Every few years, media comes alive with discussion and debate around the use of technology in pop music, often focused on that most personal of instruments – the human voice.

Vocal manipulation is nothing new. It is ubiquitous and fundamental to pop music production – from self-harmonising on records in the 1950s, to autotune technology in the 90s and now millisecond precise editing, combining hundreds of individual vocal performances at the syllable level.

Generative AI is now prevalent in music as well. The use of platforms such as Suno are hugely popular. Suno can clone a voice within minutes. This can then be used to automatically generate a song with your voice, no matter how in tune or technically capable it originally was.

It can also take existing voices and remap them to other tunes. For example, take this mashup (below) of Cotton Eye Joe, “sung” by a digital Amy Winehouse.

But with the advent of this technology, is there a threshold of achievement before the individual voice is manipulated so much it is effectively removed altogether?

Here are six songs that exemplify how evolving technologies have changed the human voice since the 1950s.

1. Buddy Holly – Words of Love (1957)

The technique of double tracking takes two separate recordings of the voice and plays them together.

This simple technique, only achievable with the creative application of advances in recording technology in the 50s, gives the impression of a “thicker” vocal.

In Words of Love, Buddy Holly went one step further and harmonised with himself. It is a technique that is still used in modern production, by pioneering musicians like Imogen Heap.

2. The Beatles – When I’m 64 (1967)

When I’m 64 features an example of pitch manipulation. It’s done by changing the playback speed of the tape the vocal was recorded onto.

The tape is sped up slightly to give a higher pitched and “frail” sound – signifying the 64-year-old man.

Prince often used this technique. You can hear it in songs like Housequake (1987) on the Sign o’ the Times album.

3. Kraftwerk – Autobahn (1974)

The vocal statement as this track kicks in sounds robotic. That is due to the use of a Vocoder machine.

The Vocoder combines the human voice with a synthesiser, creating a strange, futuristic effect.

Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (2001) is another example of this technology.

4. Milli Vanilli – Girl You Know It’s True (1988)

Milli Vanilli is perhaps one of the more controversial examples. That’s because in Girl You know It’s True, the vocals were not performed by the artists themselves. Instead, other anonymous singers were used to lay down the vocals for the albums and the two stars mimed. It caused an uproar when the truth came out.

While not strictly a technique, this is a key pivot point where music is commodified beyond the song into a wider package. The MTV era moved backing track performances to the foreground, as artists – especially pop artists – began to mime to the “perfect” recorded music.

This in turn led to protest performances on shows like the UK’s Top of the Pops, from artists like Oasis who played up to the fact they weren’t singing live.

It also caused embarrassment for singer Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live in 2004 when her lip-synching was revealed as the wrong track played out.

5. Cher – Believe (1998)

Believe was one of the first mainstream examples of using autotune technology as an effect, rather than its intended use of bringing an otherwise out of tune vocal into tune.

The verses and pre-choruses of this track are where this takes place.

This was the catalyst that has led on to autotune being a valid production technique. Its use is exemplified by artists like Charli XCX.

6. Ariana Grande – 7 Rings (2019)

Extreme editing of vocals is achievable in modern music software. We are a long way away from literally taking a razor blade to tape to combine one or two vocal performances, as would have been the norm in the late 50s and 60s.

Nowadays we can edit beyond the individual syllable, and it is common practice to do so, to create the “perfect” performance.

In this example, a stylistic choice has been made to remove the biological necessity of breathing – a technical achievement in vocal layering and processing. There are many other vocal processing effects going on as well, but the minimal breathing is notable.

Grande is also know for using Imogen Heap’s MiMu Gloves to play with her vocals by controlling the sound through hand gestures.

Too much tech?

Artists like Grande use technology creatively. But the use of autotune in particular is becoming standard across recorded, and sometimes even live performance.

It has been argued by artists like Justin Hawkins that many singers sound the way they do precisely because they are not perfect and can’t sing exactly in tune. The character and the nuance of who they are lies in between the tones and microtones.

More sophisticated techniques in production, either live or recorded, will continue to develop, now aided by AI. These developments will challenge ideas of authenticity, creative ethics, artistry and ownership.

But it is my hope that artists and musicians rise to this challenge and discover new creative possibilities, sparking new and unheard sonic textures and musical genres. All the while retaining that most fundamental component of creativity – humanity.

Luke Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Sound Technology, School of Arts, Media and Creative Technologies, University of Salford

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

Sir David Attenborough turns 100 this week.

Very few people have the good fortune to live for a century. Fewer still achieve so much and touch so many lives.

Across his seven decade career with the BBC, Attenborough ushered in the transition from black and white to colour television. He gave the now legendary comedy troupe Monty Python their lucky break, greenlighting their Flying Circus. His keen eye and care for viewers is in part why tennis balls are yellow, not white – they’re much easier to see on screen.

But Attenborough is, of course, most famous for his nature documentaries. For decades, he has fronted the camera to educate, entertain and inspire billions of people about the complexity, wonder and majesty of the natural world, and the many threats it faces. It wasn’t a given – Attenborough was told early in his career his teeth were too big for television!

For ecologists like myself, Attenborough’s work has been a source of deep inspiration. It was instrumental in my decision to pursue a life and a career dedicated to understanding, caring and fighting for the protection of nature. For this gift, I am eternally grateful.

A career driven by curiosity

Attenborough’s connection with nature came early, forged in no small part through an insatiable fascination with fossils – including his childhood joy at discovering an ammonite in the Leicestershire countryside.

He went on to study geology and zoology at Cambridge University, graduating in 1947. He served in the navy and worked in an educational publishing house. Notably, the BBC rejected his first job application as a radio producer in 1950. But he tried again, and joined the BBC as a trainee producer in 1952.

His career in nature documentaries began to bud almost immediately, with his Zoo Quest series beginning in 1954. But it burst into full bloom with the landmark Life on Earth series in 1979, which brought distant locations, extraordinary wildlife and evolution and ecology to TV. It instilled a sense of wonder and awe in audiences, while maintaining and respecting scientific accuracy.

The master storyteller

One reason Attenborough has had such success as a communicator is his understated, calm but authoritative demeanour. When you sit down to watch an Attenborough documentary, you feel in safe hands.

His approach isn’t the norm. In other nature documentaries, wildlife can often seem secondary, as props for the presenter.

In series such as The Living Planet, The Trials of Life, The Blue Planet, The Planet Earth, and scores of others, Attenborough took us across the globe, revealing nature’s beauty, oddities and extraordinary complexity, as well as its macabre and brutal aspects. The habitats home to the world’s species are brought to life in extraordinary detail. We watch with laughter, trepidation, sadness, anger, excitement and awe, ebbing and flowing as nature’s stories unfold.

Who can forget the first time they saw and heard the extraordinary vocal repertoire and mimicry of a lyrebird, or a curious mountain gorilla’s desire to connect with a fellow great ape? The epic battle for survival between a hatchling iguana and hungry hordes of racer snakes? Or the breathtaking explosion of colour and complexity of a coral reef? Each of these was captured by master cinematographers and the story told to us by Attenborough.

Over his long career, Attenborough has become an icon. He was voted the UK’s best TV presenter of all time. But his prodigious output has come at a personal cost too. One of his regrets is how much time he has spent away from his family.

He is also not off limits to criticism. For a long time, Attenborough focused on the glory of nature, largely omitting the damage humans do through overfishing, deforestation, pollution, spreading exotic species, and other threats. He has also shied away from assigning blame to those most responsible for the harms inflicted on nature.

In 2018, he said too much focus on why so much wildlife is threatened was a “turn-off” for some viewers. Ecologists and conservation scientists can sympathise. We know bombarding people with doom and gloom invites apathy and despair, not a desire to act. It’s a hard line to walk between harsh realities and hope.

To his credit, Attenborough has belatedly focused on these issues in recent years. Footage of plastic pollution in Blue Planet II and the ravages of industrial fishing in Ocean have brought a sharp focus on these issues.

In 2020, he released A Life On Our Planet, which he describes as a “witness statement” to the startling losses of biodiversity he has seen over his lifetime. Rather than just spell out the problems, Attenborough laid out how to solve them – and the role we can all play in fixing the two biggest and deeply interwoven problems nature faces: climate change and biodiversity declines and extinctions.

While Attenborough’s earlier work largely avoided these difficult conversations, they succeeded in bringing nature’s wonder to millions of people. This shouldn’t be overlooked. At a time when more and more of us are cut off from nature, Attenborough’s documentaries forged a new connection. For people to care about losing nature, they first have to know and love it.

Conservation relies on stories

Scientific research rarely leads to the behavioural changes we might hope for. Accumulating facts and evidence is vital. But it’s not enough. What humans respond to is stories.

Alongside other globally renowned voices such as the late, great Jane Goodall, Attenborough’s work telling the stories of nature has shaped public opinion. In turn, it has galvanised conservation efforts such as the push to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

As he celebrates his centenary, it’s encouraging to see a new generation and diversity of voices in the media and science communication, advocacy, and scientific community. They speak and share their messages with great clarity, confidence, and passion.

Attenborough is just one person. He can’t replace the vital role of scientists, community leaders, conservationists and policymakers in conserving nature. But no one will ever replace David’s distinctive voice. As he has said:

it seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living

Hear, hear. Happy birthday for May 8th, David Attenborough.

Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

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

Sir David Attenborough has mastered the craft of storytelling. He has undoubtedly inspired generations of people around the globe to love and care for the natural world. And in doing so, he’s become one of the most recognisable – and most trusted – faces on our screens.

Now, he’s celebrating his 100th birthday and a lifetime of wildlife filmmaking. As part of The Conversation UK’s climate storytelling strand, four experts critique how he has influenced everything from conservation and documentary production to the communication of the biggest story of all – climate change.

Scientific insight

Ben Garrod, science broadcaster and Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement at the University of East Anglia, has presented alongside Attenborough in several landmark documentaries. Here he reflects on Attenborough’s passion for furthering our scientific understanding of the natural world.

I once sat on a remote beach with Attenborough, near the very tip of South America. I can still clearly remember the warmth of the rounded, flat stones beneath me. We sat only a metre or so apart. We’d just spent the morning filming the excavation of the largest dinosaur ever discovered.

Over lunch, Attenborough had recalled we were close to a beach he’d filmed at years before, where grey whale mothers drew in close to shore with their calves to rub against the stone in the shallows to exfoliate their skin. As luck would have it, it was the perfect time of year and before long, there we were watching a mother and calf just a few metres offshore.

Facts and figures bubbled out of Attenborough excitedly, not at all like the calm and more measured way we’re all so used to. For those few minutes, he was childlike in his wonder and excitement at the scene in front of us and I marvelled at how he has not only maintained that love for the natural world for so long but how he has always so passionately shared it with the rest of us.

For a century now, Attenborough’s life has been intimately interwoven not only with humanity’s growing scientific understanding of the natural world but also its accelerating loss. Spanning over 70 years, Attenborough has been our most trusted and prolific mediator between scientific knowledge and the public.

His early landmark BBC series Life on Earth: A Natural History (1979) did something few academic texts ever could. It made the complexity of evolutionary biology accessible. Across his work, natural selection, adaptation, ecology and behaviour are not presented as intangible concepts but as organic processes shaping form, function and ultimately survival across the natural world.

In doing so, Attenborough helped normalise evolutionary thinking for hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide, embedding complex scientific principles into popular culture, right in our living rooms.

Central to his work has been a commitment to scientific accuracy. Attenborough’s programmes have been developed in close collaboration with academics and field researchers, ensuring narratives about animal behaviour, ecosystems and biodiversity reflect current evidence.

This relationship between science and storytelling has been crucial because rather than dumbing down complexity, Attenborough’s “everyday” approach demonstrates audiences can engage with content that could all too easily be written off as belonging to more academic and scientifically literate viewers.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

Yet the tone of his work has changed. His early documentaries were characterised by a sense of abundance and discovery. Over time, as scientific evidence for biodiversity loss and climate change mounted, his work shifted accordingly. More recently, his documentaries increasingly shine a light on human impact, habitat destruction and extinction risk. This evolution of change in his own tone mirrors the science itself, highlighting Attenborough’s credibility as a communicator willing to adjust his message as the evidence demands.

Attenborough’s contribution to conservation has not come through activism alone. Research shows that an emotional connection to nature precedes any behavioural change. Attenborough has actively helped build the public conditions necessary for conservation policy and action by fostering wonder, curiosity and empathy for the natural world. His influence can be traced in the generations of scientists, conservationists and educators who cite his programmes as formative experiences.

For many, particularly those without access to wild spaces, Attenborough’s work provides an opportunity and gateway to encounter wild animals and remote ecosystems but also local habitats, helping give us all access to the wonder he perceives in the world around him.

As he turns 100, Attenborough’s legacy is surely inseparable from the global environmental challenges we now face. He has helped society understand not only how life evolved, but, more importantly, why it matters that we protect it now. In an era defined by ecological crisis, his work reminds us that scientific knowledge is most powerful when it connects people to the living world so strongly, it compels us to care enough to protect it, so that we might carry on his legacy and, just like him, act as stewards.

Natural history filmmaking

Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, Professor of Science Communication at the UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies, explains the impact Attenborough has had on natural history television.

In the early 1950s, television was taking off across Britain, but the BBC was still finding its visual voice. Its controller, Cecil McGivern, warned in June 1952 that there was “far too much emphasis…on the spoken word and far too little on the thing seen”. Most early television producers had come from BBC radio and initially made programmes that resembled radio with pictures.

Into this world stepped a young David Attenborough, unencumbered by a career in sound, ready to invent a new language for television and, in the process, reshape natural history filmmaking. At 26, he earned his first natural history credit as producer of The Coelacanth (1953), a 20-minute programme prompted by the capture of a live coelacanth “living fossil” fish off Madagascar.

Eschewing sensationalism, Attenborough tied the story to Darwin’s theory of evolution. This use of wildlife programmes to communicate scientific ideas became his trademark.

The programme blended prerecorded footage with live studio sequences featuring evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, who used the coelacanth to illustrate life’s transition from sea to land.

With the Zoo Quest series (1954), Attenborough began reshaping wildlife television. For these programmes, he travelled to exotic places with staff from the London Zoo to capture animals for the collection. Each episode relied on prerecorded film linked by live studio sequences, allowing tighter narrative control. The hero in the films, shot by Charles Lagus, was Attenborough himself, who back in London also presented the studio sequences. By assuming all the roles of hero, producer, narrator and presenter, Attenborough became the central performer in the story.

From then on, Attenborough’s fluid on-screen performances gained him much acclaim. A very hard worker, he put much effort in producing highly detailed scripts, which left little to chance. Indeed, by the early 1960s, he had all but lost faith in live television, writing to a BBC colleague:

To begin with I got a tremendous kick out of the excitement of putting out programmes live. But it wore off after a bit and really, except for challenging interviews with lots of ‘immediacy’, I’m for film or some other sort of controlled recording process every time. It is so maddening to miss an effect because of some small mechanical hitch, as so often happens live.

Consistently high ratings encouraged others to emulate his method, and live formats became less fashionable. Film-based production also allowed programmes to be stockpiled, repeated and sold, supporting a more sustainable business model.

After Attenborough moved into BBC management in 1965, his goal was to turn natural history television into a science communication genre. He argued that it was “important” to move away from programmes that simply showcased the beauty of nature and instead engage viewers “to examine in a serious and critical way new trends and ideas in zoology”. Returning to hands-on programme-making a decade later, he embedded this vision in his magnum opus, Life on Earth (1979).

In the early 1950s, when Attenborough joined the BBC, natural history television had been mostly conceived of as a specialist genre catering for amateur naturalists to share in the aesthetic and emotional enjoyment of nature. By the 1980s, he had helped transform it into one of the most popular genres of TV programming and a powerful conduit for science communication. This influence continues in his later work, including Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II and Our Planet, which combine cinematic storytelling with urgent environmental themes.

As he celebrates his 100th birthday, Attenborough’s legacy endures, defining natural history television as one of the most powerful forms of science communication and inspiring generations to look at the living world with wonder and understanding.

Communicating research

Saffron O'Neill researches climate communication and public engagement. She explains the ways Attenborough has shaped climate communication techniques across the world.

Attenborough is one of the few voices on climate change that almost everyone is willing to listen to. Over seven decades, his work has transformed how scientific knowledge is communicated, combining advances in broadcasting with powerful storytelling.

Research by Climate Outreach in 2020 found that Attenborough is trusted by people across the political spectrum, from “progressive activists” to “backbone conservatives”. More than 95% of people surveyed recognise him and his programmes reach an exceptionally diverse audience, even in today’s competitive media landscape.

My colleague, PhD researcher Kate Holden, is exploring how young people engage with marine sustainability through online video, from traditional nature documentaries to YouTubers like MrBeast. Attenborough still stands out as an expert young people take seriously.

Part of his appeal lies in his willingness to meet audiences where they are, adapting to changing media habits. He joined Instagram in 2020 (breaking the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to reach one million followers) and has collaborated with Netflix to stream shows.

Attenborough has shown the power of the media to shape how we see the natural world. Although there is little evidence for the appealing notion that watching a documentary like Blue Planet II directly drives behavioural change (such as reducing peoples’ plastic consumption), nature documentaries can certainly drive both public and policy interest via increased media attention.

Engaging the public on climate and nature requires moving beyond a simple notion of “getting the message across” and towards recognising the complexity and power of storytelling. For this, Attenborough’s success is an invaluable model.

His programmes combine top-class storytelling with pioneering technology. The visual appeal of his richly crafted documentaries is matched by compelling stories about little-known species. His work forms a substantial archive of success – many of the most popular TV programmes of all time are his nature documentaries.

In a highly cited paper from 2007, a team led by environmental social scientist Irene Lorenzoni defined engagement with climate change. They claimed that: “It is not enough for people to know about climate change in order to be engaged; they also need to care about it, be motivated and able to take action.”

Early Attenborough programming focused on increasing peoples’ knowledge about the natural world and as part of this, implicitly providing a reason to care about it. Increasingly though, he has moved to a more explicit stance about the climate emergency and our moral and ethical duty to act. An analysis of Attenborough’s use of language carried out in the late 2010s demonstrates this. It shows how he now uses emotional appeals to action. During an appearance on the Outrage + Optimism podcast he said: “we have an obligation on our shoulders and it would be to our deep eternal shame if we fail to acknowledge that.”

When a communicator like activist Greta Thunberg makes an appeal to morality, it can polarise audiences. Attenborough’s broad popularity makes his message reach wider audiences. His trustworthiness, storytelling mastery and innovative use of technology helps explain why he continues to have such a lasting impact on science and environmental communication, seven decades after his first broadcast.

Speaking up about climate change

Chloe Brimicombe, Climate Scientist at the University of Oxford, explores whether Attenborough’s on-screen attention to the climate crisis could have started earlier.

In his early documentaries, Attenborough focused on the wonder of the natural world.

He did go on to warn of the dangers of how humans were damaging the environment, but much of his early messaging reflected the belief that climate change can be linked to overpopulation. This is not demonstrated by the evidence. In fact, the richest in society are the most polluting but the smallest population group.

However, in recent years his beliefs changed with the science and more of his films started to cover climate change directly. For example, Climate Change: The Facts in 2019 and Perfect Planet 2021.

Attenborough’s works are part of the culture of the UK and the world. In my own life Attenborough’s works have always been present. During my undergraduate degree at Aberystwyth University, I was shown Frozen Planet in a lecture about glaciers and ice sheets because my lecturer was featured in the series. That moment stuck with me as I started my career as a climate scientist.

During my PhD in environmental sciences at the University of Reading, my fellow researchers were all big fans of Attenborough and of what could be achieved through the power of documentary film-making. In 2025, I was lucky enough to attend the film premier of Ocean with David Attenborough, something I consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

As well as inspiring audiences with awe and wonder, documentaries can be an important way to communicate what is happening to our changing climate. They reach audiences that might not otherwise engage on the subject. Documentary making has drawn critique for focusing on a producer’s interest instead of capturing the scientific background behind a certain issue.

This has led to schemes such as the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Scheme being setup to help bring scientists and documentary makers together.

In Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet (2020), he talks about the changes he has seen in the natural environment and his concern for the future of the planet. In the film Ocean with David Attenborough, the 2025 premier took place just before the UN’s ocean summit in Nice, France. This helped lead to real policy discussions and changes. That includes supporting the global ocean’s treaty, a landmark international agreement which creates a network of protected ocean sanctuaries.

Attenborough may have been late in communicating specifically on climate change. But, in recent years he has changed to being a strong advocate. Now, it’s time to make sure that message is heard and acted upon so that the world’s wonders remain for many generations to come.

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.

Chloe Brimicombe, Postdoctoral Researcher, Climate Science, University of Oxford; Ben Garrod, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement, University of East Anglia; Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, Head of Department, Science and Technology Studies, UCL, and Saffron O'Neill, Professor of Geography, University of Exeter

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

Ted Turner, who died on April 6, 2026, was bright, shrewd and, most of all, lucky. The cable TV visionary proved to be in the right place, at the right time, to change television and video news forever.

Most of his big gambles, on things such as the MGM studio and library, which led to the creation of the Turner Classic Movies channel, paid off handsomely.

But Turner will be remembered mostly for the creation and development of the Cable News Network – CNN – which launched in 1980 and made our knowledge of distant events instantaneous and our world more comprehensible. In this sense, Turner’s legacy extends beyond television. He changed our conception not only of journalism but also of our world.

Turner’s obituaries note his record-setting philanthropy, his impressive conservation efforts and his campaign to make the world safer by securing post-Soviet Union era nuclear weaponry. Over the course of his 87 years, Turner proved an outstanding yachtsman, an active and involved sports team owner and a quotable maverick in the business world.

Yet as a scholar of broadcast history – and a former CNN employee – I think Turner’s ultimate legacy is a bit more atmospheric than measurable.

He changed the media ecology in profound and lasting ways. CNN’s arrival disrupted an established media environment, in which broadcast journalism routines and audience viewing habits had become standardized by the ABC, CBS and NBC TV networks.

The ramshackle early CNN, with its farcical “world headquarters” housed in a former Atlanta-area country club, was derided as the “Chicken Noodle Network” by veteran network journalists. But by the mid-1980s it had established profitability, and by 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War, it assumed a singular position in America’s – and the world’s – information environment.

CNN had matured to respectability, and Turner was recognized as a visionary by Time magazine, which named him 1991’s Man of the Year. His idea had blossomed into a new arena for global information sharing, and his cable network fully competed with the established broadcast channels on big stories throughout the 1990s.

Right place, right time, right team

Turner’s cable TV news revolution required significant collaboration. The fulfillment of his vision needed luck, inherited money, innovative new technologies, supportive partners and even federal regulatory intervention.

For example, had Newton Minow’s Federal Communications Commission not pushed Congress to pass the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962, American TV manufacturers would likely never have placed the UHF dial on their sets. That UHF dial made additional local TV competition possible by allowing more stations to broadcast.

In 1970, Turner purchased UHF Channel 17 in Atlanta, which he named WTGC for “Turner Communications Group,” and UHF Channel 36 in Charlotte, North Carolina, which he named WRET for “Robert Edward Turner,” and began building his broadcasting empire.

By the mid-1970s, the cost of satellite distribution to cable system operators had decreased to such an extent that Turner realized – and seized – an opportunity to nationally distribute his local station. He worked with satellite and cable system operators, building early relationships that would prove beneficial to everyone in the cable industry as it developed over the 1980s and ’90s.

In 1979 and 1980, he used these relationships to build the first 24-hour TV network, but it was his internal hires that made the original channel function. To launch CNN, Turner hired veterans of the TV news business, including Robert Wussler, who had previously been president of CBS Sports and the CBS Television Network. And he hired Reese Schonfeld, who had previously founded the Independent Television News Association, a national syndicator of pooled local TV programming.

It was Turner’s vision, investments and established partnerships that made CNN possible. But the creation of the network proved a team effort requiring managerial competence and veteran television production experience.

CNN’s success was never assured. The channel continually lost money in its initial years. But the idea of 24-hour TV news being delivered to paying subscribers, through their cable system operators, proved so valuable that as early as 1981, two CBS executives secretly jetted to Atlanta to meet with Turner and Wussler about purchasing the network.

“I’ll sell you CNN,” he told them. But the deal floundered when the CBS executives would not accept anything less than 51% ownership – and control – of the channel. “You want control? You don’t buy control of Ted Turner’s companies,” he explained. “Forty-nine percent or less.”

Only four years later, Turner would turn the tables and attempt to take over CBS.

Turner came very close to living long enough to see CBS and CNN under a single ownership. CBS’ parent company, Paramount Skydance, is closing in on the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, the corporation that owns CNN.

Yet today, these two once hugely profitable news operations have been subsumed within massive multinational corporations, with their legacy brand equity providing as much value to their ownership as their journalism. Turner had long bemoaned the managerial fate of his cable news channel, which he sold to Warner Bros. in 1996.

Success invites criticism, establishes a legacy

Turner is one of the few figures in American media history who left a clearly identifiable legacy. There was a media world that existed before CNN and the one that came after. CNN’s success gave rise to competitors such as MSNBC, Fox News and others.

These channels simultaneously differentiated themselves from CNN while constantly measuring themselves against their older rival. But Turner’s original vision was distinct from the panel programs and punditry that’s now replaced original reporting from around the world.

Turner wanted to own and operate a global news organization where the news would always be the star, and where, like the classic wire services, professional reporting would be instant and accurate. And he wanted to make a fortune while doing it.

When he finally succeeded, critics began to complain about what journalist and academic Tom Rosenstiel called “The Myth of CNN” in a cover story in The New Republic in 1994. Scholars bemoaned CNN for its privileging good visuals over context and depth. They argued that its foreign coverage failed to maintain sufficient independence from the U.S. government.

Dictators and terrorists around the world learned to exploit CNN to get their messages across to the American public. In this sense, CNN’s neutrality, once a source of respect and credibility, could also undermine it by making the channel easily exploitable.

Billions of people around the world now take for granted the profusion of news access to anywhere on earth, at any time of day or night. That world was unimaginable before Turner’s work to make CNN conceivable and then real.

His legacy is not simply a series of cable channels but an entirely new way of thinking about information retrieval and access. Think about that the next time you scroll past video clips from London, Tokyo, Beirut or Mexico City, or check out breaking news videos from Ukraine or Tehran. And thank Ted for making such a world possible.

Michael J. Socolow, Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine

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

Peas aren’t often seen as a particularly exciting vegetable. They tend to be treated as a basic side dish or something people eat out of habit, rather than choice. But they’re also cheap, widely available and contain a combination of nutrients that can have a positive impact on our health.

While peas will not transform health on their own, when eaten regularly they can provide a useful contribution to daily protein, fibre and micronutrients intake.

Here are a few reasons why peas are worth including in your diet more often.

1. They’re a source of plant protein

Protein is essential for maintaining muscle, immune function and helping us feel full after meals. While not the highest protein food out there, they contain more protein than most vegetables.

Cooked green peas provide around 5g of protein per 100g, while dried peas contain closer to 8g per 100g. That is less than lentils (around 6g per 100g) or chickpeas (over 7g per 100g), but more than vegetables such as carrots (less than 0.5g of protein per 100g) or sweetcorn (less than 3g per 100g).

Pea protein has a well-balanced amino acid profile, containing all nine essential amino acids. These are the building blocks for protein, which the body uses for growth and repair, as well as to make enzymes, hormones and immune molecules.

However, like other grain legumes, peas are relatively low in sulfur‑containing amino acids – particularly methionine, which plays a key role in protein synthesis and growth.

This means that peas would not be ideal as your sole protein source. But since most people eat peas alongside other plant and animal proteins, this isn’t usually a problem – and peas can be a useful way to increase your protein intake.

Pea protein is also relatively easy to digest and absorb. Research suggests it has good bioavailability compared with many other plant protein sources, meaning the body can make good use of it.

2. Their fibre supports gut and metabolic health

Many people do not eat enough dietary fibre. Peas can help contribute to you achieving the recommended 30g of fibre per day. A 100g portion of cooked peas provides more than 6g of fibre, with dried peas providing even more (around 8g of fibre per 100g). Fibre plays an important role in digestive health, but its effects extend beyond the gut.

Peas contain both insoluble and soluble fibre. Insoluble fibre helps move food through the digestive system, reducing constipation. Soluble fibre dissolves in water to form a gel‑like substance, which slows digestion and helps regulate blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

Peas also contain prebiotic fibres, including galactooligosaccharides. These fibres feed beneficial bacteria in the gut, rather than being digested by the body. Supporting these bacteria helps achieve a more diverse gut microbiome, which has been linked to better metabolic health.

3. Peas contain iron and other beneficial plant compounds

Iron is essential for producing the blood protein haemoglobin, which carries oxygen around the body. But iron deficiency remains common worldwide, particularly among people who menstruate.

While vegetables are not usually major sources of iron, peas contain more iron than many commonly eaten vegetables such as carrots and peppers. However, it’s important to make sure you’re eating the right type of peas if you’re looking to get more iron in your diet.

For instance, mature peas tend to contain higher levels of phytic acid, a compound that can limit iron absorption in the gut. Green peas, which are harvested earlier, contain iron while having much lower levels of phytic acid. This gives garden peas and petit pois a more favourable iron‑to‑phytate ratio, which is associated with better iron bioavailability.

Peas also contain polyphenols, including flavonoids. These are plant compounds that have antioxidant and anti‑inflammatory effects, helping protect cells from damage and supporting overall health.

Regularly consuming flavonoids has been associated with improved cardiovascular health, better blood sugar regulation, and a lower risk of several chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer.

4. They’re one of the most affordable healthy foods

Cost plays a major role in influencing what people eat. Peas remain one of the cheapest ways to add some extra protein and fibre to meals.

Frozen peas can be bought for around £1 to £1.50 per kilogram at most major supermarkets. They’re frequently cheaper than other frozen vegetables, and much cheaper than many fresh vegetables.

Frozen peas also generate very little waste. You can cook the amount you need, which makes them good value for households trying to eat well on a limited budget.

5. Peas are easy to store, cook and eat regularly

Convenience also has a strong influence on food choices. Peas are easy to keep and use in different ways. Fresh, frozen, tinned and dried peas all have a place, but frozen peas are particularly practical.

Frozen vegetables are usually harvested at peak ripeness and frozen quickly. This helps preserve nutrients and reduces spoilage. Studies show that frozen and canned vegetables are nutritionally comparable to fresh varieties, and sometimes even retain nutrients better during storage.

Because peas require little preparation, they’re easy to add to meals that families already eat. They may even be more of a hit with children. Research suggests that many children are more accepting of vegetables that are soft and slightly sweet rather than bitter or tough, which may explain why peas are often better received than other vegetables.

Keeping peas on hand also makes it easy to add to your and your child’s platess regularly. Research shows that the more children are given a certain type of food, the more likely they are to eat them.

Simple ways to eat more peas

Including peas does not require major changes to eating habits. Keeping a bag of peas in the freezer makes it easy to add them to pasta, rice, risottos or curries, or to serve them as a quick side.

Peas can also be blended into soups, stirred into sauces, or added into pesto. Dried, frozen or tinned peas work well in soups and stews.

Peas may not seem exciting. But as part of a varied diet, they’re a reliable way to add protein, fibre and nutrients without adding too much cost or complexity.

Rachel Woods, Associate Professor, University of Nottingham; University of Lincoln

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A recent trip to Haworth, in West Yorkshire, got me thinking about Anne Brontë, who died 177 years ago this month. Stepping into St Michael and All Angels’ Church, a carved stone pillar prominently declares the location of the Brontë family vault. All members of the Brontë family – parents Patrick and Maria, sisters Elizabeth and Maria who died young, the rebellious brother Branwell, and Emily and Charlotte – are all listed. Yet, not mentioned is Anne Brontë, who is buried in Scarborough, almost 100 miles away.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights are repeatedly included on lists of Britain’s favourite novels and are firmly ensconced in the popular literary canon.

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey occasionally receive an honourable mention, but are often nowhere in sight. Like their author, they have been too frequently overlooked. Googling for articles on Anne Brontë brings up very few hits. I began to wonder: why is that?

Finding Anne

Agnes Grey, A Novel was the name of Anne’s first book, published in December 1847. She had been working on the text for many months before sending it off to the publisher Thomas Cautley Newby in July of that year. Emily’s Wuthering Heights was also accepted by Newby at the same time. It was a painful two months later that Charlotte finally found a publisher for her book, Jane Eyre.

Unluckily for her sisters, Charlotte’s publisher was more proactive than their own, and Jane Eyre became a sensation. Newby then decided to print Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights, riding on the coattails of Charlotte’s success. More naturalistic than Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, but similarly focused on the life of a poor governess, Anne’s novel had been upstaged and was received, as the author Samantha Ellis notes, as a “pale imitation of Jane Eyre”.

Even worse, the gender-neutral pseudonyms the sisters had chosen to hide their identities (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell), had ensured that the three books were thought to have been by only one author. Anne was not disheartened by Charlotte’s success or these authorship disputes however, and soon embarked on her second literary project.

Appallingly, many editions of Anne second and most famous work, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, have been abridged. In 1854, overzealous publisher Thomas Hodgson slashed huge chunks of text which featured controversial subject matter detailing the protagonist’s concerns about her husband’s depraved behaviour, so that the novel would fit neatly into a single volume.

Brontë scholars declare this to be a “corrupt text”, which cuts four pages of the novel’s opening, all expletives (filler words), 25 additional paragraphs and most of chapter 28. While more recent editions of the novel have reprinted the original 1848 text, many of us, without knowing, have read the potted version.

This censorship of Anne’s text is frankly unacceptable, as poor editing aside, much contextual information which she included for a reason has been removed. Charlotte’s opinion of her sister’s book, writing in a letter in 1850 that it “hardly appears desirable to preserve”, also damaged Anne Brontë’s reputation further.

Far from Haworth

Another factor in her neglect is that Anne’s grave is miles away from the rest of her family’s. She travelled to Scarborough in 1849 in an attempt to ease the symptoms of the tuberculosis that killed her only three days after her arrival.

Only a very dedicated Brontë fan would follow in her footsteps and make the pilgrimage to Scarborough in addition to Haworth. This Yorkshire town will always be the main site of the Brontë sisters fandom as long as their home, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, remains. Anne Brontë does not have a formal memorial in Haworth, while the rest of her family is buried there. This sets her apart even more.

Perhaps it is simply that Anne was the youngest in a remarkable family, and so in death is overlooked as she may have been in life. Or her stories are not the gothic fantasies featuring troubled and problematic literary heroes like Rochester and Heathcliff we immediately associate with the Brontë name.

Instead, Anne Brontë’s works are visceral and real, commenting unflinchingly on the dark sides of human nature: cruelty and violence to children and women, adultery, alcoholism, and coercive control being just some of the topics she covers. Contemporary reviewers called the novel “brutal” and “coarse”.

Utterly shocking at the time, with its descriptions of alcohol abuse and a female protagonist leaving her unhappy marriage, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is often hailed as a feminist masterpiece. Yet, this does not tie into the romantic ideal readers expect. Wuthering Heights grapples with many of the same themes, but while that novel is viewed as a gothic romance, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered by many as a social-realist text.

This enduring oversight could be for all of these reasons or a combination of some. Still, I resent the descriptions of Anne by journalists such as Charlotte Cory as the “runt of the literary litter”, and urge readers and Brontë fans to give her work a chance in its own right.

The 1996 mini-series of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is available to watch online. To me it is a travesty that it is 30 years since there was an adaptation of this novel. And there has never been a big-screen treatment of Agnes Grey, while Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have seen myriad film versions. A fine writer and one who is equal to her sisters, Anne Brontë deserves better.

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, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Amy Wilcockson, Research Fellow, English Literature, Queen Mary University of London

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Music superstar Taylor Swift has applied to trademark her voice and image to head off the threat of AI-generated impersonations. But the problem extends much further than pop royalty.

Anyone can be manipulated by the powerful technology: AI-created videos of you endorsing a politician you despise, images on social media of you in a skin-tight Spiderwoman outfit you never wore, a simulation of your voice allowing users to indulge their sexual fantasies … all possible.

The rapid development of deepfakes is amplifying calls for better legal protections for individuals’ images and likenesses. The notorious rollout of new picture-editing capabilities by X’s Grok chatbot in late 2025 only added to their urgency.

And the law has begun to respond. Australia now criminalises creating and sharing sexually explicit material online, including digitally created material.

In the US, the 2025 Take it Down Act prohibits non-consensual publication of intimate depictions of individuals, including “digital forgeries”.

In New Zealand, proposed amendments to the Crimes Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act will improve criminal law responses to sexual deepfakes.

But another legal front is opening up, too: victims are turning to tort law. Part of the civil (rather than criminal) law, tort claims do not require the state to act. People can seek damages and injunctions to shut down or block access to the harmful and humiliating material.

Misappropriation of personality

Some countries, including Canada, South Africa and India, recognise a common law tort of misappropriation of personality.

This targets unauthorised use of a person’s name, likeness and voice, usually for commercial purposes. About half of the states in the US recognise some version of this tort.

Now, the Indian courts are taking the lead in extending the tort to include deepfakes.

Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Anil Kapoor have used tort law to shut down websites and other online platforms where deepfakes have been posted – including fake pornographic videos and chatbots.

Elsewhere, including in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia, the law is much more piecemeal because the common law does not recognise a specific tort of misappropriation of personality.

This means protections need to be cobbled together from more established legal claims, including defamation, breach of confidence and and “passing off”.

A court battle is currently raging in the UK over whether a digitally-assisted resurrection of Peter Cushing in the 2016 Star Wars movie Rogue One is a form of “unjust enrichment”. (Cushing starred in a previous Star Wars episode but died in 1994.)

The right to live with dignity

In the Bollywood cases, the courts explained that deepfakes affect victims’ “right to live with dignity”. The judges linked these tort principles to constitutional protections for “life and liberty”.

Canadian judges have said similar things, linking protections for individuals’ personality to rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights.

Human dignity – essentially the right not to be a means to others’ ends – is at the core of these protections and it recognises the inherent worth of all people. Deepfakes cut right across these fundamental legal commitments.

In the case of Anil Kapoor, the court acknowledged additional harms beyond those he suffered. The legal protections were also for “the sake of his family and friends who would not like to see his image, name and other elements being misused, especially for such tarnishing and negative use”.

This recognises an emerging legal concern with connections between people, not only with the rights of individuals. It also aligns with the increasing role of Māori tikanga (law and custom) in New Zealand’s common law.

Another welcome development in the United States is proposed legislation that would enable non-celebrities, not just the rich and famous, to bring damages claims and seek injunctions against deepfakes.

A bill introduced to Congress in April would extend protections to US citizens’ “DNA sequences or traits” that could be used to replicate or misuse identity in commercial applications.

Protecting victims of deepfakes will require an array of legal responses: criminal, civil, technological and regulatory – including trademark law, as Taylor Swift is using.

Unfortunately, few of us have the financial means to bring a torts claim. Even so, the emphasis on human dignity in the Bollywood cases reminds us of what’s at stake: the inherent worth of all people – celebrities and non-celebrities alike.

Graeme Austin, Professor of Law, University of Melbourne; Chair of Private Law, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

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Displays of artworks from the permanent collections of state and national galleries are often overlooked. Critics tend to flock to a crowded calendar of blockbusters and temporary shows. These may offer greater novelty and relevance for current events. But this isn’t always true.

New Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia is a case in point. Tucked away on the second floor, it would be easy to miss this showcase for new acquisitions and collection highlights.

But the culturally, stylistically and materially diverse display is a welcome treat for those who take the time to wander this far into the building.

The weight of moving images

Two groups of related works bracket the space, distinct in aesthetic but mirrored in concept.

A suite of new acquisitions created between 2012 and 2016 by Thai-born contemporary artist Korakrit Arunanondchai takes up one end of the gallery.

Visitors are invited to lay back on denim cushions to watch his 25-minute video. Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2014-15) is a multilingual reflection on globalisation, myth and identity.

Arunanondchai uses sculptural elements to lend weight to moving images. I found similarities with fellow Bangkok-based film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose meditative video installation A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage) featured earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Arunanondchai’s mannequins in painted denim embody themes of self-creation and costumed performance. They are avatars for a global culture that transforms all it touches – at least at face value.

The mirrored acrylic surfaces of Untitled (2557–2558) (Mirror 3) (2012) and Untitled (Ground) (2016) invite viewers to consider their own place in this cultural tide. Reflected faces are adorned with cast-off tech, scraps of denim and scattered twigs and soil. It is a bowerbird-like collage of trophies and scraps.

Weerasethakul transformed the algorithmic flow of a social media feed into a dream-like stream of half-seen images. Arunanondchai mimics the aerial viewpoint and slick editing of tourism promos and music videos. His work is just as captivating, but much more maximalist in tone.

Exploring cultural exports

At the opposite end of the gallery, a second group of mannequins showcase Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please Guest Artist Series (1996–98).

Designed in collaboration with contemporary artists Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo Qiang, these also exemplify the global flow of cultural forms.

Here, the Americanisation implied by acid-wash denim comes into contact with Japanese “soft power” narratives of design innovation and technological ingenuity.

Similar narratives can be read into Tokyo-based artist collective teamLab’s four-channel video Black waves (2016) and Yoshitomo Nara’s painting No War (2019).

Nara’s large-headed girl in acrylics on wood combines the child-like “cuteness” of kawaii culture with the graphic appeal of Takashi Murakami’s “superflat” aesthetic. Both are lucrative cultural exports.

TeamLab have found global fame as “ultra-technologists”. They are committed to a digital metamorphosis of Japanese artistic traditions. Black waves transforms the linear style of ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world”, into an ocean of living pixels.

Samples of these traditions appear throughout the space. Miyake, Nara and teamLab are tied to a longer lineage of cultural exchange.

A selection of nihonga, “Japanese-style paintings”, of Mt Fuji document an earlier era of soft power. They were presented to Australia by the International Cultural Appreciation Society of Japan in 1977.

Kato Shinmei’s Maiko, apprentice geisha (1976) is another nihonga work. It implies a connection between the Yoshiwara pleasure district at the centre of ukiyo-e and the contemporary “floating worlds” of global fashion and politics.

Kabuki actor portraits dating to the 1920s and 1930s exemplify the renewal of ukiyo-e as part of the shin-hanga or “new prints” movement.

This reinforces the exhibition’s overarching themes of performance, impersonation and surface appeal masking hidden realities.

Much more than a highlight reel

These themes are evident, too, in a stellar display of mostly Chinese photographic works lining the gallery walls.

Featuring iconic images by Hong Hao, Song Dong, Wang Qingsong and Yang Fudong newly acquired for the collection, this is a real stand-out.

Their conceptually complex, technically daring and aesthetically polished visions of consumerist excess, urban squalor and the fragile boundaries of self-identity illustrate the burst of Chinese photographic artistry during the 1990s and 2000s.

Contemporary art photography is one of several core collection strengths of the gallery celebrated in New Asian Art. They sit alongside contemporary Southeast Asian art, Japanese prints and Indonesian textiles (in a stunning display of contemporary batik shoulder slings and skirts).

The exhibition offers much more than a highlight reel. Curators Carol Cains and Shaune Lakin have carefully selected both new and more familiar works to draw out the fluidity of contemporary Asian identities, fusing past and present, myth and technology and local and global cultural currents.

New Asian Art is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until April 18 2027.

Alex Burchmore, Senior Lecturer, Art History and Curatorial Studies, Australian National University

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Over the past 15 years, I have witnessed university students’ shrinking patience for reading – especially for reading “long” books. Increasingly, students also opt for audiobooks. While speeding up the reading experience, these fundamentally change what is noticed.

The neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf suggests many students no longer have the “cognitive patience” to read long books due to the complexities of thought and sustained attention required.

One explanation for this shift is the dominance of digital technology in our daily lives, which has rewired our brains for surface-level scanning and multitasking, weakening our capability for prolonged attention. Another is our culture of instant gratification.

Some studies into the “screen inferiority effect” suggest when we read on paper (rather than on screens such as smartphones) the brain often processes more deeply and comprehension is better. Memory and information recall are also stronger.

So where does this leave the classics?

Millions of Australians, both children and adults, struggle with literacy.

In this series, we explore the challenges of reading in an age of smartphones and social media – and ask experts how we can become better readers.

Many books considered “classics” are long. Masterpieces such as Middlemarch or Les Misérables might seem intimidating because in physical form they resemble door stops and they often have complex, demanding language and long, convoluted sentences.

But reading the classics can deliver cognitive, social, emotional and even ethical benefits, helping us strengthen habits of thoughtful attention and develop the skills to communicate with clarity and empathy.

Extending our attention spans increases our ability to connect thoughts and ideas, challenges memory and recall and perhaps helps us attend more patiently to our own lives and the lives of others. In reading Robinson Crusoe, for instance, we share in the patience of the title character, stranded on a desert island. We, too, pay careful heed to details and signs in the world around him.

The complex language of classics can help us discern meaning amid a multitude of voices. When working through multiple sentence clauses and the layered sentences of a meaningful paragraph we need to suspend judgement until we have the fuller picture. Following complex and interwoven narratives also helps us to understand human complexity in real life.

Here are some tips for reading the classics – and some shorter ones to start with.

1. Follow your instincts

Find out which classic novels influenced the development of your favourite genre and you might find a natural fit. My brilliant English teacher at school, Mr Taylor, knew I loved detective fiction, so he kept recommending Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone as an early example of crime mystery. Eventually taking his advice, I loved it and followed it with Collins’s other classic, The Woman in White.

2. Remove distractions

It can help to set aside dedicated reading time, such as 20–30 minutes a day in which phones, smartwatches and other devices are out of the way. There is an added benefit: research by Mindlab International has shown reading for only six minutes reduces stress levels by 68%.

3. Make a note of memorable sentences

You don’t need a teacher to notice powerful moments or startling language. For example, Charles Dickens’s opening to A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”) famously captures the coexistence of extremes in the world – of hope and despair, of wisdom and foolishness. Dickens has crafted an enduring truth of human experience.

4. Ask yourself questions

Why is this considered a classic? Why do I dislike this particular character? Why does this scene make me feel uncomfortable? Usually, the author wants you to consider why things were written the way they were (rather than, for example, with a different vocabulary or narrative voice). Asking questions deepens comprehension.

5. Embrace the unknown

If longer sentences or old-fashioned language trip you up, go over them again and then keep going. Kindles offer instant definitions at the touch of the screen but sometimes looking up every word in the dictionary can interfere with the opportunity to deduce meaning from context.

6. Be ready to laugh

Some classic novels are downright funny. I am currently reading Anthony Trollope’s The Warden. The sentences may be long, but they are almost always punctuated with hilarious insights into the hypocrisies of human beings and the naming rights the author deploys are childishly funny.

7. Read aloud

Classic novels were often serialised and read aloud in instalments in families or community groups. As a teenager, some of my most memorable early forays into the classics were shared with a dear cousin while staying with our grandparents in the Blue Mountains, when we would read aloud to each other on wintry, windy nights by the fireplace. Here, I first encountered Daphne Du Maurier’s evocative West Country mystery Rebecca and Dodie Smith’s eccentric and funny I Capture the Castle. Begin your adventure into the classics by reading aloud with a friend or in a book club.

8. Don’t feel too daunted

Remember that getting started with the story, getting to know the writer’s style, gradually piecing together the world of the novel can be the hardest stage. Take your time, be patient and persist. The further you get into a novel like War and Peace, the easier it is to continue because you simply want to know what happens.

Here are three short classics worth the journey.

George Eliot’s Silas Marner

A heartwarming study of the “inward life” of Silas, the weaver, exiled from his fellowship of narrow religious sectarians. He finds purpose in life, first in money and then in the fatherly love he develops for Eppie, the child who wanders into his home. Silas Marner is an accessible taster of Eliot’s longer experiments exploring emotion and “fellow feeling”.

James Joyce’s Dubliners

This book is, strictly speaking, a collection of 12 short stories. Together they form a masterpiece of brutal Anglo-Irish realism interrupted by moments of epiphany. The book contends with questions of action and inaction, betrayal, political idealism and pragmatism. The story of Eveline, who is on the cusp of eloping with the “very kind, manly, and open-hearted” Frank on a night-boat to Buenos Aires to escape the ill-treatment of her ageing, abusive father, leaves the reader astonished by the sudden departure in the final lines from her earlier rational self-analysis.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

An experimental novel set on one summer’s day in London, 1923. The socialite Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party but the absence of any chapter breaks in the book creates for the reader a sense of the stifling impact of war that still lingers over British family, social and political life. In the trauma of returned soldier Septimus Smith we read an early fictional exploration of shell shock.

Johanna Harris, Associate Professor, Literature, Western Civilisation Program, Australian Catholic University

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

On Mother’s Day, Americans go all out with gift-buying and dining out to honor the women in their lives. In fact, according to some estimates, consumer spending in the United States on this day is around US$34 billion.

This consumerist emphasis has long been criticized – including by the holiday’s founder, Anna Jarvis. She started the celebration in 1908 to honor her own mother, Civil War-era activist Ann Jarvis, who founded Mothers’ Day Work Clubs in her native West Virginia.

These clubs were associations of local mothers who came together for collective workdays during which they provided education and assistance to families. When the Civil War broke out, the clubs pivoted to promoting peace and reconciliation and offered food and medical assistance to both Union and Confederate soldiers. These mothers viewed peace as the only way to preserve their communities and to ensure the health and well-being of all.

As a scholar of Greek and Roman antiquity, I’m aware that honoring motherhood goes far beyond women’s work in the domestic sphere. In fact, for millennia the role of mothers has included not only childbearing and education but also protection over the community as a whole, especially through advocacy for peace.

Texts dating as far back as the fifth century B.C.E. show mothers promoting peace. In Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” the women of Athens unite to end the Peloponnesian War. The leader of the peace movement argues that women suffer twice as much as men in war – bearing children only to send them off to die as soldiers.

Mothers and ancient goddesses

In the ancient world, motherhood itself guaranteed a woman’s power within her family and community, especially if the baby was male. The birth provided an heir for the family and ensured that the woman was not going to be rejected by her husband for childlessness.

In fact, as classical scholar Florencia Foxley explains, motherhood elevated a woman to the rank of protectress and sustainer of the city because she provided a new generation of citizens and soldiers for the community.

The birth of children also gave the woman unofficial power and influence over the political decisions made by her husband and sons, as dramatized in the play “Lysistrata.”

The cult of the Greek goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus and queen of the gods, reflects this dual function of mothers as protectors of children and of communities in the ancient world.

Hera was worshipped in wedding rituals, and she presided over childbirth in the figure of her daughter Eileithyia, the midwife goddess. Beyond the domestic sphere, Hera was also the divine protectress of the ancient city of Argos.

In Rome, under her Latin name Juno, she was worshipped with the epithets of Pronuba as the goddess of marriage, and Lucina as the goddess of childbirth. Nonetheless, Juno was also an integral part of the Capitoline Triad with Jupiter and Minerva, the trio of deities that protected the city. In fact, Juno was credited with saving Rome from an attack by the Gauls in 390 B.C.E. when her sacred geese warned the Romans of the approaching enemy army.

Contemporary practices

The tremendous power of women as peace advocates and protectors of communities continues today.

As journalist Margot Adler has shown, some neo-pagans believe that ancient societies that worshipped mother deities were more peaceful than cultures with patriarchal religious traditions. Today, these worshippers seek to revive the cults of mother deities in order to return to this harmonious way of life. They invoke mother goddesses to promote the political power of women, demilitarization and harmony with the natural world, as well as world peace.

Similarly, “Lysistrata” continues to inspire women’s advocacy for peace worldwide. In 2003, for instance, peace activists Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower advocated against the Iraq War by coordinating over 1,000 readings of “Lysistrata” worldwide in a single day.

Admittedly, the play presents female characters in ridiculous ways and, as classical scholar Mary Beard has pointed out, the ending of the play makes it clear that women’s political power is only a fantasy. Yet the play acknowledges that women suffered disproportionately from the consequences of war in ancient times, just as they do today.

The play also acknowledges, albeit in a humorous way, that women wield tremendous power for peace, which is borne out today as well. In fact, according to a study by King’s College London, “states where women hold more political power are less likely to go to war and less likely to commit human rights abuses.”

In a different context, Catholics around the world honor Mary as a mother figure associated with peace and justice. One of her manifestations, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is a popular figure of veneration in Mexico and Latin America, particularly among people of Indigenous descent.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is represented pregnant and venerated by devotees seeking protection and peace. Pope John Paul II, in a public prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1979, asked her to “grant peace, justice and prosperity to our peoples.”

The way Mother’s Day is celebrated in the U.S. today conspicuously omits the tremendous power that women wield beyond the domestic sphere. While women’s work raising children and supporting their families is important and should always be honored, Anna Jarvis envisioned this day as more expansive – a day that honors women as political and moral actors, especially as agents of peace globally.

Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Tufts University

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