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This padlet provides you with guidance to the TOK course, sample resources, and quick videos that will orientate you with what's required to set up and deliver a fantastic TOK course.

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These twelve 3-minute videos offer clear and practical advice for anyone teaching TOK for the first time - and for those who want to rethink the way they do things.

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12 tips for TOK teachers | TIP 1: RELAX!

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These twelve 3-minute videos offer clear and practical advice for anyone teaching TOK for the first time - and for those who want to rethink the way they do things.

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12 tips for TOK teachers | TIP 1: RELAX!

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A 3-minute guide to the exhibition objects

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A 3-minute guide to the exhibition objects

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How do I choose my TOK exhibition objects? | TOK explainer videos

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What is the TOK exhibition? | TOK explainer videos

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What is the TOK essay? | TOK explainer videos

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What is theory of knowledge? | TOK explainer videos

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Introducing the new BQ framework (for 2024-25)

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Lesson objective I can understand the different aspects of the TOK exhibition, and how it will be assessed

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1.14 Introducing the TOK exhibition | Class presentation (24-25)

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Katie Kermode is a memory champion who holds four world records for such impressive feats as memorizing 1,080 numbers in 30 minutes. Meanwhile, most of us can't memorize a single password, recall a grocery list longer than seven items, or name that one actor who seems to be in everything. (You know the one.)

But Kermode and other memory virtuosos weren't gifted with flawless memories. They train in techniques such as the "method of loci" to hack their working memories to manage vast amounts of information quickly. Research shows, however, that such training doesn't impact general cognitive or memory functions. In other words, the life of a memory champion is as full of Post-It reminders and password managers as anyone else's.

Certainly it would be better if our memories were a perfect record of everything we encountered, right? Not necessarily. According to Charan Ranganath, neuroscientist and the author of Why We Remember, humans evolved the memory system we did because it helps us stay attentive to what is important.

Big Think recently spoke with Ranganath to discuss how memories form, how they help keep our thinking quick, and what we can do to connect more with the memories that matter most to us.

Big Think: What's wrong with the common assumption that memory is a recording stored in the brain?

Ranganath: Although it's understandable that so many have that assumption, there are a few things off with it. The first thing is that we're supposed to remember everything. The second is that when we remember, it's an exact replay of what happened. Neither of those is true scientifically.

People retain only a fraction of the experiences they have. That's true of everyone I know of who has been quantitatively studied. People also embellish their memories. They can distort them; they can make inferences.

I always say my phone has a photographic memory. I store lots of photos on it, I rarely go back to them, and if I want a particular one, I spend a long time searching for it. [Conversely], the brain is about quality over quantity. It's designed to carry what you need so that you can be nimble and agile and find what you need when you need it.

A figment of the imagination?

Big Think: How do we alter memories when we remember?

Ranganath: There are two schools of thought. One school is that you form a new memory when you are remembering. The other school is that you actually alter the original memory. It doesn't really matter which explanation is correct, subjectively speaking. The act of remembering changes the way you'll remember an event later on.

In neurobiology, people talk about a phenomenon called reconsolidation.After a memory is activated, there are all of these chemical changes that effectively make the memory more vulnerable - that is, the connections between the neurons that help bring that memory to life become a bit unstable. Things can happen that can alter that memory at that point.

We can see this when remembering past events. When we tell the same memory over and over, it becomes less detailed and more rote. It reflects a kind of story rather than a re-imagining of what happened.

We think, 'Oh, nobody can predict the future. That's just psychic nonsense.' But we all predict the future every day.
Charan Ranganath

Big Think: How does imagination play a part in memory embellishment?

Ranganath: A memory is not only the things we saw and heard; it's also our thoughts and our feelings. That means that when you remember something, it's not just what happened. It reflects your interpretation of what happened.

For instance, if you're tired of work, you might remember a beach vacation and think, "That was so great!" On the other hand, if money is tight and your family is bugging you to take another trip, you might look back on the same vacation and think, "We stood in line forever at the airport, and we all got sick after we came back."

Both are true, but the way we imagine it can be very different depending on your goals, perspectives, and beliefs.

Through no fault of one's own memory

Big Think: So, can our memories be described as "faulty"?

Ranganath: If the goal was to store everything in some mental vault, then from that perspective, memory is faulty. But if the goal is to use the past in meaningful ways, combine different experiences creatively, or consider new possibilities, then our memory is doing exactly what it should be.

For instance, the brain is optimized to process information quickly and then generate a prediction about what's going to happen next. The value of that predictive processing is not only that it's fast; it also optimizes the information you get. Even when our predictions are wrong, that orients us to where the new, important information is.

Imagine I walk into my friend's kitchen. My eyes aren't going to move randomly all over the place. They're going to scan the kitchen counters and then the refrigerator. They're going to go to the places where my brain expects important things to be. That's all based on our previous experiences and knowledge of kitchens.

But now let's say I go into my friend's kitchen and find someone has left my guitar on the counter or a blender on the floor. My eyes will gravitate to them before I'm even aware of it. That's memory in action. My memory tells me where everything is supposed to be, and when something violates that expectation, it becomes a point of maximal information. I don't even need to form a new memory. It's only the new information that I really need to take in.

It's so powerful because we think, "Oh, nobody can predict the future. That's just psychic nonsense." But we all predict the future every day. Sure, sometimes we're better at it than other times, but we are pretty good at it, and that's what memory is all about.

Keeping memory in the picture

Big Think: What should we expect from our memories, and how can we get the most out of them?

Ranganath: We can expect that our memories can be fragmentary, and they're definitely going to be incomplete.

While there are many tips for memorizing particular kinds of information, a basic principle of memory is that memories compete with each other. That's not necessarily intuitive. We tend to think that people have a memory, it goes into this mental slot, and then you pull it up. In fact, that thing you're storing in your memory is competing with all these surrounding memories.

The analogy I like is that of a cluttered desk covered in standard yellow Post-It notes. If I want to find the note with my bank account password on it, it's going to take forever. On the other hand, if I wrote the password on a hot pink or fluorescent green Post-It, it's easy to locate because it's different from everything else.

So, the principle for having something be memorable is to attend to what's distinctive about it. The more you can attend to what is distinctive and be mindful of it, the more vivid the memory.

We're constantly taking pictures and then throwing them on social media. But this is the ultimate form of electronic amnesia.
Charan Ranganath

[For instance], we're constantly taking pictures and then throwing them on social media. But this is the ultimate form of electronic amnesia. You're cheating your experiencing self because you don't connect with what's happening, and you're cheating your remembering self because you've deprived yourself of a great memory.

So instead of taking pictures of every moment of your vacation, pay attention to what makes a particular moment distinctive. Ask yourself: What is going to be most memorable in each picture I take? How can I compose the picture to focus on the vivid details that will bring me back to this time and place?

That's when pictures become valuable - when they force you to pay attention to the things that are important to you in that moment.

Big Think: Anything you'd like to add?

Ranganath: I would like people to change their expectations about what their memory is and should be for. That may help us be more forgiving of ourselves and others.

It can also be important for the expectations of how we learn. A lot of kids struggle in school, and we tend to view struggle as bad, but one of the messages in my book is that struggling is a sign of learning under the right conditions. The process of working through something is a learning process.

The last thing is that memory should give you more options, not fewer. Memory can sometimes leave you with a narrow worldview if you become stuck in the same beliefs, looking for the same information that confirms what you remember to be true. That's when memory leads you to get stuck in a corner.

Instead, you should use memory to strategically think of things that can help you in the present or [generate] future possibilities - giving you the options that will help you be more flexible, creative, and imaginative.

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Why memory is more about your future than your past

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Memories aren't mental recordings. They are mental information designed to keep our thinking nimble and helps us better manage the future.

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For the first time in history, a single language dominates global scientific communication. But the actual production of knowledge continues to be a multilingual enterprise.

The use of English as the norm poses challenges for scholars from regions where English is not widely spoken. They must decide whether to publish in English for global visibility, or publish in their native language to make their work accessible to local communities. And when they work in English, they end up expending more time and effort writing and revising papers than their native English-speaking peers.

As gatekeepers of scientific knowledge, academic publishers play a key role in helping or hindering the participation of a multilingual scientific community. So how are they doing?

We reviewed the policies of 736 journals in the biological sciences and discovered the great majority are making only minimal efforts to overcome language barriers in academic publishing. Our research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

A wide range of inclusive policies

Linguistically inclusive policies come in many forms, and can be implemented at each stage of the editorial process. They might aim to make publishing more multilingual. Alternatively - if sticking with English - they may aim to reduce the burden on non-native English speakers.

Allowing papers to be published in more than one language at the same time would resolve the dilemma many non-native English speaking scholars face about communicating locally or globally. However, only 7% of the journals we surveyed allowed this possibility. (A further 11% will allow multilingual versions of an abstract alone.)

Read more: Non-native English speaking scientists work much harder just to keep up, global research reveals

Another possibility would be to implement machine translation tools to make versions of an article available in multiple languages on a journal's website. There has been recent progress in this area, but only 11% of journals we surveyed have put it into practice.

Journals can also indicate they value submissions from authors from diverse linguistic backgrounds by explicitly declaring they will not reject manuscripts solely on the basis of the perceived quality of the English. Surprisingly, we found only two journals stated this.

Similarly, providing author guidelines in multiple languages would further encourage submissions from diverse authors. While 11% of the journals we examined translate specific sections of their guidelines to other languages, only 8% offer their entire guidelines in more than one language.

To ensure published research learns from the scientific contributions of scholars from around the globe, journals should explicitly allow or encourage non-English literature to be cited. Only one tenth of journals mention this in author guidelines.

Journals may also adopt measures to ensure work submitted by non-native English speakers is assessed fairly. One such measure is the provision of English-language editing services.

More than half the journals we surveyed refer authors to some kind of editing services; only 1% offer the service free of charge to authors. The cost of editing may impose a considerable financial burden on scholars in lower-income countries.

Another measure is to educate reviewers and editors about language barriers and instruct them to assess the manuscripts based on their research attributes alone. This is something only 4-6% of journals implement.

Drivers of inclusivity

We also identify two key influences on a journal's adoption of linguistically inclusive policy.

The first is impact factor, a measure commonly taken to represent the prestige of a journal. We found journals with higher impact factors tend to adopt less-inclusive policies, possibly because they mostly target English-proficient authors and readers.

The second influence is ownership by a scientific society. Journals owned by scientific societies tended to adopt more inclusive policies. They have also taken the lead in the movement to publish multilingual content.

Read more: What is open access and why should we care?

Many scientific societies have a mandate to foster diverse communities. They are supported by their members and are well positioned to push for a cultural change in scientific publishing.

We also found that open access journals (which make research available to the public for free) were no more likely to adopt inclusive linguistic policies, nor were journals with more diverse editorial boards.

The apparent lack of influence of linguistically diverse board members is a puzzle. Perhaps editors who have experienced language barriers in their own professional life do not advocate for non-native English speaking authors. Or perhaps editorial boards have less power to define editorial policies than we might expect.

Language barriers

Language barriers deepen geographic divides, hampering knowledge sharing. Tackling them in academic publishing becomes critical to effectively address both regional and global issues, such as health and conservation.

In our study, we looked at a number of linguistically inclusive policies, but there are plenty of other things journals can do to help scientists from non-English speaking backgrounds. These range from using artificial intelligence tools to the re-negotiation of copyrights to authorise the publication of translations elsewhere.

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Prestigious journals make it hard for scientists who don't speak English to get published. And we all lose out

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A study of 736 biological science journals showed only a small fraction are making efforts to foster a multilingual scientific community.

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How advances in philosophy made the world safer for scientists

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Science and philosophy seem like separate fields, but philosophical advancements have helped to keep scientists safe.

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I understand Big Question 5, and can relate it to the themes and areas of knowledge

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5.1 Introducing BQ5 | Class presentation (24-25)

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In the trailer for his latest epic film, "Napoleon," director Ridley Scott urges viewers to "witness the rise of an emperor, lover, tyrant and legend."

What many saw instead were the historical inaccuracies from the timing of the battles to the length of Marie Antoinette's hair at the time of her execution (It was famously shorn at her death; the trailer shows it long.) The criticisms were enough for Scott to fire back, telling the New Yorker that historians picking the movie apart should "get a life."

Historian and Northeastern London associate professor Estelle Paranque takes a more lax approach on the trailers for the movie that comes out Nov. 22.

"I enjoyed the trailers for what they are," said Paranque. "People are upset (that) Joaquin Phoenix doesn't have Napoleon's dynamism. You weren't there. None of us were. It is OK for a director or for someone who writes a play or any type of historical fiction to give their own interpretation."

Paranque is no stranger to historical fiction. She specializes in queenship, royal, and diplomatic studies during the 16th and 17th centuries, meaning she's studied some of the most fictionalized figures in history, such as French queen Catherine de' Medici and Queen Elizabeth I of England. She's contributed to historical documentaries, docudramas and podcasts as well.

Paranque runs a YouTube series that offers her own analysis on the accuracy of historical movies and shows like " Oppenheimer" in order to bridge the gap between fact and fiction.

Despite her critiques, Paranque says historical fiction is beneficial for historians because it's often the jumping-off point to get people interested in history.

"I think what I like about historical fiction is that with all these movies there are doors and windows to the past," she said. "I'm hoping people will be more interested to know (more)."

One of the biggest issues Paranque often highlights in her videos is the tendency for creators to lean into the sensational or the stereotypical. Catherine de' Medici dabbles in black magic in shows like "The Serpent Queen" (which Paranque calls "appalling") and "Reign." Anne Boleyn is portrayed as a scheming seductress in "The Other Boleyn Girl" and "The Tudors," when in reality, historians believe she was very pious and Henry VIII was the one who pursued her.

"There is a danger of historical fiction perpetuating myth because it never goes deep," Paranque said. "It could improve if it engaged better with the work of historians and ... tried to find a way to work with historians to make the (facts) entertaining. The thing with the Tudors or Elizabeth I or Catherine de'Medici is you really don't have to make things up to make it entertaining. ... The downside of historical fiction is it helps perpetuate what historians try so hard to debunk, the myths and dark legends of certain people."

Despite this, the genre can spark an interest in history. Paranque points to Showtime's "The Tudors" as an example of this. Based on the reign of Henry VIII, the show succeeded in entertaining viewers for four seasons, but Paranque said it heavily sexualized the female characters, particularly Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife who was also executed after allegedly committing adultery.

"Some of the storylines were completely butchered," Paranque said. "The complexity of the court was completely butchered. There were a lot of storylines that didn't make any sense. ... At the same time, so many people reach out to me and tell me that 'The Tudors' is the reason why they love the Tudors and read all Tudor books now. Historical fiction helps put history into popular interest. Without it, historians would have a smaller audience."

The same goes for Napoleon. Even when filmmakers and authors, like Scott, try to stick to the real history, it's impossible to squeeze everything into a two-hour film, Paranque said.

But fictional elements aren't always a bad thing. In the " Napoleon" trailers, viewers see the emperor crowning himself while making a comment about finding the crown of France in a gutter and claiming it for himself. It's not something the general ever said in public, Paranque said, but it works so far as creating an accurate idea of Napoleon.

"I like the fact that line made it in," she said. "Maybe it was not the right place, but I think it works. ... He's tapping into Napoleon being seen as a tyrant and as a legend at the same time," Paranque said. "Even when we think that these people are doing a disservice to history, we have to (think) twice because by criticizing them, by criticizing what they've done, you always end up talking about the real history. And that is quite nice for historians."
Erin Kayata is a Northeastern Global News reporter. Email her at e.kayata@northeastern.edu. Follow her on X/Twitter @erin_kayata.

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Are there historical inaccuracies in Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon'? This history professor says that's OK

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The new trailers for Ridley Scott's film on Napoleon inflamed some historians due to inaccuracies, but a history expert says that's fine.

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here's a video format spreading on TikTok. Recorded in towns across suburban England, teenage interviewers stop their peers on the street, fielding questions that range from fashion choices to humorous hypotheticals and local neighbourhood dramas, in the process building a large social media following and showcasing their patch of land to the world. "950 [pounds] for that, you know my ting," a teenage white boy says about his Canada Goose jacket in a video recorded in Bury St Edmunds. "We're checking his drip, ya dun know, you heard my man," someone says in another video.

Both the hosts and many of the interviewees speak with this distinct drawl - Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect born in London's African-Caribbean communities in the 1970s and 80s. (Some now argue that "Black British English" is a more fitting term.) It's rooted in Jamaican patois with influences from cockney, and more recently Arabic, the US and West African Pidgin English.

A primary cause of this spread - which goes beyond viral TikToks - is British rap, with drill, grime and more taking new linguistic styles to the far corners of the country. In some cases, the entire cultural spread of MLE is contained in a single song. "I'm giving them UK slang / My brudda, my fam, my akh / You say: 'The feds just done a sweep' / We say, 'The boy dem run in my gaff'," Central Cee rapped in a 2022 freestyle, nodding to patois, cockney and Arabic respectively - akh is an Arabic word that has fed into MLE from the British Somali community, who are among both the largest Muslim and Black communities in Britain. Elsewhere, west African slang and dialects have continued to creep into British rap. Drizzled on to songs by the likes of Skepta, J Hus and NSG, terms such as wahala (trouble), "let me land" (let me finish) and juju (ancient African spiritual belief systems) are a reflection of how African communities are carving themselves deeply into British soil.

"You have quite a long history of British vernaculars being exported through British cultural forms," says Christian Ilbury, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh - from Scouse accents with the Beatles to Arctic Monkeys and the presence of industrial working-class accents in indie music. "Grime essentially became the vehicle in which we perceived MLE." Those kids in suburban England, he says, "don't speak this variety because of where they grew up. They're using it to align with a cultural orientation that they appreciate."

In recent years, the audience for UK rap has broadened, flowing out of inner cities. Key to its spread was the internet, which tore down the music industry's traditional barriers to access and spread this new way of speaking. "Social media has played a huge role," says Rob Drummond, professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. "Everybody can access everything, so it's going to spread faster. Young people are maintaining communication all the time through Snapchat and WhatsApp. It makes it much more immersive and immediate."

Ilbury agrees: "With social media, you get representations of MLE that transcend geographical boundaries."

Also key is the particular appeal of Black pop culture, as defined by US writer and activist Kevin Powell in a September 2000 interview with Time: "You cannot discuss Black music without taking into account its edginess ... its rebelliousness ... and the fact that edginess and rebelliousness ultimately appeals to white young people as much as it does to Black young people."

That dynamic took root in Britain in the 1970s, when various forms of reggae - also subversive and at times perceived as anti-establishment - became distinctly British iterations of a Black coolness that appealed to younger white audiences.

In the early 70s, slang in wider London revolved heavily around "East End, white working-class slang, with some Yiddish and with some [Romany-derived queer slang] Polari," says Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King's College London. Things began to shift in the middle of the decade, he says, when "a lot of younger white kids got into reggae and later into dancehall and dub," and started to "pick up slang that wasn't from the old varieties". They were leaning into the patois present in the music, and subsequently in MLE, with phrases like "yard' (house) and "babylon" (establishment or police).

They were leaning into the patois present in the music, and subsequently in MLE. "Jamaican culture in London," says Thorne, was perceived as "super cool. The mods loved it, then later skinheads and punks loved it." He remembers the music spreading into London's whiter suburbs, but not reaching further because the genres "weren't really global at all, they were still local" - and there was no internet to spread them onward.

Now, with digitally distributed British rap speaking to an expanded audience, this dynamic has started to play out nationally. When grime erupted in 2014, it arrived with a distinct sense of fashion and language - words like "bait", "gassed" and "ends", as well as distinct attire consisting of tracksuits and streetwear. It was more than just a genre: it was a culture. "And how do you express your alignment with grime music?" says Ilbury. "You start speaking in a way that sounds like MLE." Since then, drill and a new generation of UK rappers have arrived with a similar impact: words such as ting and certi (certified) ever-present in the sound, alongside streetwear brands including Trapstar, Hoodrich and Corteiz. Ronan Bennett's TV drama series Top Boy has also become enormously popular.

Many of the most high-profile British rappers of recent times have been men, so MLE "is often heard as extremely masculine" by wider Britain, Ilbury notes, and therefore, "often associated with young men". As a result, the dialect seems to have resonated more strongly with teenage boys in the suburbs. Drummond says that the music, and therefore the language associated with it, carries for young men in these regions, "what we might in linguistics call a 'covert prestige'".

In Drummond's field studies in Manchester, he noticed that the dialect was more likely to be used by boys, with girls maintaining their more regional ways of communicating. "Using particular ways of speaking for these young people, especially young men, is a way of performing an identity," he says. "But unfortunately, it comes with a whole load of baggage that maybe they're not quite ready for."

These developments come with questions of cultural appropriation. They also highlight the racially loaded demonisation of MLE as a language associated with "roadmen", where in increasingly popular TikTok and Instagram skits, "roadman" has become a byword for low intelligence and stupidity.

Linguists note that many of these young white men from middle England are likely to drop MLE when they move into more professional environments. But MLE's current popularity will likely leave a permanent mark, with the dialect already becoming a standardised part of white British speech. "Even when they dial it down because they get a nice responsible job in a bank, there's still a fundamental change," Drummond says. "It's like a tide. You've got a big wave coming in, and that dies down, but the tide is still moving in that direction."

Aniefiok Ekpoudom is a writer from south London. His first book, Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain, is a social history of British rap. To support theGuardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Bait, ting, certi: how UK rap changed the language of the nation

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Fuelled by music fandom and social media, young British people's slang is evolving to include words with pidgin, patois and Arabic roots - even where strong regional English dialects exist

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If you opened Facebook, Twitter or Instagram about a decade ago, you'd likely see posts from friends and family, in chronological order. Nowadays, users are hit with a barrage of content curated by an algorithm. Passionate about plants? Sports? Cats? Politics? That's what you're going to see.

"[There] are equations that measure what you're doing, surveille the data of all the users on these platforms, and then try to predict what each person is most likely to engage with," New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka explains. "So rather than having this neat, ordered feed, you have this feed that's constantly trying to guess what you're going to click on, what you're going to read, what you're going to watch or listen to."

In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka examines the algorithmic recommendations that dictate everything from the music, news and movies we consume, to the foods we eat and the places we go. He argues that all of this machine-guided curation has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.

"For us consumers, they are making us more passive just by feeding us so much stuff, by constantly recommending things that we are unlikely to click away from, that we're going to tolerate [but] not find too surprising or challenging," Chayka says.

What's more, Chayka says, the algorithms pressure artists and other content creators to shape their work in ways that fit the feeds. For musicians working through Spotify or TikTok, this might mean recording catchy hooks that occur right at the beginning of a song - when a user is most likely to hear it.

Though the algorithms can feel inescapable, Chayka says increased regulation of social media companies can mitigate their impact. "I think if Meta, Facebook's parent company, was forced to spin off some of its properties, like Instagram or WhatsApp, and those properties were made to compete against each other, then maybe users would have more agency and more choices for what they're consuming," he says.

Interview highlights

On how the internet takes power away from gatekeepers

There's this huge power of the internet to let anyone publish the art that they make or the songs that they write. And I think that's really powerful and unique. ... [In] the cultural ecosystem that we had before, there were these gatekeepers, like magazine editors or record executives or even radio station deejays, who you did have to work through to get your art heard or seen or bought. And so these were human beings who had their own biases and preferences and social networks, and they tended to block people who didn't fit with their own vision.

Now, in the algorithmic era, let's say rather than seeking to please those human gatekeepers or figure out their tastes, the metric is just how much engagement you can get on these digital platforms. So the measure of your success is how many likes did you get? How many saves did you get on TikTok or bookmarks? How many streams did you get on Spotify?

So I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both of these kinds of regimes. Like, on the internet, anyone can put out their work and anyone can get heard. But that means to succeed, you also have to placate or adapt to these algorithmic ecosystems that, I think, don't always let the most interesting work get heard or seen.
On the difficulty of knowing what's going outside of your specific algorithm
These digital platforms and feeds, they kind of promise a great communal experience, like we're connecting with all the other TikTok users or all of the other Instagram users, but I think they're actually kind of atomizing our experiences, because we can never tell what other people are seeing in their own feeds. We don't have a sense of how many other people are fans of the same thing that we are fans of, or even if they're seeing the same piece of culture that we're seeing, or experiencing an album or a TV show, in the same way. So I think there's this lack of connection ... this sense that we're alone in our consumption habits and we can't come together over art in the same way, which I think is kind of deadening the experience of art and making it harder to have that kind of collective enthusiasm for specific things.
On how success on social media determines who gets book deals, TV shows and record deals
Every publisher will ask a new author, "What is your platform like? How big of a platform do you have?" Which is almost a euphemism for, "How many followers do you have online?" - whether that's [on] Twitter or Instagram or an email newsletter. They want to know that you already have an audience going into this process, that you have a built-in fan base for what you're doing. And culture doesn't always work that way. I don't think every idea should have to be so iterative that you need fans already for something to succeed, that you have to kind of engage audiences at every point in the process of something to have it be successful. So for a musician, maybe you'll get a big record deal only if you go viral on TikTok. Or if you have a hit YouTube series, maybe you'll get more gigs as an actor. There's this kind of gatekeeping effect here, too, I think, where in order to get more success on algorithmic platforms, you have to start with seeding some kind of success on there already.
On how some film and TV lean into becoming internet memes
You can see how TV shows and movies have adapted to algorithmic feeds by the kind of one-liner, GIF-ready scenes that you see in so many TV shows and movies now. You can kind of see how a moment in a film is made to be shared on Twitter, or how a certain reaction in a reality TV show, for example, is made to become a meme. And I think a lot of production choices have been influenced by that need for your piece of content to drive more pieces of content and to inspire its own reactions and riffs and more memes.
On how algorithms impact journalism
Algorithmic feeds, I think, took on the responsibility that a lot of news publications once had. ... In decades past, we would see the news stories that we consumed on a daily basis from The New York Times front page on the print paper or as on The New York Times homepage on the internet. Now, instead of the publication choosing which stories are most important, which things you should see right away, the Twitter or X algorithmic feed is sorting out what kinds of stories you're consuming and what narratives are being built up. We now have TikTok talking heads and explainers rather than news anchors on cable TV. So the responsibility for choosing what's important, I think, has been ported over to algorithmic recommendations rather than human editors or producers.
On how passive consumption affects how deeply we think about culture

What I worry about is the passivity of consumption that we've been pushed into, the ways that we're encouraged not to think about the culture we're consuming, to not go deeper and not follow our own inclinations.

I think passive consumption certainly has its role. We are not always actively consuming culture and thinking deeply about the genius of a painting or a symphony ... it's not something we can do all the time. But what I worry about is the passivity of consumption that we've been pushed into, the ways that we're encouraged not to think about the culture we're consuming, to not go deeper and not follow our own inclinations. ... And I suppose that when I really think about it, is the kind of horror that's at the end of all this, at least for me, is that ... we'll never have the Fellini film that's so challenging you think about it for the rest of your life, or see the painting that's so strange and discomforting that it really sticks with you. Like I don't want to leave those masterpieces of art behind just because they don't immediately engage people.

Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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How social media algorithms 'flatten' our culture by making decisions for us

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Filterworld author Kyle Chayka examines the algorithms that dictate what we watch, read and listen to. He argues that machine-guided curation makes us docile consumers.

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Lesson objective I can explain the different elements of the TOK course, and how I’ll be assessed at the end of it

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1.2 Taking ownership of TOK | Class presentation (24-25)

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AP article investigating a misleading photo in Madrid

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AP article investigating a misleading photo in Madrid

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Video of an unrelated protest in Madrid is being misrepresented as a pro-Palestinian demonstration

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False. The protest seen in the video has nothing to do with the Middle Eastern conflict. The footage was featured by a Spanish news outlet in coverage of a demonstration on Sunday opposing a deal that would grant amnesty to Catalan separatists in exchange for their support of a new coalition governm

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I can explain why social media encourages the spread of misinformation, and discuss my responsibility in countering it

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3.3 Falsehood flies | Class presentation (24-25)

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Conversation article, looking at the ideas of WK Clifford

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Conversation article, looking at the ideas of WK Clifford

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The impact of disinformation and misinformation has become impossible to ignore. Whether it is denial about climate change, conspiracy theories about elections, or misinformation about vaccines, the pervasiveness of social media has given "alternative facts" an influence previously not possible.

Bad information isn't just a practical problem - it's a philosophical one, too. For one thing, it's about epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with knowledge: how to discern truth, and what it means to "know" something, in the first place.

But what about ethics? People often think about responsibility in terms of actions and their consequences. We seldom discuss whether people are ethically accountable for not just what they do, but what they believe - and how they consume, analyze or ignore information to arrive at their beliefs.

So when someone embraces the idea that mankind has never touched the Moon, or that a mass shooting was a hoax, are they not just incorrect, but ethically wrong?

Know the good, do the good

Some thinkers have argued the answer is yes - arguments I've studied in my own work as an ethicist.

Even back in the 5th century B.C., Socrates linked epistemology and ethics implicitly. Socrates is mostly known through his students' writings, such as Plato's " Republic," in which Plato depicts Socrates' endeavors to uncover the nature of justice and goodness. One of the ideas attributed to Socrates is often summarized with the adage that "to know the good is to do the good."

The idea, in part, is that everyone seeks to do what they think is best - so no one errs intentionally. To err ethically, in this view, is the result of a mistaken belief about what the good is, rather than an intent to act unjustly.

More recently, in the 19th century, British mathematician and philosopher W.K. Clifford linked the process of belief formation with ethics. In his 1877 essay " The Ethics of Belief," Clifford made the forceful ethical claim that it is wrong - always, everywhere and for everyone - to believe something without sufficient evidence.

In his view, we all have an ethical duty to test our beliefs, to check our sources and to place more weight in scientific evidence than anecdotal hearsay. In short, we have a duty to cultivate what today might be called "epistemic humility": the awareness that we ourselves can hold incorrect beliefs, and to act accordingly.

Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S./Wikimedia Commons

As a philosopher interested in disinformation and its relationship to ethics and public discourse, I think there is a lot to be gained from his essay. In my own research, I have argued that each us has a responsibility to be mindful of how we form our beliefs, insofar as we are fellow citizens with a common stake in our larger society.

Setting sail

Clifford begins his essay with the example of a ship owner who has chartered his vessel to a group of emigrants leaving Europe for the Americas. The owner has reason to doubt the boat is in a seaworthy-enough condition to cross the Atlantic, and considers having the boat thoroughly overhauled to make sure it is safe.

In the end, though, he convinces himself otherwise, suppressing and rationalizing away any doubts. He wishes the passengers well with a light heart. When the ship goes down midsea, and the ship's passengers with it, he quietly collects the insurance.

Most people would probably say the ship owner was at least somewhat ethically to blame. After all, he neglected his due diligence to make sure the ship was sound before its voyage.

What if the ship had been fit for voyage and made the trip safely? It would be no credit to the owner, Clifford argues, because he had no right to believe it was safe: He'd chosen not to learn whether it was seaworthy.

In other words, it's not only the owner's actions - or lack of action - that have ethical implications. His beliefs do, too.

In this example it is easy to see how belief guides actions. Part of Clifford's larger point, however, is that a person's beliefs always hold the potential to affect others and their actions.

No man - or idea - is an island

There are two premises that can be found in Clifford's essay.

The first is that each belief creates the cognitive conditions for related beliefs to follow. In other words, once you hold one belief, it becomes easier to believe in similar ideas.

This is borne out in contemporary cognitive science research. For example, a number of false conspiratorial beliefs - like the belief that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings - are found to correspond with the likelihood of a person falsely believing that climate change is a hoax.

Clifford's second premise is that no human beings are so isolated that their beliefs won't at some point influence other people.

People do not arrive at their beliefs in a vacuum. The influence of family, friends, social circles, media and political leaders on others' views is well documented. Studies show that mere exposure to misinformation can have a lasting cognitive impact on how we interpret and remember events, even after the information has been corrected. In other words, once accepted, misinformation creates a bias that resists revision.

Taking these points together, Clifford argues that it is always wrong - not just factually, but ethically - to believe something on insufficient evidence. This point does not assume that each person always has the resources to develop an informed belief on each topic. He argues it is acceptable to defer to experts if they exist, or withhold judgment on matters where one has no sound grounding for an informed belief.

That said, as Clifford suggests in his essay, theft is still harmful, even if the thief has never been exposed to the lesson that it is wrong.

An ounce of prevention

Arguing that people are ethically responsible for nonevidential beliefs doesn't necessarily mean they are blameworthy. As I have argued in other work, Clifford's premises show the morally relevant nature of belief formation. It is enough to suggest that developing and nurturing critical thinking is an ethical responsibility, without denouncing every person who holds a belief that can't be supported as inherently immoral.

Ethics is often talked about as if it were merely a matter of identifying and chastising bad behaviors. Yet, as far back as Plato and Socrates, ethics has been about offering guidance for a life well lived in community with others.

Likewise, the ethics of belief can serve as a reminder of how important it is, for other people's sakes, to develop good habits of inquiry. Learning to identify fallacious arguments can be a kind of cognitive inoculation against misinformation.

That might mean renewing educational institutions' investment in disciplines that, like philosophy, have historically taught students how to think critically and communicate clearly. Modern society tends to look for technological mechanisms to guard us against misinformation, but the best solution might still be a solid education with generous exposure to the liberal arts - and ensuring all citizens have access to it.

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Bad beliefs: Misinformation is factually wrong - but is it ethically wrong, too?

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A philosopher unpacks the 'ethics of belief' for an age awash in bad information.

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Vox article, exploring misinformation in relation to conflicts going on in the world

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Vox article, exploring misinformation in relation to conflicts going on in the world

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Don’t believe everything you see and hear about Israel and Palestine

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Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is easy to find online. Here’s how to avoid spreading it.

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I can discuss how the suppression of certain perspectives impacts on how effectively we understand the world

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4.9 Marginalized perspectives | Class presentation (24-25)

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Female scientists are less likely to receive authorship credit or to be named on patents related to the work they do compared with their male counterparts - including in fields such as healthcare, where women dominate - data suggests.

This gender gap may help to explain well-documented disparities in the apparent contributions of male and female scientists - such as that of Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA initially went unrecognised because she was not cited on the core Nature article byJames Watson and Francis Crick.

"We have known for a long time that women publish and patent at a lower rate than men. But, because previous data never showed who participated in research, no one knew why," said Prof Julia Lane at New York University in the US, who led the new research.

Lane and her colleagues analysed administrative data on research projects conducted at 52 US colleges and universities between 2013 and 2016. They matched information about 128,859 scientists to 39,426 journal articles and 7,675 patents, looking at which people who worked on individual projects received credit and which did not.

The study, also published in Nature, suggests Rosalind Franklin was far from unique in not receiving due credit for her work. It found that, on average, across all job titles and fields, men were around twice as likely to be named on a scientific article or patent by their research team as women.

This gap was seen in female-dominated fields such as health, as well as in male-dominated fields, such as engineering, and was particularly evident during the earliest stages of women's careers. For example, only 15 out of 100 female postgraduates were ever named as an author on a publication, compared with 21 out of 100 of their male peers.

"There is a clear gap between the rate at which women and men are named as co-authors on publications," said Lane. "The gap is strong, persistent, and independent of the research field. I fear that it will deter young women from pursuing science as a career."

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The team also surveyed more than 2,400 published scientists, asking whether they had ever been excluded from a paper to which they had contributed, and why they thought this happened. Of women, 43% reported having been excluded from a publication, compared with 38% of men. The most common explanation was that others had underestimated their contribution, however, women were twice as likely to cite discrimination or bias as an explanation, while men were more likely to say their contributions did not warrant authorship.

Dr Tina Joshi, a lecturer in molecular microbiology at the University of Plymouth, said: "This is a welcome study that highlights the gender disparity many women continue to face in academia. We can continue to address this inequality as an academic community by encouraging dialogue regarding equality, diversity and inclusion, and working together to give all researchers credit for their contributions."

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Female scientists less likely to be given authorship credits, analysis finds

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Disparities extend to lower chance of being named on patents and to areas such as healthcare where women dominate

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On 14 July 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall arrived by boat to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania. Here, in what is now Gombe Stream National Park, her ground-breaking scientific research into chimpanzee behaviour began.

Previously a secretarial student without an undergraduate degree in science, Goodall says she observed her wild subjects with an open mind and without preconceptions. Controversially at the time, she defied convention by giving these chimps names instead of numbers.

One image taken of Goodall during this time captured her fresh approach, challenged the scientific norm and has become one of the world's most recognisable photos.

Her late husband, Dutch photographer Hugo van Lawick, went to Gombe in 1962 where he took thousands of photographs of Goodall. But it was in 1964 that he took what became an iconic photograph of Goodall with an infant chimp known as Flint.

In the photo, Goodall is shown crouching down and reaching out with her right arm to Flint, the first chimp to be born at Gombe after Goodall's arrival, as he extends his left arm up towards her.

As Goodall tells BBC Future, this was long before the era of digital photography, so she had to wait a while before she could see the printed images. "It was couple of months or more before there was a safe way to send exposed rolls to the [National] Geographic for processing, and then another wait while they sent the prints back to Kigoma," she recalls. "When I saw it, though I did not realise it would become iconic, it did make me think of Michelangelo's painting of God reaching out to Man."

The photo of Jane Goodall with infant chimp Flint challenged scientific norms and changed our view of the animal kingdom (Credit: Hugo van Lawick)

The photo, taken in 1964, was first published in National Geographic magazine in December 1965. Another photo of Goodall studying the Gombe chimpanzees was on the front cover and published as part of van Lawick's photo series titled "New Discoveries Among Africa's Chimpanzees". That same year, National Geographic released Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, the first of many documentaries showcasing Goodall's research.

The photo, along with van Lawick's documentary film People of the Forest: The Chimps of Gombe, "forced science to abandon the idea that humans were the only sentient beings with personalities, minds and emotions" says Goodall, adding that she was taught this as a student at Cambridge University in 1962. "Thus [this image] opened up a whole new way of understanding who animals are and showed that we humans are a part of and not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom."

Goodall was the first person to notice that chimpanzees were stripping down stiff blades of grass, then sticking them into holes in termite mounds to catch and eat these insects. Until then, tool use like this was believed to distinguish humans from all other animals.
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Mark Wright, director of science at conservation charity WWF, says Goodall was "a real trailblazer" in many ways. But this photograph helped people recognise the importance of a female perspective within the scientific research community, he says. "She was a young woman saying that women are equally well-placed to do really first class research in the field.

"Up until then, it had been a pretty male-dominated environment. There then was a succession of high profile women doing this sort of work."

Gilbert M Grosvenor, former chair of the National Geographic Society, has likewise argued that "Goodall's trailblazing path for other women primatologists is arguably her greatest legacy".

"During the last third of the 20th Century, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas, Cheryl Knott, Penny Patterson, and many more women have followed her," he wrote in the Jane Goodall Institute's biography of the primatologist."Indeed, women now dominate long-term primate behavioural studies worldwide." (Read more: The woman who redefined mankind).

When the photo was taken in 1964, Goodall was immersed in life at Gombe, beginning to understand the chimps she was studying and slowly building up her observations of their behaviour. This first-hand experience has always been her priority, says Wright. "This photo reminded us that for much of this work, there's no alternative to being in the field. A lot of studies were in zoos or safari parks - you need to get in the field to really understand the natural behaviour. And you have to do that for the long-term, you can't just nip in for a couple of weeks. She reinforced that."

Goodall went to East Africa without any formal qualifications and lived in Gombe for more than two decades, dedicating her life to studying chimps for generations. Wright says this photo relays a powerful message to people who haven't studied science but still want to get involved in research because sometimes, an open mind is the best starting point: "This wasn't someone in a lab coat, she made it relatable. And because she wasn't encumbered by lots of formal training, she could go in as a free thinker and then interpret [what she saw]."

Jane Goodall's research into chimps in Tanzania paved the way for other female primatologists (Credit: Penelope Breese / Getty Images)

Keen to open the world of scientific research up to everyone, Goodall has inspired many people to study primatology in the field. Since 1960, more than 482 scientific research papers and graduate theses about chimpanzee health and behaviour have been published by Gombe Stream Research Center, with hundreds of scientists studying there.

Alongside her vast body of documentary films, books and National Geographic articles, Goodall's photographs with Flint flagged the importance of conserving individual animals. "Previously it was all about saving species - individuals were not important. The scientific thinking changed," says Goodall.

A 2021 review by US anthropologist Michael Lawrence Wilson summarises the many findings of research undertaken at Gombe and reflects on the impact of the chimpanzee research efforts pioneered here by Goodall. "Gombe exemplifies what has become a standard approach for primate field studies: collaborative research, collecting systematic information on identified individuals, followed throughout their entire lives," it concludes.

Today this photo makes Goodall feel nostalgic. "It reminds me of a magical time when I knew each individual chimpanzee as well as members of my family. I watched Flint's development from a tiny infant to a spoilt brat, always supported by his older sister or one of his older brothers if another youngster accidentally (or sometimes deliberately!) hurt him. The image makes me think of those best days of my life," she says.

The closeness between Goodall and Flint in the photograph also reflects the culture at the time, says Wright, noting that scientists now keep further from the animal subjects they are observing. "But she was doing something that hadn't really been done before...I take my hat off to her. Her work was absolutely ground-breaking."

Above all, the picture shows Goodall's genuine love for her subject, Wright says. "There is a warmth and an affection for the species she's studying. There's also a love for Gombe, too - she found her place."

For Goodall, it's her simple connection to Flint that makes this image so captivating. "I suspect it was the appeal of that little infant reaching out so trustingly - a real bond between human and chimpanzee. At least, that is why it is so powerful for me!"
*The Jane Goodall Institute notes that physical contact with wild animals is no longer deemed appropriate and says that it -- Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. "does not endorse handling, interacting or close proximity to chimpanzees or other wildlife".
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List" - a handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, Travel and Reel delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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The human-chimp bond captured in an iconic photo

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In 1964, Jane Goodall's husband Hugo van Lawick took a photo of her and an infant chimp reaching out to each other. Decades later, it continues to impact how we view chimpanzees.

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When Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was a 10-year-old growing up in East Los Angeles, she came across the Errol Morris documentary A Brief History of Time, which chronicled the life of the physicist Stephen Hawking. Watching it, Prescod-Weinstein says, she realized Hawking "was being paid to use math all day to solve problems Einstein hadn't worked out."

For a queer Black Jewish kid from a working-class neighborhood who liked doing math, that seemed like a pretty good deal. "That was really where I got my first taste of the idea that math is kind of like the language of the universe," Prescod-Weinstein told me.

She's now an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, where she studies dark matter and particle physics. She's also on the core faculty of the university's Women's Studies department - a seemingly unusual combination that hints at the multifaceted approach she brings to her work.

In 2021, Prescod-Weinstein published The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred, a wide-ranging book that is both a scientific explainer and an argument that unjust power structures shape the world of physics. She tells stories of subatomic particles like baryons, which are the building blocks of atoms; she critiques a trend she's seen, in which writers compare the mystery and invisibility of dark matter to the lived experiences of Black people. In a chapter called "Rape Is Part of This Scientific Story" - a chapter that grew unexpectedly out of her writing on the dark universe, and that she debated including in the book - she writes about how her own experience of sexual assault shaped her understanding of injustices in her field.

I recently asked Prescod-Weinstein about being one of the few Black women in her field, how concepts from physics apply to our lives, and why dark matter is a complicated metaphor. She spoke to me from her home office in New Hampshire, at a desk covered with books, notepads, and at least two figurines of Star Trek 's Lieutenant Commander Uhura. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Early in your book, you write that particle physics continues to teach you that "the universe is always more bizarre and more wonderfully queer than we think." How do you see queerness in the universe?
Yeah, I think the universe is weird, man! There are so many things about it that are counterintuitive. What we do in science is exist at the boundary of what humanity understands about the universe, and you try and push that boundary forward. And that means living in the place where things are not known, and that means being confused and asking a lot of questions. So science is really a practice of question asking.

Queerness is just like that. Queerness is living at that boundary of what is known and unknown. There are certain understandings of queerness that in 2021 seem antiquated. And similarly, there were scientific ideas back in 2000 that we know better than now. We know what the mass of the Higgs [boson] is now. We did not know that in 2000. So I think there's a real way in which queerness and science track with each other.
You describe yourself in the book as a "griot of the universe, a storyteller." Could you explain what that means?
Griot is a West African word that I think comes up in a few different languages across the region. As I understand it, it's traditionally a community storyteller and oral historian, and I think that's what I do. I'm a storyteller about the universe. I'm using a very particular language - mathematics - with a set of rules associated with it. But all forms of storytelling have rules that we impose on them.
You write a lot about invisibility - literally, in the case of dark matter, and metaphorically when it comes to the contributions of women, nonbinary folks, and people of color in the field of physics. At one point, you write about physicists who draw a comparison between dark matter and the lived experiences of Black people. Can you talk a bit about that?
I literally have this chapter called "Black People Are Luminous Matter." I have a very clear agenda there that I wanted to hit home. We're not magical Negros. We feel pain. We feel pain just as much as white people do, despite a widespread belief from medical students and doctors.

I wanted to look at our physicality, not as a uniform thing but in its breadth. There are a lot of different ways to be Black. But all of them come from baryons, and none of them come from dark matter.
How are baryons and dark matter different?
When I say baryons, I mean the stuff that everything we can see is generally made of. When I talk about dark matter, I'm talking about this invisible, transparent thing that seems to dominate galaxy structure. But it's literally invisible. It doesn't have a color.
Is there a better metaphor to be found in physics?
Yeah, if you really want a cosmic analogy for race and racism, weak gravitational lensing is much more useful.

Essentially, one of the big lessons of general relativity is that spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to curve. So when you have matter in spacetime - say, the sun - the spacetime is being distorted by the presence of that matter. Your spacetime is actually bending. If you get a lot of dark matter together, it can bend light as though it has gone through a funhouse mirror. The light looks like it's coming from one place when it's actually coming from another.

This is called gravitational lensing, and the most fantastical version of it, when you really have a lot of dark matter, is that you can actually see multiple images of a galaxy. There's only one galaxy, but your telescope sees multiple images because the photons are riding on very funny paths. Sometimes it's really dramatic and you see multiple images, and sometimes you just see distortion. The question always is, "Is that gravitational lensing, or is that galaxy just weird?" The way that you figure that out is you do statistics. You look at everything and say, "Are all of these distorted in a way that is consistent?"

I've been a Black Jew around white Jews. It's very easy to be, like, "Are you sure that when that white Jewish professor was asking you if you're really Jewish, it was because you're Black?" But get a bunch of Black Jews together and talk to them about their experiences, and you're like, "Ah, we all seem to experience that same distortion, and how people think it's okay to talk to us." That's systemic. It becomes a lot harder to deny when there's a systemic picture there.

You write about the difficulties of joining the field as one of the few Black woman physicists in the country, and the shame you still feel about your B-minus college average. This really spoke to me - I didn't know cosmology professors have imposter syndrome! How do you keep working through that?
I should say that I don't actually think I have imposter syndrome. We often tell people that they have imposter syndrome when people are correctly identifying: "Oh, I don't belong here." The system is not built for them. And that's correct. There is some fundamental sense in which you do not belong.

Should you feel like you belong? Should the space be a place where you do belong? Yes. But are you wrong for assessing that you don't? No. That means your capacity for analysis is working. I actually think that we need to be telling people that their ability to identify that is actually a sign of competency.
I like that reframing. Throughout the book, you point to scientists assuming their work is free from the messiness of society and politics and history. You show us that culture and society are deeply embedded in physics, but few people are willing to have that conversation. Is that starting to change?
I guess there are two different answers to this question. I feel like things are dramatically different than they were 15 years ago, and I also feel like there's been very little change. I have a chapter on sexual misconduct and specifically the impact it had on my daily life. We're still at the point where whisper networks are essential, and that relies unreasonably on women and other minoritized-gender people to do the labor of sharing information that could cause us professional problems if people find out that they are the ones sharing the information.
This brings to mind the name of another chapter, called "Wages for Scientific Housework."
Absolutely. The victims or survivors, however they see themselves, who come forward do an enormous service to the community. It's an incredible piece of emotional housework and labor to push astronomy to be a better place and safer place. And people who have survived serious incidents of sexual misconduct, myself included, live with an enormous amount of guilt about not naming names in public. But it's really like, do you feel like climbing on a cross or not? Or do you want to have a life and be doing this work? You know, I like math. I still actually really like math. I want to be able to do that in peace, and it seems like this is the more peaceful option than the alternative.
Your book ends with a letter to your mother and a section from the Torah. How do your family and your faith fit into your work?
Until I was 10, I thought being Jewish meant you were a labor organizer, because that was the kind of Jewish family I came from. I know it's super dorky, but it's also 100 percent what I thought, coming from an organizing family. I think their influences imprinted all over the book. I don't think I would be a scientist who thinks so deeply about these social questions if I hadn't been raised to ask all of these questions, and to think expansively about what it means to understand the world. That's not just a mathematical question. It's not just a physical question. It is also a social and a political question.

Correction, January 18, 3:40 pm: A previous version of this article misstated the location of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's home office. It is in New Hampshire.

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A physicist's lessons about race, power, and the universe

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In her book The Disordered Cosmos, Black queer scientist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein argues that physics can be more universal.

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Why Are Scientists So Afraid to Call Their Work “Feminist”?

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The idea that researchers can be objective is outdated.

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The FT on 'deprioritizing western knowledge systems' in art

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The FT on 'deprioritizing western knowledge systems' in art

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As I'm writing this column I'm preparing to go to Sharjah, to view the art at the Sharjah Biennial. One of the things I love about art is how it can challenge our perspectives and invite us to reflect on our allegiances, belief systems and actions. We inhabit a world that has historically valued western knowledge systems over non-western, traditional or indigenous ways of understanding. But we have much to learn from engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems.

Many west African cosmologies share some variation of the idea that the Earth and the natural world are sacred and should be afforded a particular reverence by humans. The Prophecy is a photo series by the Beninese-Belgian photographer Fabrice Monteiro, which he began in Senegal in 2013. "Untitled # 1" is one of several images of mythological-looking characters made from pieces of garbage and transformed into living, walking allegories of ecological and environmental crises in Senegal, among them water pollution and plastic waste.

In this work, a giant female figure rises up from a mound of refuse like a towering deity about to cast a judgment on humanity. She stands above an ominous landscape, dense bushes interspersed with carpets of rubbish and smouldering with smoke. Influenced by the Greek myth of Gaia, Monteiro created a narrative that a tired Mother Earth has sent her spirit children to prophesy to humanity about the consequences of how they are treating the natural world. Inherent in these warnings is the idea that human behaviour towards the rest of creation is partly the result of a broken relationship between the two, and our human inability to recognise any life force other than our own.

Monteiro was also inspired by west African masquerades. Looking at his work, I was taken back to a memory from my childhood when my family lived in Nigeria. It was a season for masquerades. At some point in the day, larger-than-life totem-like figures with masks and streams of raffia would begin to parade through the streets, hollering, beating instruments and dancing in elaborate, colourful costumes - extraordinary even on the vast landscape of my childhood imagination. I was terrified by these figures because I didn't think they were human.

Monteiro created a narrative that a tired Mother Earth has sent her spirit children to prophesy to humanity about the consequences of how they are treating the natural world

In my own Igbo tradition, many masquerades are representative of a relationship between the spirit and the human world, implying ancestors and those in the spiritual world are invested in what we humans get up to. Though I didn't fully understand it or have the language to articulate it, I knew this spectacle was symbolic of the fluidity of borders between the earthly and the transcendent. I have never had trouble believing in a thin line between earthly and spiritual realities.

Monteiro's work draws also on elements of animism, primarily the belief that humans are not the only ones with a life force energy or a spiritual essence. Whatever we might think of that idea, the way we treat creation might be significantly affected if we were open to the possibility that rivers, lakes, oceans, plants, trees, mountains and other animals have the potential to possess some aspect of a soul, and that a spirit world existed that ached at the broken relationship between humanity and the rest of creation.

The 53-year-old Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor has been working for years on pieces that speak to the collision of African and western cultures. Ehikhamenor was born in Edo state, whose capital is Benin City, and was raised with both the traditional religious beliefs of his grandfather and the Catholic faith of his schooling. "Still Standing" (2022) is a 12ft mixed-media image of Oba Ovonramwen, ruler of the Benin Kingdom who went into exile after the 1897 razing and looting of Benin City by British forces. The Oba's traditional gown, headdress and accessories were made in Ehikhamenor's Lagos studio from thousands of orange, red and white rosary beads. Hanging on the gown are miniature Benin bronze ornament masks, a nod to the theft by the British of these precious cultural and religious artefacts; the artist cast them in Benin with traditional bronze-casters. The background is made of thousands of white rosaries that glow in the dark.

Works such as "Still Standing" aim to open a dialogue about how African cultural and religious knowledge was affected by the colonial project. Commissioned as part of a series that asked artists to respond to monuments in St Paul's Cathedral, London, the work was displayed next to the memorial brass of Harry Rawson, the British admiral who led the 1897 Benin expedition. It has now been acquired by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which last year agreed in principle to return its own collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria.

In "The world is not what exists but what happens", 34-year-old Mozambican artist Cassi Namoda paints an almost folkloric image of a small trail of people moving along a formless waterscape, united by the labour of carrying a large, thick cloth. The figures seem to float across the canvas in front of a curvaceous, tangerine-coloured mountain range. The clouds are swaths of coral, caramel, soft pink and sky blue. A tiny blood-red moon hangs at the top right-hand corner of the frame. In the lower half, on the right hand side, is a faint outline of a ladder in the water; perhaps a portal to another realm, an underworld open to the traversing of beings between different realities.

Some of Namoda's work is inspired by Kenyan philosopher, theologian and writer John Mbiti, an ordained Anglican priest. In his seminal 1969 book African Religions and Philosophy, he suggested traditional African religious ideas should be afforded the same level of respect as other global faiths (although he was criticised by some for applying a Christian worldview to African cosmologies).

Mbiti also posited a uniquely African understanding of time, marked by two distinct time periods, the Sasa and the Zamani. Sasa time includes the present and recent past; Zamani time includes the far past and an immeasurable past. According to his book, when a person dies, they remain in Sasa time until the last person who can remember the deceased also dies. Then the person is considered to be in Zamani time.

When I look at Namoda's painting with this concept in mind, I see a lineage of people, connected by a literal fabric of time. Those at the back carry the events of the past, recognising how they affect how the people at the front exist in present time. The two people at the front are covered and immersed in the wide breath of the present, as they move towards a future no one can see.

I think there are gifts in being open to the belief that the way we live our lives in the present can be deeply marked by patterns and behaviours from our ancestral past, suggesting we inherit more from those who came before us than just physical characteristics. It can be empowering to consider that some of our behaviour or ways of living in the world are inherited from our ancestors, offering an opportunity for unlearning and relearning as we make our way through the world.
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As I'm writing this column I'm preparing to go to Sharjah, to view the art at the Sharjah Biennial. One of the things I love about art is how it can challenge our perspectives and invite us to reflect on our allegiances, belief systems and actions.

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Crystal Palace goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey did not know what a Nazi salute was when he was charged with making the offensive gesture, says a Football Association panel.

The regulatory commission has published its written reasons for the decision.

It said Hennessey showed a "lamentable degree of ignorance" about Adolf Hitler, fascism and the Nazi regime.

Hennessey was pictured with his right arm in the air and left hand above his mouth in a photo posted on Instagram by German team-mate Max Meyer after Palace's FA Cup win over Grimsby on 5 January.

Hennessey denied the charge and said any resemblance to the Nazi gesture was "absolutely coincidental".

The charge was found not proven after two members of the three-man panel believed the photograph had been "misinterpreted" and the other said the "only plausible explanation" was that Hennessey made the salute.

Hennessey said he "waved and shouted at the person taking the picture to get on with it" and "put my hand over my mouth to make the sound carry".

He submitted photographs to the panel of him making similar gestures during matches to attract the attention of team-mates.

The panel said Hennessey was "able to corroborate" his explanation with a series of photographs, including one that showed his right arm raised and left hand across his mouth in a "similar way" to the photo posted on Instagram.

Hennessey said "from the outset" of the hearing that he did not know what a Nazi salute was.

"Improbable as that may seem to those of us of an older generation, we do not reject that assertion as untrue," said the panel.

"In fact, when cross-examined about this Mr Hennessey displayed a very considerable - one might even say lamentable - degree of ignorance about anything to do with Hitler, Fascism and the Nazi regime.

"Regrettable though it may be that anyone should be unaware of so important a part of our own and world history, we do not feel we should therefore find he was not telling the truth about this.

"All we would say (at the risk of sounding patronising) is that Mr Hennessey would be well advised to familiarise himself with events which continue to have great significance to those who live in a free country."

The panel said other photographs from the evening showed Hennessey's arm "raised in slightly different but comparable postures" that "at its lowest" demonstrates he was trying to attract the attention of the photographer, Jordan Bussolini.

It said the FA was "entirely justified" in bringing the case but that "rather than giving a Nazi salute, we think it more likely that Mr Hennessey was, as he says, trying to shout at and to catch the attention of the waiter."

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Crystal Palace goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey did not know what a Nazi salute was when he was charged with making the offensive gesture, says a Football Association panel. The regulatory commission has published its written reasons for the decision. It said Hennessey showed a "lamentable degree of ignorance" about Adolf Hitler, fascism and the Nazi regime.

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A New Humanist article exploring the role of history in checking modern power

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A New Humanist article exploring the role of history in checking modern power

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I can critically discuss the validity of the claim that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

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2.7 Condemned to repeat the past? | Class presentation (24-25)

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What is authentic critical thinking (ACT)?

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What is authentic critical thinking (ACT)?

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This 3-minute video outlines what we mean by 'authentic critical thinking', and why we put it at the heart of everything we do.

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What is authentic critical thinking (ACT)?

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This one-hour webinar discusses why TOK needs to keep pace with the fast-changing world, and how our rebooted BQ framework offers the best-ever experience for TOK learners and teachers.