Year 12 students are coming to the end of their formal schooling. Many are having graduation ceremonies at the moment ahead of their final exams.

Over the next few months, some school leavers might find their friends are travelling overseas while others are beginning new jobs. Maybe some classmates are moving to different towns or cities to study or work.

As young people begin to move into this new life stage, they might feel their school friendships and wider networks are becoming more distant or disconnected. They may feel lost or lonely.

What do we mean by loneliness?

Loneliness happens whenever a person feels a discrepancy between their desired and actual connections.

It’s different to social isolation, which involves a person having objectively fewer social contacts, social roles, and relationships. And it’s different from being alone, which is an objective experience of being physically removed from other people.

What the research says

When students finish school, we know they are at a vulnerable age.

In Australia, survey data suggests 43% of young people aged between 15 and 25 years experience loneliness.

A separate Norwegian study looked at how people aged between 13 and 31 years experienced loneliness. It found feelings of loneliness tended to increase in people aged 18–25. The research also suggests those who viewed their parents as caring, who maintained close friendships, and who lived in their family home until they were 18 years old experienced less loneliness.

What contributes to loneliness in high school leavers?

Completing Year 12 is a major milestone. After graduation, young people enter an often enjoyable, but also challenging, period of new experiences.

They fall into a developmental category known as emerging adulthood. It’s a time when young adults are exploring their identities, forming worldviews and figuring out how to navigate love, work and friendships.

Research suggests loneliness can emerge during this stage of life due to social transitions and the expectations young people place on themselves as to what their lives as adults should look like.

But big changes aren’t all doom and gloom. Major life transitions offer young adults opportunities to grow as they begin to experience life without the familiar structure of school.

However, if you are experiencing loneliness during this time, there are things you can do to improve your sense of connection.

Be courageous and put yourself out there

Building meaningful connections requires time and commitment. This means young people sometimes need to be brave and put themselves out there. This can look like inviting friends for regular catch-ups, or saying yes to more invitations to connect with new colleagues at work or classmates at uni.

Join social clubs

Research shows engaging with your local community can reduce feelings of loneliness.

After you finish high school, you can become more involved in community activities by joining a local sports team, a theatre club, a book club or maybe a Dungeons and Dragons group. Finding people with shared interests can be a great way to develop connections in an environment that feels comfortable for you.

Use social media intentionally

Social media use can create a false sense of connection and lead to loneliness. Scrolling on Instagram or TikTok might make a young person feel like they’re in the loop, but it can lead them to make more comparisons between themselves and others. Research suggests young people who use social media for two or more hours a day are more likely to feel lonely that those who don’t use it.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use social media at all. It can be helpful for establishing and maintaining connections, especially if your friends live far away.

But it’s important to set boundaries when using social media. Some ways you can do this include:

• setting time limits for apps

• turning off social media notifications.

• following social media accounts that inspire you, and muting or blocking accounts that make you feel bad.

Seek additional support

If you want to connect but are finding it challenging, it may not be an issue of motivation. Research shows, for some young adults who are persistently lonely, their brains change the way they process social situations.

Some common signals this might be happening, include:

• a persistent low mood and irritability

• negative self talk, such as “I’m unlikable” and “no one here notices me”

• trouble sleeping

• feeling worried or concerned about talking to people or socialising

• wanting to make connections but feeling fearful or sensitive to rejection.

If you are feeling really disconnected, and it’s impacting your health and wellbeing, it’s important to reach out to a professional for help. They can help you understand more about the difficulties you might be experiencing.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Robbie Eres, Lecturer in Psychology, Deakin University

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

For all the talk about generational differences at work, some of the biggest differences show up in surprisingly ordinary moments.

Take being late for work. A Gen Z employee in her 20s I spoke with works at a small, locally owned café and restaurant run by an older Gen X owner. When she realized she was going to be late one day, she texted him. He was frustrated. To him, being late was serious enough to warrant a phone call, and a text felt too casual and impersonal.

She saw the exact same interaction very differently.

“He’s super busy, so I felt a call was going to take up too much time,” she told me. “So I texted. I thought it was more considerate.”

Both thought they understood what respectful workplace communication looked like. They just had completely different definitions of it.

I study workplace culture and communication, and I see this type of misunderstanding as increasingly common in multigenerational workplaces. And this is becoming more pronounced as Gen Z moves further into the workforce. The oldest members of Gen Z are now approaching 30, while the youngest are in college and high school.

What’s distinctive about the older members of Gen Z is that many went through college, internships or their first jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of our communication moved online and masks often covered half our faces. And there’s a new twist now, as artificial intelligence changes how we communicate all over again.

The result isn’t necessarily that Gen Z employees communicate better or worse with their bosses and colleagues than previous generations did. I argue that they have simply learned to do so in a very different environment.

When a text means something more

The café example is an easy one to dismiss as younger workers preferring texting and feeling that phone calls are for important occasions only.

But that misses what I think is the more interesting point: The employee wasn’t trying to avoid her boss. She thought she was respecting his time.

For her boss, by contrast, the phone call itself carried meaning. It communicated that she understood the seriousness of being late.

Neither one had explained that expectation to the other.

Managers shouldn’t assume employees attach the same meaning they do to a particular form of communication. If being late requires a phone call, they need to say so. A two-minute conversation about expectations can prevent both people from walking away from an interaction believing the other was disrespectful.

Another common stumble concerns openness, which might feel like oversharing.

One Gen Z worker I spoke with had recently started a job at a large New England company in a blue-collar industry. He was struggling with severe anxiety and decided to tell his baby boomer manager. The manager was sympathetic, but also uneasy.

“It made me feel uncomfortable, if I’m being honest,” the manager told me. “I didn’t want to downplay his anxiety, but I’m not sure I needed to know.”

That distinction matters. His reaction wasn’t that anxiety wasn’t real or that his employee should simply get over it. But he questioned how much of it belonged in their professional relationship.

Many older workers learned that professionalism is about setting clear boundaries between personal and professional life. Members of Gen Z are coming of age during a period when conversations about mental health and personal well-being are considerably more public. What feels like honesty to one person can feel like oversharing to their boss.

This doesn’t mean that managers have to become therapists, and employees don’t have to disclose everything happening in their lives. But both may need to recognize that their comfort level around disclosure isn’t universal.

Learning to read a room when the room disappeared

Some workplace communication is never spoken at all. Think about how people traditionally learned to read a room. They watched faces around a conference table. They noticed a change in a manager’s tone. Someone caught them after a meeting and quietly explained what had just happened.

Now think about someone who was 18 or 19 in 2020.

At exactly the age when many young people would have been developing these skills in college, internships and early jobs, the room disappeared. Classes went online. Internships became remote. When people returned in person, masks sometimes made facial communication more difficult.

That doesn’t mean members of Gen Z can’t read facial expressions, but we should be careful about assuming everyone had the same opportunities to learn the unwritten signals of professional life. If feedback matters, I believe managers should say it. A disappointed expression on a Zoom call is a poor substitute for a conversation.

I thought that was understood

Imagine a manager telling a young employee: “I need this by Friday.” The employee sends it back at 4:30 p.m. that Friday afternoon. The manager is annoyed because they intended to review it that morning, make changes and send it along to someone else.

The employee is equally confused. The deadline was Friday, and they met it.

This deadline mismatch gets at something I have repeatedly encountered in my research with Gen Z workers. In a survey I conducted of 250 Gen Z professionals across industries, clear structural expectations emerged alongside fairness and empathetic engagement as recurring themes.

If an employee wants clarity, it shouldn’t automatically be confused with hand-holding. An employee can want autonomy and still want to know exactly what success looks like. “Friday” and “Friday by 10 a.m. because I need three hours to review this” communicate very different expectations.

Artificial intelligence may make this issue even more important. We can now produce polished emails, summarize meetings and generate information faster than ever. But more communication does not guarantee more understanding.

I believe that may be the larger lesson for every generation working together. We tend to mistake the workplace norms we learned for common sense. They aren’t. They were taught to us by the workplaces, technologies and moments in history in which we began our careers.

Gen Z is learning theirs in a very different world.

Jeff LeBlanc, Learning Facilitator for Online Master of Business Administration, Boston University

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

When asked about the greatest innovation of humans, people will often say language or fire. A new paper suggests that these innovations may be more interlinked than we previously assumed.

Understanding how human language evolved is one of the hardest problems in science to unpick, since writing is a relatively recent innovation. Also, the vocal tracts and brains of our ancestors did not fossilise as they were made of soft tissue. We are left, then, with indirect evidence about how humans and other apes communicate today.

One of the most prominent theories about the origins of human language is that our ancestors started to communicate using gestural language. This theory is based on our understanding of the abilities of apes, as evidence suggest both chimpanzees and gorillas have gestural communication systems.

We also know that one of the best strategies for communicating when you don’t have a shared language is gesture. We often do this when communicating on holiday with someone who doesn’t speak our language; we point, mime and emote to get our message across.

Some of my previous research has shown that we do this because gestures or sign languages are often more iconic than words in spoken languages. This means their meaning is easier to guess for someone without any previous knowledge of the gesture or language being spoken; perfect for creating a new language from scratch.

Did fireside storytelling aid the evolution of human language?

If human language started with gestures, then why are the vast majority of languages today spoken? One reason for this shift might lie in the limits of gestural language. You need a light source to see a gesture, and communication would have been necessary for our ancestors after dark.

An article by researchers at the University of St Andrews argues that by the dim light of a campfire, we might find an explanation for why we moved from gesture to spoken language. While a light source, firelight is potentially too dim for us to rely on it for the meaningful bits of early gestural language. For fully expressive stories in the dark, we would need spoken language but still keep gestural elements to emphasise and emote our speech.

The study highlights how storytelling links to some of the features of human language that make it unique. Stories have complex structures and are often displaced in time and space, meaning they talk about things not immediately present, in the past, or sometimes not even real.

The article suggests that social storytelling is what enabled us to surpass the communicative abilities of other living apes, into the rich, expressive tapestry of human language. Storytelling aids our social bonds and helps us understand the world and how to behave. It can help us develop our imagination, identities and cultural belief systems.

The idea that language emerged for social bonding is not new; however, the authors of the new article highlight that fireside context might have been crucial. They argue that the colour spectrum of fire is well suited for human vision without suppressing the melatonin that helps us sleep, like modern screen light can.

The study also highlights that human neurons synchronise to the frequency of flickering firelight, which the authors argue can improve shared social experience and bonding through connected rhythmic activities that can promote empathy.

How about storytelling today?

Other research, reviewed in my own work, has shown that stories from our early oral traditions share similar traits to one another. This is thought to happen because the social transmission of stories acts like evolution. Instead of survival of the fittest, we get survival of the most memorable aspects of stories as they are shared. Stories survive when they have more social, human-oriented content, counterintuitive elements, create negative emotions and have elements of survival.

Researchers think this happens because swapping stories about social bonds, unexpected dangers and survival are advantageous for our evolution.

Storytelling is still one of the primary ways we understand the world even now, through the news and social media. This content is full of human interest, negative emotions and surprise.

Storytelling in the modern world is now often about getting the most clicks and attention. It is often about keeping people up past their bedtime looking at the melatonin suppressing blue light of our screens.

I’m left wondering, after reading about the potential fireside origins of our language, that we might feel more connection and trust by going back to sharing stories around a fire.

Hannah Little, Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Liverpool

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

As a student in the 1960s, Zandra Rhodes would often visit the costume court of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to study the Elizabethan doublets. She went on to incorporate elements of Tudor costume into many of her couture collections.

Now things have come full circle. As an icon of British fashion – and a dame – Rhodes’ collections are providing inspiration for a new generation of students. Upon receiving her honorary doctorate of the arts from De Montfort University (DMU) in 2023, Rhodes announced her decision to donate her archive to the university.

These remarkable archives are at the heart of a major new public exhibition across the DMU campus. The University Gallery will explore Rhodes’ creative process and design collaborations with brands such as Ikea, Marks & Spencers and TopShop.

The University Museum will also present an in-depth study of her autumn/winter 1983 Medieval Collection. Together, these displays draw on material from the Zandra Rhodes Foundation’s donation to reveal both the breadth of the designer’s career and the rich educational potential of her archive.

Rhodes originally studied printed textile design at the Royal College of Art in London. After graduating in 1964, she became frustrated with clothing manufacturers who considered her textile patterns too outlandish to use on their garments, so she decided to move into fashion design.

Rhodes ensured that each garment she designed would perfectly showcase her own textile prints. Her trademark diaphanous dresses have been worn by royalty and celebrities, from Princess Diana to Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Harry. Rhodes herself embodies a flamboyant personal style and is famed for her bright pink hair, theatrical make-up and bold costume jewellery.

Fashion and textiles have been taught at DMU for over 150 years, from corsetry and footwear to knitwear and textile design. The university’s special collections hold numerous archives which reflect this background in fashion and textiles teaching.

Rhodes’ archive collection spans 1964 to 2021, and provides a wealth of useful material including: samples of mock-ups and final garments from ready-to-wear collections; documents that chart the development of a design from initial sketches through to fabric sampling, patterning, costing and marketing; press cuttings; photographs; and audio-visual recordings.

Exploring the creative process

Rhodes was very specific that her collection was to be used for teaching the next generation of fashion designers. We have been delighted to incorporate it into a wide range of teaching activities.

Beyond vague ideas about “vintage style”, few students will have considered using heritage or historic costume as inspiration for their own work, even though this approach is increasingly championed by the wider fashion industry.

The scope of Rhodes’ collection allows us to trace the development of a garment from initial conception to finished product, following the chain of design, production and marketing. Reviewing the methods and practices of a globally successful designer is invaluable to students who are at the very start of their own careers.

It demonstrates for them first-hand how much trial and error, collaboration and sheer effort goes into the creative process, and how the path from concept to completion is strewn with mistakes and revisions. That is a powerful lesson for students, who may mistake difficulties in their own work for a lack of talent. The archive shows instead that uncertainty and imperfection are normal parts of the creative process.

The value of hands-on learning

During archive sessions, we take an object-based learning approach. Students are encouraged to get hands-on with the garments and other items in the collection, analysing their cut, construction, materials, techniques, patterning, embellishment and visual impact. This champions the value of materiality in a digital, AI-driven age where many students experience fashion primarily through a screen.

We have also developed creative approaches to lessons that allow the students to engage with the archive in a stimulating way. Sketching from the archive helps build confidence in drawing, supported by seeing real examples of how vital drawing is to Rhodes’ practice.

In another exercise, students analyse the wide range of influences that inspire Rhodes’ pattern designs, from nature and landscapes to urban cityscapes, found objects and folk art. They then find and photograph their own inspirations and create their own Rhodes-inspired patterns.

Adapting the Rhodes signature style

Academic staff collaborating with special collections have designed an increasing number of module assessments that require students to use the archive as direct inspiration for their own designed collections. This has expanded to include numerous design and creative subjects.

Footwear students have made Zandra Rhodes-inspired collections, while fashion marketing students have designed and promoted collaborations between existing brands and the designer. Elsewhere, students of the interior design theatre module have created stage sets drawing on her work on opera costuming, and museum design students have prepared proposals for exhibitions showcasing the archive collection.

Our work shows that there is significant benefit to students when they gain an understanding of creative processes and methods through hands-on handling of heritage collections and archival papers.

The excitement of our students when they encounter the Rhodes’ collection is palpable, and we have noted improvements to their work once they have been immersed in the archive.

One described experiencing the archive first-hand as a “really special moment. It was actually really moving being able to dive into someone’s work and life – it felt very personal.”

It is clear that having access to a rich and comprehensive fashion archive from a top British designer has the capacity to engage and inspire the upcoming designers of the future.

Zandra Rhodes: Archive Unfolded will be on show at De Montfort University, Leicester until January 16 2027

Katharine Short, Archives and Special Collections Manager, De Montfort University and Carolyn Hardaker, Head of School of Design Innovation, De Montfort University

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

When King Æthelred II came to the English throne in 978 CE as a child of around ten, England had enjoyed decades without major Viking attacks.

That respite was short-lived.

News of England’s changed political fortunes swiftly made its way to Scandinavia and within two years the Vikings had returned.

By 991 CE, repeated failures to repel the raiders had convinced the king to adopt a new policy: buying peace, via a payment to the Vikings that came to be known as the Danegeld.

Put simply, Æthelred was trying to pay the Vikings off.

What was the Danegeld and how did it work?

The Danegeld was a kingdom-wide tax imposed on the people of England to raise vast quantities of silver.

It was initially levied on an as-needs basis to purchase peace with the Vikings. In 991 CE, the sum was ₤10,000, which Æthelred paid

for the great terror they occasioned by the sea-coast.

In 1012 CE, the amount had risen to ₤48,000. Over the course of his reign, Æthelred would pay a staggering sum of ₤240,000 in tribute to Viking raiders and mercenaries – all in the hope this would make them go away.

It was such a lot of money

It is difficult to conceptualise this sum in modern terms. In total, this would have equated to around 84 tonnes of silver, equivalent to roughly 58 million pennies.

No other kingdom in contemporary western Europe possessed the fiscal machinery to raise such sums on a repeated basis.

The cumulative Danegeld extracted during Æthelred’s reign exceeds even the highest scholarly estimates for the entire quantity of coins circulating within England at any one time.

These payments have left an enduring archaeological trace. Tens of thousands of Æthelredian coins have been found in Scandinavian hoards, by far the largest volume of extant coins from his reign.

But was it such a bad idea?

The decision of Æthelred and his advisers to pay tribute to the Vikings for peace has often been derided. The writer and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) famously quipped

that if once you have paid him the Danegeld

you never get rid of the Dane.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a medieval historical record written in Old English) also reflects that

for all this truce and tribute, [the Vikings] journeyed nonetheless in bands everywhere, and harried our wretched people, and plundered and killed them.

Although writing centuries earlier than Kipling, the chronicler still wrote with the benefit of hindsight and in full awareness that the policy of paying tribute had failed to arrest the Viking incursions in Æthelred’s reign.

It’s easy to say now that paying the Vikings to go away “didn’t work”. But this obscures the fact the raiders were not a united force. Paying off one Viking band did not ensure another would stop coming.

And Æthelred was not the first king to pay for peace with the Vikings.

This was a common method by which Frankish kings dealt with the raiders who established themselves along the rivers of France.

In England, King Alfred the Great (King Æthelred II’s great-great-grandfather) had previously paid for peace with the Vikings in the 870s CE.

Alfred, however, benefited from a sympathetic narrative tradition that cast even his defeats in positive terms. And in the end, as one historian put it:

no amount of special pleading can alter the fact that Alfred survived his Viking onslaught whereas Æthelred did not.

Æthelred really did try very hard

Æthelred was not an inactive leader. From 992 CE, there is greater evidence of English resistance through fleets and armies locally and kingdom-wide.

The Danegeld was just one part of wider royal policy responding to the Vikings. In fact, Æthelred invested heavily in England’s defensive capacity but was thwarted in large part by internal political division.

Remarkably, his defensive efforts, especially around ship building, required the levying of yet further taxes. Most notable among these was called the heregeld. It was an annual land levy that is often conflated with the Danegeld.

It was first used to pay Æthelred’s Scandinavian mercenaries before becoming an ongoing means of maintaining the kingdom’s armies and fleets.

The legacy of the Danegeld

King Æthelred II died in 1016 CE in London, besieged by the forces of the Danish prince Cnut, who would succeed him as king of England.

But this was not the end of the Danegeld. Far from abandoning the system, one of Cnut’s first acts as king was to impose a massive Danegeld of ₤82,500, ₤10,500 of which was extracted from London alone. The ongoing maintenance of Cnut’s forces required around an additional ₤14,000 in heregeld each year.

Cnut, it seems, had immediately seen the potential of the administrative structures that had developed to collect the Danegeld and heregeld and decided to exploit them.

Although the Danegeld was raised several more times in the reigns of Cnut and his sons, it was the heregeld model of taxation which had the longest legacy.

Like Cnut, England’s next conqueror, William, also, as one historian puts it:

had straightaway grasped the potential of the economic and organisational resources of the English kingdom.

He immediately brought back a land-based geld, the heregeld having been briefly abolished in 1051 by former King Edward the Confessor (one of King Æthelred II’s sons). William the Conqueror levied this tax every year of his reign.

Although William’s tax resembled that of the heregeld, it came to be known as the Danegeld.

Detached from its original purpose of buying peace from Viking armies, the Danegeld became a regular source of royal revenue inherited and repeatedly exploited by the Norman kings.

Thus, while perhaps a sign of military weakness in its inception, the Danegeld ultimately became one of the foundational elements of an increasingly sophisticated fiscal and military system that survived both Æthelred and the end of the Viking Age.

Matthew Firth, Research Fellow in Medieval History, Flinders University

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

Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood has bluntly warned governments not to undermine public trust by “playing politics with our institutions”.

Delivering the Centre for Public Integrity Oration in Sydney on Wednesday evening, Wood said, “In a world where ‘cut through’ is at a premium, throwing shade on the messenger can be simpler and easier than debating the finer points of the message”.

Wood targeted the recent attack from Western Australian Premier Roger Cook on the Productivity Commission after the PC released a report strongly criticising the current GST distribution that overtly favours WA. Cook denounced the report as coming from “east coast clowns” who did not understand WA.

“My primary concern about comments like these that ‘play the man, not the ball’ is the impact on institutional trust,” Wood said.

“There is an important distinction between arguing an institution ‘got it wrong’ on a particular issue and placing a question in people’s minds about the impartiality and calibre of the organisation and its work more broadly”.

Wood said the PC was “by no means the only institution to have been subject to opportunistic political attacks”.

Climate scientists had “been through the wringer.

"Ongoing disparagement of science or expertise over time erodes trust,” she said.

Wood said that in the United States, acceptance of facts and experts had decayed in recent years.

“It’s nigh on impossible to have a reasoned debate without a bedrock of agreed fact. And it’s hard to get those facts on the record when people dismiss expertise out of hand,” Wood said.

“Thankfully, that’s not typically the case here. Attacks on institutions remain rare and are not well accepted,” she said.

Wood said she had been heartened by the support of the PC from everyone from Treasurer Jim Chalmers to members of the public when it had come under attack.

But we should absolutely not let it become part of our culture.

Robust debate on the issues? Absolutely. Periodic review of organisational performance and effectiveness? Perfectly appropriate.

But name calling instead of debating the evidence? Let’s leave it for the school yard.

In her oration, titled “Growing trust and trusting growth: the economic case for integrity”, Wood linked growth, productivity, integrity and public trust.

“Over the long run, our material living standards are determined by economic growth and specifically productivity growth,” she said.

“Our ability to produce more with less is the reason that Australians have longer, healthier lives, less poverty, and more and better goods and services, and work five fewer hours per week than the Australians of the 1960s.”

Corruption was bad for growth, she said. This was so even when it was “grey” corruption – which was a far more common problem in Australia than the more overt forms of corruption.

Grey corruption is a broad term that encompasses any actions where governments exercise their powers to favour private interests or political interests over the national interest.

This can include being influenced by money or favours, nepotism, and our old friend pork barrelling – where money is allocated based on a political calculus rather than a sound policy rationale.

This grey corruption can chill economic activity through many of the same channels as more traditional corruption.

Wood did not specifically canvass the debates about “pork barrelling” in recent years, such as the “sports rorts” affair under the Morrison government, and the controversy about the Albanese’s government’s grants based on election promises which included $6 million for a golf club in the prime minister’s seat. The Centre for Public Integrity highlighted the political skew in this latter program.

Wood said governments should fund infrastructure and there were some legitimate cases for industry policy.

“But processes and transparency are crucial to ensure the laundry stays white.”

“Clear criteria, open processes, independent assessments, budget rules, and transparency on the costs and benefits can all help reduce the long-term growth-sapping risks of wading in the grey,” Wood said.

“One of the best safeguards against corruption and its insidious economic effect is strong institutions acting in the national interest.”

Wood said her main message was that “public integrity matters”.

It matters for trust between citizens, institutions and governments.

It matters for the ability of businesses to be dynamic and innovative.

It matters for the capacity of governments to deliver the services people expect.

“And for all these reasons it matters for productivity and income growth.

"Pointing out gaps in our integrity system might upset politicians from time to time but it keeps our democracy strong.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

For countless people, social media has become a go-to source of advice on how to look, eat and exercise.

On Instagram and TikTok, wellness influencers push their own strict diet and workout regimens, while peddling everything from activewear to protein powders.

Invariably, they’re young, beautiful, thin and toned. Influencers such as Sommer Ray, Tammy Hembrow and Kayla Itsines have attracted tens of millions of followers by presenting highly curated versions of health, happiness and success.

There can be benefits. Many young women find fitness influencers motivating and educational, while social media can provide communities of support for those pursuing their own health and fitness goals.

But this influence – often coming from people with questionable credibility, on major platforms that lack safeguards against unsupported health advice – can also come at a cost.

Our newly published research suggests that’s particularly the case for young women trying to navigate constantly changing ideas about fitness and the “ideal” body.

Chasing constantly changing ideals

We surveyed 200 young New Zealand women about the body ideals they encountered online. They identified a sometimes contradictory mix: being lean and toned, thin, curvy, fashionable, fat-free, muscular or “thick” – with shapely buttocks and thighs.

Some 57% felt young women were under strong pressure to achieve these ideals. But they also recognised how difficult they could be to reconcile: how, for instance, do you simultaneously achieve an ideal that demands being both thin and curvy?

We found another contradiction. Online fitness trends such as the popular “fitspiration” are often presented in terms of empowerment, body positivity and self-love, while at the same time encouraging strict control over diet, exercise and other aspects of daily life.

For some, constantly chasing these ideals took a toll. Participants described disappointment and negative relationships with bodies that never seemed “enough”. Some feared gaining weight or found themselves continually looking for new “flaws”.

The pressure could also translate into potentially harmful behaviour. Some 17% of participants reported engaging in disordered eating practices, while others had considered cosmetic surgery. Even those who felt they had achieved an ideal body continued comparing themselves with others online – only to encounter another ideal to live up to.

And the pressure to improve did not necessarily stop with appearance.

In separate focus groups with 15 young women in the North Island, we explored experiences of the “glow up” – a social media trend that became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic centred on a visible, digitally documented transformation into a supposedly better version of yourself.

Some said the trend had motivated them to become more active and healthy. But most described pressure to transform multiple aspects of their lives, from sleep and diet to exercise and career goals.

Life itself could become a “project” aimed at becoming healthier, more successful and more attractive. Under what we termed the “glow up imperative”, many felt disappointed when they could not match the transformations presented by fitness influencers.

Aware of the harm, but hard to escape

Our research found young women were generally aware of – and critical of – rapidly changing and often contradictory body ideals.

As one participant put it:

Only 20 years ago [it was] ideal to be thin with small breasts and [butts]. Now the standards have changed where thin abdomen, larger breasts and butts are the ideal, but most types of muscle definition is unattractive. Many people feel pressured to follow these ideals in order to feel loved and accepted.

Recognising these pressures, however, didn’t make them easy to escape. Participants described social media as “inescapable” and present in their lives “24/7”, with some feeling unable to switch off even when they wanted to.

Many suggested ways of managing that exposure themselves, such as unfollowing harmful accounts or taking a “digital detox” to spend more time on offline activities such as sport or journalling.

Education can also help young people recognise and navigate harmful content. But relying on individual action places much of the responsibility on the same young women being exposed to it.

This raises a wider question about where responsibility for reducing harm should lie.

Focusing on what young women can do themselves risks overlooking the role of social media platforms and the algorithms that determine what users see – and which can repeatedly amplify popular trends and unrealistic body ideals.

Our findings suggest tackling these harms will require more than asking young women to change their own online behaviour. At the same time, their experiences should be central to solutions to address this complex problem.

Francesca Kurghan, PhD Candidate, University of Waikato and Holly Thorpe, Professor in Sociology of Sport and Gender, University of Waikato

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In his lifetime, Les Murray (1938–2019) was often associated with contradiction and tension. He was seen as both Australia’s national poet and a reactionary who was out of step with modern Australian life. He was internationally fêted, often seen as a potential Nobel laureate, but he had a complicated local reputation. He was a university-educated “subhuman redneck”, to evoke the title of his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems.

Unlike some poets, Murray was not celebrated for one or two “big” poems (like Kenneth Slessor and his Five Bells). Murray’s Collected Poems contains dozens of poems that could be discussed here. I have chosen The Broad Bean Sermon, partly because it illustrates his extraordinary skill and ability to produce delight, and partly because it reminds us that, to a large degree, he kept his ideological pugilism outside the pages of his poetry collections.

In other words, whatever cultural anxieties Murray might elicit (or might have elicited), they tend to fall away when you actually read his poems.

The Broad Bean Sermon was published in Murray’s fourth collection, Lunch and Counter Lunch (1974). The joke of the book’s title might be opaque to those who did not grow up in the 1970s and ‘80s, but the mixing of dialectics (the system of arguing that resolves contradictory ideas) with the Australian pub meal known as the counter lunch is classic Murray.

The mix of erudition and vernacular culture illustrates how Murray was not accidentally associated with contradiction. He habitually brought together apparently contradictory things: high and low cultural registers, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, urban sophistication and rural wisdom, capacious broad-mindedness and cramped belligerence.

The Broad Bean Sermon, while not necessarily Murray’s “best” or even best-known poem, shows why for many years Murray was considered, and is still considered by some, to be Australia’s preeminent poet.

Why a 'sermon’?

The title of the poem is ambiguous. Is the poem a sermon about broad beans or by broad beans? Even if the voice is apparently objective (that is, talking about the beans), this doubleness never wholly leaves this sermon.

And why a “sermon”? By the 1970s, sermons were not especially cool, associated as they were with lecturing and moralising. Murray’s use of the word suggests a long tradition of preaching that brought together the written and the spoken word, the prepared and the extemporised text.

Describing the poem as a sermon, of course, adds a religious note at the beginning of a piece ostensibly about a humble legume. This religious note is also present in the poem’s form. Made up of nine tercets (three-line stanzas), the poem is a trinity of trinities.

While the Christian resonance of this structure is not directly commented upon in the poem, it is impossible not to see Christian symbolism in a poem by a poet who routinely dedicated his books “To the Glory of God”. Murray converted to Roman Catholicism in 1962.

The poem’s opening stanza immediately shows that this religiosity is not to be confused with ponderous moralising. The first lines offer a kind of establishing shot of beanstalks, which humorously confuses religious and military language:

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,
recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.

The awkward, energetic syntax is typical of Murray, as is the technical detail of the beanstalks being compared to Air Force recruits dressed in green dacron, the brand name of a type of polyester.

That the church parade is “slack” and “without belief”, and the recruits “unbuttoned”, suggests an endearing sense of casualness about the beans, which are calling to be picked via the language of the Lord’s Prayer (“trespass against us”), another religious note.

The poem goes on to describe the beans as both static (“square in stem-section”) and amusingly dynamic:

they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.

The punning here of “grow/go to great lengths” leads the reader to energetic verb and preposition combinations: “keel over”, “kink down”, “grow up”.

The reference to “greenstuff”, meanwhile, might be an allusion to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855), another energetic poem of praise that makes the everyday extraordinary, in which the poet sees grass (another green plant) as “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”.

In the third stanza of The Broad Bean Sermon, the poet calls attention to snails that “hang rapt in their food” (another pun), while spiders “tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage”.

The flags there again might echo Whitman (“the flag of my disposition”), while the reference to “cordage” again strikes a technical note. The term refers to ropes and lines, especially with regard to the rigging of a vessel.

The references to the snails and spiders, however lightly rendered, gives the setting a sense of life-and-death reality, rather than an idealised pastoral version of the natural world. This is also seen in the reference to the “cat-and-mouse floor” (presumably a metaphor for the dynamic to-and-fro of light through the plants).

A poem of bounty

In the next stanza, the poet appears to address himself:

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfuls more.

This is a poem now of bounty. The poet is like Adam in the garden of Eden, wanting for nothing and supplied by nature’s boundless largess. Barely working, he takes beans by the shirtful (another moment of casualness, and suggestive of lived experience).

From there, the poem goes on to engage in an audacious display of poetic invention. A single, complicated sentence snakes through twelve and a half lines in a catalogue of bean diversity.

                                                At every hour of daylight

appear more that you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,

beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover

till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,

like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers …

These extraordinary lines demonstrate how even in a poem as apparently light and humble as a broad bean sermon, Murray’s technical prowess can make the quotidian and unremarkable extraordinary and endlessly multifarious.

The cataloguing of the beans’ diversity is made up of a host of compound neologisms: “thin-straight”, “thin-crescent”, and so on. Once again, the poet takes on an Adamic quality, moving through the literal garden, naming things like the first man.

What is most notable about the list is the way it represents plenitude by celebrating difference and imperfection. Consistent with the relaxed opening, this world, while implicitly divine, does not require any religious belief (the beans, after all, are “a slack church parade / without belief”). Rather, it requires attention, engagement and appreciation, things central to any poetic act.

In evoking the natural creativity of beans, Murray matches that creative plenty with an outpouring of newly minted images. What John Kinsella in Beyond Ambiguity calls the poem’s “overwhelming optimism” is not just the beans’ literal fruiting, but also “the bounty available to all people”. The beans, in their generous generation, also require the speaker’s action. As the final stanza puts it,

Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness
– it is your health – you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

The vow here again sounds a religious note: a vow is a solemn promise, often made in religious contexts, such as marriage and taking religious orders. But the moral seriousness of vowing sits easily with the poet’s state of happiness, which is also “your health”.

The poem ends with a look to the future, when the last of the season’s beans will appear, ordinary and semi-comic in appearance: “misshapen as toes”.

A poem of praise

The Broad Bean Sermon fuses the material and spiritual worlds, physical and ethical forms of health, the religious and the secular, the ordinary and the transcendent.

As a poem of praise (another form associated with religious discourse), it traffics in an emotion not often found in contemporary poetry: happiness.

The sense of happiness comes through the metaphorical and syntactical energy of the poem. This energy amounts to a joyful acceptance of natural and human diversity, with the description of the beans (“portly”, “stiff”, and so on) acting as an implicit comparison with human beings. This is a poem that is the opposite of heroic or epic, delighting in the diverse morphology of things.

Ultimately, The Broad Bean Sermon brings together ancient and modern (poetic) traditions, a productive tension that plays out throughout Murray’s long career. For Murray, it was the poetic image itself that could resolve such tensions. In his essay The Trade in Images (1988), he writes of poetic images in a way that is interestingly coincident with the language of The Broad Bean Sermon:

Images are at their least disruptive in art, where they are at their most mysterious and many sided and inexhaustible, food for contemplation rather than precipitate action. In art, imagery and conflict alike are raised beyond embodiment in action to a more perpetual embodiment where their life needs nothing further from the world to feed itself. Art […] has arrived, without having to find its way there through tyrannies, at the true ambiguity of things, and can let all things, even opposites, be true at once.

This is no doubt a utopian view of things, but Murray’s appeal to the benign efficacy of poetic images as a way to resolve conflict and contradiction should not be ignored or forgotten. In poems such as The Broad Bean Sermon, Murray gifts us poetry that is nothing less than a dynamic encounter with being, which is mysterious and inexhaustible.

David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University

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How does the type of music affect plants growth? – Thomas, 14, Auckland, New Zealand

When I’m in the lab studying my plants, I love to listen to music. But do my plants like it too, or do they just want some peace and quiet?

It turns out plant lovers have wondered the same thing for nearly 70 years. And there are many albums and playlists for people to play to their plants. One of the most famous (and my favourite) is Mother Earth’s Plantasia. It was released in 1976 – “for plants and the people who love them”.

Some people may think it’s nice to listen to music with their plants. But is there any truth to the idea that certain music boosts plant growth?

Let’s dive into the science.

Where did this idea come from?

One of the most well known studies on music and plants was published by author Dorothy Retallack in 1973. It was a book called The Sound of Music and Plants.

Retallack did several experiments playing music to plants. She reported that rock music made her study plants die, while classical music made them flourish.

However, she was actually a music student with very little training in the scientific method. Her results were not peer reviewed, and the work was strongly criticised by the scientific community.

Nevertheless, the story was widely publicised.

A related book, titled The Secret Life of Plants, was also published in 1973. It covered multiple aspects of plant “intelligence”. A documentary of the same name aired in 1979. It featured incredible stories, such as that of a cactus that could speak Japanese.

Despite being scientifically dubious, these ideas flourished in the alternative movement of the 1970s.

Recent developments

In the decades since, many more studies have been published looking at the effect of music on plants. Many continue in the same vein as Retallack’s work, measuring effects of different types of music on plant growth.

But the quality of these studies is also questionable.

For example, some report statistical differences where there are none, do not include any statistical analysis, or are missing important parts of the methods.

Other studies also focus on the effect religious music or chants have on plant growth, and contain strong religious language. This suggests some biases in how the studies are designed.

Other studies are more robust in their methods. They have sound statistical methods, compare sounds other than music, and discuss possible effects of sound wave vibrations.

However, since there is no evidence that plants have any ability to distinguish the subtle differences that define genres of music, the general consensus is that any research testing the effect of different types of music is inherently biased.

Plants and sound

As in many cases in science, I think the true relationship between plants and sound is more interesting than the myth.

Plants haven’t evolved to appreciate music as humans have. But the world has always had sound. So what does the world sound like to a plant?

Plants evolved on Earth more than 850 million years ago, in the form of single-celled organisms that could harvest energy from sunlight. By 390 million years ago – what’s known as the mid Devonian period – plants had evolved into what we would recognise today as ferns, with structures such as roots and leaves.

At this time, plants might have been exposed to sounds such as the munching of insects, thunder, rain, and running water.

While our experience of sound is through the human experience of hearing, from a physics perspective, sound is simply waves of pressure. These pressure waves, or sound waves, interact with the physical environment as they pass through it.

Studies have found that sound waves interact with plant structures such as leaf hairs. This shows plants can sense sound, without actually “hearing” it in the way that we might imagine.

Researchers have also found that some plants will grow towards the sound of running water if it is played over speakers. Some plants had an improved predator defence response after they were played the sounds of insect predators.

On the other hand, some human-generated sounds have been found to have a negative effect on plant health.

So it’s possible that music could affect plant growth – if it happens to align with wavelengths and rhythms that mimic sounds the plant has evolved with, such as running water. However, because plants are highly varied and have evolved in different environments, if a certain music happened to improve growth in one species, it is unlikely to have the same effect on another species.

As for me, I’ll continue listening to music in the lab. But I won’t worry about whether my plants will judge my taste.

Lily Whelehan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation, The University of Queensland

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A small notebook found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (the national library of France) has turned out to be one of the most important Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart discoveries in decades.

The 44 pages of the notebook document composition lessons that Mozart gave in Paris in 1778 to Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes, a highly accomplished young aristocratic harpist. The manuscript was recognised in February 2026 by François-Pierre Goy, a curator in the library’s music department who recognised Mozart’s handwriting in the unattributed notebook. Laurence Decobert, a specialist in Mozart’s manuscripts, agreed with him and Armin Brinzing, director of the Bibliotheca Mozartiana in Salzburg, later authenticated the document.

The notebook lets readers follow Mozart’s teaching from one exercise to the next. It also preserves something that composer-centred histories often miss: the musical work taking place around him, in this case by a young woman.

Marie-Louise was the daughter of Adrien-Louis de Bonnières – a diplomat and talented amateur flautist. Her father commissioned Mozart’s well-known Concerto for Flute and Harp, K299, intending that father and daughter should perform it together.

Between May and July 1778, Mozart taught Marie-Louise composition almost every day. The recently discovered notebook contains exercises and seven short pieces for flute and harp. More significantly, it preserves the work of teacher and pupil on the same pages. Their musical hands are interwoven: Mozart proposes, corrects and develops ideas, while his pupil copies, completes and experiments.

The pages show composition being taught in real time through corrections, copied passages and ideas exchanged between pupil and teacher.

Listening beyond Mozart’s verdict

Mozart was not complimentary about his pupil. In a letter to his father, Leopold, dated May 14 1778, he complained that she had “no ideas”. A later letter was similarly dismissive of her aptitude for composition. Such remarks have helped determine how Marie-Louise has been remembered: as a minor figure in Mozart’s biography and the technically capable but supposedly uninspired daughter of his patron. The manuscript allows us to look beyond that verdict.

Several exercises in the notebook are entirely in Marie-Louise’s hand. Six of the flute-and-harp pieces are complete, although they begin from ideas supplied by Mozart. The seventh remains unfinished, followed by six blank pages – perhaps because her lessons ended when she married on July 26 of the same year.

It is impossible to tell from the notebook just how far Marie-Louise’s talent might have developed. However, it is clear from it that her education was not limited to playing the harp: she was seriously engaged in composition too.

Much of the musical life of women of Marie-Louise’s social class took place in a domestic setting. They learned to play instruments and performed for guests. Some also bought sheet music, commissioned works or hired professional musicians. These gatherings could also matter to professional musicians. A performance in a private home might bring a composer to the attention of a future patron or lead to a new commission.

Marie-Louise’s handwriting is valuable because it records her own part in the lessons. We can follow how she worked through the exercise, rather than relying solely on Mozart’s opinion of her. For many women, the surviving evidence is far scarcer – perhaps a single sheet of music or a mention in a letter.

The salon as a musical institution

This pattern resonates strongly with my own research into 19th-century European musical culture, particularly salons – private gatherings where musicians performed for and socialised with influential patrons, as well as patronage and archival musical networks.

As musicologist Rebecca Cypess argues in Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment, salons mediated between the public and private spheres. In her salon, the hostess was free to decide for herself who to invite and what music to play. This gave her real cultural influence at a time when official musical institutions offered women very few opportunities.

This influence depended on privilege. Marie-Louise had access to Mozart’s works thanks to her family’s wealth and status. Nevertheless, the music played in the homes of the elite contributed to the development of general musical culture, even if later historical studies associated it exclusively with the name of this famous composer.

The newly recovered compositions received their first public performance at the BnF on June 21 2026, played by flautist Mathilde Calderini and harpist Nicolas Tulliez. France Musique recorded the performance and later broadcast it.

It is easy to see why a newly identified Mozart manuscript has attracted attention among devotees of the composer. But the notebook also belongs to Marie-Louise. Her hand appears throughout its exercises, preserving a rare record of music-making that usually took place in private and seldom entered written histories.

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Stacy Olive Jarvis, PhD Candidate in in Musicology, University of Birmingham

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In case you missed it, Rachel Cusk’s new novel Life of M has been the centre of heated online debate. Dubbed a “biogossip” (biography based on gossip) allegedly inspired by the actress Natalie Portman, the novel investigates fame, power and truth with a particular emphasis on storytelling.

Much of the discussion of the book revolves around the similarities between Portman’s real life rather than how Cusk explores her chosen themes. In a recent article for The Guardian, journalist Elle Hunt provides a handy list of must-know information for those wishing to read the novel but may be unsure of all the details. The biogossip argument is certainly plausible. For instance, references to Léon: The Professional (1994) and Black Swan (2010) are easy enough to pick up if you are aware of Portman’s filmography. At the conclusion, Hunt asks whether more gossip in literature could solve the crisis of people reading less than ever.

It is interesting to consider whether easy-to-spot references to public figures are the key to drawing new readers in. However, asking for more gossip may be addressing the symptoms rather than the cause and ignores the fact that gossip has always existed in literature, and to a far greater extent than you might think.

Since the birth of the modern novel, scandalous discourse has permeated stories in complex and exciting ways. The genre of the biogossip has existed since the 1600s, with French writer Madeleine de Scudéry credited with writing the first roman à clef (French for “novel with a key”). Stories within this genre satirise current affairs, placing real figures behind thinly veiled character disguises.

These books were a way of discussing controversial topics and sharing insider knowledge while avoiding charges of libel. Take de Scudéry’s novel Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (co-written with her brother Georges) discusses major figures associated with The Fronde (1648 to 1653), a series of uprisings against the regency government of Queen Anne of Austria and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Using ancient Persia as a veil for 17th-century French court dynamics, de Scudéry contributed her tuppence-worth via the ten volume novel.

But liking gossip and being a good gossiper goes much further when it comes to reading.

Consider the last time you had a really good gossip session with a close friend, going over an incident in excruciating detail. It feels like a simple thing to engage with when, in reality, complex social processes are occurring simultaneously.

Gossip relies on individuals holding knowledge about a social network, and the quality of the conversation is dependent on the extent to which participants engage with the information being evaluated. It is expected that you offer an opinion, which not only contributes to the communal knowledge pot but is also a demonstration of a your morals, perceptions and assumptions. We are not always conscious of this happening, but we usually walk away from a conversation with a better understanding of other people and ourselves – how we react to certain behaviours, actions and motivations.

The same process can be applied to literature. Regardless of genre or era, novels naturally rely on characters interacting with their fictional contexts, including social networks. The intimacies and power dynamics navigated through a novel can be decoded by using the same skills we exercise when we gossip.

Every conversation a reader is privy to in a novel is essential to the practice, as it is the author providing breadcrumbs that lead to deeper character insights. Their reactions and responses inform our understanding of what the novel is trying to do. By engaging with the text in the same way we gossip, it unlocks a channel through which classics and other supposedly inaccessible texts can be understood.

Take, for example, the first page of Pride and Prejudice. Austen deploys gossip to illustrate the Bennett parents’ attitude to marriage: Mrs Bennett has heard from Mrs Long that Netherfield is to be occupied by a young eligble man, which only excites the local mothers. Mr Bennett remains unmoved, he’s even disparaging of the prospect of one of his girls marrying the handsome, single, rich landowner. Mrs Bennett’s desperation to get her girls married versus her husband’s lax attitude hints at the forthcoming conflicts of the novel. Eagle-eyed readers can notice this and unlock how Austen is satirising marriage culture from the opening lines.

The same can be applied to Shakespeare plays. Much Ado About Nothing is in essence a series of carefully constructed gossip that relies on the subject of conversation to be within earshot and so generating the plot and moments of character development.

The play’s subplot involves Don Pedro, Ursula and Hero playing matchmakers for Benedick and Beatrice. Don Pedro’s gang carefully arrange a conversation in which Benedick overhears them gossiping about Beatrice’s unrelenting affection for him. Likewise, Ursula and Hero ensure Beatrice is present for their gossip about Benedick’s affections for her. The result? They confess their love for each other and the subplot is resolved – all thanks to the power of gossip.

So, what does that mean for readers? It is generally understood that fictional stories are excellent ways to wrestle with what it means to be human and all the messy parts that go with it. By reading as a gossip, we specifically practice the identification of behavioural signs and patterns and can apply the knowledge to future scenarios, both fictional and non-fictional.

In the process of gossip, we become better at reading social situations because we have an insight into the potential subtexts of any given conversation. It also makes reading more enjoyable and helps illuminate the similarities between someone from the 18th century and us in the present. It unveils the persistence of humanity’s problems, from awkward interactions to first loves, and helps us realise that we are not alone in our experiences.

I invite you to pick up a book and keep an eye out for any gossip – you might just find out something new.

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Tabitha Rowland, PhD in Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool

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