Saturday, July 01, 2023

The racist literary origins of Indiana Jones, The Great White Thief

Classics such as King Solomon’s Mines make the hero out to simply be a dashing man of science, even though he's stealing the treasures of indigenous peoples

Author of the article:Gerry Canavan, Washington Post
Published Jul 01, 2023

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, stealing a valuable relic of indigenous people in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the film that started the franchise.

PHOTO BY LUCASFILM

To the contemporary viewer, the Indiana Jones franchise feels like a genre unto itself — or at least like the origin of one. By now, our whip-wielding hero’s adventures have inspired countless others, including the tomb-raiding Lara Croft, the Declaration of Independence-stealing Benjamin Franklin Gates in National Treasure, the Mummy franchise, Uncharted and Duck Tales.

Of course, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and their Indiana Jones collaborators drew heavily on the adventure stories of their childhoods, and those of generations before them, when they created the character. What fragments of literature, history and popular culture came together, in such uneven ways, to make this film series such a massive global phenomenon? Excavating the origins of a genre text like Indiana Jones is dangerous work: Once you’ve torn through all those old libraries, dusty tomes, misleading maps and forgotten, trap-filled labyrinths, are the contents of those cultural tombs worth anything at all?

The most direct antecedents of Indiana Jones are the Flash Gordon and Zorro serials from the 1930s and ’40s, which famously thrilled Lucas as a boy. Organized around cycles of thrilling cliffhangers and daring escapes, they featured a style of storytelling that was already old-fashioned when Lucas was devouring it in matinees growing up in California in the 1950s.

It’s a bit hard to accept that almost as many years separate Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) from Zorro Rides Again (1937) as separate Raiders from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which is fresh in theatres. That Zorro film can be watched in full on YouTube these days, and, while undoubtedly dated, it contains inspired stunts and surprising, Marvel-style moments of action comedy, such as the scene where Zorro cracks his whip to keep a bar full of ruffians at bay (as the lead thug holds his bruised fingers and moans).

Swashbuckling hero

Adventure novels from around the turn of the 20th century, a genre coded as “boys’ entertainment,” are another important antecedent for Indiana Jones. Most notable among them may be the H. Rider Haggard cycle of Allan Quatermain novels (1885-1927) that began with King Solomon’s Mines (1885). These books saw their swashbuckling hero, a master hunter, seeking lost treasures across Africa, Asia and South America, eventually uncovering over the course of the series a hidden world of mystery, magic and danger far exceeding the rationalist, scientistic expectations of mainland Europe.

Quatermain’s first-person narration is funny and gripping, especially coupled with the footnotes from an “Editor” issuing their own corrections and commentary — but it is very hard to ignore the story’s racism, beginning with an extended commentary on racial slurs in the novel’s first chapter. Ngugi wa Thiong’o singles out Haggard for special scorn in Decolonising the Mind as one of the “geniuses of racism,” and the award is not undeserved.

The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard’s era: A brilliant White man, very often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples. It’s as if they felt obliged to remind us that there’s always a worse White man, as a sort of alibi. It makes perfect sense, from this perspective, that Indiana Jones’s least-successful films are the ones that, like Temple of Doom, leave the Nazis out.

As the adventure genre developed, it grew to incorporate what we now call science fiction — and Indiana Jones’s escapades have plenty of overlap with that genre, too.

Indy frequently encounters improbably intricate traps built by pre-industrial cultures that apparently require no maintenance over millennia — and, of course, he once saw a UFO. That also speaks to some of the material in the franchise’s DNA: Similar stories can be found in such novels as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels (1912-1966) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, The Power of the Coming Race (1871). The last of those contributed to a feverish and largely apocryphal fascination with Nazi occultism that lingers to this day, thanks in no small part to the way the Indiana Jones franchise picked up on it.

If these influential texts are haunted today by their unavoidable racism, it’s not as if Indy’s creators — who grew up loving these stories — were wholly unaware of the problems with them.

The lonely skeptic

“You and I are very much alike,” taunts his first major doppelgänger, Belloq (Paul Freeman), in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in a speech that has been plagiarized by movie villains ever since. Even the original ’80s films know, on some level, that Jones is a villain in his story. The climax of every Indiana Jones movie, after all, comes only when Indy finally decides to relinquish whatever it was he was trying to get, rather than follow his obsession over a cliff (or down a chasm, or into space); the happy ending is when he gives up and just goes home.

Here, we find the traces of another weird antecedent of the Indiana Jones franchise, distinct from all the others: the religious conversion narrative. A self-obsessed and lonely skeptic, a man of science who has let his career crowd out all other aspects of his life and induced him to make morally questionable decisions in pursuit of fortune and glory, is granted a momentary gift of grace, a glimpse of the divine (or, once, aliens), which changes his life forever (at least until the next movie is greenlit and the whole cycle starts anew). In this way, every Indiana Jones film is really just a genre-swapped version of A Christmas Carol.

Indiana Jones has many children, and the franchise’s influence is so sweeping that even the biggest video game in the world at the moment, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, bears its mark. But, five movies and 42 years in, we might start to wonder if Indiana Jones does belong in a museum.

The two movies produced in the 2000s, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Dial of Destiny, have each been preoccupied by the concept of Jones growing old. In Dial of Destiny, especially, we find Indy exhausted and bitter as he finally retires from his tenured professorship at Marshall College, with the advertising for the film loudly promising/bemoaning that this time it really is his last adventure (really).

Today, the figure of the Great White Hero feels almost completely used up. In 2023, Marshall College undoubtedly begins its events with a land acknowledgment and has probably scraped Jones’s name off whatever building it was on. It makes perfect sense that the plot of Dial of Destiny sees the character fighting with Nazis (again) over an ancient doohickey that can do time travel. Even those of us who love the character can do so now only by winding back the years.

Gerry Canavan is a professor in the English department at Marquette University and the author of a biography of SF author; Octavia E. Butler.

University of Waterloo stabbings: We all need to teach 'gender issues' to protect our communities from hate

Story by j wallace skelton, Assistant professor, Faculty of Education, Queer Studies in Education, University of Regina • Yesterday

A community event takes place on June 29 outside Hagey Hall at the University of Waterloo to focus on supporting one another and making everyone feel safe after an attack at the university earlier in the week.© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nicole Osborne

At the end of my interview for my current position as assistant professor of queer studies in education at the University of Regina, the hiring committee asked me if I had any questions. My first was: “When they come for me — and they will — what will the university do to protect me?”

I’m not paranoid, I’m a realist, and I’m not alone in asking questions like it. It’s also my attempt to be clear that institutions that make their money and reputation from the work of gender scholars are responsible for our safety.

Institutions need to take action to protect scholars and students whose work is feminist, celebratory of trans and nonbinary folks and inclusive of 2SLGBTQIA+ people, reproductive justice and gender justice.

Those of us doing this work have been shouldering the burden of our own and our students’ safety, individually, and often in isolation from each other. We need the burden to be shared — by our institutions, by our colleagues and by you, dear reader.

Collectively, as a society, we failed University of Waterloo philosophy professor Katy Fulfer and two of her students on June 28.

Fulfer and her students were stabbed while she taught her gender studies class in what the university described as a “hate-motivated attack related to gender expression and gender identity.”

The attack was horrific and unacceptable. The conditions that made it possible — escalation of rhetoric of hate accompanied by hateful and violent actions against 2SLGBTQIA+ people — are deliberate, a manifestation of hate and vitriol that is nurtured by people who feel threatened by this teacher’s and other’s work.

This was not senseless, as in without logic. It unfolded in a climate where a political movement desires to push women, queer, trans and nonbinary people out of public life.

If we only blame the attacker, we fail again because this is not an isolated incident. It is part of a campaign of escalating incidents on university and college campuses, outside public schools, inside and outside school board meetings.

Broad responses needed

Our society’s and universities’ response to this needs to be similarly broad.

First, in keeping with Ring Theory, when a specific incident happens, we provide care in towards the people most impacted, and allow them to share their feelings and needs outward towards those less impacted.

Fulfer and her students need to be at the centre of that care. Also needing care are others across Canada who do similar work, who teach similar material, who study in similar classes. If you have not yet reached out to colleagues or students, do so now.

Let them know you know what happened, that you suspect they may be impacted, offer what you can (support, to be on call if they need something, to talk about security, to support them moving their class online if they feel it is necessary, to co-work, to listen, to advocate for their needs). Offer what is appropriate for your level of knowledge, power and connection.

Creating safe work, learning environments

Next, recognizing that this is not an isolated single incident, we need to think about both how we create safe work and learning environments and how we de-escalate movements of misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Creating safety takes many forms

Most powerfully, if you are an educator and you are not already teaching intersectional feminist, 2SLGBTQIA+ content in your courses, start doing so now. We all need to be addressing gender issues.

Read more: What is intersectionality? All of who I am

Those that wish to do harm can not target all of us at once. We need to do this because our students are encountering hate in all manner of places, and they need our commitment to create safety for them. They need to know that they are not alone in this.

Being public with support means things like writing public letters and policy statements or painting trans Pride crosswalks. A person walks on a trans Pride flag crosswalk in Calgary in 2019.

Address misogyny, homophobia, transphobia

Within or beyond universities, when we encounter misogyny, homophobia and transphobia we need to address it, and address it with everyone who was impacted. We need our institutions to be public in their support. Yes, this means public letters, policy statements, flying rainbow flags and painting trans Pride crosswalks.

It means engaging those most targeted by the hate, who need to be centred in the planning. It means recognizing that the work we are already doing about our own and our students’ safety is work, and compensating us for it. We should not let only certain professors who are most targeted do additional labour, while those who are not targeted get to use their paid time for research or writing.

Read more: 4 ways white people can be accountable for addressing anti-Black racism at universities

We need both broad institutional responses and specific ones that meet individual needs.

More public conversations

Broadly, our institutions are reflections of our culture. We need a culture shift. We need individual conversations with the people around us, and public conversations in our media, places of worship, businesses and organizations.

We need to make celebration of gender diversity, honouring of women and 2SLGBTQIA+ people the culture. We’ve enshrined this in law, in the Charter and in human rights codes, but our practice does not live up to the goals of our legislation. We need all of us to be in this work. We need to create opportunities for people who have been antithetical towards this work to do better, and to change.

In my own work, I have often felt guided by the words of Supreme Court Justice Beverley McLachlin.

In Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36, a decision that was about whether it was appropriate to read lesbian and gay picture books in kindergarten (yes, it is). McLachlin wrote:

“Exposure to some cognitive dissonance is arguably necessary if children are to be taught what tolerance itself involves. … Children cannot learn this unless they are exposed to views that differ from those they are taught at home.”

OK if it feels uncomfortable

It’s OK if this work is new to you. It’s OK if it feels uncomfortable at first. Do it anyway, and keep doing it and you will get better at it. Figure out your own compelling reasons to do it. Connect with others who are.

As a colleague of mine wrote after reading about the attack, it is OK to be “both afraid and bravely continuing to speak up.”

Universities need to ensure everyone affected is engaged in responses. Black and Indigenous colleagues, some of whom are also 2SLGBTQIA+, have significant expertise at combating hate. As I have learned from them and with them, resisting hate of all forms is all of our work, and if we do it together — in solidarity, community, in ongoing conversation — we will win.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:

Addressing campus sexual violence: New risk assessment tool can help administrators make difficult decisions

The long fight against sexual assault and harassment at universities

j wallace skelton is currently working on a SSHRC funded research project researching parent advocates of trans and nonbinary youth. j is the primary consultant at Juxtapose Consulting, but it not taking on further consulting projects at this time.

How weather likely impacted the Battle of Gettysburg's extensive death toll

Story by Randi Mann •

This Day In Weather History is a daily podcast by Chris Mei from The Weather Network, featuring stories about people, communities and events and how weather impacted them.

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Between July 1 and 3, 1863, Union and Confederate forces fought in the Battle of Gettysburg. The Battle took place in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and is considered a turning point in the American Civil War. It's known to be one of the bloodiest battles on American soil.

Historians report that the Battle resulted in 46,286 causalities and missing soldiers. The Battle was so bloody because of bayonets, muskets, and cannons, but the weather also likely impacted the overall death toll.

How weather likely impacted the Battle of Gettysburg's extensive death toll© Provided by The Weather Network"L. Prang & Co. print of the painting "Hancock at Gettysburg" by Thure de Thulstrup." Courtesy of Wikipedia

Rev. Dr. Michael Jacobs, a math professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania College at the time), recorded his weather observations during the three-day Battle. Because of his notes, the "Meteorology of the Battle" was published. It outlines specific weather details from the Battle of Gettysburg and potential impacts.

On Wednesday, July 1, 1863, the Battle began. The sky was covered by cumulostratus clouds. It was 76 degrees (24.4 °C) and there was a light breeze.

The second day of the Battle started with similar weather conditions. By the afternoon, the sky was 30 per cent clear and the temperature rose to 81 degrees (27.2 °C).

The third day of the Battle started with significant cloud cover but a lot of it cleared by the afternoon. However, the cloud that didn't clear happened to be the "massive thunder-cloud of summer." At around 6 p.m. EDT, a thunderstorm developed. "The thunder seemed tame, after the artillery firing of the afternoon," wrote Rev. Dr. Jacobs.

The first two days of the Battle were hot and soldiers were dressed in heavy uniforms and weaponry. The soldiers were likely subjected to heatstroke and heat exhaustion.

And on the third day of the Battle, many of the wounded were still lying in the field. Those who were laying in areas near the Plum Run Creek drowned. The excessive rain from the storm overflowed the creek's banks and flooded the likely dry hard surface.

How weather likely impacted the Battle of Gettysburg's extensive death toll© Provided by The Weather Network"Overview map of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863." Courtesy of Hal Jespersen/Wikipedia/CC BY 3.0

On July 4, the soldiers had to trek almost 30 km, pulling wagons filled with the wounded. The conditions were rough as the dirt roads started t dissolve. As they tried to head back to Virginia, they couldn't cross the Potomac River. Normally it would be shallow enough to walk across, but the rain caused the water levels to rise and the army was trapped on the north side while the Union forces were in pursuit.

To learn more about the meteorological impacts on the Battle of Gettysburg, listen to today's episode of "This Day In Weather History."

Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the 'new abnormal'

It was a smell that invoked a memory. Both for Emily Kuchlbauer in North Carolina and Ryan Bomba in Chicago. It was smoke from wildfires, the odor of an increasingly hot and occasionally on-fire world.

Kuchlbauer had flashbacks to the surprise of soot coating her car three years ago when she was a recent college graduate in San Diego. Bomba had deja vu from San Francisco, where the air was so thick with smoke people had to mask up. They figured they left wildfire worries behind in California, but a Canada that's burning from sea to warming sea brought one of the more visceral effects of climate change home to places that once seemed immune.

“It’s been very apocalyptic feeling, because in California the dialogue is like, ‘Oh, it’s normal. This is just what happens on the West Coast,’ but it’s very much not normal here,” Kuchlbauer said.

As Earth's climate continues to change from heat-trapping gases spewed into the air, ever fewer people are out of reach from the billowing and deadly fingers of wildfire smoke, scientists say. Already wildfires are consuming three times more of the United States and Canada each year than in the 1980s and studies predict fire and smoke to worsen.

While many people exposed to bad air may be asking themselves if this is a “new normal,” several scientists told The Associated Press they specifically reject any such idea because the phrase makes it sound like the world has changed to a new and steady pattern of extreme events.

“Is this a new normal? No, it’s a new abnormal,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said. “It continues to get worse. If we continue to warm the planet, we don’t settle into some new state. It’s an ever-moving baseline of worse and worse.”

It's so bad that perhaps the term “wildfire” also needs to be rethought, suggested Woodwell Climate Research Center senior scientist Jennifer Francis.

“We can’t really call them wildfires anymore,” Francis said. “To some extent they’re just not, they’re not wild. They’re not natural anymore. We are just making them more likely. We’re making them more intense.”

Several scientists told the AP that the problem of smoke and wildfires will progressively worsen until the world significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, which has not happened despite years of international negotiations and lofty goals.

Fires in North America are generally getting worse, burning more land. Even before July, traditionally the busiest fire month for the country, Canada has set a record for most area burned with 31,432 square miles (81,409 square kilometers), which is nearly 15% higher than the old record.

“A year like this could happen with or without climate change, but warming temperatures just made it a lot more probable,” said A. Park Williams, a UCLA bioclimatologist who studies fire and water. “We're seeing, especially across the West, big increases in smoke exposure and reduction in air quality that are attributable to increase in fire activity."

Numerous studies have linked climate change to increases in North American fires because global warming is increasing extreme weather, especially drought and mostly in the West.

As the atmosphere dries, it sucks moisture out of plants, creating more fuel that burns easier, faster and with greater intensity. Then you add more lightning strikes from more storms, some of which are dry lightning strikes, said Canadian fire scientist Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. Fire seasons are getting longer, starting earlier and lasting later because of warmer weather, he said.

“We have to learn to live with fire and smoke, that’s the new reality,” Flannigan said.

Ronak Bhatia, who moved from California to Illinois for college in 2018 and now lives in Chicago, said at first it seemed like a joke: wildfire smoke following him and his friends from the West Coast. But if it continues, it will no longer be as funny.

“It makes you think about climate change and also how it essentially could affect, you know, anywhere,” Bhatia said. “It’s not just the California problem or Australia problem. It’s kind of an everywhere problem.”

Wildfires in the U.S. on average now burn about 12,000 square miles (31,000 square kilometers) yearly, about the size of Maryland. From 1983 to 1987, when the National Interagency Fire Center started keeping statistics, only about 3,300 square miles (8,546 square kilometers) burned annually.

During the past five years, including a record low 2020, Canada has averaged 12,279 square miles (31,803 square kilometers) burned, which is three and a half times larger than the 1983 to 1987 average.

The type of fires seen this year in western Canada are in amounts scientists and computer models predicted for the 2030s and 2040s. And eastern Canada, where it rains more often, wasn't supposed to see occasional fire years like this until the mid 21st century, Flannigan said.

If the Canadian east is burning, that means eventually, and probably sooner than researchers thought, eastern U.S. states will also, Flannigan said. He and Williams pointed to devastating fires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that killed 14 people in 2016 during a brief drought in the East.

America burned much more in the past, but that's because people didn't try to stop fires and they were less of a threat. The West used to have larger and regular fires until the mid-19th century, with more land settlement and then the U.S. government trying to douse every fire after the great 1910 Yellowstone fire, Williams said.

Since about the 1950s, America pretty much got wildfires down to a minimum, but that hasn't been the case since about 2000.

“We thought we had it under control, but we don't,” Williams said. “The climate changed so much that we lost control of it.”

The warmer the Arctic gets and the more snow and ice melt there — the Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of Earth — the differences in the summer between Arctic and mid-latitudes get smaller. That allows the jet stream of air high above the ground to meander and get stuck, prolonging bouts of bad weather, Mann and Francis said. Other scientists say they are waiting for more evidence on the impact of bouts of stuck weather.

A new study published on June 23 links a stuck weather pattern to reduced North American snow cover in the spring.

For people exposed to nasty air from wildfire smoke, increasing threats to health are part of the new reality.

Wildfires expose about 44 million people per year worldwide to unhealthy air, causing about 677,000 deaths annually with almost 39% of them children, according to a 2021 study out of the United Kingdom.

One study that looked at a dozen years of wildfire smoke exposure in Washington state showed a 1% all-ages increase in the odds of non-traumatic death the same day as the smoke hit the area and 2% for the day after. Risk of respiratory deaths jumped 14% and even more, 35%, for adults ages 45 to 64.

Based on peer-reviewed studies, the Health Effects Institute estimated that smoke’s chief pollutant caused 4 million deaths worldwide and nearly 48,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2019.

The tiny particles making up a main pollutant of wildfire smoke, called PM2.5, are just the right size to embed deep in the lungs and absorb into the blood. But while their size has garnered attention, their composition also matters, said Kris Ebi, a University of Washington climate and health scientist.

“There is emerging evidence that the toxicity of wildfire smoke PM2.5 is more toxic than what comes out of tailpipes,” Ebi said.

A cascade of health effects may become a growing problem in the wake of wildfires, including downwind from the source, said Ed Avol, professor emeritus at the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California.

Beyond irritated eyes and scratchy throats, breathing in wildfire smoke also can create long-term issues all over the body. Avol said those include respiratory effects including asthma and COPD, as well as impacts on heart, brain and kidney function.

“In the longer term, climate change and unfortunately wildfire smoke is not going away because we really haven’t done that much quick enough to make a difference,” Avol said, adding that while people can take steps like masking up or using air filters to try to protect themselves, we are ultimately “behind the curve here in terms of responding to it.”

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Borenstein reported from Washington and Walling from Chicago.

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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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Follow Seth Borenstein and Melina Walling on Twitter at @borenbears and @MelinaWalling.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By Seth Borenstein And Melina Walling, The Associated Press

UNION WORKERS DEFEND LGBTQ RIGHTS

PCS opposes V&A’s removal of trans rights and LGBTQ+ materials from museum

PCS opposes a decision by the director of the V&A to remove a poster supporting transgender rights and 2 books about LGBTQ+ identities from the Young V&A.

The decision to remove the poster and books ahead of the museum’s reopening on 1 July was made by the V&A director, Tristram Hunt, last week. PCS urges the V&A to reverse this decision.

The local PCS branch has been working closely with the V&A Staff LGBTQ Working Group and our trade union comrades in Prospect to explore ways to have the popular poster returned to display, and the books to the Young V&A (YVA) shop.

On Monday (26 June), members of the LGBTQ Working Group, Prospect reps, and several of our branch reps attended a meeting with Tristram to discuss the issue. The group stated that the object should be returned to display and the books to the shop. This request was denied.

Reps will continue to work closely with the LGBTQ Working Group, the MASS Action Group, Prospect reps, and PCS branch members to find a way forward and resolve this issue.

The poster, which was produced by the charity Stonewall, reads: ‘Some people are trans, get over it!’. The books removed from the YVA bookshop - Seeing Gender and Here and Queer - are illustrated books on gender identity on queerness.

Steven Warwick, PCS Culture Group Secretary, said: "PCS is absolutely clear that we oppose the removal of these objects and urges the V&A to reverse this decision. The poster was simply a statement of fact that “Some people are trans”. That the director of the V&A considers this to be a controversial statement is disappointing

"Seeking to hide the existence of Trans people contributes to the idea that being Trans is somehow unacceptable and adds to the current climate of transphobia and trans-erasure, putting trans people, particularly young trans people, at risk. It is particularly galling that this decision was made during LGBTQ+ History month.

"PCS gives our unwavering support to our trans and non-binary members and to the larger trans and non-binary community."

First ever view of the Milky Way seen through the lens of neutrino particles

The Milky Way, as seen with neutrino particles.

IceCube Collaboration / US National Science Foundation (Lily Le and Shawn Johnson) / ESO (S. Brunier)

Subir Sarkar
Published: June 30, 2023

THE CONVERSATION

Data collected by an observatory in Antarctica has produced our first view of the Milky Way galaxy through the lens of neutrino particles. It’s the first time we have seen our galaxy “painted” with a particle, rather than in different wavelengths of light.

The result, published in Science, provides researchers with a new window on the cosmos. The neutrinos are thought to be produced, in part, by high-energy, charged particles called cosmic rays colliding with other matter. Because of the limits of our detection equipment, there’s much we still don’t know about cosmic rays. Therefore, neutrinos are another way of studying them.

It has been speculated since antiquity that the Milky Way we see arching across the night sky consists of stars like our Sun. In the 18th century, it was recognised to be a flattened slab of stars that we are viewing from within. It is only 100 years since we learnt that the Milky Way is in fact a galaxy, or “island universe”, one among a hundred billion others.

In 1923, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble identified a type of pulsating star called a “Cepheid variable” in what was then known as the Andromeda “nebula” (a giant cloud of dust and gas). Thanks to the prior work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, this provided a measure of the distance from Earth to Andromeda.

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This demonstrated that Andromeda is a far away galaxy like our own, settling a long-running debate and completely transforming our notion of our place in the universe.
Opening windows

Subsequently, as new astronomical windows have opened on to the sky, we have seen our galactic home in many different wavelengths of light –- in radio waves, in various infrared bands, in X-rays and in gamma-rays. Now, we can see our cosmic abode in neutrino particles, which have very low mass and only interact very weakly with other matter – hence their nickname of “ghost particles”.

Neutrinos are emitted from our galaxy when cosmic rays collide with interstellar matter. However, neutrinos are also produced by stars like the Sun, some exploding stars, or supernovas, and probably by most high-energy phenomena that we observe in the universe such as gamma-ray bursts and quasars. Hence, they can provide us an unprecedented view of highly energetic processes in our galaxy – a view that we can’t get from using light alone.

A digital operating module, part of the IceCube observatory, being lowered into the ice.

Mark Krasberg, IceCube/NSF, Author provided

The new breakthrough detection required a rather strange “telescope” that is buried several kilometres deep in the Antarctic ice cap, under the South Pole. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses a gigatonne of the ultra-transparent ice under huge pressures to detect a form of energy called Cherenkov radiation.

This faint radiation is emitted by charged particles, which, in ice, can travel faster than light (but not in a vacuum). The particles are created by incoming neutrinos, which come from cosmic ray collisions in the galaxy, hitting the atoms in the ice.

Cosmic rays are mainly proton particles (these make up the atomic nucleus along with neutrons), together with a few heavy nuclei and electrons. About a century ago, these were discovered to be raining down on the Earth uniformly from all directions. We do not yet definitively know all their sources, as their travel directions are scrambled by magnetic fields that exist in the space between stars.
Deep in the ice

Neutrinos can act as unique tracers of cosmic ray interactions deep in the Milky Way. However, the ghostly particles are also generated when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. So the researchers using the IceCube data needed a way to distinguish between the neutrinos of “astrophysical” origin – those originating from extraterrestrial sources – and those created from cosmic ray collisions within our atmosphere.

The researchers focused on a type of neutrino interaction in the ice called a cascade. These result in roughly spherical showers of light and give the researchers a better level of sensitivity to the astrophysical neutrinos from the Milky Way. This is because a cascade provides a better measurement of a neutrino’s energy than other types of interactions, even though they they are harder to reconstruct.

The IceCube Observatory is located at the South Pole.

Erik Beiser, IceCube/NSF, Author provided

Analysis of ten years of IceCube data using sophisticated machine learning techniques yielded nearly 60,000 neutrino events with an energy above 500 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Of these, only about 7% were of astrophysical origin, with the rest being due to the “background” source of neutrinos that are generated in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The hypothesis that all the neutrino events could be due to cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s atmosphere was definitively rejected at a level of statistical significance known as 4.5 sigma. Put another way, our result has only about a 1 in 150,000 chance of being a fluke.

This falls a little short of the conventional 5 sigma standard for claiming a discovery in particle physics. However, such emission from the Milky Way is expected on sound astrophysical grounds.

With the upcoming enlargement of the experiment – IceCube-Gen2 will be ten times bigger – we will acquire many more neutrino events and the current blurry picture will turn into a detailed view of our galaxy, one that we have never had before.

Author

Subir Sarkar
Emeritus professor, University of Oxford
Disclosure statement
Subir Sarkar received funding from the University of Oxford to support his participation in IceCube.
Partners

Cis is not a slur

Elon Musk is banning the term from Twitter for being a slur. But the argument is so flimsy that it's obvious bad faith.

Commentary by Alex Bollinger

Friday, June 30, 2023

Last week, Elon Musk banned the terms “cis” and “cisgender” from Twitter, calling the terms “slurs.”

It’s much ado about perhaps the dullest term someone could have come up with to describe people whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth. The Latin prefix trans- means “on or to the other side of” and cis- is its Latin opposite: “on this side.”

Elon Musk’s trans daughter petitions court to change name & sever ties with her transphobic father
The 18-year-old daughter wrote in court filings that she no longer wishes “to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

That’s it. Someone learned a little Latin and came up with a boringly neutral opposite.

But Musk is far from the first cis person to claim oppression from the term “cisgender.” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) said the same thing in April, calling the term “ridiculous and a slur.”

And Musk has set off other people claiming that “cis” is a slur… while, of course, suggesting no alternative. Transphobic psychologist Jordan Peterson tweeted, “Call me cis to my face and see what happens” in the wake of Musk’s statement.

Anti-transgender journalist Abigail Shrier apparently thinks that taking the term out of its context proved that it’s “offensive.” Her argument is that using adjectives to describe people negates who they are; is a “tall woman” not a woman now because of the “qualifier”?

The arguments that it is not a slur are fairly strong. First, cisgender people are not an oppressed minority because they are neither oppressed nor a minority. They make up the overwhelming majority of the population and control nearly all the levers of power in the U.S. Every single person in Congress and every U.S. president in history has at least presented as cisgender, and cisgender people are less likely to be unemployed, the victims of violent crime, and unhoused compared to transgender people.

Moreover, a slur seeks to subordinate the target. Calling someone “cisgender” doesn’t do that. Plenty of cisgender people, when they find out what the word “cisgender” means, just think, “Oh, I guess that’s me, OK,” and move on with their lives. On the other hand, actual slurs make the targets feel attacked, ostracized, and ashamed. They carry histories of oppression and violence. They terrorize.

The arguments for why cis is a slur are easy to find on social media and don’t have quite as much thought behind them. One such argument is that some transgender people have sometimes said the word in a mean way. But that just raises the question: if someone gets mad at someone else and says, “You stupid man!” does that now mean that the word “man” is a slur? That’s an absurd conclusion drawn from an absurd premise. Value-neutral words can be used in different contexts with different tones, but that’s not what makes a slur.

Another argument is that some cisgender people don’t like the term – for reasons that can’t be specified – so using it while knowing that there exists somewhere a cisgender person who doesn’t like it makes it a slur in and of itself. But language doesn’t require absolute consensus around all words and definitions to function; someone might hate a specific word for purely sonic reasons and, unfortunately, the rest of us aren’t going to avoid it.

The most telling part of this argument – the part that gives away the whole game – is that they don’t present an alternative term. As a gay man, I believe that “fa***t” is a slur and I don’t want people calling me that, but I’ll quickly offer up “gay” as a neutral alternative. My problem is with the word itself and there are plenty of other perfectly acceptable words.

The “cis is a slur” crowd, though, doesn’t have an alternative word because the issue has never been the word itself, and they are arguing in bad faith. Their actual problem is with the idea that one’s gender identity isn’t a direct function of their genitalia or genetics, the idea that transgender people’s identities are legitimate at all. Since “I just plain refuse to recognize the humanity of people different from me” doesn’t play well with all audiences, they’re calling “cisgender” a slur and playing the victim.

Even better, by coopting the language of human rights advocacy, they take the attention away from transgender people – who could use some support right now! – and put it on themselves as cisgender people – who, as noted above, are doing just fine as a class.

And it is these people’s lack of good faith that allows them to argue that they have a right to pretend that transgender people don’t exist, to deadname and misgender transgender people as they please – “It’s my sincerely held belief that you don’t exist” – while crying foul for being forced to even acknowledge the part of their identity that gives them privilege over another group of people.

That’s how people like Jordan Peterson – whose YouTube channel was demonetized because he refused to stop misgendering and deadnaming Elliot Page – can complain about how he’s being called a word he doesn’t like. He’s not being inconsistent in his statements; he’s being consistently transphobic.

Musk is a deeply unserious person with several personal beefs against transgender people. But the anti-trans sentiment he’s stirring up on Twitter is very serious. And if people are going to combat it, they need words like “cisgender” to at least describe it.

Tory speechless as NO ONE in Question Time audience raises hand to support Rwanda plan

Health minister Helen Whately appeared flustered after BBC Question Time host Fiona Bruce asked if anyone supported the government's plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and no one put their hand up

By
Sophie Huskisson
Political Correspondent
30 Jun 2023

A Tory minister was left tongue-tied on Question Time last night after not one person in the audience said it supported the government’s Rwanda plan.

The crowd - which included many Conservative voters - failed to raise their hands when asked three times by presenter Fiona Bruce if they wanted to speak up in support for the policy

The Question Time debate topic - “Is it time to give up on the government’s Rwanda plan?” was chosen after top judges yesterday ruled the government's plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful as it could not be considered a "safe third country".

Ms Bruce asked the audience: “Is there anyone here who supports the Rwanda policy and who wants to speak up, because we have a lot of Conservative voters here in the audience?

“I mean if there’s no-one here, then let’s recognise that fact. Is there anyone here who supports the Rwanda policy?”

Presenter Fiona Bruce asked the audience three times if they wanted to speak up in support for the policy

One man piped up to ask why people do not stay in other safe countries they cross before reaching the UK, but ultimately added: “I don’t support the Rwanda policy, as much.”

For a third time, Ms Bruce asked: “But just so I’m clear, as we’re very careful how we select our audience - and I’m not trying to overstate the importance here, this is not a YouGov poll - but what I’m seeing here is, even though we have more people who voted Conservative here who supports sending people to Rwanda.”

Not a single person raised their hand with one panel member then shouting: “Good on you”, to which the audience responded with applause.”

The BBC presenter pressed Tory MP Helen Whately for a response.

She stuttered as she began her answer: “Now, or after? I think there’s a few things to pick up here… I think this is a very hard problem to solve.”

Tory minister Helen Whately said it was morally wrong not to do something to stop people risking their lives on small boats

“I think most of us feel we want to be welcoming people and understand people have made hard and difficult journeys to try to come to the UK before they choose to get into a small boat,” the Minister for Social Care went on.

“Yes, they are in France and have crossed several safe countries, but we know they have started out from places where life is very hard.”

Ms Whately said she had visited a migrant camp in Calais a few years ago and heard their reasons for wanting to come to the UK.

“I heard those stories directly but it doesn’t mean that it is morally right to continue a situation where we have people risking their lives in small boats and paying people smugglers to do that. We have to do something different to deter that,” she added.

As Ms Whately attempted to diss Labour for not having a plan, Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan retorted back to her that the Rwanda plan was “inhumane” and “unworkable” and now it’s “unlawful”.

The Labour frontbencher said: “I just think we need to take a moment and think about what drives people to leave everything they have; take their children on treacherous journeys.

Cher Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (second from left) and Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan (to his right) expressed harsh criticism for the plans

Why do we articulate more when speaking to babies and puppies?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CNRS

Why do we articulate more when speaking to babies and puppies? — IMAGE: PHOTOGRAPH OF A MOTHER AND A PUPPY. view more
CREDIT: © DR MARK PANNETON

Babies and puppies have at least two things in common: aside from being newborns, they promote a positive emotional state in human mothers, leading them to articulate better when they speak. This finding is the result of research by an international team1 that included Alejandrina Cristia, a CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique (LSCP) (CNRS/EHESS/ENS-PSL). Scientists studied the vocal behaviour of ten mothers to better understand why mothers articulate more when speaking to infants. Participants were asked to speak to a puppy, to their six-month-old baby, and to an adult for about ten minutes. Researchers extracted every voyel from the recordings, studied their acoustic characteristics, and measure the emotions expressed according to adults who were unaware of the context in which each vowel had been pronounced. Surprisingly, the team found that mothers articulated better and expressed more positive emotions when speaking to their babies or to puppies. In both situations, mothers displayed a range of positive emotions, which correlated with changes in their vocalisations. Other research shows that hyperarticulation leads to a clearer pronunciation of words and makes speech easier for infants to process. Published in the Journal of Child Language on 1 July, these findings demonstrate that future studies on maternal speech should consider the emotional state of individuals.

Notes

From Virginia Tech (Virginia, United States) and Pacific Lutheran University (Washington D.C., United States)

JOURNAL

Journal of Child Language

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH