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Why a one-cent stamp is set to sell for millions

<p>An extremely rare stamp that was once bought for a measly one cent is set to sell for millions of dollars, breaking records at a US auction house. </p> <p>While to the untrained eye, the blue stamp seems like any old stamp, the 1868 one-cent Z-grill is actually the rarest stamp in America due to its unique history and rarity. </p> <p>On June 14th, the one-cent Z-grill will be put up for sale by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, marking the first time the rare stamp has been on auction since 1998. </p> <p>Experts from the New York auction house say it could fetch $6 million to $7.5 million (AUD), which would make it the single most expensive US stamp ever sold.</p> <p>The reason for the extraordinary price comes down to the fact that out of the two known Z-grill stamp copies, the one up for auction is the only copy available for private purchase by collectors, while other historic copy is held at the New York Public Library.</p> <p>The Z-grill is unique due to its signature embossed paper, which was introduced to the US postal service after the Civil War to prevent stamps from being reused. </p> <p>Since 2005, the coveted stamp has belonged to billionaire investor and “bond king” Bill Gross.</p> <p>“It’s considered the trophy of collecting United States stamps,” said Charles Shreve, who has managed and built Gross’ extensive stamp collection for years and serves as director of international auctions at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries.</p> <p>“There’s only one. If you want to brag, that’s the stamp.”</p> <p>Mr Gross' entire collection is estimated to be worth $22.6 million to $30 million AUD. The top 100 stamps from the collection will be auctioned off on June 14th, while the remaining stamps will be sold on June 15th.</p> <p>“There’s multiple stamps that’ll bring $500,000 or $750,000 (USD) but the (one-cent) Z-grill is the star of the show,” Shreve said.</p> <p>“I just know some people who are lusting for it, and we want to try to get as many people interested in it as possible.”</p> <p><em>Image credits: Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries</em></p>

Money & Banking

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Fear of ageing is really a fear of the unknown – and modern society is making things worse

<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/chao-fang-1010933">Chao Fang</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-liverpool-1198">University of Liverpool</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/alastair-comery-1501915">Alastair Comery</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-bath-1325">University of Bath</a></em></p> <p>For the first time in human history, we have entered an era in which reaching old age is taken for granted. Unlike in ages past, when living to an older age was a luxury afforded mainly to the privileged, globally around <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.FE.ZS?locations=1W">79% of women</a> and <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?locations=1W">70% of men</a> can expect to reach the age of 65 and beyond.</p> <p>Despite longer life expectancy, many people in the contemporary west see growing old as undesirable and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/apr/02/ageing-and-the-mortality-alarm-i-started-panicking-about-future-me">even scary</a>. Research shows, however, that anxiety about ageing may in fact be <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0164027500225004">fear of the unknown</a>.</p> <p>Society’s <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/articles/199409/learning-love-growing-old">focus on youthfulness</a> and <a href="https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/introductory-psychology/ableism-negative-reactions-disability">capability</a> can cause anxiety about becoming weak and unwanted. Adverts for anti-ageing products <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-20th-century-rejuvenation-techniques-gave-rise-to-the-modern-anti-ageing-industry-133569">are everywhere</a>, reinforcing the idea that growing older is inherently unattractive.</p> <p>Some people fear ageing so much that it becomes a pathological condition <a href="https://mind.help/topic/gerascophobia/">called gerascophobia</a>, leading to irrational thoughts and behaviour, for example, a fixation on health, illness and mortality and a preoccupation with hiding the signs of ageing.</p> <p>We frequently hear about attempts to reverse ageing, often by the super rich. For example, <a href="https://fortune.com/well/2023/01/26/bryan-johnson-extreme-anti-aging/">Bryan Johnson</a>, a 45-year-old American entrepreneur, is spending millions of dollars a year to obtain the physical age of 18.</p> <p>While the desire to reverse ageing is not a new phenomenon, advancements in biomedicine have brought it closer.</p> <p>Work published by genetics professor <a href="https://lifespanbook.com/">David Sinclair</a> at Harvard University in 2019 suggests that it may be possible to challenge the limits of cell reproduction to extend our lifespan, for example. His <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00527-6">information theory of ageing</a> argues that <a href="https://epigeneticsandchromatin.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1756-8935-6-3">reprogramming DNA</a> can improve damaged and old tissues, and delay or even reverse ageing. However, these new possibilities can also heighten our fear of ageing.</p> <h2>From the unproductive to undervalued</h2> <p>People haven’t always dreaded growing older. In many societies, older people used to be widely regarded as wise and important – and in some they still are.</p> <p>In ancient China, there was a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/605890">culture</a> of respecting and seeking advice from older family members. There is still an ethos of <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363941/">filial piety</a> (showing reverence and care for elders and ancestors) today, even if it’s not as pronounced as it used to be. The same went for <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ageing-and-society/article/abs/old-age-in-the-dark-ages-the-status-of-old-age-during-the-early-middle-ages/3699DC4100DE852BDA1E1B3BBF33DDBC">medieval Europe</a>, where older people’s experiences and wisdom were highly valued.</p> <p>However, the industrial revolution in the west from the 18th century led to a cultural shift where older people <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1014358415896">became excluded from society</a> and were considered unproductive. People who had surpassed the age to work, alongside those with incurable diseases, were regarded by society as <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13607860903228762">“evils”</a> in need of assistance.</p> <p>The treatment of older people has taken a different form since the early 20th century. The introduction of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/business/retirement/why-the-world-needs-to-rethink-retirement.html">universal pension systems</a> made ageing a central concern in welfare systems. But as the demands for social and health care have increased, journalists increasingly portray ageing as a <a href="https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-news/archive/older-people-feel-a-burden-to-society/">burden</a> on society.</p> <p>Consequently, growing older is often associated with managing the risk of ill health and alleviating the onus of care from younger relatives. This can result in the <a href="https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utq.90.2.09">institutionalisation</a> of older people in residential facilities that keep them hidden, sequestered from the awareness of younger generations.</p> <p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0164027500225004">Research</a> analysing the responses of 1,200 US adults from the American Association of Retired Persons’ Images of Ageing survey shows that much of the perceived fear of ageing is closely aligned with the fear of the unknown, rather than the ageing process itself. This fear is only exacerbated by the largely separate lives lived by older and younger generations.</p> <p>The prevalence of nuclear families and the decline of <a href="https://www.cpc.ac.uk/docs/BP45_UnAffordable_housing_and_the_residential_separation_of_age_groups.pdf">traditional mixed-generational communities</a> have deprived younger people of the opportunity to more fully understand the experiences of older people. Plus, the rapid increase in <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/why-its-more-difficult-for-young-people-to-buy-a-house-now-than-it-was-fifty-years-ago-12537254">house prices</a> means many young people cannot afford to live near their older relatives.</p> <p>The separation of older people from children and young people has sparked generational conflicts that seemingly continue to <a href="https://www.economist.com/britain/2017/05/04/britains-generational-divide-has-never-been-wider">grow wider than ever</a>. Older people are frequently portrayed in the media as conservative and privileged, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/12/old-young-gap-britain-generation-dysfunctional-family">making it difficult</a> for younger generations to comprehend why older people act and think the way they do.</p> <h2>Intergenerational interactions</h2> <p>Academics suggest that creating <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.996520/full">a system</a> for older and younger generations to interact in everyday settings is vital.</p> <p>A set of three <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5031197/#bjso12146-bib-0004">UK-based studies</a> in 2016 analysed and compared the effects of direct contact, extended contact and interactions between younger (aged 17 to 30) and older people (65 and over). The findings indicated that good quality direct intergenerational contact can improve young people’s attitudes towards older adults (especially when sustained over time).</p> <p>Intergenerational programmes have been adopted globally, including mixed and <a href="https://www.cohousing.org/multigenerational-cohousing/">intergenerational housing</a>, <a href="https://www.nurseryinbelong.org.uk/intergenerational-choir-hits-high-note-at-belong-chester/">community choirs</a> and <a href="https://www.shareable.net/how-sharing-can-bring-japans-elderly-and-youth-together/">senior volunteers reading to young children in nurseries</a>.</p> <p><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10433-018-00497-4">Studies show</a> that these activities can not only enhance the wellbeing of older people but also help younger people gain an appreciation of ageing as a valuable and fulfilling life stage.</p> <p>Getting worried about growing older is normal, just as we experience anxieties in other stages of life, such as adolescence and marriage. But here’s the thing – instead of seeing ageing as a looming figure, it is important to realise it is just a part of life.</p> <p>Once we understand ageing as a regular experience, <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/changepower/202106/do-you-have-fogo-taming-the-fear-getting-old">we can let go</a> of these worries and approach the journey through different life stages with a positive attitude and a fortified will to enrich our lives and the lives of those around us.<img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220925/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /></p> <p><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/chao-fang-1010933"><em>Chao Fang</em></a><em>, Lecturer in Sociology, Deputy Director of the Centre for Ageing and the Life Course, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-liverpool-1198">University of Liverpool</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/alastair-comery-1501915">Alastair Comery</a>, PhD Candidate, Sociology, Centre for Death and Society, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-bath-1325">University of Bath</a></em></p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images </em></p> <p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/fear-of-ageing-is-really-a-fear-of-the-unknown-and-modern-society-is-making-things-worse-220925">original article</a>.</em></p>

Beauty & Style

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The move to a cashless society isn’t just a possibility, it’s well underway

<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/angel-zhong-1204643">Angel Zhong</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/rmit-university-1063">RMIT University</a></em></p> <p>When was the last time you used cash? For many Australians using cash or even swiping a card has become a rare event.</p> <p>The move towards a cashless society started 50 years ago with the introduction of the Bankcard and was driven by technological advancements. But it really took off with the COVID pandemic when consumers and retailers were reluctant to handle potentially infected notes and coins.</p> <p>The federal government last week underscored its recognition of this trend by <a href="https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/jim-chalmers-2022/media-releases/modernising-payments-regulation">unveiling reforms</a> to regulate digital payment providers. </p> <p>Treasurer Jim Chalmers said: "As payments increasingly become digital, our payments system needs to remain fit for purpose so that it delivers for consumers and small businesses. We want to make sure the shift to digital payments occurs in a way that promotes greater competition, innovation and productivity across our entire economy."</p> <p>From big cities to remote rural corners the shift towards digital payments is evident. This raises the question, is a cashless society inevitable?</p> <h2>The phenomenal growth of the digital payments</h2> <p>The convenience of digital transactions has become irresistible for consumers and businesses and has led to the sector eclipsing traditional payment methods.</p> <p>The relentless march of technology has produced myriad innovative platforms from mobile wallets to buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) schemes, each vying for a piece of this burgeoning market.</p> <p>A recent <a href="https://www.ausbanking.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Bank-On-It-%E2%80%93-Customer-Trends-2023-1.pdf">report</a> by the Australian Banking Association paints a vivid picture of the digital payment industry’s explosive expansion.</p> <p>The use of digital wallet payments on smartphones and watches has soared from $746 million in 2018 to over $93 billion in 2022. Cash only accounts for 13% of consumer payments in Australia as of the end of 2022, a stark contrast to 70% in 2007.</p> <p>Digital wallets are popular with most age groups. Young Australians aged between 18 and 29 are leading the pack, with two thirds <a href="https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/jun/consumer-payment-behaviour-in-australia.html">using digital wallets</a> to pay for goods and services.</p> <p>About <a href="https://www.ausbanking.org.au/almost-40-leave-wallets-at-home/">40% of Australians</a> are comfortable leaving home without their actual wallets or even credit or debit cards, as long as they have their mobile devices with digital wallets.</p> <p>The astonishing speed at which Australians have embraced digital payments places the country among the top users of cashless payments globally, surpassing the United States and European countries.</p> <p>Digital wallets are not the only players in this space. The use of BNPL products is also growing rapidly in Australia, which was where many of the large-scale products in this category started.</p> <p>The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) reports the total value of all BNPL transactions increased by <a href="https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/find-a-document/reports/rep-672-buy-now-pay-later-an-industry-update/">79% in the 2018–19 financial year</a>. This continues into 2022 with an annual growth beyond 30% according to the <a href="https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/annual-reports/psb/2022/the-evolving-retail-payments-landscape.html">Reserve Bank of Australia</a> (RBA).</p> <p>PayID and PayPal payments are also claiming their shares in this space.</p> <h2>Are government regulations necessary?</h2> <p>The government’s planned regulation of the system, contained in amendments to the Reforms to the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act 1998, is a big step towards establishing a secure and trustworthy cashless society in Australia.</p> <p>It will subject BNPL and digital wallet service providers like Apple Pay and Google Pay to the same oversight by the RBA as traditional credit and debit cards.</p> <p>The regulations will require providers meet clear standards for security measures, data protection and dispute resolution to give Australians confidence their funds and personal information are safeguarded.</p> <p>With increasing concern over cyber attacks, the regulations will help reduce the risk of fraudulent activities and money laundering and help identify suspicious transactions, maintaining the integrity of the financial system.</p> <p>Also, regulation will promote fair competition and market stability by levelling the playing field and by preventing monopolies.</p> <p>While banks support the forthcoming regulation, new market players are less positive. For example, Apple Pay says it is merely <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/new-rba-powers-to-regulate-apple-google-payments-20231010-p5eb6d">providing technical architecture</a> rather than payment services.</p> <p>The current regulatory debate is not new. When credit cards made their debut in Australia in the early 1970s, there were hardly any safeguards for consumers. This led to card users being hit with high interest rates on money owed, sneaky fees and aggressive marketing tactics.</p> <p>Consequently, regulations were introduced to hold card providers to a standard of responsible behaviour. Today, they must openly disclose interest rates, fees and charges, and follow stringent guidelines in advertising their products and services.</p> <p>Regulating digital wallet providers strikes a crucial balance between innovation and accountability, ensuring life-changing technology continues to serve the public interest.</p> <p>The shift towards a cashless society in Australia isn’t just a possibility, it’s already well underway.</p> <p>The blend of technological advancements, changing consumer preferences and regulatory adaptations has set the stage for this transformation. The new regulations will help Australians navigate this transition more confidently.<img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215446/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /></p> <p><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/angel-zhong-1204643"><em>Angel Zhong</em></a><em>, Associate Professor of Finance, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/rmit-university-1063">RMIT University</a></em></p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-move-to-a-cashless-society-isnt-just-a-possibility-its-well-underway-215446">original article</a>.</em></p>

Money & Banking

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How 1920s high society fashion pushed gender boundaries through ‘freaking’ parties

<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/dominic-janes-347508">Dominic Janes</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/keele-university-1012">Keele University</a></em></p> <p>The 1920s brought about a rise in androgynous fashion among a high society set that broke boundaries and caused controversy. This drew on a subculture that had existed for decades, perhaps centuries, but after the first world war gender-bending fashions became front page news.</p> <p>It was a time of upheaval. Established regimes were toppling across Europe. In Britain, women over 30 had finally been given the vote and there was widespread concern about the new hedonism of their younger “flapper” sisters.</p> <p>There was also a new market for novels, such as Radcylffe Hall’s <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2019/4/1/radclyffe-hall-well-of-loneliness-legacy#:%7E:text=On%20November%2016%2C%201928%2C%20Biron,its%20immediate%20removal%20from%20circulation.">banned book</a> <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221121-the-well-of-loneliness-the-most-corrosive-book-ever">The Well of Loneliness</a> (1928) that focused on, rather than merely hinted at, queer lives. Daring male university students <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwab036">started wearing makeup</a>. One of these was <a href="https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/cecil-beaton-an-introduction">Cecil Beaton</a>, the future celebrity photographer, who <a href="https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/ht24wj66t">delighted in cross-dressing</a> both on stage and off.</p> <p>Beaton became part of a set of high society socialites who were known as the “<a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/cecil-beaton-bright-young-things/exhibition">bright young things</a>”. They were often socially privileged, many of them were queer and their antics were <a href="https://djtaylorwriter.co.uk/page10.htm">widely followed in the media</a> with a mixture of horror and fascination.</p> <p>The “things” took partying seriously and paid great attention to their outfits. They dressed to transgress. In 1920, high society magazine <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/freak-to-chic-9781350172609/">The Sketch reported</a> that what it termed “freak parties” were suddenly in vogue with the younger set.</p> <p>Before the war, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/freak-to-chic-9781350172609/">articles had appeared</a> condemning unusual styles as “freak fashions”, but suddenly “<a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/freak-to-chic-9781350248083/">freaking</a>” was all the rage.</p> <p>Until this point, menswear had been heavily circumscribed. Black was the default colour for formal occasions and tweed for informal settings. But suddenly there was a circle who were keen to try out new looks, no matter how bizarre – or queer-looking – the results.</p> <h2>Queer parties, queer fashions</h2> <p>These styles were often worn as fancy dress, but they borrowed looks from marginalised queer communities such as feminine-styled queer men, some of whom made a living by selling sexual services.</p> <p>One such man was Quentin Crisp, whose memoir <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/324730/the-naked-civil-servant-by-quentin-crisp/">The Naked Civil Servant</a> (1968) was dramatised as a <a href="http://www.crisperanto.org/news/NCSusa2007.html">pioneering TV drama</a>.</p> <p>Another source of inspiration was the <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3682948.html">freak show</a>. These displays, horrifying from a 21st century point of view, were a popular element of circuses at the time. They featured such stock characters as the muscled giant and the bearded lady, some of whom <a href="https://www.thehumanmarvels.com/annie-jones-the-esau-woman/">became celebrities</a> in their own right.</p> <p>Masquerade and fancy dress parties had long been a feature of urban social life, but the bright young things innovated in that they impressed less through the expense of their outfits and more through their queer implications.</p> <p>Many such parties were themed, such as a Greek-themed freak party that was hailed as the greatest “Dionysia” of 1929 (Dionysus being the Greek god of sex and pleasure). Androgynous and cross dressing looks were common and men such as Beaton designed their own frocks.</p> <p>In July 1927, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Her-Husband-was-a-Woman-Womens-Gender-Crossing-in-Modern-British-Popular/Oram/p/book/9780415400077">one magazine declared</a> that an event attended by Beaton’s friend Stephen Tennant dressed as the Queen of Sheba and bisexual actress Tallulah Bankhead dressed as a male tennis star was: “one of the queerest of all the ‘freak’ parties ever given in London”.</p> <h2>The party’s over</h2> <p>The Wall Street crash of 1929 led to a rapid shift in public mood. Economic recession led people to favour sobriety over flamboyance. Money for the parties ran out and media attention faltered.</p> <p>Gender-bending style vanished from the fashionable arena, although it persisted on inner cities streets. Quentin Crisp’s mode of <a href="https://bodleianshop.co.uk/products/british-dandies">queer dandyism</a> was daring for its time, but it only became extraordinary by virtue of his unwillingness to modernise.</p> <p>Seemingly he, and pretty much he alone, continued to wear the queer looks of the interwar period into the television age. He duly <a href="http://www.crisperanto.org/news/AnEnglishmanInNYmovie.html">became a transatlantic celebrity</a> late in life when he became the inspiration for Sting’s song <a href="https://www.sting.com/discography/album/189/Singles">Englishman in New York</a> in 1987.</p> <p>Cecil Beaton, meanwhile, became a leading photographer for Vogue magazine and was commissioned to take official <a href="https://www.rct.uk/cecil-beaton-1904-80">coronation portraits of Elizabeth II</a>. He also designed the fantastic dresses worn by Audrey Hepburn in the film <a href="https://www.tatler.com/article/in-cecil-beatons-show-stopping-designs-for-my-fair-lady-lies-a-story-of-tantrums-and-top-hats">My Fair Lady</a> (1964), inspired by the gowns he and his compatriots had dreamed up for themselves some 40 years earlier.<img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205893/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /></p> <p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/dominic-janes-347508">Dominic Janes</a>, Professor of Modern History, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/keele-university-1012">Keele University</a></em></p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty </em><em>Images </em></p> <p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-1920s-high-society-fashion-pushed-gender-boundaries-through-freaking-parties-205893">original article</a>.</em></p>

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Tiredness of life: the growing phenomenon in western society

<p>Molly was 88 years old and in good health. She had outlived two husbands, her siblings, most of her friends and her only son. </p> <p>“I don’t have any meaningful relationships left, dear,” she told me. “They’ve all died. And you know what? Underneath it all, I want to leave this world too.” </p> <p>Leaning a little closer, as though she was telling me a secret, she continued: "Shall I tell you what I am? I’m strong. I can admit to myself and to you that there’s nothing left for me here. I’m more than ready to leave when it’s my time. In fact, it can’t come quickly enough."</p> <p>I’ve <a href="https://theconversation.com/loneliness-loss-and-regret-what-getting-old-really-feels-like-new-study-157731">interviewed</a> many older people for research. Every so often, I’m struck by the sincerity with which some people feel that their life is completed. They seem tired of being alive. </p> <p>I’m a member of of the European <a href="https://research.ugent.be/web/result/project/6d511516-39ad-4c2e-ad46-44d5ce25ca29/details/en">Understanding Tiredness of Life in Older People Research Network</a>, a group of geriatricians, psychiatrists, social scientists, psychologists and death scholars. We want to better understand the phenomenon and unpick what is unique about it. The network is also working on advice for politicians and healthcare practices, as well as caregiver and patient support.</p> <p>Professor of care ethics Els van Wijngaarden and colleagues in the Netherlands <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953615002889">listened to a group of older people</a> who were not seriously ill, yet felt a yearning to end their lives. The key issues they identified in such people were: aching loneliness, pain associated with not mattering, struggles with self-expression, existential tiredness, and fear of being reduced to a completely dependent state.</p> <p>This need not be the consequence of a lifetime of suffering, or a response to intolerable physical pain. Tiredness of life also seems to arise in people who consider themselves to have lived fulfilling lives.</p> <p>One man of 92 told the network’s researchers: "You have no effect on anything. The ship sets sail and everyone has a job, but you just sail along. I am cargo to them. That’s not easy. That’s not me. Humiliation is too strong a word, but it is bordering on it. I simply feel ignored, completely marginalised."</p> <p>Another man said: "Look at the condition of those old ladies in the building opposite. Gaunt and half-dead, pointlessly driven around in a wheelchair … It has nothing to do with being human anymore. It is a stage of life I simply don’t want to go through."</p> <h2>A unique suffering</h2> <p>The American novelist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/books/review/07gord.html">Philip Roth wrote</a> that “old age is not a battle, old age is a massacre”. If we live long enough, we can lose our identity, physical capabilities, partner, friends and careers. </p> <p>For some people, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ageing-and-society/article/abs/gradual-separation-from-the-world-a-qualitative-exploration-of-existential-loneliness-in-old-age/5567288AD35DFB878F3F756FF233FB1C">this elicits</a> a deep-rooted sense that life has been stripped of meaning – and that the tools we need to rebuild a sense of purpose are irretrievable.</p> <p>Care professor Helena Larsson and colleagues in Sweden have <a href="https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s12877-017-0533-1.pdf#:%7E:text=This%20study%20is%20part%20of%20a%20larger%20research,was%20analysed%20using%20Hsiehand%20Shannon%E2%80%99s%20conventional%20content%20analysis.">written about</a> a gradual “turning out of the lights” in old age. They argue that people steadily let go of life, until they reach a point where they are ready to turn off the outside world. Larsson’s team raises the question of whether this might be inevitable for us all. </p> <p>Of course, this sort of suffering shares characteristics (it’s depressing and painful) with anguish we encounter at other points in life. But it’s not the same. Consider the existential suffering that might arise from a terminal illness or recent divorce. In these examples, part of the suffering is connected to the fact that there is more of life’s voyage to make – but that the rest of the journey feels uncertain and no longer looks the way we fantasised it would. </p> <p>This sort of suffering is often tied to mourning a future we feel we should have had, or fearing a future we are uncertain about. One of the distinctions in tiredness of life is that there is no desire for, or mourning of, a future; only a profound sense that the journey is over, yet drags on painfully and indefinitely.</p> <h2>The global view</h2> <p>In countries where euthanasia and assisted suicide are <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n147">legal</a>, doctors and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265161.2021.2013981?casa_token=XEzfqjWH8uUAAAAA:GD6c6mZEv7q9eq2fqfSNcrbGWYD1-0ehOU3tTTJ2Zbnyraf3VvdvQcIRXF847Dp6T9k_yWctt3E">researchers are debating</a> whether tiredness of life meets the threshold for the sort of <a href="http://www.bioethics.org.au/Resources/Online%20Articles/Opinion%20Pieces/2201%20Tired%20of%20Life.pdf">unceasing emotional suffering</a> that grants people the right to euthanasia. </p> <p>The fact that this problem is common enough for researchers to debate it may suggest that modern life has shut older people out of western society. Perhaps elders are <a href="https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/703688/">no longer revered</a> for their wisdom and experience. But it’s not inevitable. In Japan, age is seen as a spring or rebirth after a busy period of working and raising children. One study found older adults in Japan showed <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183740/#R34">higher scores on personal growth</a> compared with midlife adults, whereas the opposite age pattern was found in the US.</p> <p>Surgeon and medical professor <a href="https://mh.bmj.com/content/41/2/145">Atul Gawande</a> argues that in western societies, medicine has created the ideal conditions for transforming ageing into a “long, slow fade”. He believes quality of life has been overlooked as we channel our resources towards biological survival. This is unprecedented in history. Tiredness of life may be evidence of the cost.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/tiredness-of-life-the-growing-phenomenon-in-western-society-203934" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>

Caring

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Why reading books is good for society, wellbeing and your career

<p>TikTok allows video up to 10 minutes, but says surveys show almost half its users are stressed by anything <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-wants-longer-videos-like-not">longer than a minute</a>. An Instagram video can be up to 90 seconds, but experts reckon the ideal time to maximise engagement is <a href="https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-reel-length/">less than 15 seconds</a>. Twitter doubled the length of tweets in 2017 to <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twitters-doubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAE7Ou03VeQ_VU9SZA2zdsZOLh6KKtVl5dj2ti0R3YgY_T_G9h7s3Ry9GOzQNecfcZbs_ko9I9YGELzKTM_2Ox9PTglVrcKM_xbBwh23aBAm12Q126TLMvre8SujfV3KkZnRIisVGD19Q3j5uP-P3RMMJuATO_ooLJgkF19ECOs3g">280 characters</a>, but the typical length is more like <a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/10/many-characters-tweet-ask-experts/">33 characters</a>.</p> <p>It’s easy to get sucked into short and sensational content. But if you’re worried this may be harming your attention span, you <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media">should be</a>. There’s solid evidence that so many demands on our attention make us <a href="https://www.curtin.edu.au/news/media-release/short-attention-spans-linked-to-social-media-distress/">more stressed</a>, and that the endless social comparison <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-social-media-makes-you-feel-bad-and-what-to-do-about-it-197691">makes us feel worse</a> about ourselves.</p> <p>For better mental health, read a book.</p> <p>Studies show a range of psychological benefits from book-reading. Reading fiction can increase your capacity for <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1239918">empathy</a>, through the process of seeing the world through a relatable character. Reading has been found to reduce stress as effectively as <a href="https://clutejournals.com/index.php/TLC/article/view/1117">yoga</a>. It is being prescribed for depression – a treatment <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-95164-009">known as bibliotherapy</a>.</p> <p>Book-reading is also a strong marker of curiosity – a <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-business-case-for-curiosity">quality prized</a> by employers such as Google. Our research shows reading is as strongly associated with curiosity as interest in science, and more strongly than mathematical ability.</p> <p>And it’s not just that curious minds are more likely to read because of a thirst for knowledge and understanding. That happens too, but our research has specifically been to investigate the role of reading in the development of curious minds.</p> <h2>Tracking reading and curiosity</h2> <p>Our <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00036846.2023.2174943">findings</a> come from analysing data from the <a href="https://www.lsay.edu.au/aboutlsay">Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth</a>, which tracks the progress of young Australians from the age of 15 till 25.</p> <p>Longitudinal surveys provide valuable insights by surveying the same people – in this case a group of about 10,000 young people. Every year for ten years they are asked about their achievements, aspirations, education, employment and life satisfaction.</p> <p>There have been five survey cohorts since 1998, the most recent starting in 2016. We analysed three of them – those beginning in 2003, 2006 and 2009, looking at the data up to age 20, at which age most have a job or are looking for one.</p> <p>The survey data is rich enough to develop proxy measures of reading and curiosity levels. It includes participants’ scores in the OECD <a href="https://www.oecd.org/pisa/">Programme for International Student Assessment</a> tests for reading, mathematics and science ability. There are survey questions about time spent reading for pleasure, time reading newspapers or magazines, and library use.</p> <p>To measure curiosity, we used respondents’ answers to questions about their interest in the following:</p> <ul> <li>learning new things</li> <li>thinking about why the world is in the state it is</li> <li>finding out more about things you don’t understand</li> <li>finding out about a new idea</li> <li>finding out how something works.</li> </ul> <p>We used statistical modelling to control for environmental and demographic variables and distinguish the effect of reading activity as a teenager on greater curiosity as a young adult. This modelling gives us confidence that reading is not just correlated with curiosity. Reading books helps build curiosity.</p> <h2>Gloom and doom-scrolling</h2> <p>Does this mean if you’re older that it’s too late to start reading? No. Our results relate to young people because the data was available. No matter what your age, deep reading has benefits over social-media scrolling.</p> <p>The <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Dopamine-Nation-Finding-Balance-Indulgence/dp/152474672X">short-term dopamine rush</a> of scrolling on a device is an elusive promise. It depletes rather than uplifts us. Our limbic brain – the part of the brain associated with our emotional and behavioural responses – remains trapped in a spiral of pleasure-seeking.</p> <p>Studies show a high correlation between <a href="https://academic.oup.com/hcr/article-abstract/44/1/3/4760433">media multitasking and attention problems</a> due to <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315167275/emotional-cognitive-overload-anne-fran%C3%A7oise-rutkowski-carol-saunders">cognitive overload</a>. The effect is most evident among young people, who have grown up with <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11126-017-9535-6">social media overexposure</a>.</p> <p>US social psychologist <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00296-x">Jonathan Haidt</a> is among the researchers <a href="https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic">warning</a> that high social media use is a major contributor to declining mental health for teenage girls, "Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller."</p> <p>Why this “giant, obvious, international, and gendered cause”? Haidt writes, "Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too — the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them for friends, enemies, and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) vastly superior bodies and lives."</p> <p>In 2020 Haidt published <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00296-x">research</a> showing girls are more vulnerable to “fear of missing out” and the aggression that social media tends to amplify. Since then he’s become even more convinced of the correlation.</p> <p>Social media, by design, is addictive.</p> <p>With TikTok, for example, videos start automatically, based on what the algorithm already knows about you. But it doesn’t just validate your preferences and feed you opinions that confirm your biases. It also varies the content so you don’t know what is coming next. This is the same trick that keeps gamblers addicted.</p> <h2>Tips to get back into books</h2> <p>If you are having difficulty choosing between your phone and a book, here’s a simple tip <a href="https://www.katymilkman.com/book">proven by behavioural science</a>. To change behaviour it also helps to change your environment.</p> <p>Try the following:</p> <ul> <li> <p>Carry a book at all times, or leave books around the house in convenient places.</p> </li> <li> <p>Schedule reading time into your day. <a href="https://howtoliveameaningfullife.com/you-should-read-everyday-but-for-how-long-the-science-says/?fbclid=IwAR03mbaXPpM19aoaO4p1AsTD0EvZsLgFQJy0RoJo8JTx9g1Q6ukh4_FEbIU">20 minutes is enough</a>. This reinforces the habit and ensures regular immersion in the book world.</p> </li> <li> <p>If you’re not enjoying a book, try another. Don’t force yourself.</p> </li> </ul> <p>You’ll feel better for it – and be prepared for a future employer asking you what books you’re reading.</p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-reading-books-is-good-for-society-wellbeing-and-your-career-200447" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.</em></p> <p><em>Images: Getty</em></p>

Books

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Ever feel like your life is a performance? Everyone does – and this 1959 book explains roles, scripts and hiding backstage

<p>Shakespeare’s adage — “All the world’s a stage” — suggests human beings are conditioned to perform, and to possess an acute social awareness of how they appear in front of others.</p> <p>It resonates in the age of social media, where we’re all performing ourselves on our screens and watching each other’s performances play out. Increasingly, those screen performances are how we meet people, and how we form relationships: from online dating, to remote work, to staying in touch with family.</p> <p>While the idea of performance as central to social life has been around for centuries, <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0228.xml">Erving Goffman</a> was the first to attempt a comprehensive account of society and everyday life using theatre as an analogy.</p> <p>His influential 1959 book <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-9780241547991">The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life</a> is something of a “bible” for scholars interested in questions of how we operate in everyday life. It became a surprise US bestseller on publication, crossing over to a general readership.</p> <p>Goffman wrote about how we perform different versions of ourselves in different social environments, while keeping our “backstage” essential selves private. He called his idea <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003160861-3/dramaturgy-charles-edgley?context=ubx&amp;refId=6e9b71d0-973c-4ebe-b90b-41a372d12623">dramaturgy</a>.</p> <p>Playwright Alan Bennett <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n19/alan-bennett/cold-sweat">wrote admiringly</a> of him, “Individuals knew they behaved in this way, but Goffman knew everybody behaved like this and so did I.”</p> <h2>Goffman as influencer (and suspected spy)</h2> <p>In a <a href="https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/about-isa/history-of-isa/books-of-the-xx-century">poll of professional sociologists</a>, Goffman’s book ranked in the top ten publications of the 20th century.</p> <p>It influenced playwrights such as <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019027250907200402">Tom Stoppard</a> and, of course, Bennett, who <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Alan-Bennett-A-Critical-Introduction/OMealy/p/book/9780815335405">was interested in</a> depicting and analysing the role-playing of everyday life that Goffman identified.</p> <p>Goffman was <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781444396621.ch24">born in Mannville</a>, Alberta in 1922 to Ukrainian Jewish parents who migrated to Canada. The sister of the man who would become famous for his theatre analogies was an actor, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0062844/">Frances Bay</a>: late in life, she would play quirky, recognisable roles such as the “marble rye” lady on <a href="https://theconversation.com/science-of-seinfeld-131606">Seinfeld</a> and a recurring part on <a href="https://theconversation.com/ill-see-you-again-in-25-years-the-return-to-twin-peaks-32624">Twin Peaks</a> (as Mrs Tremond/Chalfant).</p> <p>The path to Goffman’s book was an unusual one. It didn’t come from directly studying the theatre, or even from asking questions about theatregoers.</p> <p>While completing postgraduate studies at the the University of Chicago, Goffman was given the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in the Shetland Islands, an isolated part of northern Scotland, for his <a href="https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/ns-ccic/release/4">PhD dissertation</a>.</p> <p>Goffman pretended to be there to <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470999912.ch3">study agricultural techniques</a>. But his actual reason was to examine the everyday life of the Shetland Islanders. As he observed the everyday practices and rituals of the remote island community, he had to negotiate suspicions he may <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Social-Organization-Sociological-Routledge/dp/0415112044">have been a spy</a>.</p> <p>In Goffman’s published book, the ethnography of the Shetland Islands takes a back seat to his dramaturgical theory.</p> <h2>More than a popular how-to manual</h2> <p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-9780241547991">The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life</a> quickly became <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Sociological-Bent-InsideMetro-Culture/dp/0170120015">a national bestseller</a>. It was picked up by general readers “as a guide to social manners and on how to be clever and calculating in social intercourse without being obvious”.</p> <p>This fascinating and complex academic work could indeed be read as a “how-to” manual on how to impress others and mitigate negative impressions. But Goffman <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Erving-Goffman/Smith/p/book/9780415355919">didn’t mean</a> “performance” literally. Reading the book as a guide to middle-class etiquette misses some of its nuances.</p> <p>One is the sophisticated understanding of how reality and contrivance relate to each other. A good performance is one that appears “unselfconscious”; a “contrived” performance is one where the fact the social actor is performing a role is “painstakingly evident”.</p> <p>In everyday language, we tend to describe the latter as trying too hard. But Goffman is making a more general point, about the way we all perform ourselves, all the time – whether the effort is visible or not.</p> <p>If “All the world is not, of course, a stage”, then “the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify”.</p> <h2>Playing roles and being in character</h2> <p>Today, we regularly use theatrical terms like “role”, “script”, “props”, “audience” and being “in and out of character” to describe how people behave in their everyday social life. But Goffman is the one who introduced these concepts, which have become part of our shared language.</p> <p>Together, they highlight how social life depends on what Goffman terms a shared definition of particular situations.</p> <p>Whether we are performing our work roles, having dinner with someone for whom we have romantic affections, or dealing with strangers in a public setting, we need to produce and maintain the appropriate definition of that reality.</p> <p>These activities are “performances”, according to Goffman, because they involve mutual awareness or attentiveness to the information others emit. This mutual awareness, or attention to others, means humans are constantly performing for audiences in their everyday lives.</p> <h2>Being in and out of character</h2> <p>It matters who the audience is – and what type of audience we have for our performances. When thinking about how people adapt their behaviour for others, Goffman differentiates between “front regions” and “back regions”.</p> <p>Front regions are where we must present what is often referred to as the “best version of ourselves”. In an open-plan office, a worker needs to look busy if their supervisor is about. So, in the front region, they need to look engaged, industrious and generally perform the role of being a worker. In an open-plan office, a worker needs to be constantly “in character”, as Goffman puts it.</p> <p>Back regions are where a social actor can “let their guard down”. In the context of a workplace, the back regions might refer to the bathroom, the lunchroom or anywhere else where the worker can relax their performance and potentially resort to “out of character” behaviour.</p> <p>If the worker takes a diversionary break to gossip with a colleague when their supervisor is no longer in earshot, they could be said to be engaging in back region conduct.</p> <p>Front and back regions are not defined by physical locations. A back region is any situation in which the individual can relax and drop their performance. (Of course, this means regions overlap with physical locations to some extent – people are more likely to be able to relax when they’re in more private settings.)</p> <p>Thus, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/open-plan-office-awful.html">open-plan offices</a> are often unpopular because workers feel they are constantly under surveillance. Conversely, the work-from-home arrangements that have become more common since the era of COVID lockdowns are popular because they allow people to relax their work personae.</p> <p>Renowned writer Jenny Diski <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n05/jenny-diski/think-of-mrs-darling">reflected</a> in 2004, "reading Goffman now is alarmingly claustrophobic. He presents a world where there is nowhere to run; a perpetual dinner party of status seeking, jockeying for position and saving face. Any idea of an authentic self becomes a nonsense. You may or may not believe in what you are performing; either type of performance is believed in or it is not."</p> <h2>21st-century Goffman</h2> <p>Dramaturgy has survived the onset of our new media environment, where the presentation of the self has migrated to platforms as diverse as <a href="https://theconversation.com/instagram-and-facebook-are-stalking-you-on-websites-accessed-through-their-apps-what-can-you-do-about-it-188645">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-corn-how-the-online-viral-corn-kid-is-on-a-well-worn-path-to-fame-in-the-child-influencer-industry-189974">TikTok</a>. In some ways, it’s more relevant than ever.</p> <p>Goffman’s approach has been applied to <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/no-sense-of-place-9780195042313?cc=au&amp;lang=en&amp;">electronic media</a>, radio and <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Media_and_Modernity/asB7QgAACAAJ?hl=en">television</a> <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003160861-19/reception-goffman-work-media-studies-peter-lunt">studies</a>, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262515047/new-tech-new-ties/">mobile phones</a> – and, more recently, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565211036797">social media</a> and even <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276419829541">AI studies</a>.</p> <p>The “successful staging” (as Goffman terms it) of our social roles has only become more complex. This is perfectly illustrated by “BBC Dad” Robert Kelly, whose 2017 <a href="https://junkee.com/bbc-dad-pictures-kids-now-marion-james/324165">live television interview</a> from his home study was interrupted when his children wandered into the room. This was before COVID lockdowns, when our home and work lives (and personae) increasingly merged.</p> <p>“Everyone understands that now,” <a href="https://junkee.com/bbc-dad-pictures-kids-now-marion-james/324165">wrote Reena Gupta</a> in 2022. “You or someone in your family or circle of friends has been BBC Dad.”</p> <p>Maintaining and maximising performances still matters. And so does Goffman.</p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/ever-feel-like-your-life-is-a-performance-everyone-does-and-this-1959-book-explains-roles-scripts-and-hiding-backstage-195939" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.</em></p> <p><em>Images: Getty</em></p>

Books

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Bringing art into public spaces can improve the social fabric of a city

<p>You don’t need to look far to see the impact of art in public spaces. Art can connect us to place and record history as it unfolds. </p> <p>Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, stories on the <a href="https://www.publicartarchive.org/public-art-covid19/">importance of public art</a> are being <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/travel/coronavirus-street-art.html">told globally</a>. And this isn’t new. Times of crisis have often inspired some of the most influential artistic movements. </p> <p>Displaying visual symbols of resistance publicly, like the face of George Floyd, can connect <a href="https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/06/george-floyd-global-murals/">social movements across the world</a>. And in Canada, the display of statues like Egerton Ryerson have been <a href="https://theconversation.com/egerton-ryerson-racist-philosophy-of-residential-schools-also-shaped-public-education-143039">deemed unacceptable</a> as we reckon with our ongoing colonial history.</p> <p>Public art <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Everyday-Practice-of-Public-Art-Art-Space-and-Social-Inclusion/Cartiere-Zebracki/p/book/9781138829213">can be defined</a> as art that is available to the general public outside of museums and galleries; publicly funded; and related to the interests or concerns of, and used by a public community.</p> <p>Public art is referred to by some as <a href="https://www.deeproot.com/blog/blog-entries/creative-placemaking-using-the-arts-as-a-tool-for-community-development">creative placemaking</a>: a process of artistic creation and collaboration that helps to shape the surrounding built, natural and social environments.</p> <p>For French philosopher <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1029-the-emancipated-spectator">Jacques Rancière</a>, art is disruptive. Done right, he says, it can make the spectator rethink their understanding of politics and society by calling to attention previously hidden inequalities. </p> <p>For many, the power of public art rests in its ability to turn artistic practice into a <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/art-of-social-practice-is-changing-the-world-one-row-house-at-a-time-2415/">social practice</a>. It challenges the viewer to confront social issues that affect the very place they stand.</p> <h2>Art in times of crisis</h2> <p>COVID-19 is just one example of a period of shared adversity when our connection to the arts has flourished. <a href="https://time.com/5827561/1918-flu-art/">The Dadaists’ commentary on the 1918 flu</a> reflected an intense and collectively frustrated desire for meaning in a world filled with chaos.</p> <p>During the Great Depression, the arts became increasingly experimental. In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal saw the largest public art <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/1934-the-art-of-the-new-deal-132242698/">funding initiative</a>the country had seen. A few decades later, in the 1980s, provinces and municipalities in Canada followed suit and began <a href="https://canadianart.ca/features/art-in-condoland/">significantly investing in public art</a>.</p> <p><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-soundtrack-of-the-sixties-demanded-respect-justice-and-equality-105640">Protest music</a> during the civil rights movement and Vietnam War expressed anger, despair and hope. Gay artists and writers <a href="https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-anglaises-2008-3-page-350.htm">during the AIDS crisis memorialized a collective grief</a> that was being either ignored or vilified. The art from both eras came at an immense cost, and has been profoundly culturally and socially influential. </p> <p>Today, the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated inequalities that were already present.</p> <p>But there has also been engagement and social solidarity: from <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/05/23/19-black-canadians-on-what-has-changed-one-year-since-george-floyds-murder-and-what-next-steps-we-need-to-take.html">Black Lives Matter</a>, to the Indigenous <a href="https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/what-were-seeing-in-2020-is-idle-no-more-2-0/">Land Back movement</a> and <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/we-are-not-the-virus/id1530051155">support for unhoused people</a>.</p> <p>Those who have the privilege not to pay attention are finding this option less viable. This engagement arguably comes with its own <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-solidarity-during-coronavirus-and-always-its-more-than-were-all-in-this-together-135002">set of problems</a>, but it is a momentum that can be built upon to imagine and do the work needed to create better futures for society. </p> <p>Artists are well positioned to do this creative imagining. </p> <h2>Art beyond the gallery</h2> <p>As we each search for meaning throughout our intensely local and geographically limited lives during the pandemic, public art finds, creates and shares the beauty, joy and solidarity that can be found in public spaces.</p> <p>Galleries are often isolated from the communities in geographical proximity. They have often been <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2017.1367190">places of exclusion</a>, and have historically served to uphold a dominant, European <a href="https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/20250">settler-centred narrative</a>. They have played a role in perpetuating colonial and racist attitudes towards Indigenous communities, their art and histories. </p> <p>Indigenous artists have long been <a href="https://www.rebeccabelmore.com/artifact-671b/">challenging these narratives</a>. Mainstream art is catching on, and there has been an unprecedented level of Indigenous <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2017.1367191">representation and leadership</a> within gallery spaces in recent decades.</p> <p>This leadership should shape public art in Canada. Public spaces, like art galleries, have also <a href="https://theconversation.com/6-ways-to-approach-urban-green-spaces-in-the-push-for-racial-justice-and-health-equity-160227">privileged some</a> more than others. Bringing art outside of the gallery space is not a catch-all solution. What matters more is how it’s done. </p> <h2>Toronto’s year of public art</h2> <p>In Toronto, the municipal government has announced that its “<a href="https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/history-art-culture/public-art/year-of-public-art/">Year of Public Art</a>” will begin in the fall with a total budget of $4.5 million in 2021. This is the inauguration of a 10-year public art plan. It responds to calls for an improved public art strategy, with a greater commitment to equity in the location of installations, the level of engagement with communities and the artists who create works.</p> <p>Toronto has promised a strong commitment to Indigenous self-determination, leadership and placemaking within its public art strategy.</p> <p>The city’s public art installations have <a href="http://www.theartfulcity.org/home/2017/3/9/50-years-of-public-art-in-toronto-where-do-we-go-from-here">increased in the past 50 years</a>, with over 700 installations added between 1967 and 2015. </p> <p>Toronto’s <a href="https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/planning-development/official-plan-guidelines/design-guidelines/percent-for-public-art-inventory/">Percent for Public Art program</a>, a commonly used strategy in cities in North America and Europe, encourages developers to donate one per cent of their gross construction costs towards public art in their development’s direct vicinity. </p> <p>The program is <a href="https://www2.ocadu.ca/sites/www2.ocadu.ca/files/project/Pt1%20-%20Redefining%20Public%20Art%20Toronto%202017.pdf">voluntary</a> though. And because most development is happening in the downtown core, this is where public art has been concentrated, meaning neighbourhoods with less development have received less investment in public art. </p> <p>Nonetheless, the city is home to a multiplicity of adept communities and talented artists who continue to use public art to build community capacity and foster social inclusion. </p> <p>Listening to artists of diverse backgrounds and elevating communities to participate meaningfully will support important conversations that determine our collective future. And that makes the investment in public art worthwhile for us all.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/bringing-art-into-public-spaces-can-improve-the-social-fabric-of-a-city-162991" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.</em></p>

Art

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When pets are family, the benefits extend into society

<p>There is a growing global trend to consider pets as part of the family. In fact, millions of people around the world love their pets, enjoying their companionship, going for walks, playing and even talking to them. And there is evidence suggesting that attachment to pets is good for human health and even helps build community.</p> <p>More and more often, animals are included in family events and become important to all members of the family. This can be particularly significant in single-parent families, where <a href="https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2214.2001.00202.x" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a pet can be an important companion to children</a>. Children with pets may have higher levels of <a href="https://doi.org/10.2752/089279306785593801" target="_blank" rel="noopener">empathy</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2009.01296.x" target="_blank" rel="noopener">self-esteem</a> compared to those who do not have pets. Thinking of pets as family members can actually make the chores associated with pet care less stressful than they are for those who consider pets as property. Spending more time caring for a pet increases attachment to that animal which in turn <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2018.1505269" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reduces stress in owners</a>.</p> <p>In the research my colleagues and I have done on <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2308-3417/3/4/75/htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">aging and social participation</a>, we found considerable analysis showing that interactions involving pets, especially if we care about them, can have a health-protective effect. Zooeyia (pronounced zoo-AY-uh) is the idea that pets, also known as companion animals, can be <a href="https://www.jabfm.org/content/28/4/526" target="_blank" rel="noopener">good for human health</a>. In fact, pet owners in Germany and Australia were found to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-005-5072-z" target="_blank" rel="noopener">visit their doctor 15 per cent fewer times annually than non-pet owners</a>.</p> <h2>Healthy, emotional connections</h2> <p>Many health benefits to humans occur when there is an emotional attachment to pets. And we tend to care the most for animals that live with us. For example, a study that looked at attachment to dogs found that people tended to <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/089279306785415466" target="_blank" rel="noopener">care about their house dogs more than those that lived in the yard</a>. Higher levels of attachment to dogs has been associated with a greater likelihood of walking the dog and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnw051" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spending more time on those walks as compared with those with a weaker bond to their dogs</a>.</p> <p>Sharing your life with a pet has been associated with a decreased risk of <a href="https://insights.ovid.com/crossref?an=00005792-201703310-00028" target="_blank" rel="noopener">coronary artery disease, a reduction in stress levels and increased physical activity (especially through dog walking)</a>. The presence of a pet during stressful activities has been shown to <a href="https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/Citation/1998/01000/SOCIAL_INTERACTION_AND_CARDIOVASCULAR_REACTIVITY.52.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lower the blood pressure of couples taking part in a stressful task</a>. In fact, <a href="http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/12672376" target="_blank" rel="noopener">levels of beta-endorphin, oxytocin and dopamine, among other markers, increased in both humans and their dogs</a> during caring interactions, demonstrating that time spent together is physiologically beneficial for both species. And owning a pet has been associated with an <a href="https://doi.org/10.1097/HJH.0000000000001214" target="_blank" rel="noopener">improved cardiovascular disease survival among older adults (aged 65 to 84 years old) being treated for hypertension</a>.</p> <h2>Pets as family and community members</h2> <p>Because pets are considered family members by many people, the loss of a dog or cat is often a cause for deep grief. A missing or dead pet is hard for many to replace because the relationship between the person and pet was specific to those individuals. The attachment between humans and animals is often so strong that it is common to <a href="https://doi.org/10.17744/mehc.26.3.udj040fw2gj75lqp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">mourn in a way that is very similar to the feelings and behaviours associated with the loss of a human family member</a>.</p> <p>The bond between humans and animals is not just good for human health, it can also help <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122085" target="_blank" rel="noopener">build community</a>. People with pets often find that <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.01.017" target="_blank" rel="noopener">activities with their companion animal creates connections with other people</a>. Social networks that are developed based on shared concern over the welfare of animals can lead to increased human-human interaction, as well as activities involving pets (e.g. dog-walking clubs). Walking a dog gets people out of private spaces, which can be isolating, and <a href="https://doi.org/10.3122/jabfm.2015.04.140254" target="_blank" rel="noopener">into public areas where interactions with neighbors and other walkers are possible</a>.</p> <h2>Protecting pets</h2> <p>Societies create laws and institutions to protect companion animals from cruelty and neglect. In most jurisdictions, regulation of shelters and pounds has not evolved to reflect the beloved status of many pets, and instead consider pets as property. If a lost pet is not reunited with an owner within a few days it can be <a href="https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90a22" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sold to a new family, to a research lab, or be euthanized</a>. However, some countries, such as <a href="https://helpanimalsindia.org/news/library/saving-indias-street-dogs-from-abc-to-arv" target="_blank" rel="noopener">India</a>, <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.4415/ann_12_01_16" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Italy</a> and <a href="https://eng.coa.gov.tw/theme_data.php?theme=eng_news&amp;id=481" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Taiwan</a> have legislated against the euthanasia of healthy shelter animals.</p> <p>But in North America euthanasia is still common. In 2017, Humane Canada found that among the shelters they surveyed, <a href="https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cfhs/pages/427/attachments/original/1542135547/Humane_Canada_-_2017_Shelter_Statistics_-_FINAL.pdf?1542135547" target="_blank" rel="noopener">over 70 per cent of lost dogs and cats were unclaimed, and tens of thousands of dogs and cats were euthanized</a>. In 2016, <a href="https://www.ccac.ca/en/facts-and-legislation/animal-data/annual-animal-data-reports.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">4,308,921 animals were experimented on</a> in Canadian laboratories. Approximately <a href="https://www.animalalliance.ca/campaigns/pets-research/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">17,000 were pet dogs and cats who were provided by shelters to research laboratories</a> and later euthanized.</p> <p>The strength of the human-animal bond has resulted in the creation of not-for-profit animal rescues whose mission is to ‘pull’ lost and abandoned animals from shelters before they are euthanized or sold for research. For example, <a href="http://marleyshope.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Marley’s Hope</a> is a Nova Scotia all-breed rescue organization. The organisation also partners with the Sipekne’katik First Nation to help <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/sipekne-katik-first-nation-implementing-dog-population-control-program-1.3094215" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rehome roaming dogs as well as spay and neuter where possible</a>. The <a href="http://www.underdograilroadcanada.com/who-are-we.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Underdog Railroad</a> in Toronto, Ontario, rescues dogs and cats from high-kill shelters as well as those offered “free to a good home” online. And <a href="http://www.elderdog.ca/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Elderdog</a> provides older adults with help to care for their pets as well as rescuing abandoned older dogs.</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.hsi.org/world/canada/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Humane Society International — Canada</a> assists in <a href="http://www.hsi.org/world/canada/news/releases/2018/06/spay-neuter-la-romaine-060718.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spay-neuter programs</a> as well as <a href="http://www.hsi.org/world/canada/work/endanimaltesting/qa/cosmetics_qa_canada.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">advocating for</a> and rescuing animals, including in the <a href="http://www.hsi.org/issues/dog_meat/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">international dog and cat meat industries</a>. They closed three South Korean dog meat farms and two slaughterhouses in 2018, rescuing 512 dogs, many of whom found homes in Canada and the USA.</p> <p>Mohandas Ghandi understood the importance of the human animal bond. In his autobiography he said “<a href="http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00litlinks/gandhi/part1/117chapter.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">man’s supremacy over the lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two</a>.” Recognizing the ways that companion animals enrich human lives, and understanding the depth of the affection between many humans and animals, may be the key to not only better health, but to improving the welfare of society as a whole.</p> <p><em><strong>This article originally appeared on The Conversation.</strong></em></p> <p><em>Image: Shutterstock</em></p>

Family & Pets

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Young woman on $100k-plus salary shares her spending habits

<p dir="ltr">A woman who earns $104,600 a year has shared how she spends her lavish pay cheque. </p> <p dir="ltr">The 24-year-old producer based in Melbourne, Australia, submitted her salary and breakdown of her spending habits to Smart Women Society.</p> <p dir="ltr">The breakdown is then shared into a short clip on TikTok revealing how much money goes where.</p> <p dir="ltr">After tax, HECS and superannuation, the young woman is left with $5,468 to take home. She also has a side hustle which brings in $1,000 monthly.</p> <p dir="ltr">The woman’s main goal is to set aside at least $60,000 for a house deposit, as well as having a safety emergency fund.</p> <p dir="ltr">A breakdown of her monthly spending habits shows $1,424 on rent, $140 on bills, $40 on her phone, $50 on transport, $90 on the internet, $74 on insurance, $300 on groceries and $160 on psychologist appointments. </p> <p dir="ltr">Once she’s got the important stuff out of the way, the woman is left with $3,728 of which $700 of it goes towards her home savings and $300 to the emergency fund.</p> <p dir="ltr">The only debts she has are a $363-a-month Invisalign treatment and her $26,000 HECS which is automatically taken out from her pay. </p> <p dir="ltr">She is then left with $2,582 for “fun” stuff such as shopping and eating out. </p> <p dir="ltr">Viewers shared their suggestions to the woman saying it would be better to put more toward the home savings.</p> <p dir="ltr">“That's a lot of money spent on 'fun' - I think I would try and save $1500 for my house,” one commented.</p> <p dir="ltr">“You need to live like you actually have a mortgage now and add those extra bills into it because when you have a mortgage you don’t get 2500 a month fun,” another added.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I’d be dropping an extra bit of cash into the house/emergency fund,” someone else shared.</p> <p dir="ltr"><em>Images: Shutterstock</em></p>

Money & Banking

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Two amazing new stamps for QEII's jubilee

<p>To celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's historic platinum Jubilee, two new postage stamps featuring Her Majesty have been released in Australia to honour the longevity of her extraordinary 70-year reign.</p> <p>The designs feature the colour platinum, in recognition of the Jubilee. The first of the two stamps will feature a portrait of the Queen from 1962 and costs $1.10.</p> <p>The photo was taken by Dorothy Wilding, the first woman appointed as official royal photographer. Images from the photo shoot helped to create the Queen's likeness on new coins, banknotes and stamps, including in Australia, to mark her Coronation.</p> <p>The Queen is wearing the St Edwards Crown, the most important and sacred of all crowns. It was worn at the Queen's coronation on the 2nd of June, 1953 and the next person who will wear the crown is Prince Charles, as heir to the throne.</p> <p>A photograph of the Queen from 2019 is the design for the second postage stamp, taken during an event to mark the centenary of British Airways in London. This one is $3.50 and will be used for international mail.</p> <p>The Queen wears blue and a diamond and turquoise brooch, once owned by the Queen's grandmother, Queen Mary. The brooch was a wedding gift from Queen Mary's in-laws, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.</p> <p>"Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the most featured person on Australian stamps, and we were the first postal authority in the Commonwealth to produce a stamp for the Queen's Birthday each year," Australia Post Group Philatelic Manager Michael Zsolt said in a statement.</p> <p>Australia Post have previously released stamps to commemorate the Queen's golden and diamond jubilees.</p> <p><em>Images: Australia Post </em></p>

Beauty & Style

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Our society should have never abandoned these 5 etiquette rules

<p>Don’t skip these etiquette rules.</p> <p><strong>1. Using good table manners</strong></p> <p>Having proper table manners is sometimes seen as being ‘stuffy’ or ‘stuck up,’ but nothing could be further from the truth,” Gottsman says. “The whole point of practising good manners at the table is to ensure everyone has a positive, comfortable dining experience.” It’s not as tricky as you think.</p> <p><strong>2. Apologising, sincerely, in person</strong></p> <p>Watch any news channel and you’ll see many examples of faux-apologising – pretending to say they’re sorry while not actually accepting any responsibility or changing their behaviour. This is not only terrible etiquette but also counterproductive, Gottsman says. “If you’ve made a mistake, the right thing to do is to own up to it and apologise, sincerely, in person,” she says. If you’re too far away for this to be feasible, a phone call or video chat is the next best thing. Apologising over text almost never goes well since it’s too difficult to read tone and intent.</p> <p><strong>3. Standing when greeting someone new</strong></p> <p>When being introduced to someone new or greeting someone who’s coming into a group, it’s polite to stand to acknowledge them – and this is true for both men and women, Tsai says. “It shows that you are welcoming and also indicates respect.”</p> <p><strong>4. Minding your own business</strong></p> <p>Gossip makes for excellent television but terrible real-life relationships, and that fact is truer than ever in this age of constant information and instant communication. “You need to be so careful about what you say, both in public and private, about others,” says Gottsman. “Not only is it not polite to speak about others behind their backs, but it protects you as well. Remember: The internet is forever!”</p> <p><strong>5. Sending thank-you notes</strong></p> <p>Everyone loves to be thanked, but hardly anyone seems to remember to do it these days. “Any way of saying thank you is wonderful, including a text or email,” Gottsman says. “But the gold standard is still a handwritten thank-you card.” Seeing your handwriting is meaningful to your loved ones, as is knowing that you took the time to do this. Plus, many people like to save these cards, and that’s much harder to do with an electronic thank-you.</p> <p><em>Written by<span> </span><span>Charlotte Hilton Andersen</span>. This article first appeared in </em><a rel="noopener" href="https://www.readersdigest.co.nz/culture/14-etiquette-rules-we-should-never-have-abandoned" target="_blank"><em>Reader’s Digest</em></a><em>. For more of what you love from the world’s best-loved magazine, </em><a rel="noopener" href="http://readersdigest.innovations.co.nz/c/readersdigestemailsubscribe?utm_source=over60&amp;utm_medium=articles&amp;utm_campaign=RDSUB&amp;keycode=WRN93V" target="_blank"><em>here’s our best subscription offer.</em></a></p> <p><img style="width: 100px !important; height: 100px !important;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7820640/1.png" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/f30947086c8e47b89cb076eb5bb9b3e2" /></p>

Beauty & Style

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Four new stamps issued in memory of Prince Philip

<div class="post_body_wrapper"> <div class="post_body"> <div class="body_text redactor-styles redactor-in"> <p>Four new stamps have been issued by the Royal Mail in the UK to remember the Duke of Edinburgh.</p> <p>The four stamps are in black-and-white and showcase the life of Prince Philip.</p> <p>The first stamp, which is a portrait of Prince Philip as a young man was taken by the photographer Baron whereas the second stamp is Prince Philip attending the passing out of his son, Prince Andrew, at Dartmouth Naval College.</p> <p>The third stamp is Philip at the Royal Windsor Horse Show and the last stamp is a portrait taken by photographer Terry O'Neill.</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> <p dir="ltr">We're proud to present a commemorative collection of stamps and collectibles honouring the life and work of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. <br /><br />Explore the collection: <a href="https://t.co/hvTzqbqIdm">https://t.co/hvTzqbqIdm</a> <a href="https://t.co/vI0t9KRebm">pic.twitter.com/vI0t9KRebm</a></p> — Royal Mail (@RoyalMail) <a href="https://twitter.com/RoyalMail/status/1392766571035123713?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 13, 2021</a></blockquote> <p>Simon Thompson, chief executive of Royal Mail, said: "Throughout adulthood, the Duke of Edinburgh dedicated himself to the service of this country, the Commonwealth and to the many causes he was involved with.</p> <p>"For more than seven decades he was at the centre of our national life. His passing is a key moment in our history which we mark with this set of commemorative stamps."</p> <p>The stamps are available for pre-order at a cost of £5.76 (NZD $11.27).</p> </div> </div> </div>

Legal

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Princess Mary looks pretty in purple as she reveals annual Christmas stamp

<p>It seems like time has flown by and with Christmas less than two months away, Crown Princess Mary just kickstarted the official countdown.</p> <p>Stepping out in her home country on Tuesday, the Danish royal launched the annual Christmas stamp - an iconic moment which takes place every year in the Scandinavian country marking the start of the festive season.</p> <blockquote style="background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 540px; min-width: 326px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);" class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/p/CG0B2mAgAks/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="12"> <div style="padding: 16px;"> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 100px;"></div> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 60px;"></div> </div> </div> <div style="padding: 19% 0;"></div> <div style="display: block; height: 50px; margin: 0 auto 12px; width: 50px;"></div> <div style="padding-top: 8px;"> <div style="color: #3897f0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 550; line-height: 18px;">View this post on Instagram</div> </div> <p style="margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;"><a style="color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CG0B2mAgAks/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" target="_blank">Lanceringen af årets julemærke fandt i dag sted på Julemærkehjemmet Liljeborg i Roskilde. Her afslørede Hendes Kongelige Højhed Kronprinsessen sammen med kunstneren Tomas Björnsson årets Julemærke, der har titlen 'Jul i Fællesskab'. Julemærket er i år en kærlig hilsen til 100-året for genforeningen af Danmark og Sønderjylland samt en hyldest til det fællesskab, som børn på Julemærkehjemmene bliver en del af.⁣ ⁣ Kronprinsessen er protektor for Julemærkefonden, der hvert år hjælper omkring 1.000 børn i alderen 7-14 år til en bedre tilværelse på de fem Julemærkehjem.⁣ ⁣ Den 16. november 1904 blev verdens første Julemærke præsenteret i Danmark. Motivet forestillede en fotografisk gengivelse af Christian 9.s hustru Dronning Louise omgivet af en ornamental ramme bestående af kroner, våbenskjold og juleroser holdt i violet. Siden da er der hvert år blevet præsenteret et nyt Julemærke, der har til formål at indsamle penge til børn på et af Danmarks fem Julemærkehjem. På hjemmene kan 1.000 børn årligt tage ophold og modtage hjælp til at bekæmpe ensomhed, mobning, social isolation og overvægt.⁣ 📸 Mads Claus Rasmussen, Ritzau Scanpix©️</a></p> <p style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">A post shared by <a style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/detdanskekongehus/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" target="_blank"> DET DANSKE KONGEHUS 🇩🇰</a> (@detdanskekongehus) on Oct 26, 2020 at 9:10am PDT</p> </div> </blockquote> <p>And Christmas can’t be celebrated without the perfect holiday outfit, and Princess Mary delivered in the style department.</p> <p>The Princess opted for a full purple ensemble featuring a loose fitting top with a keyhole neckline as she joined guests at Julemaerkehjemmet Liljeborg in Roskilde.</p> <p>She paired it with a set of wide-legged trousers and kept her hair straight and simple.</p> <blockquote style="background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 540px; min-width: 326px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);" class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/p/CG0Z4C4gDyj/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="12"> <div style="padding: 16px;"> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 100px;"></div> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 60px;"></div> </div> </div> <div style="padding: 19% 0;"></div> <div style="display: block; height: 50px; margin: 0 auto 12px; width: 50px;"></div> <div style="padding-top: 8px;"> <div style="color: #3897f0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 550; line-height: 18px;">View this post on Instagram</div> </div> <p style="margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;"><a style="color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CG0Z4C4gDyj/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" target="_blank">Samfundsansvar, bæredygtighed og klima var på programmet, da Hendes Kongelige Højhed Kronprinsessen i dag uddelte CSR Prisen til Arla Foods, A.P. Møller-Mærsk og Ørsted på Børsen i København.⁣ ⁣ Det var syvende år i træk, at Kronprinsessen overrakte CSR Prisen 2020 til de virksomheder, der har udgivet Danmarks bedste rapporter om samfundsansvar.⁣ ⁣ Bag prisuddelingen står revisorforeningen FSR – danske revisorer. Med CSR Prisen ønsker de at anerkende store danske virksomheder, som i deres årlige rapporter skaber gennemsigtighed og troværdighed om virksomhedens samfundsansvar, og som på den måde kan være en inspiration for andre.⁣ ⁣ 📸 Carsten Lundager og Martin Høien / Aller Foto &amp; Video©️</a></p> <p style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">A post shared by <a style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/detdanskekongehus/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" target="_blank"> DET DANSKE KONGEHUS 🇩🇰</a> (@detdanskekongehus) on Oct 26, 2020 at 12:40pm PDT</p> </div> </blockquote> <p>Later on, she attended another event to present the Corporate Responsibility Award, a recognition of companies that have kept social responsibility top of mind in their practices.</p>

Beauty & Style

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg forged a new place for women in the law and society

<p>Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-20/what-ruth-bader-ginsburgs-death-means-for-donald-trump/12519640">death</a> has generated an outpouring of grief around the globe. Part of this grief reflects her unparalleled status as a feminist icon and pioneer for women in the legal profession and beyond.</p> <p>There is already considerable interest in what her departure means for the future of the US Supreme Court, and indeed, the wider political landscape. But to understand that, we must reflect on her legacy.</p> <p>In 1956, Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard Law School, one of only nine women in her year alongside about 500 men. Reflecting the prevailing mindset of the time, which regarded the study and practise of law as the proper domain of men, the Harvard dean, Erwin Griswold, <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/7/23/ginsburg-blasts-harvard-law-pin-testimony/">asked each of the nine women</a> how they could justify taking the place of a man.</p> <p>Ginsburg’s answer, that she wanted to better understand her husband Marty’s career as a lawyer (he was the year ahead of her at Harvard), belies the reality of the enormous contribution she would make to public life in the subsequent six decades.</p> <p>The number nine would come to be significant in marking her success in a profession traditionally dominated by men. In 1993, she took her place on the nine-judge Supreme Court as the second woman appointed in its history.</p> <p>In more recent years, in response to questions about when there will be “enough” women judges, Ginsburg replied there would enough <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/30/justice-ginsburg-all-female-supreme-court">when there were nine women</a> on the Supreme Court. Acknowledging that people are shocked by this response, Ginsburg famously countered “there’s been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”</p> <p>This exchange points to just how ingrained the idea that judging is men’s work had become.</p> <p><strong>A formidable mind</strong></p> <p>Long before President Bill Clinton resolved to nominate Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had established a reputation as an academic (she was the second woman to teach law full-time at Rutgers University and the first woman to become a tenured professor at Columbia Law School). She was also known as a feminist litigator, leading the American Civil Liberties Union’s campaign for gender equality.</p> <p>Ginsburg’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an uncontroversial appointment. She was regarded as a restrained moderate and was <a href="https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=103&amp;session=1&amp;vote=00232">confirmed by the Senate 96 votes to three</a>.</p> <p>Although there were some concerns she was a “<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=2vwUCgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA166&amp;lpg=PA166&amp;dq=%E2%80%9Cradical+doctrinaire+feminist%E2%80%9D+ginsburg&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=czf2V7bZm8&amp;sig=ACfU3U1S2Dh6FVpm8o7uhDnEvlGAwoLQiA&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjwgdiYmvXrAhWlF6YKHdc1ClwQ6AEwA3oECAEQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=%E2%80%9Cradical%20doctrinaire%20feminist%E2%80%9D%20ginsburg&amp;f=false">radical doctrinaire feminist</a>”, her credentials were bolstered by her record on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980).</p> <p>Ginsburg had spent the 1970s pursuing <a href="https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2253&amp;context=facpub">a litigation strategy</a> to secure woman’s equality — although she would <a href="https://achievement.org/">describe</a> her approach in broader terms as the “<em>constitutional principle of equal citizenship stature of men and women.”</em></p> <p>In a series of cases, she <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/411/677/">sought to establish</a></p> <p><em>sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.</em></p> <p>By extension, she argued, legal classifications on the basis of sex should be subject to the “strict scrutiny” required in cases where there were distinctions or classifications on the basis of race. To put it more bluntly, pigeon-holing on the basis of sex should be unconstitutional. The nub of her argument, whether acting for men or women plaintiffs, was that treating men and women differently under the law <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1694">helped to</a> “<em>keep woman in her place, a place inferior to that occupied by men in our society.”</em></p> <p><strong>Outside the court — and inside, too</strong></p> <p>Feminist theorists have sometimes expressed reservations about the extent to which a legal system designed by men to the exclusion of women can ever be fully appropriated to achieve equality for women.</p> <p>While some feminists have seen much promise in the possibility for law reform, others have been more circumspect. This tension is reflected in the <a href="https://www.northeastern.edu/lawstudentaffairs/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/When-the-First-Quail-Calls.pdf">two-pronged strategy proposed</a> by Professor Mari Matsuda — that there are times to “stand <em>outside</em> the courtroom” and there are times to “stand <em>inside</em> the courtroom”.</p> <p>Ginsburg’s legacy in life and law reflects the latter approach. Her faith in the law is reflected in her approach to stand <em>inside</em> the courtroom (literally as a litigator and a judge) to transform existing legal categories. In this way, her approach was <a href="https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol63/iss5/4/">reconstructive</a> rather than radical (which is not say that some of her thinking wasn’t radical for its time).</p> <p>Ginsburg sought to reconstruct sex roles and emphasised men and women alike were diminished by stereotypes based on sex.</p> <p>Importantly, Ginsburg did not simply pursue formal equality (the idea that equality will be achieved by treating everyone the same). Rather, she advocated for affirmative action as a principle of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4099346?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">equality of opportunity</a>.</p> <p>She favoured incremental rather than radical change, reflecting a view that such an approach would minimise the potential for backlash. Her critique <a href="https://time.com/5354490/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade/">of the strategy</a> adopted in the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade (the case upon which US reproductive rights are based), and her departure from the feminist orthodoxy on this point, reflected her preference for incrementalism.</p> <p><strong>Legacy on the bench</strong></p> <p>Ginsburg’s jurisprudential contributions on the Supreme Court continued the legacy she began in the 1970s.</p> <p>One of her most <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/518/515/">significant majority opinions</a> in 1996 required the Virginia Military Institute to admit women. Importantly, this was because it had not been able to provide “exceedingly persuasive justification” for making distinctions on the basis of sex. Although this standard fell short of the “strict scrutiny test” required in cases involving classifications on the basis of race, it nonetheless entrenched an important equality principle.</p> <p>But it was perhaps her judicial dissents, sometimes delivered <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-1074.pdf">blisteringly</a> in the years where she was the lone woman on the bench (prior to President Barack Obama’s appointment of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27court.html">Sonia Sotomayor in 2009</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/10/barack-obama-nominate-elena-kagan">Elena Kagan in 2010</a>), that seem to have really captured the wider public imagination and catapulted her into the zeitgeist.</p> <p>It was in the wake of her 2013 dissent in a <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf">case about the Voting Rights Act</a> that she reached the status of a global feminist icon. A <a href="https://notoriousrbg.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a> account was established in her honour, giving her the nickname “Notorious RBG” (a title drawn from the rapper Biggie Smalls’ nickname Notorious B.I.G). A 2018 documentary <a href="https://iview.abc.net.au/show/rbg">RBG </a> chronicled her legacy and status as a cultural icon, and a 2018 motion picture <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4669788/">On the Basis of Sex</a> depicted her early life and cases.</p> <p>Ginsburg’s celebrity certainly expanded during her time on the court — but this is not to say to it has been without controversy or critique, even from more liberal or progressive sources.</p> <p>She has been criticised for her decisions (for example, a particular decision about <a href="https://www.law.du.edu/forms/writing-competitions/documents/winners/7.pdf">Native Americans and sovereignty</a>), for her comments about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/10/13/sorry-it-turns-out-ruth-bader-ginsburg-is-not-your-liberal-cartoon-superhero-after-all/">race and national anthem protests</a>, and for being too partisan — particularly in her criticism of President Donald Trump. (<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36796495">She called him a “faker” and later apologised</a>.)</p> <p><strong>A great legacy</strong></p> <p>Did Ginsburg’s feminism or celebrity undermine her legitimacy as a judge? Questions of judicial legacy and legitimacy are complex and inevitably shaped by institutional, political and legal norms. Importantly, her contributions as a lawyer and a judge have done much to demonstrate how legal rules and approaches previously regarded as neutral and objective in reality reflected a masculine view of the world.</p> <p>Over 25 years ago, Ginsburg <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/21/us/the-supreme-court-excerpts-from-senate-hearings-on-the-ginsburg-nomination.html">expressed her aspiration</a> that women would be appointed to the Supreme Court with increased regularity: “<em>Indeed, in my lifetime, I expect to see three, four, perhaps even more women on the High Court Bench, women not shaped from the same mold but of different complexions. Yes, there are miles in front, but what distance we have travelled from the day President Thomas Jefferson told his secretary of state: ‘The appointment of women to [public] office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared.”</em></p> <p>That Ginsburg came to share the Supreme Court with two women, Kagan and Sotomayor, must have given her some hope that women’s access to places “where decisions are being made” was at least tentatively secure, even if hard-won feminist gains sometimes felt tenuous at best.</p> <p>Ginsburg was a trailblazer in every aspect of her life and career. The women who follow her benefit from a legacy that powerfully re-imagined what it means to be a lawyer and a judge in a legal system that had been made in men’s image.</p> <p><em>Written by KCasey McLoughlin. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/ruth-bader-ginsburg-forged-a-new-place-for-women-in-the-law-and-society-146540">The Conversation.</a></em></p>

Caring

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How to stamp out COVID-19 in New Zealand again

<p>Auckland, and possibly other parts of New Zealand, almost certainly have more cases of COVID-19 in the community than the <a href="https://www.health.govt.nz/news-media/media-releases/4-cases-covid-19-unknown-source">four new cases confirmed</a> yesterday.</p> <p>Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern activated a <a href="https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/pm-comments-auckland-covid-19-case">resurgence plan</a> late yesterday, placing all of Auckland back under alert level 3 restrictions from today until midnight on Friday to allow time for contacts to be traced and tested.</p> <p>But until we can identify the chain of transmission, New Zealanders should prepare for restrictions to remain in place for longer.</p> <p>All four new cases are within one family in South Auckland, with no links yet discovered to quarantine or border facilities. But family members work in different places across different suburbs, which means the restrictions need to apply to the whole city.</p> <p><strong>Get news that’s free, independent and based on evidence.</strong></p> <p>Get newsletter</p> <p>When Melbourne found itself in a similar position a month ago, the city’s strategy was to lockdown specific suburbs. Unfortunately this failed to contain the virus.</p> <p><strong>Quick return to restrictions</strong></p> <p>Swift and decisive action is important, and we support the decision to place stricter conditions on Auckland and to return the rest of the country to alert level 2. We should all be very cautious.</p> <p>Everyone working at the border or in managed isolation will be tested and pop-up stations have opened across Auckland to carry out mass testing. But it is quite possible someone within the wider contact network of the cases has travelled outside Auckland. People who have travelled to Auckland in the last two weeks should act as if they are under level 3 restrictions and stay home from work.</p> <p>Whether we are in Auckland or not, we should all resume social distancing, working from home if we can, and wearing a mask if possible when we go out. If we do the right things now, there’s a good chance we will be able to contain this community outbreak before it spreads too much further.</p> <p>We’re going to need to do a lot of testing to work out how far the virus has spread. It’s more effective at this stage to target high-risk groups rather than testing people at random. People with symptoms or people who have been identified as close contacts of known cases should be prioritised for testing.</p> <p>If you are offered a test or you don’t feel well, you should get tested, but if you feel fine, just stay at home.</p> <p><strong>Contact tracing</strong></p> <p>Rapid contact tracing is going to be key to getting the virus under control. <a href="https://www.tepunahamatatini.ac.nz/2020/08/10/successful-covid-19-contact-tracing-systems-for-new-zealand/">Our recent modelling</a> shows that if we can trace and quarantine 80% of contacts within two days on average, it will go a long way to containing the outbreak.</p> <p>Contact tracers are also doing backward tracing – finding the source of infection so we know how many other cases are out there – as well as forward tracing, which means quarantining contacts so they don’t pass the virus on.</p> <p>For Auckland, moving to alert level 3 reduces the number of contacts most of us have. This will make the job easier for contact tracers over the coming days as they may only have to trace one or two contacts per person rather than ten or more.</p> <p>Everyone should now draw up a list of where they’ve been and who they’ve seen for the last two weeks. This is also a wake-up call to redouble our efforts to keep diaries of activities and to use the <a href="https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-novel-coronavirus-resources-and-tools/nz-covid-tracer-app">NZ COVID Tracer app</a> to keep a record.</p> <p>The Tracer app has the added advantage that the Ministry of Health can automatically notify anybody who has visited the same location as a confirmed or potential case. We encourage Aucklanders in particular to check their apps, diaries and bank accounts to compile as much detail as possible of places they have visited or people they have met over the last 14 days.</p> <p><strong>What happens next</strong></p> <p>What happens next really depends on the results of the contact tracing investigations already underway. There is a lot of luck involved in the early stages of an outbreak like this one. If we are lucky, many of those infected may not have yet have passed the virus on.</p> <p>But it’s also possible there may have been a superspreading event, for example at a workplace or social gathering. In that case, there could be a large number of cases already out there. Although the alert level is currently in place until Friday, we should be prepared for this to be extended, depending on how many cases we find in the next three days.</p> <p>Back in February, when we had our first cases of COVID-19, the situation was very different. We had an open border and most cases were international travellers or their close contacts.</p> <p>We were also getting around 80 new cases a day by the time we went into lockdown in March. This time we have locked down with a smaller number of cases and we still have strict border restrictions in place.</p> <p>This should give us confidence that if we all do the right things, we will be able to get the outbreak under control much faster than last time.</p> <p><em>Written by Michael Plank, Alex James and Shaun Hendy. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-zealand-is-on-alert-as-covid-19-returns-this-is-what-we-need-to-stamp-it-out-again-144304">The Conversation.</a> </em></p>

Art

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Queen Elizabeth celebrates stamp collector society’s 150th anniversary with a grin

<p>Queen Elizabeth was in her element as she visited the Royal Philatelic Society to celebrate its 150th anniversary.</p> <p>Philately is the study of stamps, postal history and other related items. The Royal Philatelic Society, according to this Instagram post by The Royal Family, aims to “promote the science and practice of the study of stamps as well as maintain collections of stamps”.</p> <p>The Queen is an avid stamp collector herself, as she has a collection that’s estimated to be worth AUD $189,291,500 NZD $199,885,605 and had a huge grin on her face as she was shown around the new building.</p> <p>Her stamp collection, according to<span> </span><em>Telegraph UK</em><span> </span>includes a rare Mauritian stamp valued at AUD $3.7 million NZD $3.9 million and the stamp went on display for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.</p> <p>She opened a new headquarters for the society, which is the oldest in the world. The Queen also met with architects, administration staff, supporters and young collectors who are busy working hard to keep the tradition of stamps alive.</p> <p>The nearly 93-year-old wore an eye catching sea blue coat dress with contrasting navy velvet trip by her personal dressmaker Angela Kelly. The look was accompanied with a matching hat.</p> <p>Angela Kelly has revealed a number of secrets from her 20 years of working with The Queen and is the first tell-all book to be sanctioned by her Majesty. The book is titled<span> </span><em>The Other Side Of The Coin: The Queen, the Dresser and the Wardrobe</em>.</p> <p>Scroll through the gallery to see the Queen enjoy herself at the Royal Philatelic Society.</p> <p><em>Photo credits: Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B5VN1P8H6Dn/">theroyalfamily</a></em></p>

Art

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Is there really a single ideal body shape for women?

<p>Many scholars of Renaissance art <a href="http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/birth-of-venus.htm">tell us</a> that Botticelli’s Birth of Venus captures the tension between the celestial perfection of divine beauty and its flawed earthly manifestation. As classical ideas blossomed anew in 15th-century Florence, Botticelli could not have missed the popular <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/neoplato/#H5">Neoplatonic notion</a> that contemplating earthly beauty teaches us about the divine.</p> <p>Evolutionary biologists aren’t all that Neoplatonic. Like most scientists, we’ve long stopped contemplating the celestial, having – to appropriate <a href="http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/16/there-is-no-need-for-god-as-a-hypothesis/">Laplace’s immortal words to Napoleon</a> – “no need of that hypothesis”. It is the messy imperfection of the real world that interests us on its own terms.</p> <p>My <a href="https://theconversation.com/columns/rob-brooks-1343">own speciality concerns</a> the messy conflicts that inhere to love, sex and beauty. Attempts to cultivate a simple understanding of beauty – one that can fill a 200-word magazine ad promoting age-reversing snake oil, for example – tend to consistently come up short.</p> <p><strong>Waist to hip</strong></p> <p>Nowhere does the barren distinction between biology and culture grow more physically obvious than in the discussion of women’s body shapes and attractiveness. The biological study of body shape has, for two decades, been preoccupied with the ratio of waist to hip circumference.</p> <p>With clever experimental manipulations of line drawings, Devendra Singh <a href="http://www.femininebeauty.info/i/singh.pdf">famously demonstrated</a> that images of women with waists 70% as big as their hips tend to be most attractive. This 0.7:1 waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), it turns out, also reflects a distribution of abdominal fat associated with good <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3874840">health</a> and <a href="https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?view_op=view_citation&amp;hl=en&amp;user=w2qTGfoAAAAJ&amp;citation_for_view=w2qTGfoAAAAJ:TQgYirikUcIC">fertility</a>.</p> <p>Singh also showed that Miss America pageant winners and Playboy playmates tended to have a WHR of 0.7 despite changes in the general slenderness of these two samples of women thought to embody American beauty ideals.</p> <p>Singh’s experiments were repeated in a variety of countries and societies that differ in both average body shape and apparent ideals. The results weren’t unanimous, but a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 came up as most attractive more often than not. The idea of an optimal ratio is so appealing in its simplicity that it became a staple factoid for magazines such as <a href="http://www.cosmopolitan.com.au/health-lifestyle/healthy-eating/2010/8/female-attractiveness-relates-to-waist-size/#_">Cosmo</a>.</p> <p>There’s plenty to argue about with waist-hip ratio research. Some researchers have found that other indices, like <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691155/">Body Mass Index</a> (BMI) explain body attractiveness more effectively.</p> <p>But others reject the reductionism of measures like WHR and BMI altogether. This rejection reaches its extremes in the notion that ideas of body attractiveness are entirely <a href="http://www.socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/fact_04-2008-wom-size.pdf">culturally constructed and arbitrary</a>. Or, more sinisterly, designed by our capitalist overlords in the diet industry to be inherently unattainable.</p> <p>The evidence? The observation that women’s bodies differ, on average, between places or times. That’s the idea animating the following video, long on production values, short on scholarship and truly astronomic on the number of hits (21 million-plus at the time of writing):</p> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"><iframe class="embed-responsive-item" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xrp0zJZu0a4"></iframe></div> <p><span class="caption">This rather questionable video, called ‘Women’s Ideal Body Types Throughout History’, is getting a lot of airplay on YouTube.</span></p> <p>I note that Botticelli’s Venus looks more at home in the 20th Century than among the more full-figured Renaissance “ideals”. So do the Goddesses and Graces in <a href="http://www.uffizi.org/artworks/la-primavera-allegory-of-spring-by-sandro-botticelli/">La Primavera</a>. Perhaps there was room for more than one kind of attractive body in the Florentine Renaissance? Or is the relationship between attractiveness and body shape less changeable and more variegated than videos like the one above would have us believe?</p> <p>Not that I’m down on body shape diversity. Despite the fact that there seems to be only one way to make a supermodel, real women differ dramatically and quite different body types can be equally attractive. The science of attractiveness must grapple with variation, both within societies and among cultures.</p> <p><strong>Enter the BodyLab</strong></p> <p>For some years our <a href="http://www.robbrooks.net/">research group</a> has wrestled with exactly these issues, and with the fact that bodies vary in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20840313">so many more dimensions</a> than just their waists and their hips. To that end, we established the <a href="http://www.bodylab.biz">BodyLab</a> project, a “digital ecosystem” in which people from all over the internet rate the attractiveness of curious-looking bodies like the male example below.</p> <p><a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73884/original/image-20150305-1931-14hs705.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73884/original/image-20150305-1931-14hs705.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="" /></a> <span class="caption">Example image from the BodyLab ‘digital ecosystem’. The VW Beetle is provided as the universal symbol of something-slightly-shorter-than-an-adult-human. Faces pixellated to preserve any grey people’s anonymity.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rob Brooks/BodyLab.biz</span></span></p> <p>We call it a “digital ecosystem” not to maximise pretentiousness, but because this experiment involved multiple generations of selection and evolution. We started with measurements of 20 American women, a sample representing a wide variety of body shapes.</p> <p>We then “mutated” those measures, adding or subtracting small amounts of random variation to each of 24 traits. Taking these newly mutated measures we built digital bodies, giving them an attractive middle-grey skin tone in an attempt to keep variation in skin colour, texture etc out of the already complex story.</p> <blockquote> <p>If you want to help out with our second study, on male bodies, visit <a href="http://www.bodylab.biz/Experiments.aspx">BodyLab</a> and click through to <em>Body Shape Study</em> and then <em>Rate Males (Generation 6)</em>.</p> </blockquote> <p>This all involved considerable technologic innovation, resulting in an experiment unlike any other. We had a population of bodies (120 per generation) that we could select after a few thousand people had rated them for attractiveness. We then “bred” from the most attractive half of all models and released the new generation into the digital ecosystem.</p> <p>What did we find? In a paper just published at <a href="http://bit.ly/1EOQcOl">Evolution &amp; Human Behavior</a>, the most dramatic result was that the average model became more slender with each generation. Almost every measure of girth decreased dramatically, whereas legs and arms evolved to be longer.</p> <p><a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73901/original/image-20150305-1942-103dem4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73901/original/image-20150305-1942-103dem4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="" /></a> <span class="caption">In eight generations, the average body became more slender. Waist, seat, collar, bust, underbust, forearm, bicep, calf and thigh girth all decreased by more than one standard deviation. At the same time, leg length (inseam) rose by 1.4 standard deviations.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rob Brooks</span></span></p> <p>That may not seem surprising, particularly because the families “bred” from the most overweight individuals at the start of the experiment were eliminated in the first few generations.</p> <p>But, after that, more families remained in the digital ecosystem, surviving generation after generation of selection, than we would have expected if there was a single most attractive body type. The Darwinian process we imposed on our bodies had started acting on the mutations we added during the breeding process.</p> <p><strong>More meaningful than the mean</strong></p> <p>Those “mutations” that we introduced allowed bodies to evolve free from all the developmental constraints that apply to real-world bodies. For example, leg lengths could evolve independently of arm lengths. Waists could get smaller even as thighs got bigger.</p> <p>When we examined those five families that lasted longest as our digital ecosystem evolved, we observed a couple of interesting nuances.</p> <p>First, selection targeted waist size itself, rather than waist-hip ratio. No statistical model involving hip size (either on its own or in waist-hip ratio) could come close to explaining attractiveness as well as waist size alone. Our subjects liked the look of slender models with especially slender waists. There was nothing magical about a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio.</p> <p>Second, within attractive families, which were the more slender families to begin with, evolution bucked the population-wide trend. These bodies began evolving to be more shapely, with bigger busts and more substantial curves.</p> <p>It turns out there’s more than one way to make an attractive body, and those different body types evolve to be well-integrated. That’s a liberating message for most of us: evolutionary biology has more to offer our understanding of diversity than the idea that only one “most attractive” body (or face, or personality) always wins out.</p> <p>What about the cultural constructionists? Are body ideals arbitrary, or tools of the patriarchal-commercial complex?</p> <p>Our results suggest that the similarities between places, and even between male and female raters, are pretty strong: the 60,000 or so people who viewed and rated our images held broadly similar ideas of what was hot and what was not. But their tastes weren’t uniform. We think most individuals could see beauty in variety, if not in the full scope of diversity on offer.</p> <p>What’s cool about our evolving bodies, however, is that we can run the experiment again and again. We can do so with different groups of subjects, or even using the same subjects before and after they’ve experienced some kind of intervention (perhaps body-image consciousness-raising?). I’m hoping we can use them to look, in unprecedented depth, at the intricate ways in which experience, culture and biology interact.<!-- Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. --><img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38432/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /><!-- End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: http://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines --></p> <p><em>Written by <span>Rob Brooks, Scientia Professor of Evolutionary Ecology; Director, Evolution &amp; Ecology Research Centre, UNSW</span>. Republished with permission of </em><a rel="noopener" href="https://theconversation.com/is-there-really-a-single-ideal-body-shape-for-women-38432" target="_blank"><em>The Conversation</em></a><em>. </em></p>

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Why the benefits of a cashless society are greatly overrated

<p>After recreational cannabis use became legal in Canada last October, research shows the number of<span> </span><a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/02/26/legalising-cannabis-reduced-the-use-of-cash-in-canada/">bank notes in circulation</a><span> </span>fell sharply. Before, marijuana buyers used cash to keep their transactions anonymous. After, there was a massive switch to the convenience of cashless payments.</p> <p>It’s a prime example of what makes a cashless society so attractive to law makers and enforcers wanting to put the squeeze on the “black economy” that can’t be tracked or taxed.</p> <p>But not everyone clinging to cash has illicit motivations.</p> <p>This month Philadelphia became the first major US city requiring all merchants to accept cash. This week the state of New Jersey followed suit. Other US cities and states are considering the same.</p> <p>The chief concern is that cashless payment systems discriminate<span> </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-is-first-u-s-city-to-ban-cashless-stores-11551967201?mod=hp_lead_pos5">against the “unbanked”</a><span> </span>– those without a bank account – making life harder for those already on the margins. “It’s really a fairness issue,” said the<span> </span><a href="https://www.phillyvoice.com/philadelphia-ban-cashless-stores-first-us-city/">councillor who sponsored the ban</a>. “Equal access is what we’re trying to get.”</p> <p>So as nations make plans to become cashless societies, and automated teller machines start to go the way of telephone booths, it’s timely to consider the pros and cons of cashless payments. We need ensure our enthusiastic<span> </span><a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-may-be-closer-to-being-a-cashless-society-but-it-wont-happen-by-2020-75258">march to the future</a><span> </span>does not trample over people or leave them behind.</p> <p><strong>Counting the unbanked</strong></p> <p>A<span> </span><a href="https://economicinclusion.gov/">national survey</a><span> </span>by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation shows about 8.4 million US households – or 6.5% of all households – were unbanked in 2017. Philadelphia’s new law is primarily to protect such people.</p> <p>Taking effect on July 1, the law requires most stores to accept cash, and forbids them charging a surcharge for paying with cash. New York, Washington and Chicago are among the cities investigating similar measures.</p> <p>In Britain a<span> </span><a href="https://www.accesstocash.org.uk/media/1087/final-report-final-web.pdf">review of cash accessibility</a><span> </span>headed by former chief financial ombudsman Natalie Ceeney has urged financial regulators to stop the country “<a href="https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/33482/access-to-cash-system-on-verge-of-collapse-warns-report?utm_medium=newsflash&amp;utm_source=2019-3-6&amp;member=103992">sleepwalking</a>” into a cashless society. Its report, published this month, recommends a national guarantee that consumers will be able to access and use cash for as long as they need it.</p> <p>About 17% of the British population – over 8 million adults – would struggle to cope in a cashless society, the report says: “While most of society recognises the benefits of digital payments, our research shows the technology doesn’t yet work for everyone.”</p> <p>The tip of the iceberg is the decline in bank branches and ATMs. Two-thirds of bank branches have closed<span> </span><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1947ac8e-e8d2-11e8-a34c-663b3f553b35">in the past three decades</a>, and the rate of closure in accelerating. Cashpoints are disappearing at<span> </span><a href="https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/33386/the-numbers-dont-add-up-universal-provision-of-access-to-cash-called-into-question?utm_medium=dailynewsletter&amp;utm_source=2019-2-15&amp;member=6040">a rate of nearly 500 a month</a>.</p> <p><strong>Learning from Sweden</strong></p> <p>But this is simply the most obvious symptom, according to the Ceeney report, with evidence from other countries demonstrating the issue of merchants accepting cash is more important.</p> <p>“Sweden, the most cashless society in the world, outlines the dangers of sleepwalking into a cashless society: millions of people could potentially be left out of the economy,” it says, “and face increased risks of isolation, exploitation, debt and rising costs.”</p> <p>About 85% of transactions in Sweden are now digital. Half the nation’s retailers expect to stop accepting cash before 2025.</p> <p>The nation is now counting the societal costs.</p> <p>The Riksbank, Sweden’s Central Bank, is asking all banks to keep providing and accepting cash while government works out how best to protect those<span> </span><a href="https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/payments-notes-and-coins/payment-patterns/">who most rely on cash</a><span> </span>– such as those aged 65 or more, those living in rural areas, those with disabilities and recent immigrants.</p> <p>An estimated 1 million Swedes are not comfortable with using a computer or smart phone to do their banking. Immigrants often do not have a bank account or credit history to get a payment card.</p> <p><strong>Considering consequences</strong></p> <p>“If cash disappears that would be a big change, with major implications for society and the economy,” Mats Dillen, the head of the Swedish Parliament Committee studying the issue,<span> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html">has said</a>. “We need to pause and think about whether this is good or bad and not just sit back and let it happen.”</p> <p>The New York City Council member pushing the bill to ban cashless-only stores, Ritchie Torres, agrees. He is particularly concerned about the issues of class and ethnic discrimination.</p> <p>“I started coming across coffee shops and cafés that were exclusively cashless and I thought: but what if I was a low-income New Yorker who has no access to a card?”<span> </span><a href="http://www.grubstreet.com/amp/2018/11/new-bill-would-make-cash-free-businesses-restaurants-illegal.html">Ritchie Torres has explained</a>. “I thought about it more and realised that even if a policy seems neutral in theory it can be racially exclusionary in practice.</p> <p>"In some ways making a payment card a requirement for consumption is analogous to making identification a requirement for voting. The effect is the same: it disempowers communities of colour.”</p> <p>These are timely reminders that we should never assume that technological change is value-free, or necessarily an improvement. All revolutions have their hidden costs. We need to ensure those costs are shared equitably, and that no one is accidentally disadvantaged by them.</p> <p><em>Written by Steve Worthington. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/depending-on-who-you-are-the-benefits-of-a-cashless-society-are-greatly-overrated-113268">The Conversation.</a></em></p>

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