Culture

In 2025, the Japanese character – worth around US$4 billion (£3.1 billion) a year to the company that owns her – is due to star in a live-action movie. A new amusement park and resort are also planned.

Her 50th year has been celebrated at events in Japan, Singapore, the US and the UK, where she received a birthday message from King Charles at a state banquet in Buckingham Palace.

Quite the party then, for a character with two black-dotted eyes, no mouth and a yellow button nose. Designed in 1974 by Yuko Shimizu (who is not believed to have made much money from her creation), Hello Kitty first appeared on a clear, vinyl coin purse – and has since grown into a merchandise empire consisting of over 50,000 different items sold across 130 countries.

Hello Kitty’s longevity is partly down to her inherent simplicity. In terms of design, she is composed of a few basic shapes, six short marks for whiskers, and a red bow. She is easy to recognise and cheap to reproduce.

The character also epitomises “Kawaii”, the Japanese term for cute. According to Professor Joshua Dale, a pioneer in the field of “cuteness studies”, perceiving objects as cute triggers psychological instincts for care and protection.

With Hello Kitty, children relate to the small, rounded character as being safe. Like others (see Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse and many, many more), she provides a sense of innocence and comfort, which attracts fans from an early age – and continue into adulthood among those longing for nostalgia.

Part of this comes down to people’s abiding enthusiasm for anthropomorphism – the notion of endowing animals and other non-humans with human-like characteristics. Some would argue that this is also a key element of the infantilisation of society more generally.

Hello Kitty also has an easily relatable storyline that resonates with consumers. According to her biography, Hello Kitty – full name Kitty White – is a cheerful little girl (so officially not actually a cat) who lives in the suburbs of London with her family. She is described as being “five apples tall” and “three apples” in weight. She apparently loves to bake cookies, and her other hobbies include travelling, listening to music and making new friends.

Corporate kitty

But away from the baking and friend-making, Hello Kitty has a very serious business side to her character. Sanrio, the Japanese firm that owns her, has employed some astute strategies to build and sustain such a successful brand.

Collaborating with other firms has been a big part of this. In 1996, Sanrio launched began its first collaboration with an electronics retail chain in Hong Kong. But things really developed three years later when the company joined up with McDonald’s to offer a Hello Kitty meal deal.

The promotion started a craze in Hong Kong with similar success in Taiwan, Japan and Singapore – where the launch in 2000 led to massive queues and even fights. Customers reportedly threw away the hamburgers as they were only interested in the special edition wedding design toy set featuring Hello Kitty and her boyfriend Dear Daniel.

This year, a 50th anniversary collection of McDonald’s toys in Singapore quickly sold out and were soon being resold online.

Elsewhere, the commercial success of Hello Kitty has been linked to licensed collaborations with big brands including Nike, Adidas, Crocs and the Italian fashion label Blumarine.

Hello Kitty products have progressed from stationery and stickers to microwave ovens, toasters and vacuum cleaners. She has appeared on Fender Stratocaster electric guitars and Swarovski jewellery.

There are also two officially licensed theme parks in Japan, Sanrio Puroland (in Tokyo) and Harmonyland (in Ōita), with another due to open on China’s Hainan island in 2025.

And to add to the animated series and films, comics, books and video games, next year Hello Kitty will follow in Barbie’s footsteps and appear in a (partly) live-action movie produced by Warner Bros. The co-director of the film, Jennifer Coyle, says the release will “spread the message of love, friendship and inclusivity that Hello Kitty stands for”.

Yet despite all of these projects, Sanrio is diversifying away from the character. Hello Kitty now accounts for 60% of the company’s business in North America (it was 99% in 2013) and just 30% worldwide. Other characters are moving on to Kitty’s patch.

According to the Sanrio 2024 character popularity ranking, Hello Kitty occupies fifth place, with Cinnamoroll (a dog with pink cheeks) sitting at the top.

Other younger creations such as Gudetama (an apathetic egg yolk) and Aggretsuko (an angry red panda) mark a notable shift from Sanrio’s emphasis on cute characters towards ones which reflect social concerns. Aggretsuko, for example, faces gender discrimination, social anxiety and a poor work-life balance. Gudetama reflects the struggles and aspirations of young people in Japan.

But as new characters come and go, Hello Kitty’s familiar expression will no doubt remain unchanged, as it has for 50 years. An inscrutable gaze looking back on five decades of incredible commercial success.

Sameer Hosany, Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London

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

In the wake of the 2024 U.S. elections, everyday people and political pundits alike have been trying to make sense of the results and the related observation that many Americans seem to be experiencing very different realities. These realities are shaped by very different media ecosystems.

Democrats tend to trust institutional media and network news more than Republicans. In contrast, Republicans have developed what they see as a more trustworthy and explicitly partisan alternative media ecosystem that has rapidly evolved and flourished in the internet era.

Cultivating robust alternative media has been a political strategy of the right for decades. Given the interactive nature of social media and ongoing investments by the right in digital media, the right-wing media ecosystem has become a highly participatory space filled with influencers, political elites and audiences.

These players engage in year-round conversations that inspire and adapt political messaging. The collaborations are not tightly scripted but improvised, facilitated by the interactivity of digital media.

For all these reasons, we, as researchers of information ecosystems and influencer culture, find it useful to think of right-wing media as a kind of improv theater. This metaphor helps us understand the social and digital structure, culture and persuasive power of right-wing influence, which is reshaping politics in the U.S. and around the world.

Elements of improv in right-wing media

Influencers are the performers in this real-life improv show that plays out on a stage of social media newsfeeds, podcasts, cable newsrooms and partisan online media outlets. The performers include political pundits and media personalities as well as a dynamic group of online opinion leaders who often ascend from the audience to the stage, in part by recognizing and exploiting the dynamics of digital media.

These influencers work together, performing a variety of roles based on a set of informal rules and performance conventions: sharing vague but emotionally resonant memes, “just asking questions” to each other, trolling a journalist, “evidencing” claims with data or photos – sometimes taken out of context – all the while engaging each other’s content.

Just as in improv, performers work daily to find a game from their audience, internet forums and each other. The “game” in improv is a concept or story with a novel element around which a performance revolves. Once a compelling game is found, performers “raise the stakes,” another improv concept where the plot intensifies and expands.

Performers follow a loose script, collaborating toward a shared goal. Digital media environments provide additional infrastructure — the platform features, networks and algorithms — that shapes the performances.

Their performances, both individual and in interaction with each other, help influencers attract and curate an audience they are highly in tune with. As in improv shows, the political performers may use a technique called a callback: referencing a previous line, exchange or game that the audience is familiar with. Or performers might react to calls from an engaged audience that cheers, jeers and steers the actors as the show unfolds. The audience may also prompt an entire skit by bringing a story to the attention of influencers or politicians.

From this perspective, influence doesn’t just flow from influencers on stage and out to the audience, but also flows from the audience to the influencers. These dynamics make the right-wing media ecosystem extremely reactive. Feedback is instant, and the right “bits” get laughs and likes. Influencers — and political leaders — can quickly adapt their messaging to their audiences’ tastes, preferences and grievances, as well as to the events and trends of the day, unencumbered by the lag of traditional news media.

Actors and audiences in right-wing media also engage in transgressive, controversial or even offensive bits, as they test the boundaries of their shared tastes, expectations and — for the political performers — ideologies.

Like a lot of improv shows, these performances feel intimate and authentic. Audience members can talk to the performers after and sometimes during the show. They can also be invited “on stage” when an influencer elevates their content.

It may be just for a single scene, but there is also opportunity for lucky, savvy or persistent contributors to become part of the theater of influencers. This increases the motivation to participate, the excitement and the sense among audience members that they are truly part of the show.

‘They’re eating the pets’

One example of right-wing media as improv came in fall 2024 when then-candidate Donald Trump baselessly claimed from a debate stage that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pets.

Prior to Trump referencing them, rumors of pet-eating had been circulating in local Springfield Facebook groups. These claims were amplified when a local neo-Nazi leader discussed the issue in a recorded town hall meeting, which circulated in apps like Telegram and Gab. Influencers who monitor these channels elevated the story, finding a new game with a novel element.

A Reddit post of a photo of a man holding a bird walking down the street was taken out of context by influencers and falsely used as “evidence” of immigrants eating pets. Memes, particularly those made by artificial intelligence, started spreading rapidly, catching the attention of politicians including Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who shared them. This raised the stakes of the improv game by tying these smaller memes to a larger political narrative about needing to stop migration at the southern border.

The improv act reached its zenith when Trump and then vice presidential candidate JD Vance elevated the claims during the week of the September debate. They presented the claims with both seriousness and a bit of a tongue-in-cheek awareness that the point of the story was not necessarily about immigrants but about the attention the narrative garnered. Vance even acknowledged the whole thing could “turn out to be false.” Veracity was not the point of this improvisation.

Growing body of research

The metaphor of right-wing media as improv emerged through research, conversation and collaboration facilitated by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where we work.

One of us, Kate Starbird, and colleagues studied the role of political influencers in election-denying rumors after the 2020 election, finding right-wing political campaigns to be participatory efforts that were largely improvised. In related work, media researcher Anna Beers described how a “theater of influencers” on the right could be identified through their interactions with a shared audience.

Doctoral student Stephen Prochaska and colleagues built on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work to characterize the production of election fraud narratives in 2020 as “deep storytelling” – telling stories with strong emotional resonance – between right-wing influencers and their online audiences.

In her study of right-wing influencers, one of us, Danielle Lee Tomson, described the performative collaboration between influencers as kayfabe, a performance convention in professional wrestling of wrestlers agreeing on a story arc before a seemingly real wrestling match.

These studies all draw on different theories and apply different methods, but they converge on the ideas of improvisation, style and participatory audiences as integral to the success of right-wing media ecosystems.

A persuasive performance

In political improv, factuality is less important than the compelling nature of the performance, the actors, the big story arc and the aesthetic. The storylines can be riveting, engaging and participatory, allowing audiences to play their own role in a grand epic of American activism.

When considered this way, the persuasive power of right-wing media to everyday Americans comes into fuller focus. When there is a 24/7 chorus of collaborative internet influencers engaging their audiences directly, institutional media begins to feel too far removed and disengaged to have a comparable effect.

Danielle Lee Tomson, Research Manager, Center for an Informed Public, University of Washington and Kate Starbird, Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington

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

But as a linguist who studies how English has changed over the centuries, I can promise that, while it might feel like nails screeching on a blackboard, the use of nonliteral “literally” developed as an organic and dynamic outgrowth of the very human desire to communicate emotion and intensity.

The literal past

The word literal first appeared in English in the late 14th century, borrowed from French. In turn, French “literal” came from Latin “littera,” with the original meaning of “pertaining to alphabetic letters.” It is this same root that delivered to English the words “literate” and “literature,” both harking back to the idea of knowing one’s “letters.”

In early English use, literal referred to the straightforward meaning recoverable from reading a religious text, as in this example from the Wycliffe Bible dating to 1383, “Holy scripture hath iiij vndirstondingis; literal, allegorik, moral, and anagogik.” The word literal as used here contrasts a direct – literal – reading of scripture’s meaning to other more symbolic or metaphorical ones.

By the late 16th century, though, literal begins to be used not just in reference to a type of reading but also as a way to emphasize that one wants one’s words to be taken literally.

This development is already a semantic leap in that, when used this way – as in, “John literally died of thirst” – the word provides no meaning contribution other than emphasizing to a listener that a speaker means it precisely as said. After all, assuming John did indeed die owing to a lack of hydration, what does a speaker really gain by saying “He literally died of thirst” versus simply “He died of thirst”?

The advantage is that using “literally” signals that what was said was unusual, unbelievable or remarkable in some way, steering a listener toward a literal rather than a perhaps more likely figurative interpretation.

After all, dying of thirst is not something you hear about every day, though suffering from thirst to the point where one feels like dying is a more universal experience. Such pragmatic enhancement of the word’s original meaning hints at how its modern marking of strong emphasis came into play.

Bleached beyond recognition

The second piece of the puzzle of how “literally” became nonliteral requires a brief foray into how word meanings organically evolve over time as they are put to work by speakers.

A very germane example comes from “very,” a word in which its most common meaning – “extremely” – is but a shadow of its original sense.

In Middle English, “very” carried the meaning of “actual” or “true,” as in being “verray in worde and dede” – that is, true in word and deed. Yet, when something is true, particularly when used in its “actual” sense, it suggests that it embodies the highest degree of whatever quality is described as true.

So, for instance, if someone is a “true fool,” they exhibit such a high degree of foolishness they are taken for an actual fool. Used this way, two distinct but related meanings – “true” and “to an extreme degree” – come to coexist.

By the 16th century, intensity rather than trueness had become the word very’s primary sense, through a process that linguists refer to as “semantic bleaching.” Interestingly, words whose meanings involve truth, such as very, really and truly, are particularly prone to semantic bleaching. And “truth,” as in “exactly as said or written,” takes us back to “literally.”

A little less literal

Recall that “literally” once pertained only to contrasting a literal versus metaphorical reading.

But, as with “very,” by the 16th century, its meaning shifts away from this purely referential meaning to a more rhetorical one: “Literally” had shifted to emphasizing a speaker’s literalness and flagging it as remarkable in some way.

At that point, providing expressivity rather than a true or literal reading had become its primary role. Just consider an argument between spouses, where one says “I literally called you three times.” The purpose of “literally” here is really only one of underscoring the implication that calling three times was excessive and unusual.

From there to hyperbolically saying “I was literally dying of thirst” is just one step further down the road of semantic bleaching. The figurative reading becomes more and more possible, as speakers capitalize exclusively on the expressive force rather than the word’s former shell of literality.

This is really no different than saying something like “I am truly dying over here” when one is frustrated, but is, in fact, not actually dying. It is intensity conveyed, not imminent death, as “truly” has moved from marking truth to marking emphasis.

Sign of the times

But what of using “literally” to mean something seemingly contradictory to its original meaning?

On that front, it is certainly far from the first word in English to have shifted toward its opposite. For instance, when in 1667’s “Paradise Lost” John Milton writes, “The Serpent … with brazen Eyes And hairie Main terrific,” the word “terrific” is absolutely intended in its original sense of “terrifying”“ as opposed to our modern "fabulous” take.

Sometimes, conflicting senses even exist at the same time. Think of how “clipping” can be about cutting something away or pulling something together. Likewise, consider the often oppositionally employed verb “to cleave,” with which one either tears apart or sticks together. In this bigger semantic picture, using “literally” nonfiguratively is really nothing to get worked up over.

The gist is that language changes because of how it finds itself most gainfully employed by speakers as it winds its way through time.

Literally’s main problem is that, unlike “terrific” or “very,” its semantic past has not yet faded from collective memory. But for those who still cling to its literalness despite the fact that Frances Brooke, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain all embraced its figurative glory, it may simply be time to literally let go.

Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno

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

Chomsky suffered a stroke in June 2023 that has severely limited his movement, impaired his speech and impeded his ability to travel. His birthday provides an occasion to consider the tremendous corpus of works that he created over the years and to reflect on the many ways that his texts and recordings still critically engage with contemporary discussions all across disciplines and realms.

Chomsky’s vast body of work includes scientific research focused on language, human nature and the mind, and political writings about U.S. imperialism, Israel and Palestine, Central America, the Vietnam War, coercive institutions, the media and the many ways in which people’s needs are subjugated in the interest of profit and control.

As a scholar of humanities and law, I’ve engaged with Chomsky’s work from an array of perspectives and authored a biography called “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent” and a book on Chomsky’s influence called “The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower.” One important theme in his broad corpus is his lifelong fascination with human creativity, which helps explain his vociferous attacks on those who seek to keep the rabble in line.

Early days

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on Dec. 7, 1928, in Philadelphia. He and his younger brother, David Chomsky, were raised in a lively household by Elsie Simonofsky and William (Zev) Chomsky, progressive educators who were deeply immersed in wide-ranging Jewish and Zionist cultural activities.

Chomsky often dates his own interest in teaching and learning to his close readings of Hebrew works with his parents and to the lively educational experiences he enjoyed at the Oak Lane County Day School, an experimental school that subscribed to John Dewey’s approach to immersive learning and promoted individual creativity over competition with other students.

A precocious learner, Chomsky at 12 years old read the proofs for his father’s book about a 13th-century Hebrew grammarian named David Kimhi. It was an auspicious beginning to a life immersed in philology, philosophy and the study of language and the mind. From very early on, he sought to understand innate human propensities for freedom, dignity and creativity, which inspired his interest in fostering those properties of human nature.

While Chomsky’s parents were what he called normal Roosevelt Democrats, he was drawn to more radical approaches to society and to the promotion of noncoercive social structures. At age 10, he read about the Spanish Civil War, which inspired him to write an editorial about the fall of Barcelona for his school’s newspaper. This was an early harbinger of his public intellectual work and his vociferous challenges to systems of oppression and illegitimate authority.

As a young man, Chomsky joined a socialist wing of the Zionist youth movement that opposed a Jewish state, and from his readings and discussions he came to favor Arab-Jewish class cooperation in a socialist Palestine. His deep knowledge of Palestine and Israel, bolstered by his ability to read and speak Arabic and Hebrew, helped inform his many vehement critiques of Israeli state power.

Radical pedagogy

After an early education focused on self-discovery and free-ranging exploration, Chomsky was introduced in high school to rote learning, competition with other students and a mainstream system of values. In reaction, he began to make regular trips to New York City, where he explored bookstores. He also made regular visits with a relative who ran a newsstand on 72nd Street that served as a lively intellectual center for emigrés interested in more radical approaches to society.

In 1944, Chomsky completed high school and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. Although he has expressed some dismay about the structures of conformity and status quo thinking he encountered there, he did find inspiration in courses with philosopher C. West Churchman, linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida and, moreover, linguist Zellig Harris. Chomsky knew members of the Harris family because Zellig Harris’ father hosted Jewish services in the Harris home that the Chomsky family occasionally attended.

Chomsky’s father’s approach to the study of language bore similarities to Zellig Harris’ work in Semitics, the study of Arabic, Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Harris invited Noam to read the proofs of his “Methods in Structural Linguistics.” This highly anticipated book was rooted in the idea that the function and the meaning of linguistic elements are determined by their their relationship to other components that make up sentences. After working hard to understand Harris’ linguistics paradigm, Chomsky eventually abandoned it, but he remained fascinated by Harris’ political views and by the unstructured, lively and creative debates that he promoted.

Chomsky met Carol Doris Schatz at the Hebrew School where her mother taught and Chomsky’s father was principal. Years later, when they were both students at the University of Pennsylvania, they started dating. They were married in 1949, and four years later they decided to move to an Israeli kibbutz, or communal agricultural settlement. They had expected to find a culture of creative free thinking there. Instead, they were deeply disappointed to find what Chomsky described as ideological conformity to Stalinist ideology. They returned to the U.S. after only six weeks.

The young couple settled in Boston and started a family. Noam pursued graduate work, while Carol paused her own studies to raise the children. She later returned to research on language acquisition, which she eventually taught and researched at MIT and Harvard. Carol Chomsky died in 2008. Noam remarried in 2014, to the Brazilian translator Valeria Wasserman Chomsky.

Chomskian revolution

When Chomsky was a student, most academic psychologists described human language as a system of habits, skills or dispositions to act that are acquired through extensive training, induction, generalization and association. By this account, language grows incrementally with experience, reinforced by a system of rewards and punishments.

This framework was at the heart of a structuralist paradigm, which analyzed the form and meaning of texts as different parts of the same thing. Any language, from this standpoint, restricts how phonemes and morphemes – the smallest units of sound and meaning in language – and other constituents are assembled and distributed. By this view, humans have the capacity to learn language in ways akin to how they acquire other kinds of knowledge.

Chomsky’s Ph.D. work, the resulting 1957 book “Syntactic Structures” and his New York Review of Books review of B.F. Skinner’s “Verbal Behaviour” challenged this paradigm and heralded the Chomskian linguistics revolution.

Chomsky’s starting point was that humans are endowed with universal grammar, which is activated by exposure to natural language. Children gain proficiency in a language by building on innate knowledge. This means that the capacity for language quite literally grows in the mind in a manner akin to how organs develop in the body.

Chomsky’s interest in innate human abilities draws in part from a range of philosophical treatises penned in the 17th and 18th centuries and associated with the Port Royal system of logic and Enlightenment philosophy, which emphasized science, individual liberty and the rule of law. He developed these ideas in a book called “Cartesian Linguistics,” which outlined his intellectual debt to the writings of, among others, Descartes, Kant, Rousseau and Wilhelm von Humboldt.

By the early 1960s, Chomsky’s work had gained him recognition in linguistics, philosophy and psychology. His own research, and that conducted by the growing number of linguists who adopted his approach, led to significant advances in the study of syntax, generative grammar, language and the mind, semantics, form and the interpretation of language.

His political engagement was documented in what I believe is a remarkable collection of interviews and books about U.S. imperialism, the Cold War, the Middle East, Central America and Southeast Asia, including “Problems of Knowledge and Freedom” and “For Reasons of State.” Puzzled by Americans’ spirit of resigned consensus, he began to collaborate with Edward S. Herman on books including “Counter-Revolutionary Violence,” “The Political Economy of Human Rights” and “Manufacturing Consent,” which was turned into a popular film by the same name.

Common thread

The common thread connecting Chomsky’s many intellectual projects are four “problems” that were the focus of much of his life’s work. One is Plato’s problem, which considers why it is that humans, whose contact with the world is brief and limited, can come to know so much. The second is Orwell’s complementary problem, which asks how is it that human beings know so little given the amount of information to which they have access. The third is Descartes’ problem, which pertains to the human capacity to freely express thoughts in constantly novel ways over an infinite range by means that are appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them. Finally, there’s Humboldt’s problem, which focuses on what constitutes language.

These problems are connected in different ways to how people learn, what impedes human development, and to speculations about the initial state of the language faculty, which he outlined in a range of texts, including “Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use,” “Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures,” “The Minimalist Program” and “Why Only Us? Language and Evolution,” with Robert C. Berwick.

Chomsky’s legacy

Remarkably tenacious and active, Chomsky continued to publish and to speak out on contemporary issues into his mid-90s. His ideas evolved but were rooted in a series of deeply seated ideas about the nature of the human mind. He is one of the most cited intellectuals in history, and he was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. Millions of people have watched his debates and discussions with William F. Buckley, Angela Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Michel Foucault, Howard Gardner, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Perle, Jean Piaget, Briahna Joy Gray and even Ali G.

As the figure widely viewed as the founder of cognitive sciences, Chomsky has been critical of the hype surrounding big data, artificial intelligence and ChatGPT.

As a voice for the downtrodden and the oppressed, he has spoken from the perspective of human rights, intellectual self-defense and the popular struggle through independent thinking against structures of power and subjugation.

Chomsky’s extraordinary achievements resonate far and wide – and are likely to continue to do so into the future.

Robert F. Barsky, Professor of Humanities and Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University

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

People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory. Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.

Music, stories and memory

When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.

While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories. Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.

We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence. On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.

The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.

Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.

We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.

Musical memories

Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. Memories may also be more flexible than previously thought and could be influenced by external auditory cues during recall.

While further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for medicine.

For people dealing with conditions such as depression or PTSD, where negative memories can be overwhelming, carefully chosen music might help reframe those memories in a more positive light and potentially reduce their negative emotional impact over time. It also opens new avenues for exploring music-based interventions in treatments for depression and other mental health conditions.

On a day-to-day level, our research highlights the potential power of the soundtrack people choose for their lives. Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music. The music you listen to while reminiscing or even while going about your daily routines might be subtly shaping how you remember those experiences in the future.

The next time you put on a favorite playlist, consider how it might be coloring not just your current mood but also your future recollections as well.

Yiren Ren, Adjunct Researcher in Cognitive Brain Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

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

It made sense, therefore, to study the source of the ideology that supposedly shaped this strange new world. Right near the beginning, in Genesis chapter 11, he found the intriguing story of the Tower of Babel, a myth on the origin of linguistic and cultural confusion.

It tells of a time when all people spoke the same language, and out of pride, they built a tower to the heavens so it would be seen from wherever they went. God realised if they continued to collaborate, nothing could stop them:

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.

The tower was abandoned – and the people scattered across the earth, with many different languages.

Many years later, when Shen contemplated the way his life and his wife’s life had been shaped by ideology and circumstance, he remembered the lesson of the Tower of Babel

Settling in Bob Hawke’s Australia

In June 1989, when student demonstrations in Beijing resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre, Jiawei Shen was in Australia. As all affected Chinese citizens were granted asylum by then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, he was able to settle in Sydney.

He was soon joined by his wife, fellow artist Lan Wang, and their baby daughter, Xini. While Lan Wang worked as a cleaner, Jiawei Shen started his Australian career by drawing portraits for tourists at Circular Quay. Most art competitions are by invitation only, but in 1993 when he entered the open-entry Archibald Prize with a portrait of Professor John Clarke, his work was hung.

He soon became an Archibald favourite. The smooth, almost photographic finish that characterised his style made him a popular artist for portrait commissions. In 1995, he was awarded the Mary MacKillop Art Award. His interpretation of the future saint pleased the conservative hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1997, Shen and Wang bought a small fisherman’s cottage at Bundeena on the edge of the Royal National Park. After the changing political climate in China saw his art (which had been out of favour) come into fashion once more, Jiawei Shen considered the nature and impact of ideology.

He thought again of the story of Babel – and how it could be seen as a metaphor for what had happened to the original ideals of Communism.

On October 30 2017, exactly 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Shen began to paint his magnum opus, The Tower of Babel. The painting is so large it fills the walls of the three storey house that was built to contain it.

James Bradley’s documentary, Welcome to Babel, records both the painstaking process of making the painting – as well as the contradictions and commonalities of Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s lives in both China and Australia.

A vision to build the communist mansion

The painting itself (which remains in Shen’s possession) is divided into four parts, one for each wall: Utopia, Internationale, Gulag and Saturnus.

The images are drawn from both historic documents and copies of works of art made by artists identifying with Communism. Utopia, the first painting, starts with Lenin and the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution, which evolved into the tyranny of Stalin and, in China, Mao.

Portraits of the great men evolve into images based on the propaganda they spread about the new society they were creating. As their ideas spread around the world, they influenced many artists – such as Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – who came to admire the idealism of this brave new world.

Shen was a child of Mao’s revolution. Born in Shanghai in 1948, he was the son of loyal party members. In his childhood he knew “we were building the Communist mansion”. He still honours the idealism of the those thinkers who imagined a world where all can flourish.

His childhood within the Party is contrasted with Lan Wang’s experience of childhood as a daughter of a despised “Rightist”. Throughout the film, her sometimes tart observations give essential leavening to her husband’s heroic narrative.

The third wall, “Gulag”, shows the cost of unthinking ideology. He remembers being hungry in Mao’s Great Famine, when overeager Party figures falsified production numbers to please their leader and people starved. Wang remembers seeing the dead.

As with other students, they were both sent to work in the country alongside peasant farmers. But while Shen remembers this as “the happiest time in my life”, Wang was sent to a remote northern province where it was cold and people starved.

‘He didn’t experience the suffering’

Jiawei Shen’s career as an artist came from his time in the country when his painting, Standing Guard for our Great Motherland, attracted the attention of Madam Mao.

His status as a heroic worker artist ended after Mao’s death, and he became an art student. The same event also freed “children of the dogs” like Lan Wang, to be educated, and so she become an artist. Her painting is whimsical and decorative, with a sense of fantasy that is absent from her husband’s work.

Wang’s experiences, as well as Shen’s own time spent out of favour, colour the wall he calls Saturnus – the dark side of the revolution. The great art featured here is Goya’s Saturn devouring his son. Shen argues China’s Cultural Revolution and the French Revolution have a great deal in common, wherein “good intentions bring about the most evil results”.

The success of Welcome to Babel largely comes from the contrast between Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s approach to their new life. He is the showman, turning his memories, and those of others, into a giant collage – a painting that will be his legacy “for the people of China”.

Wang grows a small garden behind the imposing new house. “He is able to create this work because he didn’t experience the suffering,” she says.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

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

Perhaps one of the most stunning aspects of the unfolding case is the large number of people who may have been witnesses to the alleged crimes. Most of these assaults allegedly occurred at crowded social events and parties since at least 2001.

Combs’ trial is scheduled to begin in May 2025. This case raises important questions about observers who witness sexual exploitation and how they respond – or stay silent.

Sexual exploitation involves using someone sexually for one’s own advantage without their permission – for example, through physical force, threat of harm, misuse of authority or when they are incapacitated from drugs or alcohol. This can encompass acts that are sometimes labeled as sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape.

We know from research that many observers do nothing when they witness sexual exploitation.

People often do not realize that their inaction may contribute to more sexual exploitation occurring.

It is helpful to understand why people often do nothing when they see sexual exploitation by distinguishing three rough categories of observers: people who enable exploitation, people who are complicit in the abuse and others who actively participate in the wrongdoing.

Those who enable

Social scientists, including the three of us, have long known that it is typical for people who see or know of sexual exploitation to respond by ignoring it, rationalizing it or minimizing it.

These people, whom we could call enablers, do not directly participate in sexual exploitation. But their silence and passivity contribute to the exploitation continuing or escalating.

Enabling sometimes happens because of power dynamics, or because people fear negative career or social repercussions from the exploiter. Others who do nothing may not recognize that the incidents are exploitative, or they may convince themselves that what they are seeing is no big deal – or it isn’t their business.

By not acting to prevent harm, enablers commit wrongdoing through omission.

Those who are complicit

Other observers become complicit in sexual exploitation and aid in the crime by helping the perpetrator commit the act in some way.

Complicity could include encouraging a perpetrator to engage in the exploitation or helping cover up evidence that it occurred. It can also mean trying to silence or shame the victim.

Complicity might look like a fraternity brother who helps his friend get a woman drunk so that he can take advantage of her, or a teammate who convinces a victim not to report the sexual exploitation perpetrated by the star quarterback because it will cost him his scholarship.

Many people do not realize that this kind of help can result in the complicit party being charged with the central crime in some cases, or with lesser charges that still carry legal culpability.

Not all complicity may reach the level of illegal activity – but from our perspective, complicity represents a failure to contribute to maintaining a safe and civil society, even if it is not technically illegal.

Those who join in the abuse

The most egregious kind of nonintervention is committed by people who actively join in perpetrating sexual acts. Often this happens when victims are incapacitated by alcohol or drugs. Several of the allegations against Combs mention victims who were reportedly intoxicated and for whom there were alleged co-perpetrators.

When more than one person engages in sexual acts with someone who is unconscious from drugs or alcohol, it is sometimes referred to as gang rape.

Most typically, co-perpetration involves two perpetrators, although occasionally there are more people involved.

Our recent research shows that among Americans who experienced an act of illegal sexual exploitation, 19% of them reported that at least one of the sexual crimes against them included more than one perpetrator.

The first step forward

All of these behaviors actively contribute to sexual exploitation, protect perpetrators from negative consequences, discourage victims from getting support or justice – and ultimately serve to maintain alarmingly high levels of sexual exploitation.

We know that individuals are much more likely to intervene to help someone who is injured or experiencing a medical emergency than someone who is being sexually exploited.

We think that we must acknowledge that sexual exploitation is an emergency requiring a response. This recognition is, perhaps, the first step in acting together to intervene and address sexual exploitation.

Zoe D. Peterson, Director of the Sexual Assault Research Initiative at the Kinsey Institute and Professor of Applied Psychology in Education and Research Methodology, Indiana University; Mary P. Koss, Regents' Professor of Public Health, University of Arizona, and RaeAnn Anderson, Assistant professor in health sciences, University of Missouri-Kansas City

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

Since the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt over 100 years ago, the contents have been examined countless times. But new details continue to surprise archaeologists.

Recently, a team at the University of York has been investigating the pierced ears of Tutankhamun’s burial mask. It’s a feature that, the team claims, was usually reserved for female or young royalty.

Tutankhamun was born in around 1341BC – an unusual time in Ancient Egyptian history. His father, the so-called heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and his stepmother, the famed Nefertiti, had been ruling from their new city in middle Egypt, Akhetaten (modern day Tell el-Amarna). There, they elevated the new state god, the sun god Aten, above all others.

The resulting changes to religious protocol meant that power was taken from the high-ranking priests of the supreme god Amun, along with the political control they were accustomed to having. After Akhenaten’s death, events are somewhat obscure, although many scholars believe that Nefertiti may have continued to rule in her own right.

Tutankhamun became pharaoh at the age of nine, and died when he was around 18 or 19 years old. During his own rule, Tutankhamun took the court back to the traditional capital cities of Thebes and Memphis, and reinstated Amun and the priests. These changes mean that discussions and conclusions about the Amarna period (1353-1322BC) during which Tutankhamun and his father ruled are not straightforward.

Royal tomb equipment

Tutankhamun’s resting place in the Valley of the Kings is relatively small. This has led to speculation that it was originally meant for a noble, queen or a princess.

The long-held belief that Tutankhamun died suddenly and had to be buried in a hurry has informed most of the ideas around his tomb and equipment. It’s also been taken to explain why so much material from other royals and nobles was reused.

However, Aidan Dodson, a professor of Eqyptology and author of several books on the Amarna period, makes a slightly different argument. Akhenaten’s successor, Pharaoh Neferneferuaten (who was most likely his wife, Nefertiti), never received a kingly burial. So, it’s likely that her material was repurposed for Tutankhamun very early in his reign. This would mean his burial equipment was already essentially completed by his early death, rather than put together in a hurry.

Tutankhamun’s actual tomb, however, was probably still incomplete, meaning that he was probably given an existing tomb that had been intended for a noble or lesser royalty.

The reuse of tomb equipment was common in this period, including coffins and burial vaults, so this in itself is not unusual. In 2015, Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves argued that these objects probably included the king’s gold burial mask. This is based on the fact that the mask is made of two parts.

Now, the University of York team are suggesting that the mask’s original face was removed and replaced, but the “female” ears left intact.

What are the implications?

The University of York team is not the first to propose that the pierced ears on Tutankhamun’s mask are significant.

The original burial place of Nefertiti has still not been discovered, although a mummy which may be the queen has been. In 2015, Reeves proposed that Nefertiti’s burial place lies behind a wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb. But remote-sensing investigations have since debunked these claims.

As far as the question of the mask being repurposed, an analysis in 2015 by the metal conservator Christian Eckmann demonstrated that, while it was indeed made in two parts, this was actually the normal way such masks were made. Eckmann found no trace of the face having been replaced.

The mummies of Tutankhamun and other kings still display pierced ears, so the representation of the piercings on such portraits as the gold mask should come as no surprise.

Therefore, I believe there is no real basis for the York team’s proposals, as far as the piercings or any significance for the history of the mask are concerned. Nevertheless, discussion of the mask’s features proves that over 100 years after Tutankhamun’s rediscovery, the afterlife of the young king continues to inspire the public imagination and scholarship.

Claire Isabella Gilmour, PhD Candidate, Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol

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

Sextius argued that humans can get all the nutrition we need from eating plants. This means that killing animals for food is done purely for the pleasure derived from eating meat. Sextius believed that killing animals for pleasure makes people develop the habit of cruelty. Morally speaking, people shouldn’t develop the habit of cruelty, so we shouldn’t kill animals just for the pleasure of eating meat.

This argument is different from most modern arguments for vegetarianism, which usually focus on animal rights, arguing that animals deserve care or that killing them causes unnecessary suffering.

The habit of cruelty argument does not focus on the animals at all. Rather it focuses how eating meat affects the people doing the eating. It warns us that by making cruelty a habit, eating meat harms people’s character.

Even if we theoretically agree that you can get all the nutrition you need from plants and that people morally shouldn’t develop the habit of cruelty, there are still a couple of problems with this argument.

You might ask: “who is developing the habit of cruelty?” Most meat eaters are not doing killing the animals they eat themselves. So, arguably, it’s those doing the killing that are developing cruel habits. Most of us aren’t these people, but likely wouldn’t want anyone to become cruel because of our own pleasure-seeking behaviour either.

All this depends, however, on whether killing animals for meat does in fact develop the habit of cruelty. Certainly, taking pleasure in killing for its own sake could. But most people don’t enjoy killing animals, only eating them.

The transmigration of souls argument

Seneca discusses another argument, which he learned from the biographer Sotion, and which went back to Pythagoras (yes, the one with the theorem).

Pythagoras believed that each soul passed from one body to another after death. He called this “transmigration”. So, when your parent dies, for example, their soul might move into the body of an animal. If you then kill that animal for food, you would have accidentally killed your parent.

You might reply: “Well I don’t believe in the soul” or “I don’t believe that it passes from one body to another”. Sotion has a counter argument. Even if you don’t believe in transmigration, it is still possible that transmigration is true. And if there’s any chance at all that an animal might house the soul of a loved one, that chance alone should be enough to make you avoid eating meat.

Are you persuaded? It is interesting that Sotion argues that you don’t need to accept transmigration to refrain from eating meat. You just need to think that transmigration is possible.

But even if you believe in transmigration, I don’t personally think this argument means you should stop eating meat. Suppose transmigration is true and you kill the animal that happens to have your loved one’s soul. Well, your loved one is fine – their soul simply moves to another body.

Maybe if you think that each soul only gets a limited number of lives, you might worry that by ending the animal’s life you destroy the soul of your parent. But this depends on the version of transmigration you believe in.

Even if it fails, there is something compelling behind the transmigration argument. The thought behind Pythagoras’ transmigration view is that humans and animals are alike. If a human soul can enter an animal body, humans and animals must be very similar kinds of creature. And if animals really are like us, why are we prepared to kill animals for food, but not other humans?

Vegetarianism wasn’t common in the ancient world. But it did have some adherents, often from religious sects, such as the Pythagoreans. But eating meat was associated with religious observance too and there was a sophisticated debate between philosophers about eating animals.

We know this from Porphry’s book-length defence of ethical vegetarianism On Abstinence from Animal Food (3rd century AD), which is a great place to find out more about ancient arguments for vegetarianism.

Matthew Duncombe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Nottingham

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

Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius, were executed on June 19, 1953, for conspiracy to commit espionage. They were accused of giving “the secret” of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, meaning they supposedly passed vital technological information to help the Soviets develop their own bomb.

As the author of a book on the Rosenberg case, I know that there was no “secret,” and that while Julius was a spy, Ethel was not.

Yet generations of Americans have learned that the Rosenbergs – both of them – betrayed their country. If now, 75 years later, we know that an innocent woman was killed, how can the government rectify this?

A miscarriage of justice that orphaned two boys

In 2015, Rosenberg sons Michael and Robert Meeropol – they took the last name of the couple who adopted them after their parents’ deaths – argued in The New York Times that their mother was wrongfully convicted and executed. They urged then-President Barack Obama to exonerate Ethel, which would officially declare her not guilty of the crime for which she was killed.

Many were sympathetic to their plea. Executing the Rosenbergs orphaned the two boys – 6-year-old Robert and 10-year-old Michael. But theirs wasn’t just an emotional plea. The facts were on their side.

Documents from the case reveal that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew Ethel was not an active spy. FBI agents arrested her only as leverage to pressure Julius to name his dozen or so collaborators.

An electrical engineer and devoted communist, Julius gained access to classified information while working with Emerson Radio Corp. and the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He recruited and managed a spy ring that provided whatever military information it could to the Soviet Union.

The pressure on Julius didn’t work, and he never named names. He and Ethel were electrocuted after a trial riddled with problems such as perjured testimony and an incompetent defense team.

The trial also featured inappropriate communications between the presiding judge and federal prosecutors.

Judge Irving Kaufman had lobbied to preside over the Rosenberg case, and Justice Department officials supported his selection to further pressure Julius: Kaufman was open to imposing the death penalty.

After the jury found the couple guilty, Kaufman consulted with the prosecuting attorneys to determine whether both Rosenbergs should get the same sentence. Prosecutors were reluctant to support Ethel’s execution. Judge Kaufman decided to sentence both Ethel and Julius to death anyway.

Getting it wrong

The crime for which they died was not spying but conspiracy to commit espionage. Prosecutors argued that since Ethel was cognizant of her husband’s espionage activities, she was involved in the conspiracy.

I used to think that, too.

“In all likelihood Ethel’s role in the spy ring was at least that of an aware spectator,” I wrote in a 2015 opinion piece after the Rosenberg sons requested her exoneration, “placing her inside the fluid category of conspiracy in the eyes of the law.”

I concluded that imposing the death penalty on Ethel was a “cruel and unjust act” for which the U.S. government should apologize – but not exonerate.

I was wrong.

I now believe that a presidential exoneration is appropriate and necessary because it will correct the view that Ethel was an active spy. It will address the serious flaws in her trial and conviction. And it will set right the historical record.

Many popular books, textbooks, tweets and news sites get the case wrong. They incorrectly lump Julius and Ethel together, labeling both as spies for the Soviet Union, and claim they were convicted of espionage. Time magazine once ranked the couple among America’s “Top 10 Crime Duos.”

For decades, the U.S. government has gotten the facts of its own criminal case wrong, too.

The National Security Agency falsely stated in a 2018 publication that the couple were executed for treason. Even the FBI’s website incorrectly claims Julius and Ethel together ran an espionage ring that passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.

Correcting the record

A newly declassified document clarifies the truth.

In August 2024, the Rosenberg sons obtained a handwritten memo from August 1950 authored by the NSA’s chief analyst, Meredith Gardner. He wrote that, based on Soviet intelligence, Ethel knew about Julius’ espionage work but “due to illness she did not engage in the work herself.”

This document confirms what other sources such as the FBI had already indicated: Ethel was not a spy and “did not engage in the work” of espionage and – most importantly – U.S. government officials knew it.

They knew it when FBI agents arrested Ethel on Aug. 11, 1950. They knew it when the jury convicted her nine months later. They knew it when the judge sentenced her to death on April 5, 1951. And they knew it when prison officials executed her on Friday, June 19, 1953.

Now, Michael and Robert Meeropol are using the declassified memo to urge Biden “to exonerate (Ethel) Rosenberg by issuing a formal presidential proclamation saying that she was wrongly convicted and executed.”

Full exoneration

I, too, have come to believe Ethel Rosenberg’s killing was a morally repugnant miscarriage of justice.

That’s why a presidential pardon by Biden, who is now contemplating his end-of-term pardon list, would not be sufficient redress. A pardon forgives someone for a crime they committed. Ethel Rosenberg did not commit the crime for which she was convicted, so it’s the U.S. government that should beg forgiveness from Ethel’s descendants.

“President Biden has the power to right this historic injustice,” said Jennifer Meeropol, Ethel’s granddaughter and director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, on Sept. 10, 2024. Only a full exoneration, Meeropol argued, could “redress the harm done to my family and bring peace to my father and uncle in their lifetimes.”

This almost surely will not happen under President-elect Donald Trump.

Roy Cohn, Trump’s late personal lawyer, was an important member of the Rosenberg trial prosecutorial team. Cohn claimed in interviews throughout his life that Ethel “alone was the ringleader, who led Julius around by a leash.” He was wrong, but Trump won’t likely contradict his mentor.

We historians know that our understanding of the past is always evolving. When new facts cast light on a past injustice, I think we should learn from those mistakes and correct the injustices that we can.

Exonerating Ethel would be an important step toward truth. And it would correct the historical record.

Lori Clune, Professor of History, California State University, Fresno

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

With the release of Wicked: Part I, actor Marissa Bode is making history as the first authentic casting of the character of Nessarose Thropp in any production of the musical.

Nessarose is the sister of Wicked’s green-skinned protagonist, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo). She was born with a disability because her mother ate milk flowers while pregnant to avoid having another child with green skin. But since Wicked’s earliest productions in 2003, the character has not been well-received among the disabled community.

This is because her disability is presented as something in need of a cure, and the inability to find one has made Nessarose bitter. She is given limited agency and the primary purpose of her character seems to be to emphasise features of other characters. She is used as a pawn in a love triangle and is vengeful and callous.

Bode is the first actor to play Nessarose who uses a wheelchair in real life. As a fan of the musical, and a researcher in disability studies, I was interested to see if this casting represented a change in attitude towards the character.

The film establishes a more compassionate relationship between the two sisters than the musical. An original scene for the movie adaptation shows a childhood flashback in which Elphaba is bullied for the colour of her skin. The taunting makes Nessarose cry, upset that her sister is being laughed at. Their father, however, misunderstands her tears, and believes that Nessarose is crying because of the rocks Elphaba launched at her bullies using her magic.

When the sisters arrive at Shiz University, Nessarose is enrolled but Elphaba isn’t – she has come along at her father’s request to look after her sister. Unlike their father, Elphaba seems well aware that Nessarose doesn’t need help.

As the students make their way onto campus, their father grabs the handles of Nessarose’s wheelchair. In unison, the sisters cry “don’t help me” and “don’t help her”. Nessarose proceeds to wheel herself and describes Shiz as her chance for a “new start”.

The film makes it clear that she is striving for independence in ways that the stage show does not. It emphasises the fact that people with disabilities do not constantly require (or even want) support. Nessarose is perfectly capable of wheeling herself into university, thanks to a building that was designed with people with disabilities in mind.

Later, Miss Coddle (Keala Settle), a teacher at Shiz, refers to Nessarose as “tragically beautiful”. This implies that her beauty is linked to her disability.

Comments which attempt to equate standards of beauty with someone’s physical disability are wrong. We don’t get much reaction from Nessarose, which is disappointing, because it would have been powerful to see her interrogating Coddle’s words. Perhaps part of the reason is that Elphaba (who has been standing beside her) interjects and introduces herself as “beautifully tragic”.

In another scene, Coddle attempts to push Nessarose’s wheelchair. Elphaba tells her that her sister doesn’t need help, and it is clear through Bode’s expression that Nessarose is uncomfortable. But she is ignored. The actor talked to Teen Vogue about this moment, saying: “I have related to that way too many times.”

Elphaba is enraged and uses magic in an attempt to protect Nessarose. She levitates objects in the courtyard, including her sister in her wheelchair. Nessarose is frightened, and later embarrassed. Once she is safely on the ground, she berates Elphaba: “This was my chance, my new start.”

What is next for Nessarose?

Bode told US TV show Today: “All disabilities are different, and there are some people in wheelchairs that have a higher level of needs and higher level of caregiving. But I think this was a moment to showcase that I don’t have to be dependent on somebody.”

Bode’s words are in direct contrast to those her character sings in the original musical. This takes place towards the beginning of act 2 in the stage show, so may appear towards the beginning of next year’s Wicked: Part II.

In the song, Nessarose denounces Elphaba (now banished from Oz):

You fly around Oz trying to rescue animals you’ve never even met
And not once have you ever thought to use your powers to rescue me!
All of my life, I’ve depended on you.

This is a prime example of how Nessarose was initially written without proper consideration for the community that she represents. She takes issue with her disability, rather than taking pride in it, and says that she has “depended on” Elphaba all of her life. The Nessarose of Wicked: Part I, in contrast, does not depend on anyone.

Bode has described herself as “over the moon” with the decision to cast her, a wheelchair user, as Nessarose. However, she also explained her apprehension at how this casting choice would be perceived.

Due to a lack of representation of people with disabilities in TV, film and theatre, she has questioned the industry’s readiness for authentic casting: “When you’re not represented a lot and you don’t see yourself, you still have — or at least I did have — a little bit of, ‘I know what I’m capable of.

"I know that I can act. I know other disabled talent that can act and can mode … But how much of the industry is willing to go for that and is willing to seek out disabled people and willing to listen?”

During production, Bode spoke with Winnie Holzman, who adapted the novel Wicked for stage and screen. The pair discussed the concerns the disabled community have with the character and worked together to make some “healthy changes”.

This extended to the film’s groundbreaking accessible production design. Chantelle Nassari, also a wheelchair user, served as the film’s disability coordinator. Her experience and insight were pivotal in making the set accessible. She also helped to design Nessarose’s custom wheelchair, modelled on the one Bode uses in her daily life.

Through details like these, Wicked is setting new standards for prioritising disability access – on both sides of the camera.

David Wilders, PhD Candidate, School of English, Dublin City University

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

This includes not only the formal and well-planned inscriptions shown on buildings and triumphal arches, but the informal scratchings, painted notices and charcoal messages scribbled on the walls of the city.

The hero of the first Gladiator film, Maximus (played by Russell Crowe in 2000), has his name crudely carved onto his makeshift secret tomb in the Colosseum. Elsewhere his name has been erased from a list of gladiatorial victors in a parody of damnatio memoriae, the process by which the name and image of a person was removed from public inscriptions and buildings.

This is rather like the way the real Emperor Geta (played by Joseph Quinn) had his name and image erased from Rome following his murder at the hands of his brother Caracalla (Fred Hechinger).

Latin-literate viewers may spot a particularly obscene threat to the emperors – “irrumabo imperatores” – painted on an external wall of Rome in the background of one scene. This most likely draws on Roman poet Catullus’s Poem 16, a work deemed so offensive that it wasn’t even translated into English until the 20th century.

While the language may seem gratuitous – it roughly translates as “I will orally fuck the emperors” – this is precisely the sort of vernacular that survives on the walls of Pompeii. Archaeologists have uncovered quotes from the poet Virgil, greetings to friends, price lists, practice alphabets, the scribbled drawings of children and the doodling of adults. Yet much of the graffiti would not look out of place on the back of a toilet door.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the walls of Pompeii’s brothel were a particular hot-spot for sexual graffiti.

One anonymous customer boasts that he had “fucked many girls there”, but similar comments are found on the walls of taverns, bathhouses and in the slightly shady area of tombs on the roads just outside of Pompeii.

Political protest

Yet there was also a serious side to ancient graffiti. The plot of the first Gladiator film centred on the memory of a democratic Rome that had once been a republic, in contrast to the oppression, cruelty and political intrigue of the city as ruled by Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). The Rome of Gladiator II is similarly portrayed as one of political unrest. It’s ruled over by two tyrannical brothers, Geta and Caracalla, who are entirely ill-suited to leadership.

In such circumstances, graffiti can be an important form of political expression and resistance. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), Romanes eunt domus daubed on a wall in Jerusalem, is famously parsed by John Cleese’s Roman soldier as “People called Romanes, they go, the house” and corrected to Romani ite domum or “Romans go home”.

This fictional scene may be the most famous example of political graffiti from the Roman world, but there are plenty of real-life instances from ancient literature. They indicate that graffiti was an established way for the people of Rome to communicate their displeasure about the actions of their leaders, writing on walls, columns and on placards hung around the necks of statues.

Brutus, for instance, was encouraged to join the conspiracy against Julius Caesar by graffiti written in Rome under the cover of darkness. When Emperor Tiberius’ stepson Germanicus died and Tiberius was suspected of having had him murdered, notices appeared on walls in Rome demanding, somewhat unfeasibly, Germanicus’ return.

In the latter years of Emperor Nero’s reign and at a time of high food prices when people must have found Nero’s theatrical excess particularly galling, mocking graffiti appeared around the city. Emperor Domitian apparently erected so many triumphal arches in the city that someone wrote “It is enough” in Greek on one of them.

People in Rome had every reason to feel aggrieved by the actions of Caracalla and Geta, both in the film and historically. The film versions of the emperors are portrayed as out-of-touch with reality, living a life of luxury and focusing only on the arena. Caracalla even makes his monkey a consul, an echo of Roman historian Suetonius’ famous claim that Emperor Caligula was planning to bestow the same honour on his horse.

The historian Cassius Dio paints a picture of the brothers abusing women and boys, embezzling money and hanging out with gladiators and charioteers in Rome. Later, Caracalla was ruthless in removing any potential threats to his power, including Geta and 20,000 of his followers as well as his own wife, Fulvia Plautilla.

The obscene graffiti directed against Caracalla and Geta in Gladiator II then is part of a long tradition of political resistance in Rome. The anonymous author undercuts the tyranny and pomp of the emperors by rendering them sexually passive – an insult to their masculinity in a Roman context – and slightly ridiculous.

Unlike the senator sitting outside the cafe with his newspaper, the daubing of “irrumabo imperatores” on a wall of Rome by cover of darkness is perfectly believable.

Claire Holleran, Associate Professor Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter

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

The piece was apparently aimed at refuting an earlier story in US Weekly that praised Markle and her management style, and featured people quoted by name.

The Daily Beast piece, written by a British-born journalist, was another example in a well-established pattern of relentless negative media framing of Markle — particularly by the same U.K. tabloids that have been sued by her husband, Prince Harry — and often via the use of unnamed sources.

This framing is readily identifiable by conducting a simple Google News search on her name. Markle, in fact, recently described herself as being one of the most bullied people in the world — which was met with more online bullying.

Although tabloid gossip is a feature of any celebrity’s life, the longstanding and seemingly orchestrated media campaign against Markle, a private citizen who left the United Kingdom almost five years ago and hasn’t spoken publicly about the Royal Family in years, is exceptional.

There have even been allegations of British media outlets attempting to pay people to lie about her.

These efforts reveal important information about the intersection of media power, gender and race.

As a communications scholar, I wanted to examine how Markle has been represented in the media and what other academics have determined in their own research about the coverage of her. The goal is not to assess the media’s derogatory claims about her; rather, it’s to shed light on the concealed structural issues underlying everyday news.

A disruptor in Brexit-era Britain

Since the onset of her relationship with Prince Harry, Markle’s identity as a feminist, biracial, American media celebrity has been under heavy media scrutiny. Early on in their relationship, The Daily Mail ran a highly controversial piece with the headline: “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton: Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed — so will he be dropping by for tea?”

This piece made no attempt to conceal its racism and was replete with negative stereotypes of Black urban poverty, depicting Markle as unfit for the privileged life of the monarchy.

Nonetheless, the couple’s wedding received generally favourable media coverage from a diverse array of outlets. This disparity prompted scholars to inquire into the symbolic meanings of the royal wedding.

In an essay that garnered significant media attention, historian Hannah Yelin and sociologist Laura Clancy argued that the monarchy co-opted Markle’s feminist rhetoric.

They wrote:

“A celebrity (post)feminist such as Markle is of great value to a British monarchy keen to set themselves apart from these other forms of patriarchy and to mask, or at least deflect attention from, their own intensely problematic relationship with issues of race, gender, class and religion.”

But when The Sunday Times published a story based upon Yelin and Clancy’s essay, it chose an eye-catching yet problematically inaccurate title: “Academics accuse Meghan Markle of dropping feminism like a hot potato.”

As this story was reproduced by other publications, Yelin and Clancy found themselves targeted with sustained online hostility. Their criticism of proliferating misogyny was co-opted into increasingly negative media coverage of Markle. This twist was a telling revelation of how attacks on Markle are closely associated with mounting public tension around feminism and visible feminists.

Racial identity

Besides the gender perspective, racial identity is also central to media discourses surrounding Markle, whose marriage to Prince Harry was depicted by some media commentators as a marked progress in British race relations.

This widely held opinion, however, is disputed by many scholars. For example, Kehinde Andrews, the first Black Studies professor in the U.K. who led the establishment of the first Black Studies program in Europe at Birmingham City University, considers Markle’s inclusion into the royal family a “cosmetic change in representation.”

He adds that framing her entry into the family as a sign of progress is “the perfect example of a post-racial delusion that demonstrates how poorly the nation understands racism and the power of the desire to live in a fantasy of progress rather than address continuing issues.”

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s high-profile departure from the Royal Family in 2020 occurred in the broader context of Brexit, and it was naturally labelled as #Megxit in online discussions.

This play on words allowed racist ideologies to persist under the guise of humour. As media scholar Kendra Marston noted:

“Staged fantasies of Markle’s expulsion from the Royal Family and indeed from Britain — neatly encapsulated in the Twitter hashtag #Megxit — seek to preserve a fantasy of the British monarchy as an exclusive symbol of national heritage that is conservative, patriarchal, white and, importantly, legitimate.”

Market-oriented journalism

Media narratives about Markle should also be understood against the backdrop of British regulatory environments and market mechanisms.

First, journalists in the U.K. navigate a maze of statutes and legal precedents. As such, their focus can be drawn to what is legally possible, and there is more legal leeway for reporting on celebrities and members of the Royal Family than there is for reporting on private people.

Ethical considerations appear in professional codes of conduct. McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists, a tome elaborating what may get journalists into legal trouble, is the British journalist’s “Bible.”

Second — and unlike the U.K.’s statutorily regulated broadcast sector — oversight of the print sector primarily rests with the industry-established Independent Press Standards Organisation. The extent to which this self-regulatory arrangement curbs newspaper excesses is a matter of debate.

Market pressures weigh on British media ethics, but there is a difference in coverage between the more sober “quality” press like The Guardian and sensationalistic tabloids like The Daily Mail and The Sun, which lean towards hyper-competitive, market-oriented journalism.

Media scholar James Curran has noted that quality news historically attracts high-end advertisers seeking high-end “niche” audiences; tabloids have sought larger, mass audiences and the advertisers targeting them. Sensationalism and outrage deliver large readerships, as does gossip, which helps audiences feel “in the know” about exclusive, high-status groups.

Gossip does appear in the quality press, though tabloids excel at providing it.

In 2012, the U.K.’s Leveson inquiry into media ethics resulted in a series of recommendations on how to regulate British newspapers in the wake of phone-hacking scandals. Those recommendations have largely been ignored.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said recently he would not revive the long-awaited second part of the inquiry, to the dismay of media regulation advocates and many parliamentarians.

Societal tensions

The media’s portrayal of Markle reveals the societal tensions underlying daily news, particularly concerning race and gender.

It also underscores the complexity of news ethics, especially in the U.K., which are exacerbated by the supposed self-regulation of some media outlets. Market pressures and the desire for clicks often result in sensationalist celebrity coverage that can often be factually problematic or, in Markle’s case, even incendiary at times.

Given the media’s impact on public perception and how it can incite online abuse of the type Markle is frequently subjected to, it seems the media should rethink how it reports on public figures and private citizens alike.

Sibo Chen, Assistant Professor, School of Professional Communication, Toronto Metropolitan University

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

But I’m most interested in how the two films misrepresent the way Roman gladiators and their bodies were viewed by their republic-minded contemporaries.

In the films, the brawny biceps of gladiators Maximus and Lucius reflect “strength and honor” – to reprise the motto of the franchise – as each of these heroes fights to overthrow self-indulgent emperors and to restore the Roman republic with its traditional political values of liberty and self-restraint.

However, as I discuss in my book, “Vitruvian Man: Rome Under Construction,” the gladiator represented something else altogether. The most famous martyr of the Roman republic – Marcus Tullius Cicero – used gladiators’ physiques not to celebrate the republic’s valiant heroes, but to deride their bloated muscles as the embodiment of amoral tyranny.

Enemies of the Republic?

Cicero’s career was both marked and made by the constitutional crises that characterized the last decades of the Roman republic. In several of his speeches from the period, he characterized the enemies of the republic as gladiators.

In the so-called second Catilinarian conspiracy of 62 B.C.E., Lucius Sergius Catilina, also known as Catiline, attempted a coup after losing his campaign to become a consul. Rome’s highest office, a consul was the rough equivalent to a U.S. president, except he served for one year alongside another consul, with each wielding equal political power.

Cicero, who was consul himself that year, pulled no punches in his speeches, which were all premised upon the notion that the would-be usurper Catiline – though of noble birth – was an enemy because he associated with “the criminals of the gladiatorial schools.”

The real defenders of Roman values – according to Cicero, anyway – exchanged sharp words in the Roman senate. Catiline, on the other hand, “trained” his superhuman physical hardiness to inflict “insult” and “wickedness” on the republic, its institutions and its freedoms, all while wielding a dagger, the weapon of thugs and cutthroats.

A couple of decades later, when the Roman republic had placed unprecedented political power in the hands of three men, Cicero again deployed the figure of the gladiator as a troubling symbol.

This time, he used it to call out one of these three “triumvirs,” Mark Antony, whose later alliance and dalliance with Cleopatra made him an enemy not only of the Roman republic, but also of Roman identity itself.

In his red-hot second Philippic – one of 14 invectives directed against Antony – Cicero put the spotlight on Antony’s rugged, gladiatorial body and its monstrous capacity for self-indulgence. This was a disgrace unfit for the Roman populace, and it was at odds with the traditional value of self-restraint in Roman political life:

“You! With your neck, your sides, your hard, gladiator’s body: you drained down enough wine at Hippia’s wedding that you had to throw it all up in plain sight of the Roman people the next day.”

But apart from the simple fact that most gladiators were enslaved – and, for that reason, were scorned by elites as social outcasts – there is another reason for the prevalence of this image in Roman political language.

Caricature as character

To participate in Roman political culture required training in rhetoric and oratory.

Although a good deal of oratorical training was done by modeling oneself after one’s teachers, the first century B.C.E. saw an influx of influential rhetorical teachers from Greece, and a boom in what might loosely be called textbooks of rhetoric. These manuals not only offer theoretical discussions of what makes a good speech, but they also reveal a great deal about Roman values.

Books like the anonymous “Rhetoric for Herennius,” which circulated in the earlier years of Cicero’s political career, teemed with examples for how to characterize the opposition in a court of law.

The author – as Cicero wrote in his own work, “On Rhetorical Brianstorming” – emphasized that discussions of physical attributes were not just fair game; they were all but expected as a way to highlight a plaintiff’s or defendant’s virtuous – or vicious – character.

Good looks, for instance, could be used favorably to show how nature’s blessings added to a client’s virtue without leading to pride. When characterized unfavorably, those same good looks might be spun as a product of the opponent’s vanity and self-indulgence.

More to the sword-point: According to the author of “Rhetoric for Herennius,” qualities of speed and strength might be highlighted to show “respectable training and effort” when done in moderation. But if you’re looking to tear down an opponent, the orator may “mention his use of [speed and strength], which any given gladiator may have thanks to dumb luck.”

Strength? Definitely.

Honor? Depends who you ask.

John M. Oksanish, Associate Professor of Classics, Wake Forest University

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

One of the study’s lead authors at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction told The New York Times that the gap persists because many Americans continue to “prioritize men’s pleasure and undervalue women’s sexual pleasure.”

As my research shows, these attitudes toward sexual pleasure have a long history.

But so do efforts to push back against them.

Almost a century ago, a pioneering American sex researcher named Katharine Bement Davis challenged the prevailing view that respectable women did not – and should not – experience sexual desire or have sex, except to please men or to have children.

Davis’s 1929 book, “Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women,” completely upended this thinking.

By surveying everyday American women, she was able to show that it was completely normal for American women to have sex for the sake of pleasure.

An unlikely advocate for sexual liberation

Davis spent the first half of her career policing women’s sexuality, not promoting it.

In 1901, after earning her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Davis became superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills. While there, she studied the women in her care. Most female convicts, she concluded, were “immoral women.”

Davis’ efforts to enforce sexual morality drew the attention of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. In 1917, he invited her to lead his private agency, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, founded to study and combat prostitution and venereal disease.

During World War I, Davis promoted sex education to curb sexually transmitted infections among soldiers and civilians. Through this work, she became convinced that sexual ignorance – not sexual immorality – posed the greatest danger to women’s welfare.

Davis had long criticized the sexual double standard, which condoned men’s sexual experimentation but condemned women’s sexual experience.

Now, she also recognized that this double standard promoted women’s chastity at the expense of knowledge. She complained that discussions of women’s sexuality were “taboo,” which resulted in “distorted views, baffled speculation, and unfortunate experiences.”

Tackling a taboo topic

Insisting that Americans needed accurate information to achieve “a sane outlook on all matters pertaining to sex,” Davis made it her mission to teach women about sex.

But first, she needed to learn about women’s actual sexual experiences. Davis decided to undertake a large-scale study of what she called “the sex life of normal women.”

Davis’ approach was a dramatic departure from existing studies of “abnormal” sexuality focused on institutionalized populations. “Except on the pathological side,” she remarked, “sex is scientifically an unexplored country.”

By contrast, Davis explained, she wanted to understand “the woman who was not pathological mentally or physically.”

To that end, Davis distributed a detailed questionnaire to what she called “women of good standing in the community” from 1921 to 1923. The resulting study sample of 1,000 married women and 1,200 unmarried women was not representative – it skewed white, well-educated and well-to-do. But their responses allowed Davis to redefine female sexuality.

America’s first sexual revolution

Davis launched her study of women’s sexuality during what historians now refer to as America’s first sexual revolution. The second – and more well-known one – would take place in the 1960s.

In the 1920s, as one commentator noted, a “revolution in manners and morals” was underway. Sex suffused popular culture. Contestants in beauty pageants displayed their charms in skimpy bathing costumes and short skirts. Actresses flaunted their sex appeal on stage and screen.

New attitudes about sex affected the daily lives of average Americans, too. Young women throughout the nation adopted the sexy look of “flappers,” the term used for women who sported short skirts, rolled stockings and bobbed hair.

Prior to the 1920s, courtship often took place in the home, allowing parents to closely supervise couples. But the ubiquitous automobile – which one juvenile court judge had dubbed “a house of prostitution on wheels” – rendered adult chaperonage obsolete and granted young people unprecedented sexual freedom.

Meanwhile, birth control activists like Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett distributed contraceptive devices and disseminated sexual information in defiance of the Comstock Act of 1873, which had defined birth control and sex education as “obscene” and made circulating such materials a federal crime.

Sex, secrecy and shame

Even amid the nation’s first sexual revolution, the facts of life remained in short supply.

According to surveys Davis distributed to married women, only about half of the respondents believed that they had been “adequately prepared … for the sex side of marriage.”

After expanding her study to include unmarried women, Davis found that fewer than one-third of all participants received sex education from their parents.

Many women didn’t know how pregnancy occurred. Some had been unprepared even for menstruation. One recalled that when she experienced her first period, “I naturally thought I was bleeding to death.”

In place of information, many women imbibed shame. “Having acquired the feeling as a small child that any sex pleasure was shameful and a great sin,” as one respondent put it, some could never overcome their discomfort with sex. Another woman regarded all sexual thoughts as “something to be shunned like the devil.”

One response succinctly summarized the problem: “Our present secrecy, fear, and repression are responsible for most of our sex ills.”

Challenging the conspiracy of silence

Many women were eager to challenge what one called a “conspiracy of silence” surrounding female sexuality.

Study participants ended up providing Davis with over 10,000 pages of handwritten responses. She used this information to produce the nation’s first major study of women’s sexuality, a 400-plus page book brimming with both statistical data and personal stories.

“Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women” covered a wide range of topics, ranging from sex education to sex play. Running throughout the entire work, however, was one central idea: Women liked sex.

Davis included data on birth control, same-sex relationships and masturbation. At the time, these practices were universally stigmatized and often criminalized. Yet significant proportions of study participants engaged in all these activities.

Nearly three-quarters of married respondents reported using contraceptives. Many probably took advantage of state laws allowing physicians to prescribe diaphragms to protect patients’ health. Surprisingly, nearly 1 in 10 women admitted having abortions, even though the procedure was illegal in every state.

More than half of unmarried women and nearly one-third of married women stated that they had experienced “intense emotional relationships” with other women. In each group, approximately half described those relationships as sexual. This was a remarkably high figure, given prevailing views of homosexuality as sexual deviance and state laws criminalizing homosexual acts.

Nearly 65% of unmarried women and more than 40% of married women reported masturbating. Since nearly all physicians and pastors condemned the practice, Davis assumed the actual numbers were even higher.

Davis’ data demonstrated that “normal” women experienced what one called “natural sex feeling.” In short, her study showed that many women enjoyed sex for its own sake.

Davis believed that reliable data would lead to “more satisfactory adjustments of the sex relationship.” In other words, better information would lead to better sex.

Davis paved the way for future studies that validate women’s sexual pleasure. While researching female sexuality, she established the National Research Council’s Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex. The Rockefeller-funded committee later subsidized Alfred Kinsey’s studies of human sexuality.

Davis’ legacy lives on. The findings from the Kinsey Institute’s latest study show that discussing sexual pleasure still matters, particularly for women. It also suggests that Americans’ understandings of sex have improved over the past century.

When Davis conducted her study in the 1920s, she found it “advisable” to define “orgasm” for participants who were unclear on the concept. Now, a generation of better-informed Americans ponder how to address a persistent “orgasm gap.”

Anya Jabour, Regents Professor of History, University of Montana

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

Unlike many Broadway shows, Wicked’s heroes Elphaba (played in the film by Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (by Ariana Grande), both women, dominate the song list. They frequently sing together, whereas other musicals typically feature duets that focus on a romance between a male and female lead.

At the heart of Wicked is the anthem Defying Gravity, which closes act one of the stage production and serves as the finale to Chu’s film. It begins as an argument between Elphaba and Glinda as they debate how to solve a mutual predicament. Elphaba explains her feelings to Glinda and asks her to leave Emerald City with her.

They dream about becoming a united front but, in the end, the song climaxes with Elphaba breaking free and accepting the consequences of embracing her magic.

The journey of the song, which begins as a conversation and ends with a battle cry, epitomises a classic musical theatre finale, as it gains momentum and rises in key.

Using similar values to Schwartz’s lyrics to Go the Distance from Hercules (1997) and his song When You Believe from The Prince of Egypt (1998), Defying Gravity is particularly special because Elphaba goes on a journey with her best friend Glinda as her audience.

Many musicals feature a rousing act one finale led by a female protagonist. For example, Mama Rose regathers her strength to make her daughter Louise a star during Everything’s Coming Up Roses in Gypsy, which has just returned to Broadway. However, Defying Gravity transcends its context in Wicked by focusing on the theme of trusting yourself and believing in who you are without compromise.

Wicked is an exploration of stigma (aimed at Elphaba in the show) and where it leads, and Defying Gravity is a watershed moment. Erivo described it as an important moment in which Elphaba resolves to “not allow the things that have hurt her, that have stripped her of her humanity to keep her down”.

Friends of Dorothy

As well as offering empowering representations of its female characters and of female friendship, Wicked is one of many queer-coded musicals. These are shows where LGBTQ+ identities or themes are unnamed but can be easily identified. Theatre professor Stacy Wolf has suggested that Wicked “does more than portray women as powerful and as friends; it presents the story of a queer romance between Elphaba and Glinda”.

This places Defying Gravity alongside the queer anthem Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, another musical adaptation based on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel. In fact, in Defying Gravity Schwartz quotes The Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen’s melody in a motif set to the word “unlimited”, which can be heard several times throughout Wicked.

Defying Gravity also uses a similar structure of escalation to another queer anthem, I Am What I Am from the musical La Cage Aux Folles. It also inspired Let It Go from Disney’s Frozen (also sung by Idina Menzel, the first Broadway Elphaba), which has its own queer history.

If Somewhere Over the Rainbow imagines whimsical escapism from an unfriendly world and I Am What I Am is fierce about being rejected by the people you love, Defying Gravity is about the power of choosing and forging your own path, with or without help.

The stirring accompaniment and building vocal line connect Defying Gravity to a tradition of classic musical theatre showstoppers. Meanwhile, the musical style and message of self actualisation recognises more modern values.

As Wicked arrives in cinemas, the message of Defying Gravity feels especially timely. Its core sentiment that “everyone deserves the chance to fly” speaks to so many people – the centre piece of a powerful musical about embracing our differences.

Hannah Thuraisingam Robbins, Assistant Professor in Popular Music, University of Nottingham

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