doesn’t love to cosy up with a hot water bottle during the colder months? Hot water bottles are a quick, easy and cost effective way of staying warm in winter – but they can also cause serious injury.

In the UK, there were 5,944 burn injuries from hot water bottles between 2014 and 2023. For example, in 2022, Sharon Portingale sustained third degree burns after taking her hot water bottle to bed. In 2021, Helen Powell was scalded after the hot water bottle she was using to relieve back pain burst.

But burns and scalds aren’t the only type of injuries risked by those who use hot water bottles.

Toasted skin syndrome is also known as erythema ab igne (redness from fire).

Exposure to heat sources, such as hot water bottles, heat pads, space heaters and even laptops, can result in a red fishnet pattern on the skin. This is caused by the dilation of the skin’s small vessels as they try to cope with the heat.

Usually, the condition resolves soon after removal of the heat source. However, prolonged and persistent heat exposure can cause skin to thin and become hyperpigmented – when some patches of the skin are darker than others. The hyperpigmentation is caused by damage to the elastic fibres of the skin and the release of melanin from skin cells.

This damage can be permanent but treatments such as laser therapy or topical creams containing 5-fluouracil can help. Delayed diagnosis of toasted skin syndrome and persistent exposure can also lead to cancers, such as basal cell carcinoma, neuroendocrine carcinoma and low-grade lymphoma.

Some people are more susceptible to heat damage. For example, those with sickle cell disease and chronic pain are more likely to suffer from erythema ab igne or significant burn injuries.

People with diabetes who have circulatory complications which affects their temperature regulation may feel the cold more and therefore use heating aids regularly. But diabetics with circulation issues may also experience poorer sensation and may not notice the skin heating until they suffer burns.

Do not use hot water bottles for keeping babies warm or to pre-heat their sleeping space. Newborns have brown fat to help them maintain a healthy body temperature and protect them from hypothermia. At birth, brown fat accounts for about 5% of babies’ body weight and is held around key organs to generate heat.

Staying warm

So, how to stay warm without using a hot water bottle?

In bed, weighted blankets help prevent warm air being forced out every time you move under them. But if you’re sitting down, keep your feet up and away from the floor – usually the coldest part of the room.

Then, rather than wearing one thick coat or jumper, it’s worth remembering that layering clothes is far more effective at trapping air and holding heat.

Your fingertips have twice as many nerve fibres as your palms and are susceptible to the cold. So wearing gloves, even inside, can help reduce the demand on your body to distribute heat to the hands – and to trap heat produced by the body against your skin.

Moving around every now and then will generate heat and help circulate the warm blood from your core to extremities, like fingers and toes.

If you do use a hot water bottle, do not use boiling water and ensure you add cold water to the bottle. Ideally, the temperature should be around 50°C-60°C.

Finally, you can decrease the risk of tissue damage when using hot water bottles or heat pads by distributing the heat evenly – move them around so the heat isn’t focused on a single area. Läs mer…

Some questions are hard to answer and always have been. Does my beloved love me back? Should my country go to war? Who stole my goats?

Questions like these have been asked of diviners around the world throughout history – and still are today. From astrology and tarot to reading entrails, divination comes in a wide variety of forms.

Yet they all address the same human needs. They promise to tame uncertainty, help us make decisions or simply satisfy our desire to understand.

Anthropologists and historians like us study divination because it sheds light on the fears and anxieties of particular cultures, many of which are universal. Our new exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Oracles, Omens & Answers, explores these issues by showcasing divination techniques from around the world.

Here are five examples of divination techniques different cultures have developed to cope with life’s uncertainties.

1. Spider divination

A Cameroonian man interprets the changes in position of various objects as caused by a crab through the practice of ŋgam dù.
Amcaja, CC BY-SA

In Cameroon, Mambila spider divination (ŋgam dù) addresses difficult questions to spiders or land crabs that live in holes in the ground.

Asking the spiders a question involves covering their hole with a broken pot and placing a stick, a stone and cards made from leaves around it. The diviner then asks a question in a yes or no format while tapping the enclosure to encourage the spider or crab to emerge. The stick and stone represent yes or no, while the leaf cards, which are specially incised with certain meanings, offer further clarification.

The movements of the spider or crab rearrange these objects, so that if a leaf card is moved to the stone or the stick, the answer emerges.

The answer is not always clear, however. If neither the stick nor the stone are selected (or both are chosen), interpretive work is required. The diviner and client must resolve the ambiguity, or decide that in this case the spider wasn’t saying anything at all.

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2. Palmistry

Reading people’s palms (palmistry) is well known as a fairground amusement, but serious forms of this divination technique exist in many cultures. The practice of reading the hands to gather insights into a person’s character and future was used in many ancient cultures across Asia and Europe.

In some traditions, the shape and depth of the lines on the palm are richest in meaning. In others, the size of the hands and fingers are also considered. In some Indian traditions, special marks and symbols appearing on the palm also provide insights.

The palms of Oscar Wilde.
Houghton Library, MS ENG 1624., CC BY-SA

Palmistry experienced a huge resurgence in 19th-century England and America, just as the science of fingerprints was being developed. If you could identify someone from their fingerprints, it seemed plausible to read their personality from their hands.

One person who had their palm read at this time was Oscar Wilde. His reader, Edward Heron-Allen, published a sketch of Wilde’s hands, explaining that his palms indicated “extraordinary brain power” and a “great power of expression”.

3. Bibliomancy

If you want a quick answer to a difficult question, you could try bibliomancy. Historically, this DIY divining technique was performed with whatever important books were on hand.

A 16th-century copy of the Divan of Hafiz.
Bodleian Library, CC BY

Throughout Europe, the works of Homer or Virgil were used. In Iran, it was often the Divan of Hafiz, a collection of Persian poetry. In Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions, holy texts have often been used, though not without controversy.

There are a few ways to do it. In south-east Asia, you might push a sharp object through the pages of the book to see where its tip reaches.

Alternatively, you could open a page at random and see where your gaze falls. Although it might need some careful interpretation, the passage is thought to hold an answer to your dilemma.

4. Astrology

Astrology exists in almost every culture around the world. As far back as ancient Babylon, astrologers have interpreted the heavens to discover hidden truths and predict the future.

The sign of Pisces in a 14th-century Arabic text.
Bodleian Library, CC BY-SA

To cast horoscopes – essentially maps of the planets and stars as seen from a particular place and time on earth – astrologers need access to accurate astronomical observations. For this reason, pre-modern astrology was closely connected to astronomy.

Astrologers might cast horoscopes for a person’s birth, for the moment at which a client asks a query, or even a date in the future to determine whether it was good timing for a particular event.

The planets and zodiac signs each carry meanings, which are augmented by their relations to each other on a horoscope. Astrologers’ readings of these charts have long helped people seeking guidance, providing answers to pressing questions and aiding decision making.

In many historical cultures, astrologers also held prominent positions in royal courts and governments, making forecasts about the health and prosperity of their realm and the likelihood of impending disasters.

5. Calendrical divination

Calendars have long been used to divine the future and establish the best times to perform certain activities. In many countries, almanacs still advise auspicious and inauspicious days for tasks ranging from getting a haircut to starting a new business deal.

In Indonesia, Hindu almanacs called pawukon explain how different weeks are ruled by different local deities. The characteristics of the deities mean that some weeks are better than others for activities like marriage ceremonies.

Illustrations in a pawukon.
Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 678., Author provided (no reuse)

In pre-conquest Mesoamerica (which roughly covered modern day central Mexico south to the north-western border of Costa Rica) your nature, fate and even your name were determined by the day on which you were born. Calendar priests in Mexico could forecast the success of a marriage by using a sacred, 260-day divination calendar. Interpreting the signs, the priest could tell whether a partnership would be happy, challenging or doomed – as well as how many children would result.

Oracles, Omens & Answers is at Oxford’s Bodleian Library at Oxford until April 27 2025. Läs mer…