Category: English
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How Turkey is cracking down on the media
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Massimo D’Angelo, Research Associate in the Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs, Loughborough University Hakan Tosun, a 50 year-old Turkish journalist, died on October 13 three days after he was assaulted in a street attack in Istanbul. Two people have been arrested. The motive for the…
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Bugonia: why some people’s brains cling to the idea that aliens are real
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol The latest absurdist offering from Yorgos Lanthimos, director of The Favourite and Poor Things, hits cinemas this week, and Bugonia promises to be another strange and rollicking masterpiece of complete, unmissable chaos. Lanthimos’s muse…
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Hurricane Melissa is a warning – why violent storms are increasingly catching the world off guard
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexander Baker, Research Scientist, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading Hurricane Melissa is tearing through the Caribbean, bringing record-breaking wind and torrential rain to Jamaica – the island’s first ever category 5 landfall. What makes Melissa so alarming isn’t just its size and strength,…
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The rise and fall of globalisation: why the world’s next financial meltdown could be much worse with the US on the sidelines
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steve Schifferes, Honorary Research Fellow, City Political Economy Research Centre, City St George’s, University of London Golden Dayz/Shutterstock This is the second in a two-part series. Read part one here. Globalisation has always had its critics – but until recently, they have come mainly from the…
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Nobody Wants This: season two tries to push beyond stereotyping Jewish women, but doesn’t get very far
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sarah Godfrey, Associate Professor, School of Media, Language and Communication, University of East Anglia Nobody Wants This is a romantic comedy following an agnostic white American woman, Joanne (Kristen Bell), and “hot rabbi” Noah Roklov (Adam Brody). Falling for Noah is easy but maintaining a relationship…
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From potion to prescription: how witches’ herbs became medical marvels
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dipa Kamdar, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University Pixel-Shot/Shutterstock As Halloween approaches, stories of witches and their potions resurface, often featuring eerie plants like belladonna, mandrake and mugwort. These botanicals, steeped in myth and folklore, have long been linked to spells and sorcery. Yet behind…
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From antibiotics to antimalarials: how repurposed drugs might keep cancer from returning
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ahmed Elbediwy, Senior Lecturer in Cancer Biology & Clinical Biochemistry, Kingston University dturphoto/Shutterstock.com Many cancer survivors live with the worry that their cancer might come back. This “recurrence” occurs when cancer cells hide somewhere in the body – like in the bone marrow – and start…
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The five most terrifying songs ever recorded
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester zef art/Shutterstock As plastic skeletons enter the shops, pumpkin spice flavourings spread through coffee houses like Japanese knot-weed and jumpers are dug out of drawers, music fans’ playlists also begin to shift, with “spooky…
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A Different Class of social commentary: Pulp’s era-defining album turns 30
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester In the summer of 1995, an exceptional heat wave swept the country. The Usual Suspects delighted cinema-goers, and the British press engineered the so-called “battle of Britpop”. Music fans were urged to choose between…
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Netflix’s A House of Dynamite sounds the nuclear alarm, but how worried should we be?
Source: ForeignAffairs4 Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Lacy, Senior Lecturer, School of Global Affairs, Lancaster University As a teenager in the 1980s, I was shown a BBC drama in school called Threads that depicted the impact of a nuclear strike on a city in northern England. Threads is a brutal vision of…
