Top 10 books about human consciousness


Authors from Carl Jung to Aldous Huxley and Susan Blackmore explore the deep mysteries of what it means to be a person

Just a chemical event? Photograph: Fredrik Skold/Alamy

Charles Foster
Wed 29 Sep 2021 12.00 BST

Do you know what sort of animal you are? It’s rather important to know. If you call yourself a humanist, for instance, don’t you need some idea of what a human is so that you can make sure your behaviour accords with your ethics? If you think that humans are just a little lower than the angels, as the Judaeo-Christian tradition says, shouldn’t you know how much lower, so you can be appropriately aspirational but not frustrated or cocky?

And then there’s the problem of personal identity. When you say “I love you”, or “I‘m afraid”, how confident are you about wielding that mighty and mysterious pronoun? Are you as confident as modern neuroscientists that “you” are just the chemical events that happen in your brain? Does that explanation satisfy you?

I expect, if you’re asked what “you” are, part of your answer would involve saying that you were human. So we’re back to the first problem.

All these questions worried me sick. I thought the best way to address them was to go on a journey back through the human story, pausing and immersing myself, using a kind of archaeological method acting, in three pivotal ages – ages when seismic shifts in human self-understanding occurred. These were the Upper Palaeolithic (the vast majority of our history: we’re still really hunter-gatherers, even if we wear a suit and sit slumped in front of a laptop), the Neolithic (when we caged the natural world and ourselves), and the Enlightenment (when the universe, previously seen as fizzing with consciousness, was declared to be merely a machine).

I wrote a book about this journey. It’s called Being a Human. I’m now a bit less queasy than I was about saying “I love you”. Though many mysteries have deepened and multiplied, I think I’ve got some idea of the sort of animal you are and I am.

Here are a few of the books I took along the road. Some were congenial; some infuriating.

1. The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist
A massive book and a massive achievement. A follow-up to McGilchrist’s epic The Master and His Emissary, which explored the way in which our perception of the world, and of ourselves, is influenced by – or is – the conversation or stand-off between the two cerebral hemispheres. The Matter With Things is a devastating assault on the view that there is only matter (whatever that is), and that consciousness can emerge from a conglomeration of unconscious units.

2. Scatterlings by Martin Shaw
Very few books about the wild are wild, and so very few are worthy of their subject. This one is. It’s a tale of how to be claimed by a place, and about how we’re dying because (being stories ourselves) we need good stories as we need clean air, and yet we’re offered only the tawdry stories of material reductionism and the free market – stories which literally de-mean us. Shaw knows how stories seep out of the earth. The earth, like everything, has agency, and it wants us to audition for parts in its constantly evolving stories. What is a thriving human? For Shaw, as for Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, it’s something that has a human body, which defines its position by reference to everything else in the world rather than by reference to itself, and which gets a good part in the local story.

3. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
Often parodied, seldom read, Jaynes argues that (for instance) the voices of the gods in the heads of the Homeric heroes were really the voices of one compartment of the mind, overheard by another, and that true modern consciousness arose when the wall between those compartments dissolved. Though there’s too much dissonance with the archaeological record to convince me, it’s a fascinating thesis, supported by a dizzying range of references, and Jaynes is a brave and swashbuckling writer.

4. The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms
The market is awash with books expressing blithe optimism that neuroscience is about to tell us what consciousness is, why it’s there, and how it is generated. Solms is with the mainstream materialist cohort in thinking that consciousness is a function of brain activity. I’d prefer to say that brains receive, process, and perhaps broadcast consciousness. But Solms’s book stands out from the herd, marked by fitting wonderment and doubt.

Exploring the sovereign subconscious … Carl Jung in 1950. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

5. Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung
Our consciousness is relatively uninteresting and insignificant compared with our unconscious. Most of what “I” really am and what “I” actually do wells up from far below the surface. Jung is one of the great explorers of the dark but sovereign subconscious. You’ll bump into his archetypes if you dream diligently, fast long enough, or sit down in a winter wood and stare into the middle distance.

6. Nine-Headed Dragon River by Peter Matthiessen
Matthiessen, best known for The Snow Leopard, was an advanced Zen practitioner. This book contains some of his meditation diaries. They’re full of vertiginous worked examples, showing how to watch your own mind working.

7. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction by Susan Blackmore
The most accessible overview of the subject, bracingly written. She thinks my views are credulous and atavistic, and says so splendidly and compellingly. Ponder her question: “What were you conscious of a moment ago?”’'

8. Breaking Convention: Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness
One of a set of proceedings of a biennial conference focusing on the academic study of psychedelics and related subjects such as shamanism and out of body and near-death experiences. Tectonic scientific progress is made by looking at the outliers – the evidence that doesn’t fit with your comforting old preconceptions. These studies do that.

9. Beyond Words by Carl Safina
Moving accounts of the reasons to suppose that various non-humans, including orcas, wolves and elephants, have emotions and a type of consciousness akin to ours. If they are conscious, why shouldn’t stones be conscious too?

10. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
Based on his experiences of taking the hallucinogen mescaline. Huxley concluded that the brain acted like a reducing valve, slowing down the influx of data into our brains to a manageable dribble. We may be drawing conclusions about the universe on the basis of a tiny fraction of the available information. We might be misreading it radically. It has recently been shown that human neural networks can process 11 dimensions. We usually use only four. We’re wired up for much, much more reality than we think.


Being a Human by Charles Foster is published by Profile in the UK and Metropolitan in the US.

Texas parole board recommends posthumous pardon for George Floyd

By Kevin Reynolds, Texas Tribune

Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, puts his arm around House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as he and other members of the Floyd family meet with leaders at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on May 25. 

File Photo by Mandel Ngan/UPI/Pool | License Photo


Oct. 4 (UPI) -- The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended Monday that George Floyd receive a posthumous full pardon for the 2004 drug charge he received in Houston.

The 7-0 decision comes five months after Houston public defender Allison Mathis sent in an application for clemency for Floyd, whose 2020 death during an arrest in Minneapolis set off national protests about police violence. Mathis claims that the officer who arrested Floyd in 2004 fabricated evidence in the case.

Gov. Greg Abbott must either approve or reject the state board's decision.

"We lament the loss of former Houstonian George Floyd and hope that his family finds comfort in Monday's decision," Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg wrote in a prepared statement. "We urge Gov. Abbott to follow the board's recommendation and grant clemency."

Earlier this year, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in Floyd's death and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Video of the arrest showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for nine minutes even as Floyd said he could not breathe.

Before moving to Minneapolis, Floyd lived for most of his life in Houston. There, in 2004, he was arrested by former Houston police officer Gerald Goines for selling $10 worth of crack cocaine.

Goines has since been indicted for murder and other misconduct charges after he led a "no-knock" raid in 2019 that resulted in the death of Houston couple Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas. Prosecutors have accused Goines of lying to obtain the warrant for the raid.

As a result of the criminal investigation into Goines, his arrest cases were reviewed. More than 160 of Goines' convictions have been dismissed.

"Goines manufactured the existence of confidential informants to bolster his cases against innocent defendants," Mathis wrote when first petitioning for Floyd's clemency in April.

Part of the Universe’s Missing Matter Found Thanks to Very Large Telescope

OCTOBER 2, 2021

• Galaxies exchange matter with their external environment thanks to galactic winds.
• The MUSE instrument from the Very Large Telescope has, for the very first time, mapped the galactic wind that drive these exchanges between galaxies and nebulae.
• This observation led to the detection of some of the Universe’s missing matter.

Galaxies can receive and exchange matter with their external environment thanks to the galactic winds created by stellar explosions. Thanks to the MUSE instrument^[1] from the Very Large Telescope at the ESO, an international research team, led on the French side by the CNRS and l’Université Claude Bernard Lyon,^[1,2] has mapped a galactic wind for the first time. This unique observation, which is detailed in a study published in MNRAS on September 16, 2021, helped to reveal where some of the Universe’s missing matter is located and to observe the formation of a nebula around a galaxy.

Galaxies are like islands of stars in the Universe, and possess ordinary or baryonic matter, which consists of elements from the periodic table, as well as dark matter,whose composition remains unknown. One of the major problems in understanding the formation of galaxies is that approximately 80% of the baryons^[3] that make up the normal matter of galaxies is missing. According to models, they were expelled from galaxies into intergalactic space by the galactic winds created by stellar explosions.  

Observation of a part of the Universe thanks to MUSE Left: Demarcation of the quasar and the galaxy studied here, Gal1. Center: Nebula consisting of magnesium represented with a size scale Right: superimposition of the nebula and the Gal1 galaxy. Credit: © Johannes Zabl

An international team,^[4] led on the French side by researchers from the CNRS and l’Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, successfully used the MUSE instrument to generate a detailed map of the galactic wind driving exchanges between a young galaxy in formation and a nebula (a cloud of gas and interstellar dust).

The team chose to observe galaxy Gal1 due to the proximity of a quasar, which served as a “lighthouse” for the scientists by guiding them toward the area of study. They also planned to observe a nebula around this galaxy, although the success of this observation was initially uncertain, as the nebula’s luminosity was unknown.

The perfect positioning of the galaxy and the quasar, as well as the discovery of gas exchange due to galactic winds, made it possible to draw up a unique map. This enabled the first observation of a nebula in formation that is simultaneously emitting and absorbing magnesium—some of the Universe’s missing baryons—with the Gal1 galaxy.

This type of normal matter nebula is known in the near Universe, but their existence for young galaxies in formation had only been supposed.

Scientists thus discovered some of the Universe’s missing baryons, thereby confirming that 80–90% of normal matter is located outside of galaxies, an observation that will help expand models for the evolution of galaxies.

Notes

1. MUSE, which stands for Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, is a 3D spectrograph designed to explore the distant Universe. The Centre de recherché astrophysique de Lyon (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1/ENS de Lyon) led its construction.
2. Researchers from the Centre de recherché astrophysique de Lyon (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1/ENS de Lyon), the Galaxies, étoiles, physique, instrumentation laboratory (CNRS/Observatoire de Paris – PSL), and the Institut de recherché en astrophysique et planétologie (CNRS/Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier/CNES) participated in the project.
3. Baryons are particles consisting of three quarks, such as protons and neutrons. They make up atoms and molecules as well as all visible structures in the observable Universe (stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, etc.). The “missing” baryons, which had never before been observed, must be distinguished from dark matter, which consists of non-baryonic matter of an unknown nature.
4. Including scientists from Saint Mary’s University in Canada, the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Potsdam in Germany, Leiden University in the Netherlands, the University of Geneva and the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in India, and the University of Porto in Portugal.

Reference: “MusE GAs FLOw and Wind (MEGAFLOW) VIII. Discovery of a Mgii emission halo probed by a quasar sightline” by Johannes Zabl, Nicolas F Bouché, Lutz Wisotzki, Joop Schaye, Floriane Leclercq, Thibault Garel, Martin Wendt, Ilane Schroetter, Sowgat Muzahid, Sebastiano Cantalupo, Thierry Contini, Roland Bacon, Jarle Brinchmann and Johan Richard, 28 July 2021, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab2165

How telescopes make the universe self-aware

Telescopes are time machines. Someday, they could take us to a time before starlight.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured some of the oldest light in the universe. Webb will go farther. But what will the telescopes of the future be capable of? 

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field/NASA

By Brian Resnick@B_resnickbrian@vox.com 

Sep 29, 2021

https://www.vox.com/

A telescope is like a time machine. When astronomers peer out into the vast distances of space, they’re also looking back in time. That’s because faraway light takes a long time to reach us. When light from distant galaxies enters our telescopes, it’s like a fossil of a time long gone.

Just as scientists study fossils on Earth to understand bygone eras, scientists can chart the evolution of the cosmos by looking at starlight of various ages — but there’s a limit to how far back in time we can see.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which is orbiting the Earth right now, can see 13.3 billion years back in time. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be able to peer even farther back in time than the Hubble after it is launched in December

“We are looking for the first light that turned on at the very beginning of cosmic time,” says Caitlin Casey, a UT Austin astronomer who has been approved to use the Webb to look for this light.

This is an epic quest. Humans have never before had the technology to see this first light. It will teach us a lot about how our universe formed, and why it looks the way it does today.

But even this first starlight does not represent the beginning of time. The Big Bang occurred hundreds of millions of years before starlight. For most of that time, the universe was shrouded in darkness. And when there’s no light, there’s nothing for existing telescopes to observe.

Yet astronomers tell me that one day, new and innovative telescopes may be able to see deeper into that darkness — to break through the barriers that even the mighty Webb Space Telescope won’t be able to see through. They dream of putting an observatory in a crater on the far side of the moon, or building one that can potentially detect ripples of warped space coming from the calamity of the Big Bang itself.

When they do, humans may finally be able to piece together a more complete timeline of the history of our universe. And is there any quest more human, or more meaningful, than the drive to understand where we come from?

The space we cannot see

The James Webb Space Telescope can see back to the first stars and galaxies, but it will be blind to the cosmic dark ages and the Big Bang. STSci/NASA

Let’s start with something very obvious. When we look up at the night sky, we can see the stars because the universe is see-through. Light can travel hundreds of millions of years — billions, even — across the transparent void to reach us. Lucky for us, scientists can use this light to study the history of the cosmos, and our place in it.

But there was a time when our universe was not transparent but opaque. In the beginning, there was darkness.

“When the universe was first created, it was so hot after the Big Bang, atoms couldn’t exist,” explains Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics. “It was just a plasma of subatomic particles.”

There’s no light shining through to us from this extreme early universe because light simply cannot travel through a plasma of particles tinier than atoms. Any light that existed then “would just go a very short distance before it would be scattered off some subatomic particle,” Hertz says.

Eventually, several hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, this plasma cooled and a bit of light broke through. Scientists call this light the cosmic microwave background — essentially the afterglow of the Big Bang — and observatories can see it in very dark places like Antarctica, the Atacama Desert, and in Earth’s orbit.

But this light represents only a small snapshot of the early universe, before stars or galaxies. It’s just a nearly uniform dispersal of matter (and dark matter). Somehow, from that starting point, we get everything we see in the universe today.

An illustrated timeline of the universe. WMAP/NASA

But soon (cosmically speaking), the universe was dark again. Shortly after the universe cooled, the cosmic dark ages began.

Back in the dark ages, the universe “was full of hydrogen and helium atoms and nothing else,” Hertz says. “And there was nothing to emit light. So it was still dark.”

What’s more, that hydrogen formed “a dense, obscuring fog of primordial gas,” as the National Science Foundation explains. If there was light anywhere, it would be shrouded in the fog.

Only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang was “the darkness of the universe ... pervaded by light for the first time,” Casey says. Astronomers call this period “cosmic dawn,” when the fog lifted and the first starlight shone through the universe. Cosmic dawn, Casey says, permanently transformed the universe “from a dark place to a light place.” That’s the universe we still live in today.

Casey says scientists still don’t precisely know what lifted the fog. They suspect the earliest stars provided the energy needed. That’s what she and others will investigate with the James Webb Space Telescope. “We’re trying to see the first galaxies turn on, for the first time, and emit their light for the first time,” she says.

But the observatory will leave other mysteries untouched: What happened in the dark ages? What happened in the moments after the Big Bang?

This is how, in the future, we might find out.

How special telescopes could see the invisible

How do you see a region of space from which no light emanates? Scientists, surprisingly, have some solutions to this problem.

One is to build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon (that is, the side that never faces the Earth). This type of telescope could help scientists peer into the dark ages, though not necessarily all the way back to the Big Bang.

During the dark ages, astronomers believe, the hydrogen that pervaded the universe emitted very faint radio waves. And that gives astronomers some hope. “You could look back into the dark ages, because those atoms were giving off radio waves,” Hertz says.

It’s as though they were broadcasting a lonesome signal from near the beginning of time, which could make it through the fog.

“If you build the right kind of radio telescope, very large, very sensitive, then you would be able to detect the radio waves and we could study the universe before the first stars and first galaxies,” Hertz says.

There are a few concepts for putting a telescope on the far side of the moon. One is actually called Farside. This one is is the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, which would nestle the observatory in a moon crater.

 Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

But we can’t detect these faint radio waves from Earth. All the radio transmissions that are produced on Earth would drown them out.

This is where the moon comes in — as a kind of giant shield. The moon is “thousands of miles of rock, so the radio waves can’t get through that,” Hertz explains. The far side of the moon is quiet enough for us to listen in.

Right now there are a few concepts for these moon telescopes, from one that nestles the telescope in a crater to ones that involve lunar rovers. There are currently no concrete plans to build and launch one.

Still, even a giant radio telescope on the far side of the moon could only take us so far. It couldn’t take us all the way back to the Big Bang, when the universe was just a dense plasma of particles.

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Astoundingly, scientists know of something that could get us much closer to the beginning, to make observations of the very early, hot universe as it existed soon after the Big Bang. But it would take a very different type of telescope — one that can see gravitational waves.

The Webb, the Hubble, and even a future radio telescope on the far side of the moon are all telescopes that capture some form of electromagnetism (which include visible light, infrared light, radio waves, microwaves, ultraviolet, and so on).

Gravitational waves, by contrast, are ripples in the very fabric of spacetime. They form as a consequence of the fact that mass can bend space.

And so when massive cataclysms happen in space (say, when two black holes collide), space ripples a bit like after a stone is thrown into a pond. It’s “like flapping space,” Hertz explains. “Space will propagate that movement as waves.”

Gravitational waves are really weird. They literally distort space as they move — shrinking it, stretching it — as if it were an image in a funhouse mirror. The thing is, when these waves reach the Earth, they are almost imperceptibly small, making changes on scales smaller than an individual atom.

An illustration of how two black holes colliding creates gravitational waves.

VIA LIGO

Remarkably, scientists have the technology to record gravitational waves. In 2015, scientists first detected gravitational waves that resulted from the collision of two black holes. Scientists believe that there are gravitational waves emanating from this very early, hot universe that existed after the Big Bang, but we would need a huge and specialized observatory to detect them.

“We need to have a gravitational wave observatory where the two ends of it are a million kilometers apart,” Hertz says.

And where do you put such an observatory? In space!

Currently, NASA and the European Space Agency have plans for a space-based gravitational observatory called LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), to launch in 2034. It will be a constellation of three satellites that form a triangle, with each side measuring a whopping 2.5 million kilometers.

“It measures whether the distance between the satellites has changed,” Hertz explains. “And if it changes, it’s because a gravitational wave went by and shrank or expanded space.”

Some of those gravitational waves could be coming from that hot cauldron of the post-Big Bang universe.

Why build telescopes?

Scientists build telescopes to learn about the history of the cosmos and where we fit into it. When we build observatories to peer into the cosmic dark ages, into the fiery heart of the Big Bang, humans fill in the blank spaces in our timeline of the evolving universe. Telescopes help answer the question: Why does the universe look the way it does today?

This urge to understand may be even deeper and more philosophical than curiosity. As Casey, the UT Austin astronomer, puts it: “Humans trying to understand the universe is really the universe trying to understand itself.”

We humans aren’t separate from the universe. We are of it. The Big Bang, the cosmic dark ages, cosmic dawn ... all of this history led to us.

In this light, building telescopes is a means to make our corner of the universe self-aware.

There’s a virtuous cycle here. The Webb Space Telescope will generate incredible images that are only going to inspire more people to get interested in science, to be curious about the universe they inhabit. Those people may dream up the next barrier-breaking telescope, and the cycle will continue.

There will never be one ultimate telescope that can see everything humans want to see. “Each telescope, whether it’s on Earth or in space, is designed to do a particular kind of science,” Hertz says. Even the mighty LISA, capable of peering back to near the very beginning of time, would be blind to some things, like starlight. Other future telescopes might not set their gaze on the beginning of time, but rather on the many planets that revolve around other stars, as they search for another Earth.

“We’re just a bunch of humans floating on a rock through space,” Casey says. “It’s wild, when you think about it, that we’re able to even piece together what happened before the Earth or the sun even existed.”

Telescopes of the future will bring even more of that history into focus.

The Cosmos Might Have Defects in Spacetime Left Over From Its Formation

The universe should be full of cracks left over from the formation of the universe.

By John Loeffler

Oct 02, 2021

Rich Murray/Flickr

We've all heard about the Big Bang: the explosive emergence of everything in the universe from a single infinitesimally small and infinitely hot point. A point that expanded rapidly and cooled into the galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually people that could look up and observe it all.

It's a hard thing to fathom, but there is evidence of the Big Bang all around us. It comes in the form of cosmic background microwave radiation that permeates the observable universe. And — if some physicists are correct — there are also cracks, like super-thin strings, in the fabric of spacetime caused by the expansion and cooling of the universe.

These cosmic strings, not to be confused with the strings of string theory, would be thinner than a proton but pack immense mass and density, enough to possibly affect the way the early universe developed through their gravitational pull.

Though these strings have likely disappeared over time, it's the effects they may have had on the early universe that scientists hope will reveal their existence and shed light on the conditions of the universe and its evolution in the moments after the Big Bang.

The Universe Right After the Big Bang

About 13.8 billion years ago, the universe could fit into a point smaller than even the smallest subatomic particle, smaller even than the quarks that combine to make up all matter in the universe.

This infinitely tiny point would have been likewise infinitely hot, as all of that matter wasn't matter at all, but a unified superforce: the combined force of gravity, electromagnetic force, weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.

After a Planck unit of time (10-43 seconds, the smallest measurable unit of time possible) from the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe plummetted to a balmy 1029 degrees Kelvin and gravity split off from the other forces.

At around 10-36 seconds, as the initial temperature dropped further, a second fundamental force, the strong nuclear force, separated from the others, leaving the only the electroweak force in a unified state. Cosmic inflation now begins and the universe grows by a factor of 1026, in about the same amount of time as it took after the Big Bang for the strong nuclear force to go its own way.

By around 10-12 seconds after the Big Bang, the temperature cools to around 1012 Kelvin and the last of the fundamental forces, electromagnetic and nuclear weak forces, become distinct. Matter, in the form of quarks and leptons begins to emerge.

For a relatively long time afterward, not much happens, but sometime around 10-6 seconds after the Big Bang, two types of leptons, electrons and neutrinos, are formed.

In the remaining time before the first second had elapsed, the temperature of the universe drops by a factor of 1,000, to a mere 1010 Kelvin, and quarks begin to combine into hadrons. These include the proton and the neutron.

It takes a veritable eternity for helium and other heavier elements to start to form, but they finally do a few minutes after the Big Bang, when the temperature of the universe is about 10,000,000 degrees Kelvin.

Fast forward to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and radiation and matter differentiate in a universe that is about 3,000 degrees Kelvin on average.

If you've ever watched Alien 3 and been confused by the fate of the antagonistic Xenomorph at the end, you might not see the problem with this timeline, but superheated objects exhibit strange properties...as anyone who's ever used a ceramic plate to cover a pot of boiling rice (don't ask, it was college and I was dumb) can tell you.

In short, there are things happening to the fabric of spacetime right now because of the extreme temperature.

What are Cosmic Strings?

Source: Chris Ringeval/Wikimedia Commons

The thing about superheated objects, even the universe, is that they do not cool down evenly.

For context, that ceramic plate mentioned above was about 255 degrees Fahrenheit to the touch at one point on its surface, and it was quickly cooling to room temperature at another point along its edge.

That temperature differential turned my ceramic plate into a bit of a bomb (no one was hurt, thankfully), and the same dynamic was having an interesting effect on the early universe, at least in theory.

As bubbles of cooler universe started to form, their boundaries were coming into contact with other bubbles with different temperatures, creating uneven fault lines between them, akin to cracks in the surface of a frozen lake.

These cracks would have been incredibly thin and of varying lengths, but their mass, and thus their density and gravitational pull, would have been enormous. A mile-long stretch of such a string would have weighed more than the Earth.

These strings would have spiderwebbed their way through the early universe in the first nanoseconds of the universe's existence and become stretched across its entirety as the universe expanded, and the tension of that stretching would have decayed the strings out of existence through gravitational vibration alone.

Some scientists wondered if the magnetic field of these strings stuck around long enough to leave an impression on the universe that could still be observable today. And, in 2010, a research team from the University of Buffalo, NY, published a paper arguing that they'd found just such an artifact in the orientation of ancient quasars.

Have Scientists Been Able to Observe Them?

The Virgo gravitational wave observatory in Italy | Source: The Virgo collaboration

Scientists have not been able to observe these cosmic strings directly, but Robert Poltis and Dejan Stojkovic published a study in the Physical Review Letters that said that a collection of nearly 200 quasars, the supermassive black holes in the center of most galaxies, located in some of the oldest galaxies on record, had their axes oriented in such a way that they formed an arc that was too well-formed to be the result of simply chance.

They suggest that this could have been influenced by the magnetic field of two primordial cosmic strings, which could present some of the first real evidence of their existence.

"It is still early to say that this work has discovered evidence for cosmic strings. It is promising, the science is sound, but one should be careful. There are assumptions made that need be checked," said Jon Urrestilla, of the University of the Basque Country in Biscay, Spain. "But it is yet another piece to the puzzle, and the more predictions we can make from the same basic science into presumably independent effects, the closer we will be to detecting whether strings really were there."

Another promising feature is that since these strings would have formed when the universe was tightly packed into a volume many, many orders of magnitude smaller than its current size, the strings would have been tightly packed together as well in the beginning. But, as the universe expanded, these strings would have stretched out and eventually crossed over one another.



This crossing over would have snapped off parts of these cosmic strings into vibrating, rubber band-like loops whose gravitational ripples might still be measurable in the universe.

A group of researchers at Tufts University ran supercomputer simulations to try to determine how many of these cosmic string loops there might be in the universe and their results, reported in a study published in the journal Physical Review D in 2014, suggested that the number of such cosmic string loops would have been considerable, but fleeting.

According to results from their simulations, there could have been billions of such loops in the universe, raising the possibility that the gravitational waves from these loops could be detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) or similar gravitational wave detectors.

“The Tufts group has done a heroic job with the string simulations," said Tanmay Vachaspati, an Arizona State University in Tempe physicist who was not involved in the Tufts University study, "and they pin down important features of the loop distribution critical for predicting gravitational-wave emission and their effects on millisecond pulsar timing,”

These gravitational wave signatures have been elusive though, with a major study examing more than 600 days of observation from both LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories failing to record any gravitational waves attributable to a cosmic string loop.

Considering that cosmic strings would be relics of the earliest moments of the universe, researchers have also looked to that other known relic of the early universe, cosmic background radiation, to see if cosmic strings might have left their mark there.

In a 2019 paper published on the preprint server ArXiv [PDF], researchers at McGill University in Montreal found that this is likely not possible with current equipment or techniques, as the marks left by these strings were simply too faint for us to see.

There is still hope that they will turn up eventually, however.

"Many extensions of the Standard Model that people really like — like a lot of superstring theories and others — naturally lead to cosmic strings after inflation [after the Big Bang] takes place," Oscar Hernández, one of the paper's co-authors told Live Science. "So what we have is an object that is predicted by very many models, so if they don't exist then all these models are ruled out. And if they do exist, oh my god, people are happy."
There is hope though that so-called 21-cm imaging will shed more light on cosmic strings, literally. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe and the very first to form shortly after cosmic inflation, radiates electromagnetic radiation at a characteristic 21cm wavelength, and so measuring hydrogen as it gets carried across the universe by cosmic expansion is a promising avenue for identifying cosmic strings.

Measuring that wavelength is still in the early stages since 21cm observatories are just starting to come online, so it's too soon to tell whether this will prove to be the key to identifying these elusive structures somewhere out there in the universe.

Source: Daniel Dominguez from CERN's Education, Communications & Outreach (ECO) Department

Another exciting bit of potential evidence for cosmic strings comes courtesy of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav).

This observatory gathered data from 45 different pulsars, which shoot out beams of radiation as they spin around their axes, and physicists detected slight variations in the timing of the "pulses" that they emitted. Originally, it was thought that these variations might have been the result of the mergers of pairs of very large black holes, but others argue that these variations might be the evidence of cosmic strings that has proven so elusive.

"We showed that cosmic strings provide a very good fit to the NANOGrav signal, slightly better than the possible alternative source of supermassive black hole binaries," John Ellis and Marek Lewicki, researchers at King's College London and the University of Warsaw, told Phys.org in 2020. "Moreover, we showed that our hypothesis will be straightforward to test in future gravitational wave observatories such as LISA.

Ellis and Lewicki aren't alone either. CERN's Kai Schmitz argued in a recent study in the journal Physical Review Letters, along with co-authors Simone Blasi and Vedran Brdar from the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, that the gravitational waves recorded in the pulsar data might be something of a gravitational analog of the cosmic microwave background.

"Thus far, all observed signals were caused by astrophysical events such as the mergers of binary black holes," Schmitz told Phys.org. "These events are called 'transient' and only lead to short-lasting signals in gravitational-wave detectors. The next big step in gravitational-wave astronomy is therefore going to be the detection of a stochastic 'background' of gravitational waves, a signal that is constantly present, reaching us from all directions in space."

There could be other causes for such "background" gravitational waves other than cosmic strings, but Schmitz and his co-authors believe that since cosmic strings would be a by-product of the phase transitions from the extremely high-energy state when electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force were all unified, they would have permeated the early universe in its infancy and spread across its entirety as it expanded, giving rise to the "background" gravitational waves.

"In this case, the phase transition giving birth to cosmic strings is unlikely to lead to an observable signal in gravitational waves itself, either because it simply does not produce any appreciable signal or because the signal is located at high, unobservable frequencies," Schmitz says.

"Cosmic strings, however, the remnants of the phase transition, have a chance to produce a large signal in gravitational waves that, if detected, can tell us about the symmetries and forces that governed the universe during the first moments of its existence."

Still, healthy skepticism is warranted, as even Schmitz acknowledges: "At present, it is important to remain cautious, as it is not even clear yet whether NANOGrav has really detected a gravitational-wave background."

What if cosmic strings do exist — or at least did exist at some point?

With so many promising avenues to explore, final confirmation of cosmic strings could be right around the corner — or, they might not have existed at all, or at least left no mark that we would ever be able to detect.

According to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration [PDF], cosmic strings would have left a noticeable mark on the cosmic microwave background, which formed roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The gravitational influence of cosmic strings should have woven itself throughout the entire cosmic microwave background, like a lattice, in a way that would still be visible today, but that is not what we see, as Hernández was disappointed to note in his 2019 paper.

"Space-based experiments like [the Cosmic Background Explorer] and [the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe] revealed that cosmic strings do not make a measurable contribution to the [cosmic microwave background], thus ruling out a significant role for cosmic strings."

Essentially, even if cosmic strings did exist, their gravitational influence might not have amounted to anything at all in the grand scheme of things.

If they do exist, however, or at least if they did exist at one time and we were able to identify some remnant or artifact of their existence, it would be a significant signpost in the roadmap of the universe; an astronomical remnant of when electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force were all united in a single superforce for the most fleeting of moments after our universe burst into existence.

They could also provide some critical support for string theory, which sparked a great deal of excitement after it was first proposed in 1968 but has started to fall out of favor for lack of any solid empirical evidence of its validity.

While cosmic strings are theorized to be incredibly thin structures, they would also be incredibly long, many millions of light-years long, and even possibly extending across the entire observable universe. The strings of string theory, meanwhile, are proposed to be one-dimensional objects on the scale of bosons and fermions, the most fundamental components of matter.

Some hypothesize, though, that a string could exist at a macroscopic scale, so-called F-strings, and exert the same kind of influence on the universe that cosmic strings are theorized to have. If cosmic strings exist, then it would at least give string theorists a solid place to start looking for evidence to bolster a theory that has proven to be almost impossible to test through experimentation.

So, regardless of which side of the string theory divide a physicist is on, finding cosmic strings would be a massive development, making it a strangely unifying endeavor in an often fractious field. The challenge, of course, is getting there.

"If we discover cosmic strings, it’ll be the result of the century,” Eugene Lim, a researcher at King's College London who specializes in the cosmology of the early universe, told Quanta Magazine in 2020. “But to quote Carl Sagan, ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,’ and right now the evidence is a bit thin."

Can the future of comedy be found in socialism?

Comedy Co-op is a new endeavor formed by a group of local improvisers in the wake of numerous L.A. clubs foundering or shutting down during the pandemic. Among the comedians, clockwise from top left, David Theune, Leonard Smith Jr., Jessica “JZ” Zepeda, James Mastraieni, Nicole Pasquale, PJ McCormick and Paige Elson.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

BY TODD MARTENS

GAME CRITIC
OCT. 3, 2021 

“This is Rick,” says comedian Jessica Zepeda, holding up a plastic tree.

Rick is a cheap Christmas decoration that has been repurposed as a sort of talking animatronic puppet that Zepeda liked to use in some of their pre-pandemic shows. In seconds they’re giving a dissertation on how puppets should behave.

“I don’t think they should cuss,” says Zepeda. “But I love cussing. But I like puppets to be pure.”

Ten minutes later Zepeda has swapped Rick, a swear-free but self-deprecating tree, for a pair of books detailing the benefits of communal governance. Their ultimate goal? To build a better comedy scene.

More than a year and a half into the pandemic, we’ve come to expect the unexpected. Perhaps the socialist revolution can start in an improv community?

Enter the Comedy Co-op, a planned theater in the works by more than 30 local comedians.

Jessica “JZ” Zepeda.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“It’s radical,” says Zepeda, who once ran a diversity show at Upright Citizens Brigade and has become one of the new group’s largest proponents of sociocracy, which utilizes a series of committees to diffuse a hierarchal set-up.

“It is asking comedians to do something that we have never traditionally done, which is think beyond yourselves.”

And it’s speaking to a charged political moment of social reckoning, when institutions large and small are being re-evaluated on their diversity, equity and workplace harassment policies.

Born out of the pandemic, when a number of prominent theaters were singled out for a lack of diversity and spiraled into financial insecurity, the Comedy Co-op is an acknowledgment that improv and stand-up constitute a low-margin world serving those with the flexibility to spend thousands of dollars on classes. Participants also say the co-op fills a long-overdue need in shifting a robust community away from brand-name theaters like Upright Citizens Brigade, the Second City, iO and Groundlings into one that is owned and governed by the community.

If comedy theaters aren’t a path to getting rich or famous, perhaps one can show the Los Angeles performance world that there’s power in socialism? It’s a model based less on propping up local celebs and more about supporting a theater because of its perceived morals and ethics.

James Mastraieni was the initial organizer of the Comedy Co-op. There are now more than 40 members.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“During the pandemic, I had a lot of time to engage with my socialist sensibilities,” says actor-comedian James Mastraieni, who kickstarted the Comedy Co-op, where everyone who works or performs is a part-owner.

“I sent an email to about 150 comedians I’ve known over the years, and explained what this is. I said, ‘If this existed, could you see yourself supporting it?’ At the time I was in this headspace of wondering if I was the only one feeling really insecure about my place in a community I’ve been in for so long. It was cathartic to get responses back, and that was my motivation to dig deeper.”

Part of it.

In the wake of nationwide George Floyd protests against police brutality and systemic racism combined with pandemic fears, practically no industry, including comedy, was spared from having its shortcomings on matters of diversity aired in public. A number of local stages were downsized before the pandemic, including geek culture hub Meltdown and iO West.

In July of last year, more than a dozen local comics told The Times that Los Angeles stages were plagued with problems of institutionalized racism, driven by a white-led power structure that marginalized diverse voices. Grievances on social media and petitions were sent to theaters such as Groundlings, Upright Citizens Brigade and Chicago’s now-shuttered iO.

Comedy Co-op is a new endeavor formed by a group of local improvisers in the wake of numerous L.A. clubs floundering or shutting down during the pandemic. From right: Paige Elson, Nicole Pasquale, Jessica “JZ” Zepeda, PJ McCormick, Leonard Smith Jr., James Mastraieni and Dave Theune.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Things got bleak.

Upright Citizens Brigade, which began in Chicago before expanding to New York and eventually becoming the nexus of the L.A. scene, is down to just one stage after shutting its East Coast spaces. Those once credited for creating modern improv were questioned over the kind of scene they created, or if it even existed anymore.

While UCB has pledged to work closely with the community as it re-imagines itself as a leaner nonprofit, iO co-founder and comedy matriarch Charna Halpern said the same before confessing that the Chicago institution was money-less and she would be forced to find a buyer.

An earlier version of this story referred to Ruha Taslimi as an actress. The performer is non-binary and uses the pronouns they/them.

“Did I just invest over a decade in a place that’s not coming back?” says performer and co-op member Ruha Taslimi of the sensation of watching theaters contract and close during the pandemic.
But out of a sense of abandonment came a realization: One’s identity isn’t tied to a business. Or, as Taslimi says, “No. That investment was in myself.”

Veteran writer-performer Alex Fernie says those involved in the co-op feel a “recommitment” to the comedy scene.

“This is not just people showing up for the fun part. This is people working to ensure that there’s a long-term viability for this,” he says.

And if they can fight the power of capitalistic structures along the way, great.

“It feels very in line with the political uproar that’s happened,” actress and comedian Paige Elson says. “There’s socialists now. Anti-hierarchy, capitalism. That’s kind of cool. I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds good to me.’”

Paige Elson
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Will you have a committee for censorship?

These days, an interview with Mastraieni is just as likely to discuss comedy theory as it is political postulation.

As he’s been doing the interview rounds, he’s met those who don’t believe a membership-based, socialist-inspired method is possible. “I had expressed that I was a socialist,” says Mastraieni of a recent interview, “and they were like, ‘Will you have a committee for censorship and canceling comedians?’ What? No. There’s a misinformed idea that when people hear socialist or worker cooperative they think censorship.”

But the Comedy Co-op even has a plan for that.

“What’s important to me is to be solution-orientated,” Zepeda says. “If someone [screws] up on stage, we’re not going to kick them out. There’s going to be accountability. We tell people to act better, and give them no tools. We need to have sensitivity training.”

The Comedy Co-op wants the community to know that if it won’t always have the answers, it’s working its way through the questions. Membership tiers are being drawn by a 30-plus steering committee currently broken up into intimate groups of four to seven to focus on branches of running a cooperative business. Multiple people are in multiple committees, creating communal links to ensure — hopefully — no decision is made in a vacuum.

Leonard Smith Jr.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Two benefit shows — one stand-up and one improv at nonprofit Glendale performance space Junior High — have been set for Oct. 3. The improv gig, which will be live-streamed, has already sold out.

A crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo will launch soon afterward, with the long-term goal of establishing a new L.A.-area theater. In the meantime, the do-it-yourself ethos of the Comedy Co-op has thrust a lot of improvisers into unsuspecting roles.

“I was at one of the early meetings, and James asked what 2% of $2,000 was and I threw the number out,” says actor and comedian Artoun Nazareth. “‘Oh, it’s $40.’ He’s like, ‘God, you’re good with numbers. You should be on the money committee.’

“So I ended up there. I’ve done a ton of research into tax law, and learned what the difference is between an LLC and a cooperative corporation,” Nazareth continues. “I didn’t know any of that was coming my way.”

But if the group is hopeful, it’s not delusional.

“We’re hoping to make enough to pay the performers and keep the lights on, and that’s it,” says Nazareth, adding all forms of alternate income will be looked at, from grants to finding a venue that could double as a filming location or allow alcohol sales.

And then, of course, there’s just the nature of any community with egos equally big and fragile.

“So many problems at so many places I’ve been involved with have stemmed from people not knowing what’s going on,” Fernie says. “It’s always going to be personal if a show doesn’t work or if a show gets ended because we put ourselves into them. But it’s worse when there’s mystery.

“On the money side, we want to be open. Here’s what’s coming in. You can see if we’re in trouble this month. I believe that transparency crosses off a lot of problems,” Fernie says.

That mind-set, says Zepeda, is among the group’s core mission statements.

“Anyone can complain,” says Zepeda. “Not everyone can problem-solve. That’s what sets us apart. I understand hesitancy. I hear it. But what other option is there? All the systems around us we have watched crumble and fall to the ground. We should be excited by ‘what if?’”

Not a rebellion

Everyone involved in the Comedy Co-op stressed that they want to see the likes of UCB return as better-run organizations.

“It’s like your family,” Elson says. “You love them. And sometimes you hate them. But it brought us together.”

If anything, the pandemic heightened generational discussions and concerns that were already bubbling under the surface.

“At some point Second City was the rebellion,” says actor and comedian David Theune. “And then maybe iO becomes the rebellion to Second City. At some point, the rebellion becomes the king and they’ve got to get taken down in some ways. That’s the way it goes.”

David Theune
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Grievances with the established system aren’t hard to come by. Just prior to the pandemic, PJ McCormick landed a spot on one of UCB’s coveted Harold teams. McCormick, who once dreamed of being a pro wrestler, says the predominantly white L.A. comedy scene didn’t make his journey easy.

“You don’t want to be judged purely based on your stereotype of, you know, of your culture or your ethnicity,” says McCormick, who is half-Filipino and half-British. “So what tends to happen, as a diverse performer, you look up [at an audition panel], you see all the white faces, and you feel like, ‘Well, I’m not comfortable bringing my experience as a Filipino person to this stage, because they may not understand the references.’ And then you are not being authentic to yourself, and you’re probably going to ruin your audition.”

PJ McCormick
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Such issues, Elson says, are a “microcosm of the entire entertainment industry,” but co-op members say they’re optimistic because diversity is ingrained into its mission statement. Zepeda, for instance, expresses pride when discussing the diversity showcase that they produced at UCB, but acknowledges there was awkwardness about it being segregated.

“It was always conflicting in our head, but then when we got to the green room with only Black, Indigenous and people of color performers, it was like, ‘Holy s—, we’ve never been in this space,’” Zepeda says. “So there is that wrestling, that tokenization, but also the necessity to fight to create a space where you can be yourself. We acknowledged it wasn’t perfect, and my mentality is that reforms are not possible in systems built on capitalism and white supremacy.”

Another concern: ensuring comedians get paid for their work. The Comedy Co-op hopes to allow performers to set their own ticket prices and take a percentage of the door. While no one has the misconceptions that such monies will cover rent — or even a burger — members want to erase the idea that appearing on a stage is payment enough.

The Comedy Co-op, however, will forgo a key money-making initiative of other theaters: no training academy. Part of that is simply an acknowledgment that there’s a number of quality improv classes offered throughout L.A. by theaters and individual performers.

But part of that is existential.

“What you find funny is what you find funny and you cannot be wrong,” Fernie says. “We want to be a place for you to pursue what you find funny. We don’t want to teach you what is funny. We want to go out of our way to reach out to schools and communities where people don’t feel welcome to check out shows.”

From left: Nicole Pasquale, Dave Theune, Paige Elson, Leonard Smith Jr., James Mastraieni, Jessica “JZ” Zepeda and PJ McCormick.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)


It’s still only comedy

Building a better comedy scene isn’t easy, regardless of the performers’ idealism.

“What I’ve known is that every single improv venue that I’ve ever been a part of, I’ve seen the same problems,” says Theune, citing money struggles and fights for stage time. “But when James had this idea, it was different. We’ve tried it these ways — and some have been unbelievably successful — but let’s try it a different way.”

And sure, at the end of the day it’s just comedy, but it’s worth stressing that the power to laugh with others is important, no matter how weird the show.

Nicole Pasquale, for instance, dreams of an early-morning performance of improvised synchronized dancing. “It’s just a fun hour,” Pasquale says. “That’s all I want to do. I want a room for silliness.”

Nicole Pasquale
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Leonard Smith Jr. can’t help but to launch into a bit of his stand-up during a phone call, even trying out some new jokes he wrote during the pandemic. And while he’s very much into the ideals of the Comedy Co-op — he admits he “made some remarks” in his ultimately rejected application for a diversity scholarship at UCB — his work is far from politically minded (“I talk about butts and sex,” he says).

For Smith, the co-op has been eye-opening in breaking down barriers. “You find your circle. You find your clique and you navigate that area, but here there’s a lot of faces I had seen but never talked to,” Smith says.

The co-op has been a lifeline for actor and co-op member Taslimi, who is immunocompromised and is not yet able to return to performing.

“It’s cheesy to say this,” says Taslimi. “I’ve done a lot of therapy, but some of my best therapy happens in this work. Being fearless, and trusting your voice, and supporting other people makes you a better person. It gives you a new relationship to your brain.”

These are among the ideals leading the co-op’s members to believe that a worker-run space is the way forward. Will it be perfect? Nope. But will it work?

“I don’t see this failing,” Zepeda says. “I’m full of self-doubt, but not with this. I see that people are working really hard, and I see everyone having to look at themselves in a different way. That’s what the past two years have been — sitting and looking at yourself. Unfortunately, it took us being robbed of our stages to value them and understand that there can be a better stage.”

Zepeda stops, takes a breath and sighs. “It’s going to work.”





Todd Martens  joined the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and covers a mix of interactive entertainment (video games) and pop music. Previously, Martens reported on the music business for Billboard Magazine. He has contributed to numerous books, including “The Big Lebowski: An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time.” He continues to torture himself by rooting for the Chicago Cubs and, while he likes dogs, he is more of a cat person.

PUTIN'S  PROPAGANDA

Western Balkans: Russia's Sputnik skews public opinion

Though Serbia has strong ties with Western Europe, most Serbs consider Russia to be their closest partner. That’s because of the narrative peddled by Kremlin-funded outlets like Sputnik, which dominate the airwaves.

Sputnik, which is funded by the Kremlin, broadcasts back-to-back news bulletins in Serbian

The majority of Serbs believe that Russia and China are their country's most important economic partners. In reality, however, Serbia conducts more than two-thirds of its foreign trade with the European Union. Western Europe also accounts for the bulk of foreign investment in Serbia.

Hundreds of thousands of Serbs work, study and live in EU countries, but very few in Russia or China. Despite that, many Serbian citizens see Moscow and Beijing as their country's closest friends while they often expect nothing positive from the EU. What explains this gap between Serbia's affinity with Russia and the reality of its ties with Moscow?

Watch video 03:38 Kremlin targets TikTok over critical content

The answer lies in the influence wielded by Russian state media on the Serbian press landscape and, beyond it, on public opinion not only in Serbia but in the entire Western Balkans region. In particular, the Serbian edition of the Kremlin-funded news portal and radio station, Sputnik depicts an image of world affairs that has little to do with reality.

According to Sputnik, Western Europe and the US are doomed and in decline while countries like Russia and China are gaining ever more influence worldwide. Russia's global news outlet is convinced it's because the social and economic systems in these countries are vastly superior to those in the West.
Free 'content' from Moscow

For years, Sputnik has been broadcasting this view of the world and it's simply adopted by many Serbian newsrooms without any context or explanation. Many news outlets in Serbia, like in other places, are plagued by a chronic lack of funds.

That's another reason the free Sputnik reports in Serbian are highly welcome. Gradually, these reports are creating an image of the world among citizens that is more virtual than real.

Many politicians in the Western Balkans like what they see from Russian state media. In addition to Sputnik, that includes RT, which until 2009 was called Russia Today. That's because the social and political value system presented by the broadcasters corresponds to their own political ideals: that of the state, led by powerful top politicians, playing a dominant role in all sectors.

Watch video 02:56 Russia: Students demand press freedom

'Putin System' an alternative to the crisis of the West

That system set up by Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to serve as a model for many politicians in southeastern Europe. For example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Nikola Gruevski, the former prime minister of Northern Macedonia, Bakir Izetbegovic, leader of Bosnia and Herzegovina's main Bosniak party, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa and Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic have all openly or indirectly repeatedly expressed their admiration for Russia's president.

On the other hand, Russian state media paint a bleak image of Western countries. Capitalism is on the verge of collapse, they say. The stock markets are heading for a crash. Broad sections of the population are impoverished. The majority of citizens have lost faith in the Western system and in its politicians and media.

As against that, Russian state outlets say the economies of Russia and China are booming and happy and prosperous societies have been created there. Thus, the people are grateful to their top political leaders.

The Sputnik formula

The constant bombardment of these images and narratives driven by the Russian press has led the Serbian media to report overwhelmingly negatively about the US and the EU over the past year. Russia and China, on the other hand, are praised to the skies with positive reports. There are hardly any critical reports.

Another constantly recurring theme in Sputnik bulletins is that Serbia can only expect bad things from the EU and the US. As a result, front-page stories regularly appear in the tabloids reporting on alleged efforts by the West to oust Serbian President Vucic.

Watch video01:51 Ukraine shuts down Russia-linked magnate's TV channels

But why should the West want to replace Vucic, when both Brussels and Washington see him as the most important partner in carrying out reforms in Serbia and the Western Balkans region?

The Sputnik formula is clear: There is no separation between news and opinion, sources are used very selectively and there is no attempt to gather detailed information. Rather, the reporting is intended to document and prove that Moscow's view of the world is the right one.

Under President Putin, in recent years, Russia has become ever more visible in the Balkans

In addition, Russia is fueling national disputes on the Balkan peninsula with Sputnik firmly on the side of the Serbs. For many years, Russia has sought to prevent the integration of the Balkans into Euro-Atlantic structures. After having suffered defeats with the NATO accessions of Montenegro and North Macedonia, Moscow is now focusing its efforts on Serbia and the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Although the EU supports Serbia and the other Western Balkan countries with many billions of euros and is present in the region through an army of diplomats and experts, it has almost nothing to counter the powerful Russian propaganda machine.

If in the future, Brussels continues to do nothing to raise awareness in Serbia of its own achievements and to underline the advantages of aligning with the West, the EU will be fighting a losing battle. With its arsenal of soft power information tools, Moscow has long won over the hearts of the Serbs.

Thomas Brey was a Balkans correspondent for the German press agency dpa for many years. He now teaches at German universities on the problems in southeastern Europe. In August 2021, his study "Russian Media in the Balkans" was published in German and Serbian.

This article was translated from German.