Category: English
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Artificial developments weaken coastal resilience – here’s how mapping them can help
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dhritiraj Sengupta, Visiting Researcher, University of Southampton Reclamation at Colombo Port, Sri Lanka. Google Earth The coastlines I trace resemble logos and luxury icons: palms, crescents, pixelated grids, surreal ornaments etched into shallow seas. The cartography is striking. The environmental consequences are very concerning. There is…
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Social work is a serious profession – why not youth work? What South Africa needs to get right
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Thulani Andrew Chauke, Lecturer, University of South Africa About 3.5 million South Africans aged 15-24 are disengaged from the formal economy and education system. In the first quarter of 2025, 37.1% of young people were not in employment, education, or training. These alarming figures highlight an…
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AI in the courtroom: the dangers of using ChatGTP in legal practice in South Africa
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Jacques Matthee, Senior Lecturer, University of the Free State A South African court case made headlines for all the wrong reasons in January 2025. The legal team in Mavundla v MEC: Department of Co-Operative Government and Traditional Affairs KwaZulu-Natal and Others had relied on case…
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In The Eleventh Hour, Salman Rushdie writes like he’s running out of time
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures, Nottingham Trent University Salman Rushdie’s new collection of short stories urgently recollects his literary legacy. It’s as though time is increasingly uncertain so the need to tell stories is great. Its title, The Eleventh Hour, says as…
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Rape culture is a problem for everyone – here are three ways to tackle it
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexandra Fanghanel, Associate Professor in Criminology, University of Greenwich skypiercerr/Shutterstock Rape, as a crime, is widely deplored. Society and media condemn rapists, and rape and other sexually-related crimes carry potentially heavy prison sentences when perpetrators are convicted. So why, given this apparent intolerance for rape, do…
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Tax rises and benefit cuts are on the horizon as Reeves prepares the UK for a bad-news budget
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steve Schifferes, Honorary Research Fellow, City Political Economy Research Centre, City St George’s, University of London The UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has made it clear that taxes will go up, and more cuts to welfare spending are on the horizon. The moves will be deeply unpopular…
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America’s teachers are being priced out of their communities − these cities are building subsidized housing to lure them back
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jeff Kruth, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Miami University Developers of Wendy’s Village, an affordable housing complex planned for teachers in Colorado Springs, Colo., completed their first homes in July 2025. WeFortify For much of the 20th century, teaching was a stable, middle-class job in the…
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SETI’s ‘Noah’s Ark’ – a space historian explores how the advent of radio astronomy led to the USSR’s search for extraterrestrial life
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – USA – By Gabriela Radulescu, Guggenheim Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution The planetary radar, built in 1960 in Crimea, from which the Morse signal ‘MIR, Lenin, USSR’ was sent in November 1962. National Radio Astronomy Observatory Archive As humans began to explore outer space in the latter half of the…
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Maps reveal the greater risk to the world’s artificial coastlines from sea-level rise
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dhritiraj Sengupta, Visiting Researcher, University of Southampton Reclamation at Colombo Port, Sri Lanka. Google Earth The coastlines I trace resemble logos and luxury icons: palms, crescents, pixelated grids, surreal ornaments etched into shallow seas. The cartography is striking. The environmental consequences are very concerning. There is…
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From nail bars to firefighting foams: how chemicals are deemed safe enough or too harmful
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Lorch, Professor of Science Communication and Chemistry, University of Hull Maksym93/Shutterstock.com If you’ve sat in a nail salon recently, you may well have encountered TPO or trimethylbenzoyl diphenylphosphine oxide to give it its full chemical name. You won’t have seen the name on the bottle.…