In April 2005, The Simpsons featured an episode where Marge, embarrassed by her hometown’s reputation for being uneducated and uncultured, invites a world-famous architect to design a new concert hall for the city.

The episode cuts to the architect, Frank Gehry (playing himself), outside his house in Santa Monica, receiving Marge’s letter. He is frustrated by the request and crumples the letter, throwing it to the ground. Looking down, the creased and ragged paper inspires him, and the episode cuts to a model of his concert hall for Springfield, which copies the shape of the crumpled letter.

By building Gehry’s design, the people of Springfield hoped to send a signal to the world that a new era of culture had arrived. As it often did, this episode of The Simpsons references a real-life phenomenon, which Gehry was credited with triggering, the “Bilbao effect”.

In 1991, the city of Bilbao in northern Spain sought to enhance its economic and cultural standing by establishing a major arts centre. Gehry was commissioned to design the Bilbao Guggenheim, proposing a 57-metre-high building, a spiralling vortex of titanium and glass, along the banks of the Nervión River.

Using software developed for aerospace industries, Gehry designed a striking, photogenic building, sharply contrasting with the city’s traditional stone and masonry streetscapes.

Finished in 1997, the response to Gehry’s building was overwhelming. Bilbao was transformed into an international tourist destination, revitalising the city and boosting its cultural credentials and economic prospects. As a result, many cities tried to reproduce the so-called “Bilbao effect” by combining iconic architecture and the arts to encourage a cultural renaissance.

Gehry, who has died at 96, leaves a powerful legacy, visible in many major cities, in the media, in galleries and in popular culture.

An architect’s life

Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Canada, in 1929 and emigrated to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, where he changed his surname to Gehry. He studied architecture and urban planning and established a successful commercial practice in 1962.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when he began experimenting with alterations and additions to his own house, that he began to develop his signature approach to architecture. An approach that was both visionary and confronting.

In 1977, Gehry purchased a colonial bungalow on a typical suburban street in Santa Monica. Soon after, he began peeling back its cladding and exposing its structural frame. He added a jumble of plywood panels, corrugated metal walls, and chain-link fencing, giving the impression of a house in a perpetual state of demolition or reconstruction.

Its fragmented, unfinished expression offended the neighbours but also led to his being exhibited in the landmark 1988 Museum of Modern Art’s Deconstructivist Architecture show.

At this event, Gehry’s house was featured alongside a range of subversive, anti-establishment works, catapulting him to international fame.

Unlike other architects featured in the exhibition – such as Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind – Gehry was not driven by a political or philosophical stance. Instead, he was interested in how people would react to the experience of architecture.

It was only after the Bilbao Guggenheim was completed that the world could see this vision.

Throughout the 2000s, Gehry completed a range of significant buildings, led by the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles, which has a similar style to the Bilbao Guggenheim.

Gehry’s Museum of Pop Culture (2000) in Seattle is a composition of anodised purple, gold, silver and sky-blue forms, resembling the remnants of a smashed electric guitar.

The Marqués de Riscal Vineyard Hotel (2006) in Elciego, Spain, features steel ribbons in Burgundy-pink and Verdelho-gold. The Louis Vuitton Foundation (2014) in Paris has 12 large glass sails, swirling around an “iceberg” of concrete panels.

Gehry only completed one building in Australia, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building (2014) in Sydney. Its design, an undulating form clad in custom-made bricks, was inspired by a crumpled brown paper bag. Marge Simpson would have approved.

Recognition and reflection

The highest global honour an architect can receive is the Pritzker Prize, often called the “Nobel prize for architecture”. Gehry was awarded this prize in 1989, with the jury praising his “controversial, but always arresting body of work” which was “iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent”.

While the Pritzker Prize is often regarded as a capstone for a career, most of Gehry’s major works were completed after the award.

Gehry revelled in experimentation, taking artistic inspiration from complex natural forms and constructing them using advanced technology. Over the last three decades, his firm continued to produce architecture that was both strikingly sculptural and playfully whimsical.

He ultimately regretted appearing on The Simpsons, feeling it devalued the complex process he followed. His architecture was not random; an artist’s eye guided it, and a sculptor’s hand created it. It was not just any crumpled form, but the perfect one for each site and client.

He sometimes joked about completing his home in Santa Monica, even humorously ending his acceptance speech for the Pritzker Prize by saying he might use his prize money to do this. Today, on the corner of 22nd Street and Washington Avenue, partly shielded by trees, Gehry’s house remains forever a work in progress. Its uncompromising yet joyful presence has endured for almost 50 years.

Michael J. Ostwald, Professor of Architectural Analytics, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“We must have a drink before the end of the year!”

December is a perfect storm for anyone trying to cut back on drinking. Between end-of-year deadlines, work parties, family gatherings and school events, alcohol is suddenly everywhere.

It can make drinking feel not just normal, but expected.

But if you want to drink less (or not at all) this silly season, you don’t have to rely on willpower alone. Having a plan can help.

Some evidence suggests when goals are focused on how you’ll approach something – such as a not-drinking strategy – rather than what you’ll avoid (alcohol), it’s easier to follow through.

So here are some simple strategies, backed by evidence.

1. Make a plan

When making decisions, our brains tend to prioritise immediate goals over long-term ones. Scientists call this “present bias”. This means it’s harder to keep your long-term goal (cutting back on alcohol) in mind when confronted by the chance for immediate gratification (having a drink).

But if you plan when you will and won’t drink in advance, you reduce the need to make this decision in real time – when alcohol is in front of you and your willpower may be lower and you’re more driven by emotion.

Look ahead at your calendar and choose your drinking and non-drinking days deliberately. Committing to the plan ahead of time reduces the chances of opportunistic drinking when social pressure is high.

2. Track your drinks

Tracking when and how much you drink is one of the most effective and well-supported strategies for reducing alcohol use and staying motivated.

You may be surprised how much tracking alone can change your drinking, simply by being more mindful and helping you understand your patterns.

It doesn’t matter how you do it – in an app, a notebook or even on your phone calendar. Writing it down is better than trying to remember. And doing it consistently works best. Aim to record drinks in real time if you can.

There are lots of free, evidence based apps, such Drink Tracker, that can help you track your drinking and drink-free days.

3. Try zero alcohol drinks

For many people, the rise of alcohol-free beer, wine and spirits has made it much easier to enjoy the ritual of drinking at social events, without the intoxication.

But they’re not for everyone – particularly those who find the look, smell and taste of alcohol triggering. Know yourself, see what works, and don’t force it if it’s not helping reach your goals.

4. Slow the pace

If your aim is to cut back, try alternating each alcoholic drink with something non-alcoholic.

Water is best, but zero, low or non-alcoholic drinks can still reduce how much you drink overall – and as a bonus they can also help you stay hydrated, which may reduce the chance of a hangover.

Eating something healthy and filling before and during drinking is also a good idea. It prevents rapid spikes in blood alcohol levels, as well as slowing the absorption of alcohol into your system. This means your body has a better chance of metabolising the alcohol.

Eating well can also help calm the cravings for sugary, fried and salty foods that are often triggered by alcohol.

5. Beware of an all-or-nothing approach

Don’t fall into the “goal violation” trap (sometimes called the abstinence violation effect). That’s the when slipping up makes you abandon your plan altogether.

Maybe someone talks you into “just a splash” – or one drink somehow becomes five – and you tell yourself: “Oh well, I’ve blown it now.”

But a slip is just a slip – it doesn’t mean you have to give up on your goals. You can reset straight away, at the next drink or the next day.

6. Set up accountability

Letting a friend or partner know that you are trying to drink less helps you stay accountable and provides support – even better if they join you.

7. Have responses ready

People may notice you’re not drinking or are drinking less. They may offer you a drink. Try a simple “I’m good” or “I’m pacing myself tonight”. Work out what feels OK to you – you don’t need to give long explanations.

8. Be kind to yourself

When you’re making a big change, it won’t always go smoothly. What matters is how you respond if you slip up. Shame and guilt often lead to more drinking, while self-compassion supports longer-term behaviour change.

Instead of seeing a slip as failure, treat it as information: What made it hard to stick to your goals? What could help next time?

December doesn’t have to derail your goals

Change comes from consistent small steps, even during the busiest month of the year. Focus on developing a relationship with alcohol that you are in control of, not the other way around.

If you are trying to make changes to your drinking, talk to your GP or check out free evidence-based resources such as Hello Sunday Morning, SMART Recovery and the Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline.

Katinka van de Ven, Alcohol and other drug specialist, UNSW Sydney and Nicole Lee, Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne based), Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating 250 years since the author’s birth. In each episode, we’ll be investigating a different aspect of Austen’s personality by interrogating one of her novels with leading researchers. Along the way, we’ll visit locations important to Austen to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in. In episode 5, we look what kind of author Austen was, and what we can learn about her view of her profession through the pages of Northanger Abbey.

From a young age Jane Austen harboured lofty writerly ambitions. Her early works, known as juvenilia, are diverse in subject matter, reflecting her wide reading taste. As well as stories that parody some of her favourite novels, such as The History of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson (1753), there are also witty takes on the essays of British politician Joseph Addison and writer Samuel Johnson, the author of the first English dictionary.

She even tried writing her own history of England. In this short text, 15-year-old Austen proudly declares herself a “partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian”, eschewing dates and presenting information from historical fiction, such as Shakespeare’s plays, as fact.

Though she was always a writer, she wasn’t a published one until Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811. By her death in 1817, Austen had published four of her six novels and earned nearly £700 – a modest fortune, but enough to grant a measure of independence to an unmarried woman otherwise reliant on her brothers.

Yet Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral, makes no mention that she was a writer. Publishing anonymously and disliking literary celebrity, she remained largely unknown as a writer in her lifetime despite occasional, reluctant contact with London’s literary circles.

Her fifth novel, Northanger Abbey – written in 1799 but published posthumously – clearly reveals her views on writing and reading books. It follows Catherine Morland, whose love of gothic fiction warps her sense of reality. It brims with Austen’s defence of the novel, dismissed at the time as frivolous women’s entertainment. It also reflects her juvenilia in its parody of gothic fiction – a genre Austen loved deeply, which is reflected in the bookshelves at her home in Chawton.

In the fifth episode of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, Naomi Joseph visits Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire with Louise Curran, lecturer in 18th-century and Romantic literature. Curran is an expert in letter writing, the development of the novel and literary celebrity.

In the lovely red brick cottage where Austen wrote and revised all six of her novels, Curran explains why Austen shied away from the limelight: “You can sort of see it in the kind of writer she is, I guess. I think there is that tension for her really writing the kinds of novels that she wanted to write, that took, as she famously put it, those three and four families in a country village, and are involved with those sort of little matters.”

Later on, Anna Walker sits down with two more Austen experts – Kathryn Sutherland, emeritus professor of English at the University of Oxford, and Anthony Mandal, a lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University – to discover what Northanger Abbey reveals of Austen’s professional life.

As Mandal explains: “The decade [Austen] was publishing in was a heyday for women’s fiction. It was a period when women outnumbered men as novelists … but the reputation of the novel was really low. It was seen as this kind of distracting form of writing, and particularly of reading. It was a waste of time. It stopped you from being a dutiful daughter or wife or mother.”

Austen wasn’t convinced. Sutherland explains that the writer was “hugely ambitious for her own talent and she saw the novel as a moral force as well as a form of entertainment. And that’s essentially what Northanger Abbey is about … the power of the novel both to lead you into misinterpretation, but ultimately, if you become a good reader, to lead you into a wise judgement of the world around you.”

Listen to episode five of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re craving more Austen, check out our Jane Austen 250 page for more expert articles celebrating the anniversary.

Disclosure statement Kathryn Sutherland, Louise Curran and Anthony Mandal do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is hosted by Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior producer and sound designer is Eloise Stevens and the executive producer is Gemma Ware. Artwork by Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

Anna Walker, Senior Arts + Culture Editor, The Conversation and Naomi Joseph, Arts + Culture Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In ancient Athens, the agora was a public forum where citizens could gather to deliberate, disagree and decide together. It was governed by deep-rooted social principles that ensured lively, inclusive, healthy debate.

Today, our public squares have moved online to the digital feeds and forums of social media. These spaces mostly lack communal rules and codes – instead, algorithms decide which voices rise above the clamour, and which are buried beneath it.

The optimistic idea of the internet being a radically democratic space feels like a distant memory. Our conversations are now shaped by opaque systems designed to maximise engagement, not understanding. Algorithmic popularity, not accuracy or fairness, determines reach.

This has created a paradox. We enjoy unprecedented freedom to speak, yet our speech is constrained by forces beyond our control. Loud voices dominate. Nuanced voices fade. Outrage travels faster than reflection. In this landscape, equal participation is all but unattainable, and honest speech can carry a very genuine risk.

Somewhere between the stone steps of Athens and the screens of today, we have lost something essential to our democratic life and dialogue: the balance between equality of voice and the courage to speak the truth, even when it is dangerous. Two ancient Athenian ideals of free speech, isegoria and parrhesia, can help us find it again.

Ancient ideas that still guide us

In Athens, isegoria referred to the right to speak, but it did not stop at mere entitlement or access. It signalled a shared responsibility, a commitment to fairness, and the idea that public life should not be governed by the powerful alone.

The term parrhesia can be defined as boldness or freedom in speaking. Again, there is nuance; parrhesia is not reckless candour, but ethical courage. It referred to the duty to speak truthfully, even when that truth provoked discomfort or danger.

These ideals were not abstract principles. They were civic practices, learned and reinforced through participation. Athenians understood that democratic speech was both a right and a responsibility, and that the quality of public life depended on the character of its citizens.

The digital sphere has changed the context but not the importance of these virtues. Access alone is insufficient. Without norms that support equality of voice and encourage truth-telling, free speech becomes vulnerable to distortion, intimidation and manipulation.

The emergence of AI-generated content intensifies these pressures. Citizens must now navigate not only human voices, but also machine-produced ones that blur the boundaries of credibility and intent.

When being heard becomes a privilege

On contemporary platforms, visibility is distributed unequally and often unpredictably. Algorithms tend to amplify ideas that trigger strong emotions, regardless of their value. Communities that already face marginalisation can find themselves unheard, while those who thrive on provocation can dominate the conversation.

On the internet, isegoria is challenged in a new way. Few people are formally excluded from it, but many are structurally invisible. The right to speak remains, but the opportunity to be heard is uneven.

At the same time, parrhesia becomes more precarious. Speaking with honesty, especially about contested issues, may expose individuals to harassment, misrepresentation or reputational harm. The cost of courage has increased, while the incentives to remain silent, or to retreat into echo chambers, have grown.

Building citizens, not audiences

The Athenians understood that democratic virtues do not emerge on their own. Isegoria and parrhesia were sustained through habits learned over time: listening as a civic duty, speaking as a shared responsibility, and recognising that public life depended on the character of its participants. In our era, the closest equivalent is civic education, the space where citizens practise the dispositions that democratic speech requires.

By making classrooms into small-scale agoras, students can learn to inhabit the ethical tension between equality of voice and integrity in speech. Activities that invite shared dialogue, equitable turn-taking and attention to quieter voices help them experience isegoria, not as an abstract right but as a lived practice of fairness.

In practice, this means holding discussions and debates where students have to verify information, articulate and justify arguments, revise their views publicly, or engage respectfully with opposing arguments. These skills all cultivate the intellectual courage associated with parrhesia.

Importantly, these experiences do not prescribe what students should believe. Instead, they rehearse the habits that make belief accountable to others: the discipline of listening, the willingness to offer reasons, and the readiness to refine a position in light of new understanding. Such practices restore a sense that democratic participation is not merely expressive, but relational and built through shared effort.

What civic education ultimately offers is practice. It creates miniature agoras where students rehearse the skills they need as citizens: speaking clearly, listening generously, questioning assumptions and engaging with those who think differently.

These habits counter the pressures of the digital world. They slow down conversation in spaces designed for speed. They introduce reflection into environments engineered for reaction. They remind us that democratic discourse is not a performance, but a shared responsibility.

Returning to the spirit of the agora

The challenge of our era is not only technological but educational. No algorithm can teach responsibility, courage or fairness. These are qualities formed through experience, reflection and practice. Athenians understood this intuitively, because their democracy relied on ordinary citizens learning how to speak as equals and with integrity.

We face the same challenge today. If we want digital public squares that support democratic life, we must prepare citizens who know how to inhabit them wisely. Civic education is not optional enrichment – it is the training ground for the habits that sustain freedom.

The agora may have changed form, but its purpose endures. To speak and listen as equals, with honesty, courage and care, is still the heart of democracy. And this is something we can teach.

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Sara Kells, Director of Program Management at IE Digital Learning and Adjunct Professor of Humanities, IE University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale is renowned for its salacious storyline of sexual misadventure. Set in 14th-century Oxford, it tells the tale of John the Carpenter, a husband so terrified that another “Noah’s flood” is coming to drown the world that he sleeps in a basket in the attic – freeing his wife to bed her lover downstairs.

Chaucer’s pilgrims all have a good laugh at John’s expense as they walk together from London towards Canterbury, echoing John’s neighbours who “gan laughen at his fantasye” of Noah’s flood and call John “wood” (mad). The pilgrims listen to this particular tale (one of 24 Canterbury Tales) as they walk along the south bank of the River Thames between Deptford and Greenwich.

That stretch of river was well-known to Chaucer. At the time of writing what remains one of English literature’s greatest works, he had been tasked, in March 1390, with repairing flood damage to the riverbank around Greenwich.

As a poet who swapped his pen for a spade to dig banks and defend the land around Greenwich from inundation, Chaucer knew from experience that flooding was no laughing matter. He – and later Shakespeare – lived through periods of weird weather not unlike what we are seeing today.

Their changing climate was triggered by falling rather than rising temperatures during what’s known as the little ice age. But the net effect was weather extremes like strong winds, storms and flooding – some of which were evoked in plays, prose and poems, offering valuable information on how communities were hit by, and responded to, these extreme events.

For the past two years, I have been scouring historical literature and performances for – now-often forgotten – experiences of living with water and flooding along the shorelines and estuaries of England’s coastlines. Whether in 15th-century “flood plays” in Hull or the “disaster pamphlets” (an early form of newsbook) that rose to popularity in Shakespeare’s lifetime, my research shows we do not only need to look to the future to understand the challenges posed by rising seas and more intense storms.

Hull’s medieval flood play

Early in the new year of 1473, a crowd gathered outside Kingston-upon-Hull’s main church to watch the annual flood play performed. The play itself is now lost, but surviving records cast tantalising light on how the play was staged between 1461 and 1531. We know, for example, it was snowing in 1473 because of a payment that year for “makyng playne the way where snawe was”.

We also know from financial records that the play was performed on an actual ship, hauled through Hull’s streets on wheels and hung on ropes for the rest of the year in Holy Trinity church (now Hull Minster). We know from payments to “Noye and his wyff”, “Noyes children” and “the god in the ship” that the play must have told a very similar story to that of two medieval pageants still performed today in the neighbouring east coast city of York.

What is not immediately clear from Hull’s records is why the town’s guild of master mariners chose the snow and ice of early January as the annual date for their flood play’s performance, when biblical plays in York and other northern towns and cities were staged during the warmer months of Easter and midsummer. A payment for Noah’s “new myttens” in 1486 speaks to the challenges of performing outdoor theatre in January, typically the coldest time of year.

In fact, Hull’s flood play was always staged on Plough Monday, the first Monday after the Christian celebration of Epiphany on January 6. This date marked the traditional start of the new agricultural year, and a close reading of Hull’s records shows themes of farming woven into the flood play. The benefits of flooding for haymaking, for example, were signalled on stage through the purchase of agrarian items like a “mawnd” (grain basket) in 1487, “hay to the shype” (ship) in 1530, and plough hales (handles) “to the chylder” (children) in 1531.

The advantages of flooding meadows had long been recognised in the Humber villages surrounding Hull – and reflected in the layout of its medieval land. Grass grew well on the well-drained meadows along the River Humber’s banks, and the hay harvested from these floodplains provided winter feed for farm animals including the oxen that pulled ploughs through arable fields in January, at the start of the new agricultural year.

Writing and water management were once familiar bedfellows – and the wisdom of building raised flood banks and making hay on floodplains is reflected throughout medieval and early modern literature.

Writing of Runnymede, an ancient meadow on the banks of the River Thames, in his 1642 poem Coopers Hill, John Denham casts an approving glance on the “wealth” that the seasonal flooding of the Thames brings to the meadows on its river banks: “O’re which he kindly spreads his spacious wing / And hatches plenty for th’ensuing Spring.”

But Denham distinguishes between two types of flood: the benevolent, seasonal kind that brings wealth to the meadows, and the “unexpected Inundations” that “spoile the Mowers hopes” and “mock the Plough-mans toyle”. Floods can bring disaster if they are unexpected (for example, if they occur during the growing season in spring and summer) or out of place (flooding arable fields rather than meadow ground). But literature reminds us they can also bring benefits – if communities learn to live with water and adapt their lives to the rising tide.

Unfortunately, despite renewed interest in nature-based solutions to flood alleviation, floodplain meadows declined sharply in the 20th century and few exist today. Downstream of Runnymede, at Egham Hythe, is Thorpe Hay Meadow. Once part of a thriving medieval economy of haymaking on floodplains, its website announces it is now the “last surviving example of unimproved grassland on Thames Gravel in Surrey”.

Gone too are Hull’s meadows and its flood play, which once celebrated the benefits of flooding for farming in this stretch of north-east English coastline. Some of the meadows in the village of Drypool, directly to the east of Hull, were built on as early as the 1540s for Henry VIII’s new defensive fortifications. Much of the remainder was absorbed into this industrial city’s urban sprawl from the 17th century onwards. Today, the Humber’s banks in urban Hull are heavily defended by a £42 million concrete frontage, protecting all the homes and businesses on the floodplain beyond.

Shakespeare’s storms

Shakespeare was born in 1564 into one of the coldest decades of the last millennium. Temperatures plunged across northern Europe in the 1560s, and the winter of 1564-5 was especially severe.

The little ice age brought shorter springs and longer winters to northern Europe. Reconstructed temperatures show the climate was on average between 1 and 1.5°C colder during Shakespeare’s lifetime than our own. But it was also an age of weather extremes, bringing heat and drought alongside snow and ice.

The weather diary of Shakespeare’s almost exact contemporary, Richard Shann (1561-1627), now housed in the British Library’s manuscripts department, is an invaluable witness to these fluctuating extremes. Writing from the village of Methley in West Yorkshire, Shann describes “a could and frostie winter” in 1607-8 “the like not seene of manie yeares before”. Indeed, the frost “was so extreame that the Rivers was in a manner dried up”.

At York, Shann writes, people “did playe at the bowles” on the river Ouse, and in London “did builde tentes upon the yse” (ice). Temperatures soared that summer, with July 1608 “so extreame hote that divers p[er]sonnes fainted in the feilde”. But the cold quickly returned. “A verie great froste” was reported as early as September 1608, with Shann reporting that the River Ouse “would have borne a swanne”.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

As the weather became more variable, with hot and cold spells more extreme, so the late 16th and 17th centuries saw an increase in the frequency and intensity of storms – such that this era has been dubbed “an age of storms”.

On Christmas Eve 1601, Shann describes “such a monstrous great wynde” in Methley “that manie persons weare at theyr wittes ende for feare of blowinge downe theyre howses”. After the storm causes the River Aire at Methley to flood, he writes of his neighbours that the water “came into theyre howses so high, that it allmost did touch theyre chambers”.

In London, meanwhile, historian John Stow (1525-1605) records extremes of heat and cold leading to storms and floods throughout the 1590s. In his Annals of England to 1603, Stow reports “great lightning, thunder and haile” in March 1598, “raine and high waters the like of long time had not been seene” on Whitsunday 1599 – and in December 1599, “winde … boisterous and great” which blew down the tops of chimneys and roofs of churches. The following June, there were “frosts every morning”.

The storminess of this period also appears to seep into Shakespeare’s work. Several of his later plays use storms at sea as plot devices to shipwreck characters on islands (The Tempest) or distant shores (Twelfth Night). In Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Shakespeare (the co-author, with George Wilkins (died 1618)) tosses his hero relentlessly across the eastern Mediterranean in a play that features no fewer than three storms at sea.

While many of Shakespeare’s storms take place in distant locations and at sea, King Lear sets the storm which rages throughout its central scenes in Kent, on the English east coast. Lear describes “the roaring sea” and “curlèd waters” that threaten to inundate the land. It is a play shaped by the east coast’s long experience of living with the threat of flooding from the North Sea.

Disaster pamphlets

Surviving reports of coastal flooding caused by a series of North Sea surges in 1570-71 describe dramatic inundations in the coastal counties of Norfolk, where “people were constrained to get up to the highest partes of the house”, and Cambridgeshire, where several “townes and villages were ouerflowed”. Meanwhile, the Lincolnshire village of Bourne, on the edge of the Fens, “was ouerflowed to [the] midway of the height of the church”.

These colourful accounts of towns and churches under water were collected and printed in one of the first “disaster pamphlets” in London in 1571. It bore the lengthy title: A Declaration of Such Tempestious and Outragious Fluddes, as hath been in Diuers Places of England.

This pioneering form of news booklet rose to popularity in Shakespeare’s lifetime to cater for popular interest in the increasingly weird weather of those decades. Disaster pamphlets gathered nationwide news of floods, storms and lightning strikes into slim, pocket-sized booklets, printed in London under dramatic titles such as Feareful Newes of Thunder and Lightening (1606) and The Wonders of this Windie Winter (1613).

Of the London booksellers who sold these pamphlets and other “strange news” booklets, Shakespeare’s close contemporary, William Barley (1565-1614), was among the most prolific. Many pamphlets were accompanied by eye-catching illustrations of disaster scenes on their title pages and inside covers.

Natural disasters were by no means confined to the east coast. Two pamphlets – William Jones’s Gods Warning to his People of England, and the anonymous A True Report of Certaine Wonderfull Ouerflowings of Waters – reported on one of Britain’s worst natural disasters, the Bristol Channel flood of January 30 1607.

Their cover illustrations depicted scenes of suffering and survival, with submerged churches and steeples featuring prominently. Inside, writers knitted together statistics recording the number of miles of land flooded and cattle drowned with eyewitness accounts of local gentlemen and landowners, who described churches “hidden in the Waters”, the “tops of Churches and Steeples like to the tops of Rockes in the Sea”. Indeed, so high were the floodwaters, Jones wrote, that “some fled into the tops of Churches and Steeples to saue themselves”.

While newsbooks continued to grow in popularity, coming of age in the civil wars of the mid-1600s as a platform for reporting political news and views, disaster pamphlets focused specifically on storms and floods appear to have waned in popularity by the end of the 17th century. Their decline coincided with the rise in the later 1600s of the first local newspapers in England and Wales, which continued to feature news of floods and other weird weather events for centuries to come.

Nonetheless, references to disaster pamphlets lived on in poems such as Jean Ingelow’s High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571 – published in 1863 – which drew on the details of A Declaration to recreate the east coast floods of three centuries earlier from the point of view of a husband who loses his wife to the rising tide.

By focusing on the loss felt by one family, Ingelow draws attention to the human cost of these disasters which, then and now, can be buried beneath faceless figures of fatalities in news reports. The poem’s narrator notes that “manye more than mine and me” lost loved ones in that surge tide.

The concept of climate change was unknown to Shakespeare’s generation, yet the changing climate of the little ice age introduced anxieties into the reporting of weird weather in disaster pamphlets. Their authors would typically couch the causes of local floods as a national issue – as stirrings of divine anger at the sins of the English nation or of its Church.

Jones’s response to the Bristol Channel flood typified this approach. In Gods Warning, he describes the flood as a “watry punishment” – one of several “threatning Tokens of [God’s] heavy wrath extended towards us that had been experienced in recent years. How floods were represented in poems, pamphlets, newspapers and books have long reflected society’s wider anxieties over the question of what these weird, wild weather events might portend.

Lost communities

The English east coast possesses some of the fastest-eroding cliffs in Europe. In East Yorkshire, the Holderness cliffs from Bridlington to Spurn Point are eroding at an astonishing 1.8 metres per year. While erosion has been happening along this coastline since the end of the last (full) ice age approximately 11,700 years ago, it is today being accelerated by the rising seas and more frequent storms of climate change.

We can measure flooding or erosion in some very alarming numbers. According to the Flamborough Head to Gibraltar Point Shoreline Management Plan of 2010, the Holderness coast retreated by around two kilometres over the past thousand years. In the process, 26 villages named in the Domesday Book of 1086 disappeared under water.

But literature goes further – revealing the experiences of those who lived on the edge of those crumbling clifftops, preserving fast-vanishing communities and coastlines for future generations.

In the early 20th century, histories of the Holderness coast’s lost villages were painstakingly pieced together from old photos, maps and archival records by Thomas Sheppard, whose Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast (1912) includes a map preserving the names and former locations of these shipwrecked villages: Cleton, Monkwell, Monkwike, Out Newton and Old Kilnsea, to name five. What must it have been like to live in these villages? How does their loss haunt today’s coastal communities, who are themselves facing a slow but sure retreat from the advancing sea?

Literature can provide what nature writer Helen MacDonald, in her collection of essays Vesper Flights (2020), calls the "qualitative texture” to enrich the statistics. It can reveal the ways of life and habits of thought of people who lived in these communities, and who adapted to the risks and benefits of living “on the edge”.

Juliet Blaxland’s The Easternmost House (2019) describes a year living in a “windblown house” in coastal Suffolk, “on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track that leads only into the sea”. The house – now demolished – was once Blaxland’s home. She wrote the book as “a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone”.

But Blaxland conjures more than bricks and mortar. She speaks to the mindset of coast-dwellers who pace out the distance between their houses and the advancing cliff edge, and who find solace, as well as sadness, in the inevitability of coastal loss. “Everyone has a cliff coming towards them, in the sense of our time being finite,” Blaxland writes. “The difference is that we can see ours, pegged out in front of us.”

From Noah to now

Coastal communities have learnt over centuries to live with uncertainty, and to continue their ways of life despite the risks. This “living with water” mentality shapes east coast communities just as surely as banks, barriers and rock armour shape the east coast’s cliffs, river mouths and beaches. It is in literature that we see this inner life revealed, and hear the voices of the past singing out to the present.

Singing was how we engaged young people with the past on the Noah to Now project. Across six months in 2024-25, colleagues from the University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute worked with singers, musicians and more than 200 young people in Hull and north-east Lincolnshire to rehearse and perform Benjamin Britten’s mid-20th century children’s opera, Noye’s Fludde, at Hull and Grimsby minsters.

The opera tells the biblical story of Noah in song, using the text of one surviving medieval flood play from 15th-century Chester as its libretto. Our chorus of school children performed as the animals in the ark, and were joined by other young people who took on solo roles or played in the orchestra.

Rooted in the medieval past, the opera introduced participating schools to the lost flood play from medieval Hull, and to that play’s connections with the longstanding culture of living with water in the Humber region. One of our venues, Hull Minster, was the church in which Hull’s medieval mariners used to hang the ship (or ark) that they hauled through Hull’s streets every January, some 500 years ago.

Britten’s opera also resonates with more recent histories of east coast flooding. Noye’s Fludde was first performed in 1958 near the composer’s coastal home of Aldeburgh in Suffolk – a town devastated five years earlier by the disastrous North Sea flood of 1953.

Water swept into more than 300 houses in Aldeburgh shortly before midnight on January 31 1953 – forcing Britten to abandon 4 Crabbe Street, his seafront home. It was days before he could return to the house to write letters declaring that “we expect to feel less damp to-morrow”, and that “I think we’re going to try sleeping here to-night”. It was another week before Britten could report that “most of the mud’s gone now, thank God!”

The events of 1953 affected the whole Aldeburgh community, and the opportunity for the town to come together five years later to sing and perform an opera about flooding must have seemed especially poignant to all involved.

It was in the spirit of that first Aldeburgh performance that we involved other east coast communities in Hull and north-east Lincolnshire – each with their own long histories of flooding – in the staging of an opera that folds medieval and mid-20th century stories of flooding to address themes rooted in the past that are still relevant today.

Teachers from the participating schools spoke of their children’s enthusiasm for learning through the medium of stories and songs about a serious topic like flooding.

“[They were] so enthralled and so wanting to pass the message on of what they’d learnt,” a teacher from north-east Lincolnshire recalled about the children’s enthusiasm on returning from one of the workshops. “They came back just full of it – and full of the stories they’d been told as well.”

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• What do trees remember?

• Family farmers say their way of life is an impossible dream when ‘the bread of life is worth less than rusty metal’

• Wildlife wonders of Britain and Ireland before the industrial revolution – my research reveals all the biodiversity we’ve lost

• Climate change triggering global collapse in insect numbers: stressed farmland shows 63% decline – new research

Stewart Mottram, Professor of Literature and Environment, University of Hull

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The Beatles’ song Yesterday was written in what psychologists refer to as the “hypnagogic state”. This is the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, when we drowsily linger in a semi-conscious state, experiencing vivid mental images and sounds.

Waking up one morning in early 1965, Paul McCartney became aware of a long complex melody playing inside his head. He jumped straight out of bed, sat down at his piano and picked out the melody on the keys. He quickly found the chords to go with the melody and created some holding phrases (as songwriters call them, before they write proper lyrics) to fit the melody.

Finding it difficult to believe that such a beautiful melody could emerge spontaneously, McCartney suspected that he was subconsciously plagiarising another composition. As he recalled: “For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before … I thought if no one claimed after a few weeks, then I could have it.” But it turned out to be original.

Many great discoveries and inventions have emerged from the hypnagogic state. The physicist Niels Bohr effectively won the Noble prize while semi-conscious. Drifting off to sleep, he dreamt he saw the nucleus of the atom, with the electrons spinning around it, just like the solar system with the sun and planets – and in this way he “discovered” the structure of the atom.

The sweet spot

Research has shown that the hypnagogic state is a creative “sweet spot.” For example, in a 2021 study, participants in a hypnagogic state were three times more likely to discover the “hidden rule” that could solve a mathematical problem.

Psychologists associate creativity with qualities such as openness to experience and cognitive flexibility. Others have suggested that creativity arises from co-ordination between the cognitive control network of the brain (which deals with planning and problem solving) and the default mode network (which is associated with daydreaming and mind-wandering).

However, in my view, one of the most important theories of creativity is one of the oldest, put forward by the early British psychologist Frederic Myers in 1881. According to Myers, ideas and insights come as a sudden “uprush” from a subliminal mind.

As Myers saw it, our conscious mind is just a small segment of our overall mind, including not only what Sigmund Freud called the unconscious, but also wider and higher levels of consciousness. Ideas may gestate unconsciously for a long time before they emerge into conscious awareness.

This is why it often feels as if ideas come from beyond the mind, as if they are gifted to us. They can come from beyond our conscious mind.

The importance of relaxation

The hypnagogic state is so creative because, as we hover between sleep and wakefulness, the conscious mind is barely active. For a brief period, our mental boundaries are permeable, and there is a chance creative insights and ideas will flow through from the subliminal mind.

In a more general sense, this is why creativity is often associated with relaxation and idleness. When we relax, our conscious minds are usually less active. Often, when we are busy, our minds are full of chattering thoughts, so there is no space for creative insights to flow through.

This is also why meditation is strongly associated with creativity. Research shows that meditation promotes general creative qualities such as openness to experience and cognitive flexibility.

But perhaps even more importantly, meditation quietens and softens the conscious mind, so that we’re more liable to receive inspiration from beyond it. As I point out in my book The Leap, this is why there is a strong connection between spiritual awakening and creativity.

Nurturing the hypnogogic state

Research has found that around 80% of people have experienced the hypnagogic state, and that around a quarter of the population experience it regularly. It is slightly more common in women than men.

It is most likely to occur at the onset of sleep, but can also occur on waking up, or during the day if we become drowsy and zone out of normal consciousness.

Can we use the hypnagogic state to enhance our creativity? It’s certainly possible to linger in the hypnagogic state, as you probably know from Sunday morning lie-ins.

However, one of the difficulties is capturing the ideas that arise. In our drowsiness, we may not feel the impulse to record of our ideas. It’s tempting to tell ourselves before falling back to sleep, “This is such a good idea that it will definitely stick in my mind.” But when we wake up some time later, the idea is gone forever.

However, through mental training, there is no reason why we can’t build up a habit of recording our hypnagogic ideas. The best practice is to keep a pen and paper right on a bedside table. Or for a more contemporary variant, keep your phone beside the bed, with the recording app open.

In fact, this is a practice that Paul McCartney has always followed. He even trained himself to write in the dark for this purpose.

We can also use a technique of “conscious napping” to generate ideas. Whenever the great inventor Thomas Edison was stuck for a solution or new idea, he would allow himself to drift into unconsciousness, while holding a metal ball. As he fell asleep, the ball would clatter to the ground and wake him, when he would often find that a new insight had emerged.

More generally, we should use idleness as a way of cultivating creativity. Don’t think of napping or relaxing as a waste of time. Far from being unproductive, they may lead to the most inspired ideas and insights of our lives.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Steve Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Leeds Beckett University

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When frost sparkles in the morning and our breath is visible as we venture outside, thoughts turn to winter warming treats like mulled wine – a drink full of ingredients that have become synonymous with Christmas.

Mulled wine is made by adding spices such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mace and nutmeg to sweetened red wine, which is then warmed gently. Across Europe and Scandinavia, it can be purchased in many pubs, bars and festive markets – while supermarket shelves groan with bottles of readymade mulled wines for you to heat at home.

There are many different English recipes out there, including some dating back to the 14th century – from a collection of manuscripts that later became known as The Forme of Cury. The beverage made by following this recipe would certainly have packed a punch, as it contains several spices from the ginger family including galangal, in addition to the more familiar ones.

And before wine was known as mulled, drinking wine flavoured with spices has a long history. There is a mention of drinking spiced wine in the biblical poem the Song of Solomon, which states: “I would give you spiced wine to drink.”

It is thought that spice-infused wine was introduced to Britain by the Romans. An older name for it was “hippocras”, although this was mainly taken as a health tonic – made from spice-infused red or white wine and taken hot or cold.

In The Merchant’s Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392), the wealthy, elderly knight January takes “ypocras, clarre, and vernage / Of spices hote, to encrese his corrage” (hypocras, clary, and vernage / of spices hot to increase his courage). January sups these three types of spiced wine to boost his virility on his wedding night for his young bride, May.

Diarist and civil servant Samuel Pepys also mentions taking “half-a-pint of mulled sack” – a sweetened Spanish wine – in an almost medicinal way to comfort himself in the middle of a working morning in March 1668, when things had been going wrong for him.

The name mulled wine comes from the Old English mulse – an archaic name for any drink made of honey mixed with water or wine, derived from the Latin word for honey (mel) and still used in modern Welsh as mêl. From mulse we get “musled”, which was used to describe anything that has been “mingled with honey”.

Before the growth of the global sugar trade, honey was the main way that food and drink was sweetened. Vin chaud, the French equivalent of mulled wine, is traditionally sweetened with honey. England imported spiced wine from Montpellier in large quantities from the 13th century, but only those of social status, like Chaucer’s knight January, would have been able to indulge in those days.

Warm sweet and spiced wine continued to be drunk for health and enjoyment throughout the centuries. But in the 18th century, mulled wine evolved again, as reflected in a recipe in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769) for a warm drink thickened with egg yolks:

Grate half a nutmeg into a pint of wine and sweeten to your taste with loaf sugar. Set it over the fire. When it boils, take it off to cool.

Beat the yolks of four eggs exceeding well, add to them a little cold wine, then mix them carefully with your hot wine a little at a time. Pour this backwards and forwards several times till it looks fine and bright.

Set it on the fire and heat a little at a time till it is quite hot and pretty thick, and pour it backwards and forwards several times.

Send it in chocolate cups and serve it up with dry toast, cut in long narrow pieces.

The result of this method is a frothy, velvety smooth confection, enjoyed with dipping toast or biscuits.

Our ancestors didn’t associate mulled wines with Christmas, so it seems likely that the pairing was popularised by Charles Dicken’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol – like so much of what we now regard as a traditional Christmas.

After Mr Scrooge has seen the error of his miserly ways, he says to Bob Cratchit: “We will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!” Smoking Bishop is a recipe for mulled wine that combines port in the wine and uses dried oranges for an added flavour note. The smoke refers to the steam rising from this hot drink.

So this year, as you cup your hands around the warm mug and inhale the fragrant steam coming off your mulled wine, think of the long history you are a part of.

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Sara Read, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University

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Sometimes you get a small electric shock from touching your car door handle on a dry summer’s day.

The source of these shocks is a spark discharge, occurring between your body and the body of the car. These sparks happen from accumulation of static electric charge – often arising from two different materials rubbing together. This process – named triboelectric charging – was discovered in ancient Greece, where it was observed that some materials are attracted by amber when rubbed.

Triboelectricity is commonly demonstrated in classroom experiments: by rubbing plastic sticks with cat fur, or by rubbing a balloon on your hair.

Now we know that, if you were returning to a parked car on Mars, you could experience a similar shock. A new study has, for the first time, directly demonstrated electrical discharges on the red planet.

The same triboelectric process operates in volcanic eruptions on Earth, where charge is accumulated by ash particles colliding. In volcanic plumes, the build up of charge can initiate very large lightning discharges – the big cousin of smaller spark discharges. Lightning discharges are even more common in thunderstorms, however, where interactions between soft hail (graupel) and ice crystals cause charge separation.

On Earth, dust storms and dust devils – a relatively short-lived whirlwind formed from rising columns of warm air – are known to substantially electrify, through collisions between dust particles. Typically, sufficient electrification to lead to spark or lightning discharges is not achieved, owing to the ~1 bar pressure at the surface. Conversely, on Mars, the lower pressure (about 1-10% of that on Earth) means that spark discharges are likely at lesser levels of electrification.

For several decades, it has been thought that dust devils on Mars may be able to produce spark discharges. Many lab experiments shaking sand around in a low-pressure carbon dioxide atmosphere, like that of Mars, have recorded highly charged dust and discharges.

However, until now, there have been no direct observations of Martian discharges. There have been several clues to the existence of charging in the Martian atmosphere, such as dust stuck to the wheels of a Nasa rover, for example.

The new – and genuinely serendipitous – observations published in Nature show that electrical discharges are present in the Martian atmosphere.

These results stemmed from a small loop in the wire connecting a microphone on the Perseverance rover to the on-board electronics. This wire, and the microphone system connected to it, proved to be an unexpectedly effective accidental lightning detector. The SuperCam microphone was intended to observe the acoustic environment of Mars, however, small electrical transients were also detected.

In investigating the source of these transient events, it was found that some of them were followed by sounds. The authors convincingly showed that the transients were caused by spark discharges, with electromagnetic signals picked up by the coil being followed by acoustic signals from the microphone. These observations are similar to seeing a flash of light and later hearing the subsequent thunder.

From investigating the time difference between the acoustic and electrical signals, the authors find that the spark discharges occur in the vicinity of the Martian lander – just a few metres away. Further, it was found that these occurrences were more common during dust storms, or when dust devils sweep over the rover.

Generally, two independent sources of corroborating information are considered necessary for unambiguous evidence of a new phenomenon. For example, lightning at Saturn is supported by separate observations from both spacecraft and Earth. When the discharges are weak, however, detection at a distance is much less achievable or even impossible. For these weak events on Mars, in-atmosphere detection is needed. Although the same signal system was used to detect them, the electrical and acoustic signals were conveyed in very different ways.

An analogous situation might be a radio broadcast made from near a thunderstorm. The effect of a lightning strike might cause a crackle of interference to be picked up by an analogue (not internet) radio, shortly before you heard thunder on the broadcast. The same radio provides these two signals, however they would seem to be observed independently.

The finding that electrical discharges occur on Mars has various implications. Atmospheric electricity can cause chemical reactions, such as the formation of complex molecules, perhaps linked to the origins of life. There are also practical applications for future space missions.

Dust was a significant problem during the Apollo missions landing on the lunar surface, as it easily penetrates any mechanical systems. Dust protection is an important part of planning for human travel to Mars. All these problems are exacerbated when the dust creates sparks, as it could result in electronic circuits malfunctioning.

Fortunately, you won’t have to worry much when a dust devil approaches during your next road trip on desert tracks; you can just drive through it, although the experience might remind you that on Mars you might see some sparks in the dust.

Martin Fullekrug, Reader, Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, University of Bath; Blair McGinness, Postdoctoral research assistant, meteorology, University of Reading, and Karen Aplin, Professor of Space Science and Technology

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If you are fluent in any language other than English, you have probably noticed that some things are impossible to translate exactly.

A Japanese designer marvelling at an object’s shibui (a sort of simple yet timelessly elegant beauty) may feel stymied by English’s lack of a precisely equivalent term.

Danish hygge refers to such a unique flavour of coziness that entire books seem to have been needed to explain it.

Portuguese speakers may struggle to convey their saudade, a mixture of yearning, wistfulness and melancholy. Speakers of Welsh will have an even harder time translating their hiraeth, which can carry a further sense of longing after one’s specifically Celtic culture and traditions.

Imprisoned by language

The words of different languages can divide and package their speakers’ thoughts and experiences differently, and provide support for the theory of “linguistic relativity”.

Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this theory derives in part from the American linguist Edward Sapir’s 1929 claim that languages function to “index” their speakers’ “network of cultural patterns”: if Danish speakers experience hygge, then they should have a word to talk about it; if English speakers don’t, then we won’t.

Yet Sapir also went a step further, claiming language users “do not live in the objective world alone […] but are very much at the mercy” of their languages.

This stronger theory of “linguistic determinism” implies English speakers may be imprisoned by our language. In this, we actually cannot experience hygge – or at least, not in the same way that a Danish person might. The missing word implies a missing concept: an empty gap in our world of experience.

Competing theories

Few theories have proven as controversial. Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf famously claimed in 1940 that the Hopi language’s lack of verb tenses (past, present, future) indicated its speakers have a different “psychic experience” of time and the universe than Western physicists.

This was countered by a later study devoting nearly 400 pages to the language of time in Hopi, which included concepts such as “today”, “January” and – yes – discussions of actions happening in the present, past and future.

Even heard of “50 Inuit words for snow?” Whorf again.

Although the number he actually claimed was closer to seven, this was later said to be both too many and too few. (It depends on how you define a “word”.)

More recently, the anthropological linguist Dan Everett claimed the Amazonian Pirahã language lacks “recursion”, or the capacity to put one sentence inside another (“{I trust {you’ll come {to realise that {my theory is better.}}}}”).

If true, this would suggest that Pirahã differs in the exact property that Noam Chomsky has argued to be the principal defining property of any human language.

Once again, Everett’s claims have been argued both to go too far and not far enough. The cycle would appear to be endless, such that two excellent recent books on the topic have adopted almost diametrically opposite perspectives – even down to the opposite wording of their titles!

Language as a comfortable house

There is truth in both perspectives.

At least some aspects of human languages must be identical or nearly so, since they are all used by members of the same human species, with the same sorts of bodies, brains and patterns of communication.

Yet recent increases in understanding of the world’s Indigenous languages have taught us two important additional lessons. First, there is far more diversity among the world’s languages than previously believed. Second, differences are often related to the patterns of culture and environment in which languages are traditionally spoken.

For example, in many Himalayan languages, an expression like “that house” comes in three flavours: “that-house-upward”, “that-house-downward” and “that-house-on-the-same-level” – a reflection of the mountainous area these speakers live in.

When their speakers migrate to lower-elevation regions, the system may shift from “upward/downward” to “upriver/downriver”. If there is no large enough river present then the distinction may disappear.

In Indigenous Aslian languages of peninsular Malaysia, there are large vocabularies referring to finely-distinguished natural odours. This is an index of the richly diverse foraging environment of their speakers.

Studies of small, tightly-knit communities like the Milang of northeastern India have revealed how languages can require speakers to mark their information source: whether a statement is the general knowledge of one’s social group, or is arrived at through a different type of source – such as hearsay, or deduction from evidence.

Speakers of languages with such “evidentiality” systems can learn to speak languages – like English – without them. Yet native language habits turn out to be hard to break. One recent study showed speakers of some languages with evidentiality add words like “reportedly” or “seemingly” into their statements more often than native English speakers.

Human languages may not be a prison their speakers cannot escape from. They may be more like comfortable houses one finds it difficult to leave. Although a word from another language can always be borrowed, its unique cultural meanings may always remain just a little bit out of reach.

Mark W. Post, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Sydney

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For a supposedly obsolete music format, audio cassette sales seem to be set on fast forward at the moment.

Cassettes are fragile, inconvenient and relatively low-quality in the sound they produce – yet we’re increasingly seeing them issued by major artists.

Is it simply a case of nostalgia?

Press play

The cassette format had its heyday during the mid-1980s, when tens of millions were sold each year.

However, the arrival of the compact disc (CDs) in the 1990s, and digital formats and streaming in the 2000s, consigned cassettes to museums, second-hand shops and landfill. The format was well and truly dead until the past decade, when it started to reenter the mainstream.

According to the British Phonographic Industry, in 2022 cassette sales in the United Kingdom reached their highest level since 2003. We’re seeing a similar trend in the United States, where cassette sales were up 204.7% in the first quarter of this year (a total of 63,288 units).

A number of major artists, including Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, the Weeknd and Royel Otis have all released material on cassette. Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, is available in 18 versions across CDs, vinyl and cassettes.

Many news article will tell you a “cassette revival” is well underway. But is it?

I would argue what we’re seeing now is not a full-blown revival. After all, the unit sales still pale in comparison to the peak in the late 1990s, when some 83 million were reportedly sold in one year in the UK alone.

Instead, I see this as a form of rediscovery – or for young listeners, discovery.

Time to pause

Recorded music today is mostly heard through digital channels such as Spotify and social media.

Meanwhile, cassettes break and jam quite easily. Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head and weakens the tape over time. The audio quality is low, and comes with a background hiss.

Why resurrect this clunky old technology when everything you could want is a languid tap away on your phone?

Analogue formats such as cassettes and vinyl are not prized for their sound, but for the tactility and sense of connection they provide. For some listeners, cassettes and LPs allow for a tangible connection with their favourite artist.

There’s an old joke about vinyl records that people get into them for the expense and the inconvenience. The same could be said for cassette tapes: our renewed interest in them could be read as a questioning (if not rejection) of the blandly smooth, ubiquitous and inescapable digital world.

The joy of the cassette is its “thingness”, its “hereness” – as opposed to an intangible string of electrical impulses on a far-flung corporate-owned server.

The inconvenience and effort of using cassettes may even make for more focused listening – something the invisible, ethereal and “instantly there” flow of streaming doesn’t demand of us.

People may also choose to buy cassettes for the nostalgia, for their “retro” cool aesthetic, to be able to own music (instead of streaming it), and to make cheap and quick recordings.

Mix tape mania

Cassettes did (and still do) have the whiff of the rebel about them. As researcher Mike Glennon explains, they give consumers the power to customise and “reconfigure recorded sound, thus inserting themselves into the production process”.

From the 1970s, blank cassettes were a cheap way for anyone to record anything. They offered limitless combinations and juxtapositions of music and sounds.

The mix tape became an art form, with carefully selected track sequences and handmade covers. Albums could even be chopped up and rearranged according to preference.

Consumers could also happily copy commercial vinyl and cassettes, as well as music from radio, TV and live gigs. In fact, the first single ever released on cassette, Bow Wow Wow’s C30,C60,C90,Go! (1980), extolled the joys and righteousness of home taping as a way of sticking it to the man – or in this case the music industry.

Unsuprisingly, the recording industry saw cassettes and home taping as a threat to its copyright-based income and struck back.

In 1981, the British Phonographic Industry launched its infamous “home taping is killing music” campaign. But the campaign’s somewhat pompous tone led to it being mercilessly mocked and largely ignored by the public.

A chance to rewind

The idea of the blank cassette as both a symbol of self-expression and freedom from corporate control continues to persist. And today, it’s not only corporate control consumers have to dodge, but also the dominance of digital streaming platforms.

Far from being just a pleasant yearning sensation, nostalgia for older technology is layered, complex and often political.

Cassettes are cheap and easy to make, so many artists past and present have used them as merchandise to sell or give away at gigs and fan events. For hardcore fans, they are solid tokens of their dedication – and many fans will buy multiple formats as a form of collecting.

Cassettes won’t replace streaming services anytime soon, but that’s not the point. What they offer is a way of listening that goes against the grain of the digital hegemony we find ourselves in. That is, until the tape snaps.

Peter Hoar, Senior Lecturer, School of Communications Studies, Auckland University of Technology

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Prada will become the new owners of the Versace brand, under a €1.25 billion (A$2.2 billion) deal.

Versace has recently struggled both financially and in keeping up with the larger luxury fashion houses. Before the sale, Versace was owned by Capri Holdings, which also holds brands including Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo.

In March, Donatella Versace stepped down as the brand’s creative director and was replaced by Dario Vitale, who previously worked for the Prada Group. This marked the first time in 47 years that Versace was not led by a family member.

The Prada Group has made a move to save the Italian brand from possibly being consolidated into the larger French groups Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) and Kering, which own considerable luxury fashion brands.

Will the luxury fashion house rivals be able to survive each other’s style?

The ‘sexy’ Versace

The iconic and sexy Versace brand was founded by Gianni Versace in 1978 in Milan, when he launched his first women’s wear collection.

Originally studying architecture like many of the great 1950s Italian fashion designers, his flamboyant and erotic style was soon embraced by many celebrities, such as Princess Diana and Elton John.

The establishment of the luxury fashion house was a family affair. Gianni’s brother Santo ran the commercial side of the business, and his younger sister Donatella also became a designer and creative director with the brand.

After Gianni was tragically murdered outside his Miami beach mansion by Andrew Cunanan in 1997, his sister Donatella continued the Versace legacy.

Under her creative leadership, the fashion house saw extravagant runways and advertising campaigns. But, over time, the fashion house struggled to maintain scale like its competitors.

The ‘luxury’ Prada

Mario Prada founded Prada in 1913 as a luxury leather-goods business.

The business didn’t find its luxury fashion house status until Miuccia Prada took over the business from her grandfather in 1978. Miuccia came to the brand with no prior design experience and with a PhD in political science.

Her background as an outsider to the fashion industry has been seen as her ultimate strength, affording her the ability to take risks and challenge every style under the Prada brand.

In 1978, Miuccia became the fashion designer for Prada and, in 1993, its sister brand Miu Miu. Both Prada and Miu Miu would come to be known for a clean and minimalist style of fashion, while also being shocking.

Miuccia invented the “ugly chic” style: taking unconventional items or materials that are considered ugly and adding high fashion value to them, such as the iconic Prada Vela bag made from nylon instead of leather. Introducing nylon fabric into luxury fashion was a shocking move in 1984.

Miuccia Prada has dressed many celebrities, including Miu Miu “it girl” Sabrina Carpenter and Nicole Kidman, who loves a Prada dress.

The Prada Group is now a public traded company valued at approximately US$15.27 billion (A$23.2 billion), with majority ownership in the hands of Miuccia and her husband Patrizio Bertelli.

The ultimate rivalry

As family-owned Italian fashion houses with markedly different styles, Prada and Versace have often been called “rivals” by Vogue journalists and business analysts. Prada is minimalist; Versace is loud and flashy. Prada is a northern Italian brand; Versace is a southern Italian brand.

While there may be a localised rivalry, the true competition is between the Italian and French luxury fashion houses.

Until the mid 20th century, Paris held a monopoly over women’s fashion. Italian fashion houses gradually grew after the second world war as the French struggled with material shortages. But the French brands continued to dominate the fashion hierarchy with the release of Dior’s “new look”.

The rise of Italian fashion provided a philosophical rivalry with French fashion houses, who focused on couture compared to Italy’s more ready-to-wear domestic luxury goods.

Prada owning Versace ends an era of rivalry between two of the most influential Italian fashion houses. But it does provide a united front of Italian fashion.

What of the future?

Prada has been known for its investment in other luxury fashion houses. It previously bought a stake in Fendi for US$245 million in 1999 before selling in 2001 for US$265 million, and bought a 9.5% stake in Gucci in 1998 before selling in 1999.

The Versace deal is just another complex acquisition within the fashion landscape.

In today’s competitive market, luxury fashion brands such as Prada are increasingly focusing on “selling to the 1%”, targeting ultra-wealthy customers. This stands in contrast to Versace’s historical focus on serving the middle market with more “accessible luxury” pricing.

The brand’s identities will remain separate, but Prada is likely to capitalise on the strengths of each brand, with Prada’s excellent craftsmanship and local manufacturing being utilised for the Versace brand. The Prada Group will have considerable work to do to relaunch the Versace brand and remain globally competitive, including deciding which market they wish to appeal to.

So, will Versace lose its sexiness? Will Prada mess with its ultra cool “ugly minimalist” style? It is unlikely fashion followers will see much change in either brand. But it remains to be seen if they can survive in partnership in the tough global fashion market.

Jye Marshall, Lecturer, Fashion Design, School of Design and Architecture, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The beach and foreshore near where Perth’s Swan River meets the sea was recently closed to swimming after a number of bull sharks were seen circling close to the surface.

In 2023, a young woman tragically died after being attacked by a bull shark nearby. In 2021 a man was seriously injured by a bull shark just upstream.

A project also began in 2021 to create new Noongar songs and dances in response to boodjar (Country) and its inhabitants. This included a song and dance for the potentially dangerous bull shark, or kworlak, which swims and lives alongside us in the river.

Bull shark have been travelling largely unseen up and down the river’s murky waters for aeons. Recognition of this informs the relationship between the river and Noongar, the Indigenous people of the region.

Together, we worked on a project to develop novel Noongar dances for bull shark and other entities which otherwise would have no recently known local performance repertoire.

Within many Indigenous cultures, singing and dancing is vital to maintaining reciprocal relationships with local ecosystems. Even watching Indigenous performance can stir vibrations in the body of the viewer. By coming to feel and listen to kworlak, we can come to respect its power and its almost miraculous ability to pass through the foamy waves into and out of the river mouth.

Through Noongar dance, everyone is invited to consider trans-species empathy as a way to restore connections between those who live in Perth, and the nonhuman species that inhabit the region.

The powerful kworlak

Walyalup is the name for Fremantle, Western Australia, resting at the mouth of the Derbal Yerrigan, otherwise known as the Swan River. Trevor Ryan grew up here where freshwater and saltwater mix. He has memories of swimming, fishing and playing with family and friends.

Kworlak travel against the current, past the waves, and up the river into the fresh water to breed in late kambarang (the season of birth, wildflowers and the last cool days before summer).

Heavy late kambarang rainfall, such as Perth saw this year, attracts sharks to feed and reproduce.

Bull shark adjust their osmoregulation, expelling excess water via kidneys and urinary tract. Senior Noongar collaborating on the project speak of kworlak waiting near yandjet, or bulrushes, seeking hidden prey such as crustaceans, tortoise and small fish. This sustains females during pregnancy and birth.

Creating Noongar songs

Across Australia, it is common for Indigenous songs to be attributed to non-human entities rather than being solely the creation of human composers.

Under Western Australia’s Aborigines Act (1905–63), speaking and singing in Noongar was vigorously discouraged, resulting in few old songs being remembered today. There are historically recorded Noongar songs about the sea, but none about sharks.

Given other sea creatures had songs, it is likely Noongar shark songs were once performed.

At Trevor’s suggestion, and after sharing song ideas with senior Noongar speakers, Clint Bracknell – who performs as Maatakitj – drew inspiration at the river to create a song of the kworlak in early 2021.

He began with a melody which he had dreamed before vocalising without words, attempting to figure out what Noongar terms the dreamed vocalisations evoked.

The song goes:

Wardangara kworlak waniny

Seafarer bull-shark sneaking

Ngadird ngadird ngadird wan

Again, again and again it sneaks

Wardangara kworlak waniny ngoornt

Seafarer bull-shark sneaking, lies

Bilya ngaril ngadird wan

Through the ribs of the river, again, it sneaks

Ngadird ngadird ngadird wan

Again, again and again it sneaks

Widi-widiny widi-widiny widi-widiny widi-widiny

Shaking everything up

The kworlak dance, choreographed by Trevor, began with the dancers treading on boodjar itself. It was important for the dancers to feel their vibrations connect to mother earth.

Stamping up and down to the beat of the clap sticks, dancers alluded to kworlak’s osmoregulation by moving their arms horizontally at the waist outwards, while turning to evoke the flow of salt and fresh water moving over, and through, the body.

The shark’s distinctive dorsal fin also featured. Dancers moved their clasped hands above their heads from the middle, left, right and back. The dance concluded with the dancers pushing their arms forward, fingers spread, each hand moving up and down over the other, to represent the biting and grinding motions of bull sharks feeding.

Trevor describes dancing on Country as being like a musician who tunes their guitar to play a song. Bodies are instruments that can be tuned to the landscape, finding the right frequency that vibrates with ancestors and Country.

Most humans today only notice sharks when a tragedy occurs. Regularly singing and dancing the kworlak reminds us of their enduring place in the ecosystem. It teaches us caution and respect.

Through embodying the stories and energy of boodjar, everyone may potentially feel through voice and physical response that they, like other entities, belong on, with, and to Country.

Trevor Ryan, Indigenous Cultural Advisor, Centre for People Place and Planet & School of Education, Edith Cowan University; Clint Bracknell, Professor of Music, The University of Western Australia, and Jonathan W. Marshall, Associate Professor & Postgraduate Research Coordinator, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tom Stoppard, who has died at 88, was one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful playwrights of our age. He won his first Tony Award for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968, and his last for Leopoldstadt in 2023.

His life was extraordinary. Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, his Jewish family fled Nazi occupation to India and then England. He chose to become a journalist rather than go to university, and became close friends with Nobel Prize winners, presidents – and Mick Jagger.

The wit and intellectual curiosity of Stoppard’s plays was so distinctive that “Stoppardian” entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. Hermione Lee’s biography of him contains a cartoon with annoyed audience members hissing: “Look at the Jones’s pretending to get all the jokes in a Stoppard play.”

Stoppard just assumed his audience was as well read and inquisitive as he was.

Philosophy is the foundation

As Stoppard said to American theatre critic Mel Gussow in 1974,

most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition that would occur to any intelligent person in his bath.

Philosophy is the foundation of Stoppard’s plays. They cite Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Bentham, Kant, Moore, Plato, Ramsey, Russell, Ryle and Zeno. One philosopher in Stoppard’s radio play Darkside (2013) is never sure if he is spelling Nietzsche correctly.

In 2003, the actor Simon Russell-Beale recalled to a National Theatre audience Stoppard introducing a cast to

2,000 years of philosophy in an hour – it was rather brilliant – just to explain what the debate was and why it was dramatically exciting.

Philosophy – but not before life

Stoppard’s interest in philosophy began in 1968. He wrote to a friend that he was

in a ridiculous philosophy\logic\math kick. I don’t know how I got into it, but you should see me […] following Wittgenstein through Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) had a philosophy of philosophy. He argued lots of academic philosophy was literal nonsense. Some things we think are important are beyond words.

Stoppard saw theatre similarly, saying in a lecture to Canadian students in 1988 that “theatre is a curious equation in which language is merely one of the components”.

Stoppard wrote philosophers who tie themselves into cerebral knots failing to prove what they want to believe about God, morals or consciousness in plays such as Jumpers (1972), Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006) and The Hard Problem (2015).

One of Stoppard’s philosophers dictates a lecture in Jumpers, saying “to begin at the beginning: is God? (To SECRETARY). Leave a space”.

Stoppard’s plays sympathise with this forlorn desire to know until it leads characters to ignore other people. Action in the world is more important than the search for knowledge if there is a marriage to be saved, a dying wife to be cared for, or an adopted child to be found. Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics is complex – but Stoppard’s plays show it in effect.

What we know, and how

In his TV play Professional Foul (1977), Stoppard sent philosophers to a conference in Prague. Scholarly debate was contained by totalitarian censorship. The professor of ethics at Cambridge University makes his call for action by riffing on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we are by no means silent.”

Stoppard also staged lines from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979). Some characters speak English, others use the same words but with different meanings. The audience observes and learns this new nonsense language, laughing at its jokes. They understand the philosophy of language as Wittgenstein did: social conventions between people, not words pinned on things.

What we can know, and how, is crucial to Stoppard’s plays even when the immediate subject matter isn’t philosophy.

It might be quantum physics in Hapgood (1988) or chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); European history in The Coast of Utopia (2002) or contemporary politics in Rock ‘n’ Roll; individual consciousness in The Hard Problem or even whatever we might mean by “love” in The Real Thing (1982). The characters really do want to know. They debate and interrogate but never find definite answers.

As Hannah suggests in Arcadia:

It’s all trivial […] Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.

But there are jokes too. Arcadia opens in 1809 with a precocious 13-year-old girl asking her dashing 22-year-old tutor: “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” before the tutor (originally played by a smoldering Rufus Sewell) pauses, and cautiously replies “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef”.

The audience erupted in laughter. I was one of them.

And as the play draws to a close, a waltz in 1809 happens in the same room as a waltz in the present. As the two dancing couples circle each other, Stoppard’s play suggests that what one person can share with another is more meaningful than justified true belief.

It is a beautiful, theatrical moment. And it is beyond words.

Fergus Edwards, Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When you picture medieval warfare, you might think of epic battles and famous monarchs. But what about the everyday soldiers who actually filled the ranks? Until recently, their stories were scattered across handwritten manuscripts in Latin or French and difficult to decipher. Now, our online database makes it possible for anyone to discover who they were and how they lived, fought and travelled.

To shed light on the foundations of our armed services – one of England’s oldest professions – we launched the Medieval Soldier Database in 2009. Today, it’s the largest searchable online database of medieval nominal data in the world. It contains military service records giving names of soldiers paid by the English Crown. It covers the period from 1369 to 1453 and many different war zones.

We created the database to challenge assumptions about the lack of professionalism of soldiers during the hundred years war and to show what their careers were really like.

In response to the high interest from historians and the public (the database has 75,000 visitors per month), the resource has recently been updated. It is now sustainably hosted by GeoData, a University of Southampton research institute. We have recently added new records, taking the dataset back to the late 1350s, meaning it now contains almost 290,000 entries.

This data is mainly drawn from muster rolls (lists of names of soldiers comprising the military force) of men-at-arms (soldiers with full armour and a range of weapons) and archers. We can even see the little dots used by officials taking the muster to confirm the soldiers had turned up and had the right equipment. All these soldiers were paid and the Exchequer wanted to be assured it was receiving value for money.

We have also included protections and appointments of attorneys and legal mechanisms to protect local interests while serving overseas. Together, these records provide rich accounts of military activities, allowing for significant conclusions to be drawn. Careers of 20 years and more are revealed. We also see men moving upwards socially because of their good service. For many soldiers, especially archers, this information may be the only record we have of their existence.

The expanded data enables us to explore the garrison of Calais from 1357 to 1459. We can see the high manpower commitment needed to maintain this key English base in northern France. Calais was the gateway through which many great expeditions passed, including that of 1359 when Edward III set out to besiege Reims to be crowned King of France.

The database also allows comparisons with other emerging projects. For instance, we can establish the military experience of rebels in the peasants’ revolt of 1381, a widespread English uprising driven by economic hardship, high taxes and social tensions, ultimately suppressed violently by King Richard II and his government. The data allows many deep dives into the past. It allows historians to demonstrate that, unlike today where the armed forces specialise, the medieval soldier would have served repeatedly across different theatres of war.

We can see expeditionary armies sent to invade France as well as naval campaigns in the English Channel. We also find soldiers in garrisons in Scotland, Ireland and France. Our data has allowed family historians to push their genealogies back further than has been previously possible.

Standout stories

The resource is home to many insightful records of key events and figures. One well known person is Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, which were written between 1387 and 1400. The database holds a number of service records for him. He was a man-at-arms in the garrison of Calais in 1387.

This was probably Chaucer’s last foray into military service, but he had considerable experience as a soldier and as a diplomat. He had been in France in 1372, 1377 and 1378. He testified to the Court of Chivalry – a court which settled disputes over coats of arms – in 1386. He told the court that he was then aged “40 and upwards” and “had been armed 27 years”. He gave more details about his service on the Reims campaign of 1359 where he was captured by the French and ransomed.

Records for a man named Thomas Crowe of Snodland in Kent shed some light on his rebellious past. During the peasants’ revolt of 1381, he was accused of “taking up position and throwing great stones” to demolish someone’s house. The database suggests he may have served in France in 1369. He was certainly in the garrison of Calais in 1385 and on a naval campaign in 1387. His military knowledge about trebuchets – a powerful type of counterbalanced medieval siege engine – or giant catapults may explain how he was able to wreak so much destruction in the revolt.

The muster roll for the garrison of Calais in 1357 shows not only the names of men-at-arms and archers but also the support roles needed: mason, locksmith, fletcher (a maker of arrows), bowyer (a maker of bows), plumber, blacksmith, wheelwright, cooper (maker of barrels), ditch digger, boatman, carter and carter’s boy. One record belongs to a tiler – Walter Tyler. Was this the future rebel leader of 1381, Wat Tyler?

We hope the database will continue to grow and go on providing answers to questions about our shared military heritage. We are sure that it will unlock many previously untold stories of soldier ancestors.

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Adrian R Bell, Chair in the History of Finance and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research, Prosperity and Resilience, Henley Business School, University of Reading; Anne Curry, Professor of Medieval History, University of Southampton, and Jason Sadler, Professorial Enterprise Fellow, GeoData Institute, Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.