Ships transport around 80% of the world’s cargo. From your food, to your car to your phone, chances are it got to you by sea. The vast majority of the world’s container ships burn fossil fuels, which is why 3% of global emissions come from shipping – slightly more than the 2.5% of emissions from aviation.

The race is on to reduce these emissions, and quickly, to meet the Paris agreement targets. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out what technologies are available to shipping companies to reduce their carbon emissions – from sails, to alternative fuels or simply taking a better route.

“ We live in a world of information. The biggest challenge is knowing how to use it,” says Daniel Precioso, a data scientist at IE University in Madrid, Spain. He’s part of a team of researchers that developed a platform called Green Navigation, what he calls a “Google maps for the sea”. Pulling together publicly available data on wind, waves and ocean currents, it can suggest new routes to ship captains to optimise their journey from A to B and reduce carbon emissions.

Precioso presented the project in November 2024 in Dubai at the Prototypes for Humanity exhibition organised by Dubai Future Solutions as a showcase for young researchers designing solutions for global challenges.

Pressure mounting

Route optimisation software like Green Navigation is seen as a transition between the status quo and a future where ships will move to using alternative, greener fuels.

 The UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) has a target for zero emissions from shipping by 2050 and a strive target of 30% reductions by 2030 relative to 2008 levels.

In early April, IMO member states will meet to discuss a proposal to introduce a flat rate tax on carbon emitted by commercial shipping. If adopted, shipping companies would have to pay a levy, the price of which is still being worked out, for every tonne of carbon dioxide they emit. The money would sit in a fund run by the IMO, which would be used to help developing countries reduce maritime emissions.

The proposal is supported by 47 countries, and it’s being pushed particularly by island nations most at risk from climate change, and flag states, those countries such as the Bahamas, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, where a lot of international ships are registered.

What’s the alternative?

If the flat tax is adopted it would add an extra financial incentive for ships to reduce their emissions and potentially move to greener alternative fuels. But Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester in the UK, says unfortunately it’s not currently cost efficient to switch away from fossil fuels.

 The challenge is that when you’re moving away from something which was naturally the cheapest, easiest fuel to come by and to burn, then inevitably if all you’re doing is literally swapping the fuel for a different fuel that is much cleaner, then that is going to be more expensive, at least in the short term.

A number of alternative fuels are being explored, such as green hydrogen, biodiesel, biomethane and green ammonia. But Larkin says no alternative fuel is currently emerging as a frontrunner, making it difficult for shipping companies to know what to invest in and creating inertia in the transition to greener fuels.

She stresses the need to reduce emissions in the shorter term to help keep the world below 1.5 degrees of warming. Options include strategies like route optimisation, sail, or wind-assist technologies, or for ships to travel at a slower speed. Larkin and her colleagues modelled the potential impact from these technologies and found combinations of these technologies could reduce a ship’s emissions by up to a third.

Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly to hear conversations with Daniel Precisio and Alice Larkin.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

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

In his latest book, Peter Kirkpatrick retrieves from Australian cultural history the compelling figure of the “wild reciter”, as a reviewer in the 1920s termed amateur elocutionists.

From the late 19th century, men, women and children recited popular verses to audiences who shared in the mass appeal of poetry. Their performances could become histrionic or strident.

Review: The Wild Reciter: Poetry and Popular Culture in Australia, 1890 to the Present (Melbourne University Publishing)

Bush ballads by Henry Lawson and A.B. “Banjo” Paterson, as well as English and American classics and topical verses, formed the repertoire of public speakers, such as the “Tangalooma Tiger” – one of many eccentrics who frequented Sydney’s Domain, drawing large crowds.

Children who learned elocution as a form of self-improvement and social mobility would practise their craft at local events. In 1933, Nancy Turner from Lithgow performed James Elroy Flecker’s War Song of the Saracens at the first City of Sydney Eisteddfod. The Daily Telegraph reported that Turner

recited like a ferocious kitten, and screwed her eyes up tightly when she shouted “We have marched from the Indus to Spain and, by God, we will go there again”, as if she meant it.

“Light-years behind Taylor Swift in terms of high-class showbiz professionalism,” writes Kirkpatrick, “the wild reciter represents poetry’s neglected and – in the best possible sense of the word – vulgar past, offering a perspective that might also speak to its present and future as a demotic art.”

A privileged place

We turn to poetry for many of life’s significant moments. Weddings and funerals remind us that rhyming verse has a privileged place in human communication. The form is freighted with meaning and can express heightened emotion. Achingly earnest or spiritually intense, romantic or maudlin, poetic language affects us, even in popular usage such as greeting cards.

In these instances, we do not always hear “good” poetry. Aesthetic qualities are often ranked second to a poem’s timely message or the personal feelings of the poetic messenger.

George Orwell coined the phrase “good bad poems” in 1942 to describe 19th-century favourites, such as Rudyard Kipling’s If and the boys’ own imperial adventure poem Gunga Din. Orwell called such poems “vulgar”; these days we might call them clichéd (and racist). Yet he observed that they expressed emotions “which nearly every human being can share”.

Orwell also reminded his readers that poems are mnemonic devices. Many older Australians can still remember verses from their schoolrooms. According to historians Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, those brought up around the first world war were a “poetry generation”. Many of those brought up in the aftermath of the second world war can recite verses from the school readers that used to structure their English literature classes.

Being able to recite as well as appreciate poetry was seen as a foundational educational skill, even if children mostly remembered stirring lines such as “the boy stood on the burning deck,” from Felicia Hemans’ Casabianca.

As political commentator Rory Stewart explains in his BBC podcast The Long History of Argument, speaking and arguing well have been seen for millennia as the key to a good education and the building blocks of democracy. Turn of the century experts, such as the American Alfred Ayres – the pen name of Thomas Embly Osmun (1826–1902) – advocated a modern style of verse performance.

Late Victorian elocution, Ayres wrote, was characterised by

orotunds, sostenutos, whispers and half-whispers, monotones, basilar tones and guttural tones, high pitches, middle pitches and low pitches, gentle tones, reverent tones, and all the rest of that old trumpery that has made many a noisy, stilted reader, but never an intelligent, agreeable one.

The old school of elocution, he argued, produced “readers occupied with the sound of their own voices”. Modern elocution, by contrast, sought to clarify “the art of speaking words in an intelligent, forcible, and agreeable manner”.

Appreciating the art of rhetoric may become ever more important in our “post-truth” world. In the age of artificial intelligence, literature professors like me are considering a return to oral assessments to verify our university students have read and understood the course readings, not just regurgitated a ChatGPT summary.

Songs and mass media

Kirkpatrick enjoys disrupting assumptions about high and low culture. He begins his book with Taylor Swift, whose 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department and subsequent world tour spawned events, media articles and academic conferences. He ends by speculating about who might be appointed as Australia’s first Poet Laureate, suggesting indie rock singers such as Nick Cave and Paul Kelly, or First Nations rapper The Kid Laroi, have a stronger hold on the public imagination than literary poets.

He has a soft spot for Evelyn Araluen’s bestselling collection Dropbear, but wonders how a First Nations poet would feel about a position intended to amplify the literature of the colonial state.

The most sustained focus on women’s writing in The Wild Reciter is reserved for Lesbia Harford’s “mortal poems”. Like the colonial Irish-Australian poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Harford set and sang her poems to Irish tunes. Whether Harford meant her poems to be sung by others remains an elusive question. But Kirkpatrick rightly notes that “we now hold song lyrics in our heads in the way that Harford’s generation held poems”.

Recurring poetic motifs, such as horses, allow Kirkpatrick to show how bush ballads contributed to emerging forms of 20th-century entertainment. Popular Australian themes would have a global influence, as modern technologies brought imagined communities together via radio, cinema and popular music. Kirkpatrick links Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River (1890) to Buffalo Bill and touring Wild West shows, and later to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

Identifying how poetry has interacted with different media challenges the common assumption that poetry is formal or stuffy: something confined to university study and highbrow poetry readings. Kirkpatrick argues, for example, that Kenneth Slessor’s appreciation of recorded music influenced his verse, as did his work as a cinema critic for the popular magazine Smith’s Weekly.

Radio programs provided opportunities for Ronald McCuiag’s light verse to reach audiences from the 1940s to the 1960s. John Laws, characterised by Bob Ellis as “the worst poet in the whole history of the entire universe”, was certainly advantaged by his long talkback radio career, which ensured a market for his five collections of poetry.

Kirkpatrick is adept at waspish summaries of bad poetry. Celebrity brought attention to Clive James’ poems – more, perhaps, than they deserved. “It’s not simply the earnestness of so many of his later poems that disables them,” writes Kirkpatrick: “the humorous ones are just as likely to disappoint.”

Popular poetry that Kirkpatrick doesn’t much care for receives little attention, and sometimes unkind assessment. He does not find Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective novel in verse, nearly as innovative as Porter or her admiring academic critics have claimed.

More than “any other kind of present-day reading or recitation”, Kirkpatrick enjoys slam poetry performances, but he finds them hard to critique. He views them as highly personal and ephemeral, based on his experience of the Bankstown Poetry Slam and the Australian Poetry Slam. His assessment mirrors cultural criticism of rap: “Slam comes from America and its missionary zeal talks with an American accent.”

Considering a contemporary Australian writer like Maxine Beneba Clarke might have revealed more complex oral poetry lineages here. Clarke’s poetry shifts confidently across performance and print; her work with schools demonstrates the ongoing vitality of poetry, and the importance of poetic education, for diverse youth communities.

Clarke’s poem Tik Tok Dance shows that the relationship between poetry and new media technologies, which Kirkpatrick traces impressively throughout the book, is constantly evolving.

“Changing the wor(l)d, verse by verse!” is the evocative catchline for the youth section of the Bankstown Poetry Slam. In February 2025, a Grand Slam billed as “Australia’s largest live poetry event” and starring the Irish–Indian “Instapoet” Nikita Gill was held at the Sydney Opera House, the heart of high culture.

Kirkpatrick is a poet and critic whose deep knowledge of poetry, literary magazines and media cultures is evident throughout. Each chapter in The Wild Reciter focuses on a different instance of popular poetry. Academic readers will recognise some chapters from their earlier publication in various books and journals.

Those professional critics might find the thin veil of scholarship in the book frustrating, but its entertaining style does not pretend to high theory, or even to much close reading. The Wild Reciter is a pacey, provocative romp through Australian literary history. Kirkpatrick enjoys a bon mot and his writing is amusing and sharp.

The figure of the public orator gets lost in some chapters – one concerns the Railroad, a magazine published by the Australian Railways Union. But it is a pleasure when the wild reciter returns in ever-new guises to thread together the multifarious parts of this enjoyable book, which returns poetry to the Australian people.

Anna Johnston, Professor of English Literature, The University of Queensland

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

Confronting images of dead seadragons, fish and octopuses washed up on South Australian beaches – and disturbing reports of “more than 100” surfers and beachgoers suffering flu-like symptoms after swimming or merely breathing in sea spray – attracted international concern last week.

Speculation about the likely cause ranged from pollution and algae to unusual bacterial infections or viruses. Today we can reveal the culprit was a tiny – but harmful – type of planktonic algae called Karenia mikimotoi.

The SA government sent us water samples from Waitpinga Beach, Petrel Cove Beach, Encounter Bay Boat Ramp and Parsons Headland on Tuesday. We studied the water under the microscope and extracted DNA for genetic analysis.

Our results revealed high numbers of the tiny harmful algal species – each just 20 microns in diameter (where one micron is one thousandth of a millimetre). While relatively common in Australian coastal waters, blooms of K. mikimotoi occur only sporadically. But similar harmful algal blooms and fish kills due to K. mikimotoi have happened in the past, such as the 2014 bloom in Coffin Bay, SA. And this latest one won’t be the last.

Harmful algal blooms

Single-celled, microbial algae occur naturally in seawater all over the world.

They are also called phytoplankton, because they float in the water column and photosynthesise like plants. “Phyto” comes from the Greek word for plant and “plankton” comes from the Greek word for wanderer, which relates to their floating movement with ocean currents and tides.

Like plants on land, the microalgae or phytoplankton in the ocean capture sunlight and produce up to half the oxygen in our atmosphere. There are more than 100,000 different species of microalgae. Every litre of seawater will normally contain a mixed group of these different microalgae species.

But under certain conditions, just a single species of microalgae can accumulate in one area and dominate over the others. If we are unlucky, the dominant species may be one that produces a toxin or has a harmful effect.

This so-called “harmful algal bloom” can cause problems for people and for marine life such as fish, invertebrates such as crabs, and even marine mammals such as whales and seals.

There are hundreds of different species of harmful algae. Each produces its own type of toxin with a particular toxic effect.

Most of these toxic chemical compounds produced by harmful algae are quite well known, including neurotoxins that affect the brain. But others are more complicated, and the mechanisms of toxicity are poorly understood. This can make it more difficult to understand the factors leading to the deaths of fish and other marine life. Unfortunately, the toxins from K. mikimotoi fall into this latter category.

Introducing Karenia mikimotoi

The species responsible for recent events in SA beaches, K. mikimotoi, causes harmful algal blooms in Asia, Europe, South Africa and South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand. These blooms all caused fish deaths, and some also caused breathing difficulties among local beachgoers.

The most drastic of these K. mikimotoi blooms have occurred in China over the past two decades. In 2012, more than 300 square kilometres of abalone farms were affected, causing about A$525 million in lost production.

Explaining the toxic effects

Microalgae can damage the gills of fish and shellfish, preventing them from breathing. This is the main cause of death. But some studies have also found damage to the gastrointestinal tracts and livers of fish.

Tests using fish gill cells clearly show the dramatic toxic effect of K. mikimotoi. When the fish gill cells were exposed to intact K. mikimotoi cells, after 3.5 hours more than 80% of the fish cells had died.

Fortunately, the toxin does not persist in the environment after the K. mikimotoi cells are dead. So once the bloom is over, the marine environment can recover relatively quickly.

Its toxicity is partly due to the algae’s production of “reactive oxygen species”, reactive forms of oxygen molecules which can cause the deaths of cells in high doses. K. mikimotoi cells may also produce lipid (fat) molecules that cause some toxic effects.

Finally, a very dense bloom of microalgae can sometimes reduce the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water column, which means there is less oxygen for other marine life.

The human health effects are not very well known but probably relate to the reactive oxygen species being an irritant.

K. mikimitoi cells can also produce “mucilage”, a type of thick, gluey substance made of complex sugars, which can accumulate bacteria inside it. This can cause “sea foam”, which was evident on beaches last week.

Unanswered questions remain

A question for many people is whether increasing water temperatures make blooms of K. mikimotoi more likely.

Another concern is whether nutrient runoff from farms, cities and aquaculture could cause more harmful algal blooms.

Unfortunately, for Australia at least, the answer to these questions is we don’t know yet. While we know some harmful algal blooms do increase when nutrient runoff is higher, others actually prefer fewer nutrients or colder temperatures.

We do know warmer water species seem to be moving further south along the Australian coastline, changing phytoplankton species abundance and distribution.

While some microalgal blooms can cause bioluminescence that is beautiful to watch, others such as K. mikimotoi can cause skin and respiratory irritations.

If you notice discoloured water, fish deaths or excessive sea foam along the coast or in an estuary, avoid fishing or swimming in the area and notify local primary industry or environmental authorities in your state.

Shauna Murray, Professor; Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney and Greta Gaiani, Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Life Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

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

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock since 1970 you will be aware of the five-day Glastonbury festival held every June (apart from “fallow” years to rest the land and the organisers), near Pilton in Somerset. Glastonbury is as much a pillar of the English summer as tennis at Wimbledon or opera at Glyndebourne.

It’s a white, middle-class rite of passage and an easy win for people wishing peer approval and the cultural capital that comes with the price of a ticket. It’s expensive and exclusive and the booking policy reflects its audience.

This year’s headliners include indie pop-rock darlings The 1975, angry girl supreme Olivia Rodrigo, old-school superstar Neil Young with his band the Chrome Hearts, with family favourite Rod Stewart filling the Sunday teatime “legend” slot.

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Other acts filling the 100-plus stages include Brat popster Charli XCX, English hip-hopper Loyle Carner, original bad boys The Prodigy (without original frontman Keith Flint, RIP) plus Raye, Doechii, Noah Kahan, Gracie Abrams, and old pros Alanis Morissette, En Vogue and Gary Numan.

With tickets costing £378.50 for Glastonbury 2025, are the 210,000 attendees getting value for money?

A Reddit thread titled “Glastonbury 2025 lineup, thoughts?”, gives a flavour of some commonly aired opinions. Disappointed customer praf973 “tried to get tickets but was unsuccessful. I’m not bitter, but the line up isn’t really looking that great.” Another commenter, Whilst-I-was-forced, declared: “Nothing to get excited about. It’s gone too commercial and sterile.”

Ok_Handle_3530 gave a different perspective: “This line-up looks … great, people are too hard to please.” ShankSpencer opined, “There are no good line-ups any more. No one young listens to bands any more, so there are no headline acts.”

The exceptionally popular festival sold out in 35 minutes this year even before the artists had been announced, raising the question: has Glastonbury become a victim of its own success?

Last year there were issues with overcrowding at some of the smaller stages creating issues for fans wanting to see acts such as the Sugababes. Some sets were even being stopped early because of crowd surges.

But what’s really behind these complaints about the lineup and are they justified? There’s been a changing of the guard as the veteran generation of performers from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s step back from performing because they have retired, are too ill or have died.

There doesn’t seem to be enough credible stadium acts from the 1990s onwards to fill their shoes, leading to a lack of enthusiasm for the current offerings. The new generation of acts have an opportunity to impress, but many of them don’t have the volume of hits that legacy acts such as Elton John or Paul McCartney provide – nor the cross-generational appeal.

There is also a growing sense that the cultural importance of the rock band is fading. Gen Z has far more in the way of distractions than previous generations with myriad forms of social media and digital entertainment. With so much competition for their attention, the tribal allegiances that bands used to command may feel dated and irrelevant to many younger people.

On their single Guys, one of this year’s headliners, The 1975 trill: “The moment that we started a band was the best thing that ever happened.” Perhaps lead singer Matty Healy’s love affair with the mythology of rock’n'roll is no longer widely shared.

Glastonbury has also been criticised for a lack of diversity. Clubbing magazine Mixmag made the point that in 2023, “the number of male acts playing this year’s Glastonbury Festival is nearly double that of female acts”.

Similarly, the festival’s lineup and audience are predominantly white and fail to adequately reflect the British music industry. Though there have been a few black bands and artists headlining over the years, it wasn’t until 2019 that the first solo black British performer headlined on the Pyramid stage, with an unforgettable set from London rapper Stormzy in a black Union Jack stab vest designed by Banksy.

For Glastonbury to move with the times, a more diverse booking policy is needed to widen the audience demographic and the festival’s appeal. Despite having enjoyed the event, mixed-heritage music journalist and academic Jenessa Williams noted: “I was still left with the feeling that certain punters saw black artists as a mockable novelty, a by-product to tolerate rather than truly a piece of the event’s heart and soul.”

And then there’s the issue of cost. According to a 2024 report, two-thirds of UK adults feel that music festivals are becoming too expensive. Popular music artists have had to pivot towards live events for income generation because of the poor returns from streaming compared to selling albums.

So are major tours and larger festivals such as Glastonbury sucking revenue out of the music economy? Research shows that while big high-profile event tours are making millions, at the other end of the spectrum grassroots venues – where new talent is incubated – are buckling under a lack of support and the prohibitive costs of running their operations.

Glastonbury won’t be making an appearance in 2026, the next fallow year for rest and recovery. This will create an opportunity for organiser Emily Eavis to reflect on some of the more problematical issues the festival faces, from diversity in the audience and artists, to the sustainability of the talent pipeline.

Maybe the last word should go to American rapper Azealia Banks commenting on this year’s festival lineup: “Glastonbury is kinda cooked.”

Adrian York, Senior Lecturer in Commercial Music Performance, University of Westminster

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

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest playwrights. A prolific and unabashedly autobiographical writer, Williams’ career spanned four decades of the 20th century.

The Glass Menagerie, which premiered in Chicago on December 26 1944, was the writer’s first major success. It won scores of national theatrical awards and catapulted Williams to enduring fame.

An engrossing new production of the classic play, currently running at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, does more than simply revive the famous piece of theatre. It revitalises it for modern audiences.

A troubled family from St. Louis

The Glass Menagerie is a lyrical exploration of memory, longing and familial obligation.

Set in the 1930s in St. Louis, the play revolves around three adult members of the Wingfield family: Tom, a restless and possibly closeted young man torn between duty and desire; Laura, his painfully shy sister, whose physical disability and introversion leave her isolated from the world; and Amanda, their domineering but fragile mother who clings to faded Southern dreams.

The plot is simple, and draws direct inspiration from Williams’ troubled family life. The Wingfields are struggling to get by. They live in a cramped apartment, in the shadow of an absent patriarch who we hear “fell in love with long distances” a long time ago.

Amanda is desperate to secure a future for Laura. She pins her hopes on the arrival of a “gentleman caller”, convinced that marriage is the only hope for her daughter’s security.

When Tom – who is also the play’s narrator (a cutout for Williams himself) – invites a colleague to dinner, the overbearing Amanda seizes the opportunity to present Laura in the best possible light. Suffice to say, things do not end well.

Lifting lyricism to its highest level

Potted plot summaries don’t really do The Glass Menagerie justice.

As Liesel Badorrek, director of the new production at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, points out, “Williams wanted to break with the prosaic realism that he felt had dominated the American theatre” and fashion a new, more symbolic approach to theatre, where memory and emotion take precedence over conventional forms of dramatic action.

According to Williams himself, his aim was to demonstrate

that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

To bring his vision to life, Williams combined heightened poetic dialogue, repeated musical motifs and unconventional stagecraft. In doing so, he intentionally blurred the lines between reality and memory, allowing the audience to experience the emotional truth of the characters, rather than a literal depiction of events.

This innovative approach to dramatic form was revolutionary at the time and became a hallmark of Williams’ mature work. As Arthur Miller once wrote:

The Glass Menagerie in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history, but it broke new ground in another way. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it.

A fresh take with remarkable depth

Miller’s observations about poetic rhapsody and form are worth keeping in mind when discussing the Ensemble Theatre’s impressive take on The Glass Menagerie.

One of the great merits of the production is how it does justice to Williams’ formal innovations while also engaging the audience on an emotional level.

Making excellent use of expressionistic lighting (Verity Hampson) and sound design (Maria Alfonsine and Damian de Boos-Smith), Badorrek’s production strikes a fine balance between preserving the play’s delicate, dreamlike structure and grounding its characters in charged performances that feel immediate and often painfully real.

Deftly blending humour and pathos, the cast of four delivers strong performances that ensure the play’s vivid lyricism enhances (but does not overwhelm) its emotional core.

Blazey Best’s Amanda is in equal measure maddening and charming, a true tour de force. Her verbal sparring with Danny Ball’s Tom was an early high point of the evening. One particularly striking moment was staged entirely in silhouette – elongated shadows stretching across the stage’s backdrop.

That said, to me the true standouts were Bridie McKim and Tom Rogers, whose interpretations of Laura and the gentleman caller, Jim, lifted the entire production.

In particular, McKim, who has called for greater disability representation in Australian theatre, brings remarkable depth and dynamism to the role of Laura. She imbues Laura with vulnerability and, crucially, strength.

McKim and Rogers breathe new life into this 81-year old staple of the dramatic canon. Their performances render Williams’ work fresh and contemporary, ensuring the play feels as urgent today as it would have in its post-war heyday.

Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

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

Wine drinking in ancient Troy was not restricted to the upper classes, as has long been supposed – something our new research has established for the first time. Colleagues at the University of Tübingen and I have discovered that wine was also enjoyed by the common folk, independent of upper-class celebrations and religious rituals.

In the late 19th century, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) excavated the ancient city of Troy. He was hoping to discover the residence of Priam, the king of the city besieged by the Greek army under Agamemnon, as immortalised by Homer in the Iliad.

Among Schliemann’s most outstanding achievements was – alongside the identification of the site of Troy itself – undoubtedly the discovery of the so-called “treasure of Priam”.

The find included several hundred gold and silver objects. But during his excavations, Schliemann was captivated by a more humble item mentioned in the Iliad – the depas amphikypellon (two-handed drinking cup). He discovered numerous cylindrical, double-handled goblets thought to be the cup mentioned in the epic tale.

Schliemann believed the vessels had been used either for ritual wine offerings to the Olympian gods or, more likely, by the royal elite for drinking. The characteristic double handles, he suggested, allowed the vessels to be passed easily between participants seated next to each other.

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Despite fierce opposition to many of his interpretations in contemporary archaeological research, Schliemann’s hypotheses on the drinking customs of the early bronze age elite have become an enduring narrative.

Further archaeological excavations at Troy (in modern Turkey) were led by the University of Tübingen between 1987 and 2012. Since then, my colleagues and I have been analysing the results, focusing on architectural findings and the vast array of artefacts uncovered.

Over time, scientific methods have played an increasingly important role, with a particular focus on the analysis of organic residues in vessels (ORA). This method has proven particularly valuable, as it provides insights into what the early bronze-age inhabitants of Troy prepared in their cooking pots and enjoyed from their drinking vessels.

Drilling into Troy’s wine culture

Excavations over the past 150 years have shown that use of the two-handed drinking cup spanned from Greece in the west to Mesopotamia in the east.

They were produced in various forms between BC2500 and 2000. Likely inspired by now-lost metal prototypes, except for one silver example in the British Museum, these ceramic vessels were often made on the potter’s wheel, a technological innovation introduced from the near east during this period.

Many of the double-handled goblets have been found not only in settlements but also in graves. This is an indicator of their special significance in cult and ritual. Written sources also suggest that wine was regarded as particularly precious during this time, though these are generally from distant geographical regions. It has therefore been inferred that only the social elite, through their control of long-distance trade, had access to it.

For many inland and eastern Anatolian settlements, this may have been true. However, Troy, like many other sites in the Aegean and western Asia Minor, was located in a region particularly favourable for the cultivation of wine, which means it would have been more widely available.

So it’s hardly surprising that two-handed vessels have been found not only in Troy’s fortified citadel with its monumental buildings, but also in areas of the outer settlement. It led us to wonder – does this mean that farmers, craftsmen and others could also consume it on special occasions, or even in their daily lives?

To address this question, it was first necessary to prove scientifically that the goblets were actually used for drinking wine. Just because they might seem suitable for it doesn’t provide proof. To this end, two fragments from the collections of the Institute of Classical Archaeology in Tübingen were analysed for organic residues by Dr Maxime Rageot.

Two grams of ceramic material was drilled from the inner walls of the vessel, and the collected ceramic powder was then treated with solvents to extract lipid and resin compounds. After further chemical processing, these were heated to a maximum of 380°C and then analysed. Several aldaric acids were identified in both specimens. Namely, succinic, fumaric, pyruvic, malic and – in significant quantities – tartaric acids.

The latter can be interpreted as a grape marker, since such concentrations are not documented in other fruits available in the Mediterranean. The identification of succinic and pyruvic acids, commonly associated with fermentation markers, suggests the presence of wine (or vinegar) derived from ripe grapes.

So Schliemann was right: the depas amphikypellon was certainly used for wine consumption. Whether this was tied to religious practices, rituals and public banqueting, or simply drinking wine as part of everyday life, remains uncertain.

However, when it comes to who consumed it, our analysis results necessitate a correction of the conventional archaeological perspective. It seems that not only the elite enjoyed drinking wine – but also the common folk. For a counter-test, two simple cups, commonly found by the hundreds in early bronze-age Troy, were also sampled. The results were striking: the exact same organic residues were identified in both specimens.

Wine for all?

In archaeology, it is often the seemingly insignificant small finds that, when viewed in a broader context, have a profound impact. Based on organic residues –imperceptible to the naked eye and detectable only at a molecular level – the role of wine consumption in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC must be fundamentally reconsidered, at least in the case of Troy.

Here, wine was far from being reserved solely for the rich and powerful. The two-handed depas amphikypellon wasn’t a status symbol for the elite – it was a widely appreciated drinking vessel. Furthermore, for everyday drinking, it seems any type of vessel would do, with no particular one set aside for the task.

Whether and to what extent a shift in perspective can be expected at other sites of the Aegean and Anatolian early bronze age can, of course, only be definitively answered through comparable biomolecular analyses. After all, as in so many cases, it wouldn’t be surprising if Troy turned out to be the exception that challenges the norm.

Stephan Blum, Research associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen

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

In our guides to the classics, experts explain key literary works.

Ask someone when they first read Jane Eyre, and they will no doubt remember: the voice of its protagonist leaps off the page as if to grab you by the forearm, pulsating with life.

Passionate, determined, and fiercely protective of her claim to happiness, Jane possesses a strength of character that utterly belies the plainness and penury of her beginnings.

Even those who haven’t read this novel, first published in 1847, are likely to associate it with popular representations of governesses and madwomen, which Jane Eyre helped enshrine as icons of the Victorian era.

Narrated from the first-person point of view, Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece is a landmark in the novel of interiority, the history of feminism, and the representation of religion and race.

Brontë’s early life

Jane Eyre is subtitled, “An Autobiography,” and the events of the novel – at once domestic and strange, familiar and fantastical – are deeply shaped by the experiences of its author. Born in Yorkshire to a prickly curate father, Charlotte Brontë was surrounded by death as a child. She lost her mother at the age of five, followed by two older sisters when a typhoid outbreak swept through their boarding school.

From then on, Charlotte remained at home with her other siblings – Anne and Emily, and her ne’er-do-well brother Branwell. Together, they lost themselves in the creation of a fictional world called “Glass Town,” which they catalogued meticulously in tiny paper booklets.

After failing disastrously as a schoolteacher and governess (which Charlotte relates in trenchant letters to family and friends), she and her sisters sought to make a career out of their childhood passion.

In the space of two years, they would publish Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, three undeniable classics in what one critic has dubbed a second “Northumbrian Renaissance.”

A child’s eye

The early chapters of Charlotte’s novel take us deep into the mind of Jane Eyre, an orphan who has been reluctantly accepted into the household of a wealthy aunt. Though only ten years old, Jane is treated worse than a servant, abused by her cousins and constantly reminded her existence is an unwanted burden.

The family nicknames her “Madame Mope,” but Jane is anything but sullen. On the contrary, she harbours within her the spirit of a “rebel slave,” desperately seeking love but unwilling to abase herself in pursuit of her aunt’s (or indeed anyone’s) approval.

When Jane is wrongfully accused of attacking her vicious cousin, she is locked in the “red-room,” the bedchamber of her dead uncle. She burns with fear and resentment, and the room becomes a potent allegory for the psychological misery inflicted upon children.

Hope seems to arrive in the prospect of a charity school for orphans, but Jane’s restless spirit stands poised to chafe against its gospel of Christian meekness. In her interview for admission, the director recounts for Jane’s edification the example of

a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn he says: ‘Oh! The verse of a Psalm!’[… and] gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.

Unimpressed by the child’s craven obeisance, Jane remarks simply, “Psalms are not interesting.”

The scenes at Lowood School, an institution for the poor, are drawn from Charlotte’s own knowledge of the boarding school that killed her sisters. The children are half-starved and beaten while their zealous benefactor espouses the virtues of poverty. Jane’s only solace is a kindly teacher and the ethereal student Helen Burns, who possesses Christ-like powers of submission.

The death of Helen from typhus points to the impossibility of moral perfection in a bleak and fallen world. While Jane admires her friend, she quickly sees that her own path will involve a different kind of suffering and resistance.

An unconventional courtship

Jane is often described as “plucky” or “spunky,” a quality best revealed by her energetic self-reliance. A self-made woman, she spends the next eight years at Lowood educating herself so she can seek out better opportunities elsewhere.

After advertising in the local newspaper, she gets hired to be governess at Thornfield Hall, a large estate with a mysterious proprietor. At this point in the novel, the tone shifts from social criticism to gothic romance, as Jane falls deeply in love with the owner of the estate, Edward Rochester.

The unconventional courtship between the star-crossed (and class-crossed) lovers is one of the novel’s chief delights. Rochester is world-weary and emotional, a dissipated aristocrat who becomes captivated by Jane’s frankness and inner strength. Jane sees glimmers of a finer nature beneath Rochester’s brutish façade, but resists the temptation to become his plaything or ornament.

In a daring renovation of the courtship plot, Brontë depicts Rochester as the needier and more flirtatious of the two. To secure Jane’s interest, he is not above pretending to be engaged to another woman or dressing as a female gypsy to ascertain the true nature of her feelings.

Jane, however, refuses to sacrifice her personal dignity at the altar of romantic love. When Rochester asks her to remain his ward’s governess after he marries his supposed fiancée, Jane bursts forth:

Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart!

In a move that scandalised some of Brontë’s critics, Rochester responds warmly to Jane’s principled self-defense and immediately proposes marriage, explaining, “My bride is here […] because my equal is here.”

Madwomen and missionaries

Most people are familiar with the phrase “the madwoman in the attic,” but few know it comes not from the novel but from a pioneering work of feminist criticism inspired by Brontë’s example.

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar placed the incredible plot twist at the heart of Jane Eyre – that Rochester is secretly married to a mixed-race madwoman from the West Indies, who is confined to the third floor of his house – at the heart of a new symbology of writing by women.

“By projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem),” they write, “female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them.”

Bertha Mason, the madwoman, thus becomes a monstrous double of Jane – a transgressive woman of violent temper who demonstrates what happens when women are oppressed by unequal marriages or violate social norms.

The invention of Bertha is a brilliantly lurid device to keep Rochester and Jane apart. But it has not always sat well with readers.

In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the Dominican writer Jean Rhys retells the story from Bertha’s perspective, humanising the bestial other. In place of the “clothed hyena” that Jane observes, Rhys shows how Bertha’s subjection to colonial schemes of exploitation and domination is as much responsible for her madness as any racial or genetic traits. Instead of Jane, it is Bertha who complains of injustice.

Brontë further develops the colonial contexts of Jane Eyre in the novel’s final section, when, after the collapse of her engagement to Rochester, Jane takes up residence with an earnest missionary and his sisters. Here, Jane finally finds herself in a community of equals, except it lacks the romantic dimension of her relationship with Rochester.

When the missionary, St. John Rivers, proposes marriage to Jane, it is because he judges her to be the perfect help-meet for his religious labours in India, not because he desires her erotically. Where Rochester was excessively sensual (we are made aware that he married Bertha for sex as well as money), St. John is coldly ambitious — not a bad man, per se, but one who sees his spiritual destiny as incompatible with the life of the heart.

Through the colonial activities of both men, Brontë associates the wider British empire with masculine egoism and derogation from equality between the sexes. Such a place, she suggests, is likely to produce “revolted slaves” not unlike her heroine Jane.

A radical solution

The most famous line of Jane Eyre – “Reader, I married him” – encapsulates how this sometimes dispiriting novel moves inexorably toward maturity and fulfilment.

While still considering St. John’s proposal, Jane hears Rochester’s voice beckoning to her through the ether – a moment of occult indulgence that recalls the more mythopoetic style of Charlotte’s sister, Emily. Fortunately, the voice inspires Jane to return to Thornfield, where she finds that Bertha has burned the house to the ground, killing herself in the process, and leaving Rochester blinded and maimed.

A sombre mood prevails as the two lovers reacquaint themselves, but Jane resumes her teasing manner when she realises that Rochester has become insecure toward her because of his disabilities, not because his passion has cooled.

In contrast to her scepticism about St. John’s mission, Jane delights in the possibility of serving as Rochester’s caretaker and nurse because she is motivated by love rather than duty.

In a culture where most people, but women especially, were encouraged to sublimate their desires to the goals of more powerful men, Jane Eyre offers a radical solution. By marrying a man who has become her physical and financial dependent – but who remains an equal romantic partner – Jane can enjoy both power and femininity, which for many Victorians was an improbable combination.

As Jane puts it,

I hold myself supremely blest – blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine.

Her confident assertion of dignity, of integrity, and of moral and social equality is as relevant to our own time as it was to hers.

Matthew Sussman, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Sydney

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

Every day, users ask search engines millions of questions. The information we receive can shape our opinions and behaviour.

We are often not aware of their influence, but internet search tools sort and rank web content when responding to our queries. This can certainly help us learn more things. But search tools can also return low-quality information and even misinformation.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have entered the search scene. While LLMs are not search engines, commercial web search engines have started to include LLM-based artificial intelligence (AI) features into their products. Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Overviews are examples of this trend.

AI-enhanced search is marketed as convenient. But, together with other changes in the nature of search over the last decades, it raises the question: what is a good search engine?

Our new paper, published in AI and Ethics, explores this. To make the possibilities clearer, we imagine four search tool models: Customer Servant, Librarian, Journalist and Teacher. These models reflect design elements in search tools and are loosely based on matching human roles.

The four models of search tools

Customer Servant

Workers in customer service give people the things they request. If someone asks for a “burger and fries”, they don’t query whether the request is good for the person, or whether they might really be after something else.

The search model we call Customer Servant is somewhat like the first computer-aided information retrieval systems introduced in the 1950s. These returned sets of unranked documents matching a Boolean query – using simple logical rules to define relationships between keywords (e.g. “cats NOT dogs”).

Librarian

As the name suggests, this model somewhat resembles human librarians. Librarian also provides content that people request, but it doesn’t always take queries at face value.

Instead, it aims for “relevance” by inferring user intentions from contextual information such as location, time or the history of user interactions. Classic web search engines of the late 1990s and early 2000s that rank results and provide a list of resources – think early Google – sit in this category.

Journalist

Journalists go beyond librarians. While often responding to what people want to know, journalists carefully curate that information, at times weeding out falsehoods and canvassing various public viewpoints.

Journalists aim to make people better informed. The Journalist search model does something similar. It may customise the presentation of results by providing additional information, or by diversifying search results to give a more balanced list of viewpoints or perspectives.

Teacher

Human teachers, like journalists, aim at giving accurate information. However, they may exercise even more control: teachers may strenuously debunk erroneous information, while pointing learners to the very best expert sources, including lesser-known ones. They may even refuse to expand on claims they deem false or superficial.

LLM-based conversational search systems such as Copilot or Gemini may play a roughly similar role. By providing a synthesised response to a prompt, they exercise more control over presented information than classic web search engines.

They may also try to explicitly discredit problematic views on topics such as health, politics, the environment or history. They might reply with “I can’t promote misinformation” or “This topic requires nuance”. Some LLMs convey a strong “opinion” on what is genuine knowledge and what is unedifying.

No search model is best

We argue each search tool model has strengths and drawbacks.

The Customer Servant is highly explainable: every result can be directly tied to keywords in your query. But this precision also limits the system, as it can’t grasp broader or deeper information needs beyond the exact terms used.

The Librarian model uses additional signals like data about clicks to return content more aligned with what users are really looking for. The catch is these systems may introduce bias. Even with the best intentions, choices about relevance and data sources can reflect underlying value judgements.

The Journalist model shifts the focus toward helping users understand topics, from science to world events, more fully. It aims to present factual information and various perspectives in balanced ways.

This approach is especially useful in moments of crisis – like a global pandemic – where countering misinformation is critical. But there’s a trade-off: tweaking search results for social good raises concerns about user autonomy. It may feel paternalistic, and could open the door to broader content interventions.

The Teacher model is even more interventionist. It guides users towards what it “judges” to be good information, while criticising or discouraging access to content it deems harmful or false. This can promote learning and critical thinking.

But filtering or downranking content can also limit choice, and raises red flags if the “teacher” – whether algorithm or AI – is biased or simply wrong. Current language models often have built-in “guardrails” to align with human values, but these are imperfect. LLMs can also hallucinate plausible-sounding nonsense, or avoid offering perspectives we might actually want to hear.

Staying vigilant is key

We might prefer different models for different purposes. For example, since teacher-like LLMs synthesise and analyse vast amounts of web material, we may sometimes want their more opinionated perspective on a topic, such as on good books, world events or nutrition.

Yet sometimes we may wish to explore specific and verifiable sources about a topic for ourselves. We may also prefer search tools to downrank some content – conspiracy theories, for example.

LLMs make mistakes and can mislead with confidence. As these models become more central to search, we need to stay aware of their drawbacks, and demand transparency and accountability from tech companies on how information is delivered.

Striking the right balance with search engine design and selection is no easy task. Too much control risks eroding individual choice and autonomy, while too little could leave harms unchecked.

Our four ethical models offer a starting point for robust discussion. Further interdisciplinary research is crucial to define when and how search engines can be used ethically and responsibly.

Simon Coghlan, Senior Lecturer in Digital Ethics, Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne; Damiano Spina, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University; Falk Scholer, Professor of Information Access and Retrieval, RMIT University, and Hui Chia, PhD Candidate in Law, The University of Melbourne

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

There is a Fox News headline that goes like this:

Transgender female runner who beat 14,000 women at London Marathon offers to give medal back

Read about the event elsewhere and it turns out the athlete was also beaten by thousands of people and it was a participation medal. While the Fox News headline is true, it is framed to potentially elicit a negative reaction.

Misinformation is on the rise. We’re told we need to think critically when we read things online, but how can we recognise such situations? And what does it mean to think critically anyway?

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is based on the idea that if all ideas are equal, then all ideas are worthless. Without this assumption, there can be nothing to be critical of.

When we think critically, we focus on the quality of our reasoning and the factors that can influence it. In other words, thinking critically primarily means being critical of your own thinking.

Importantly, critical thinking is not strongly correlated with intelligence. While some believe intelligence is basically fixed (though there is debate around this), we can learn to think critically.

Other factors being equal, there’s also no evidence thinking critically is an innate ability. In fact, we have evidence critical thinking can be improved as a skill in itself, and it is transferrable to other contexts.

The tools of argumentation

Many factors can affect the quality of your thinking. They include things like cognitive biases (systemic thinking errors), prior beliefs, prejudices and worldviews, framing effects, and how much you know about the subject.

To understand the quality of our reasoning, we can use the concepts and language of argumentation.

People often think “arguments” are about conflicting views. A better way to understand argumentation is to view it as a way of making our thinking visible and accessible to each other.

Arguments contain premises, those things we think are true about the world, and conclusions, which is where we end up in our thinking. Moving from premises to conclusions is called inferring, and it is the quality of these inferences that is the concern of critical thinking.

For example, if I offer the premises

P1: All Gronks are green

P2: Fred is a Gronk

Then you have already inferred the conclusion

C: Fred is green

You don’t even need to know what a Gronk is to make that inference.

All our rational judgements and decisions are made up of chains of inferences. Constructing, evaluating and identifying types of arguments is the core business of critical thinking.

How can we improve our critical thinking skills?

To help us get better at it, we can understand critical thinking in three main ways.

First, we can see critical thinking as a subject we can learn. In this subject, we study how arguments work and how our reasoning can be influenced or improved. We also learn what makes for good thinking by using ideas like accuracy, clarity, relevance, depth and more. These are what we value in good thinking. By learning this, we start to think about how we think, not just what we think about.

Second, we improve our critical thinking by using what we’ve learned in real situations. This helps us build important thinking skills like analysing, justifying, evaluating and explaining.

Third, we can also think of critical thinking as a habit or attitude – something we choose to practice in our everyday lives. This means being curious, open-minded and willing to question things instead of just accepting them. It also means being aware of our own biases and trying to be fair and honest in how we think.

When we put all three of these together, we become better thinkers – not just in educational contexts, but in life.

Practical steps to improving critical thinking

Since critical thinking centres on the giving and taking of reasons, practising this is a step towards improvement. There are some useful ways to do this.

1. Make reasoning – rather than conclusions – the basis of your discussions with others.

When asking for someone’s opinion, inquire as to why they think that. And offer your thinking to others. Making our thinking visible leads to deep and meaningful conversations in which we can test each other’s thinking and develop the virtues of open-mindedness and curiosity.

2. Always assess the credibility of information based on its source and with a reflection on your own biases.

The processes of our thinking can shape information as we receive it, just as much as the source can in providing it. This develops the virtues of carefulness and humility.

3. Keep the fundamental question of critical inquiry in mind.

The most important question in critical thinking is: “how do we know?”. Continually testing the quality of your inquiry – and therefore thinking – is key. Focusing on this question gives us practice in applying the values of inquiry and develops virtues such as persistence and resilience.

You are not alone!

Reasoning is best understood as a social competence: we reason with and towards each other. Indeed, to be called reasonable is a social compliment.

It’s only when we have to think with others that we really test the quality of our thinking. It’s easy to convince yourself about something, but when you play in the arena of public reasoning, the bar is much higher.

So, be the reasonable person in the room.

That doesn’t mean everyone has to come around to your way of thinking. But it does mean everyone will get closer to the truth because of you.

Use online resources

There are many accessible tools for developing critical thinking. Kialo (Esperanto for “reason”), brings together people from around the world on a user-friendly (and free) platform to help test our reasoning in a well-moderated and respectful environment. It is an excellent place to practice the giving and taking of reasons and to understand alternative positions.

The School of Thought, developed to curate free critical thinking resources, includes many that are often used in educational contexts.

There’s also a plethora of online courses that can guide development in critical thinking, from Australian and international universities.

Peter Ellerton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Education; Curriculum Director, UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland

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