When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, civil servants found themselves at the centre of a deep political and economic crisis.

The state was, and remains, the largest employer, surpassing private companies and NGOs. In 2015, the approved national budget accounted for 465,041 government personnel. Over 85% were engaged in security-related functions. Despite the absence of official statistics, observations confirm that the civil service has not shrunk over the years.

As the conflict became increasingly politicised and shaped by ethnic divisions, civil servants had to navigate shifting loyalties and growing insecurity.

The war also triggered an economic collapse. In 2015, the South Sudanese pound lost nearly 90% of its value against the US dollar. Trade routes were disrupted. Domestic production of products declined and shortages of imported goods fuelled hyperinflation.

The near-total collapse of oil exports – the government’s main source of revenue – severely weakened state finances. By late 2015, the government was effectively bankrupt and increasingly unable to fund the public sector.

This resulted in long delays in civil servants’ salary payments from several months to a year. Hyperinflation also eroded the value of wages.

Read more:
Is Sudan’s war the reason for South Sudan’s economic crisis? What’s really going on with oil revenue

This did not lead to a mass exodus from the civil service, however. During my PhD fieldwork, I found that many civil servants chose to stay. As a political sociologist, I was interested in understanding their decision to remain in a broke administration during such challenging times. I explored the little-known wartime experiences of ordinary middle-ranking civil servants to make sense of it.

Drawing on 22 months of fieldwork in South Sudan, I found that civil servants chose to remain in government because – despite the absence of a salary and direct income – their jobs provided benefits. These included social status, and access to networks and opportunities. The job provided a sense of normality, too, during a period of political upheaval. It was also a realistic route to paid employment in a hoped-for future. Other options were scarce.

The civil war formally ended with the 2018 peace agreement, but South Sudan remains mired in political and economic crises. My findings help explain why, despite repeated shocks, state institutions have endured.

The study

I collected the data in my study between 2017 and 2022 in the region of Western Equatoria in South Sudan. The region doesn’t have oil resources, hosts a variety of ethnic groups and plunged into war later than many others. I relied on observations from various administration offices at county and state levels, and informal conversations held during these visits.

As part of my research, I followed the stories of six civil servants – two women and four men – from different departments and directorates at the county and state levels. They held different grades within the administration. They were aged over 30 and held at least a high school certificate.

The findings

My study shows that civil servants’ attachment to a state with no money was shaped by material, social and political factors.

Before the war – from independence in 2011 to 2013 – even lower-ranking government jobs provided civil servants with a modest but stable standard of living. For instance, a cleaner (grade 16) in public administration earned around US$180 to US$200 at the time. But after the conflict began, that economic security disappeared.

By April 2017, a director’s monthly salary (grade 3) could only buy a 20kg bag of rice and a 10kg bag of red beans. An administrative officer’s (grade 12) salary could barely pay for 2kg of rice.

All civil servants had to look for other sources of income for daily survival. These included farming, small-scale businesses, and renting or selling properties. The economic security attached to a position in the civil service had vanished.

Yet civil servants continued to go to the office because it still gave them access to other forms of resources, helped them maintain their status and preserved an appearance of normality.

The benefits included:

• access to opportunities, such as NGO trainings and workshops that provided per diems for the period of participation, or a certificate of attendance that could be added to a CV

• the knowledge and power to help people and do favours, which helped them cultivate social networks that could be used to access goods, services or credit

• preserving social position and maintaining practices that reinforced a sense of normality, both in the eyes of others and for themselves

• a shared experience which fostered forms of solidarity and mutual understanding among civil servants. They organised social activities and support mechanisms, such as savings groups, among themselves rather than with other social groups.

A desired future

Despite the South Sudanese government’s withdrawal from many of its social responsibilities, civil servants continued to imagine a different kind of state. Those I interviewed shared a vision of a strong and functioning state.

It was often accompanied by a sense of self-fulfilment, as they imagined themselves helping to build such a state. Maintaining the functioning of state institutions and preserving some level of public service during the crisis became a meaningful commitment, a survival strategy and an investment in upward mobility within a “wished-for state”.

The decision to remain in this career was also shaped by a lack of alternatives, however. Middle-ranking civil servants had relatively low levels of formal education and lacked the networks needed to secure other employment. The private sector has remained small because of a difficult business climate and a lack of economic diversification.

The total collapse of a functioning state would mean the disappearance of their jobs – which helps explain their efforts to keep the administration going.

The economic crisis in South Sudan raises questions, however, about how long civil servants can continue to sustain state institutions.

In many cases, salaries have gone unpaid for more than a year. And cash shortages in banks prevent civil servants from accessing whatever funds may be available to them.

Emmanuelle Veuillet does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/serving-a-state-that-couldnt-pay-why-south-sudans-civil-servants-didnt-quit-during-the-war/

South Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011 was meant to close the chapter on one of Africa’s longest civil wars: the north-south war that preceded it. Formally, it did. But independence did not end the deeper struggles over power, revenue and coercion inside the newly independent state.

South Sudan returned to war in 2013, watched a 2015 settlement collapse, and now lives under a 2018 Revitalised Agreement whose promised transition has been postponed repeatedly.

This is usually told as a story of failed peacemaking, with too many spoilers and too little political will. But what if these deals are not failing so much as working? What if they stabilise order precisely by preserving the systems that make violence profitable?

Political settlements theory helps explain why peace agreements often focus on dividing power, offices and resources among elites. The hope is that if rival leaders receive a share of power, offices and resources, they will have less reason to fight. But negotiated transitions can also carry wartime systems into peace. The question, then, is not only who gets a share of the state, but what kinds of war economies, revenue systems and coercive practices are being preserved.

As an economic historian of war and peace, I have spent more than a decade tracing how rulers in South Sudan and Sudan raise money, goods, labour and other resources, and how payment is enforced through soldiers, officials, checkpoints and offices. My recent research paper examined how South Sudan’s peace agreements reshaped the country’s systems of revenue, spending and coercion: who could extract resources, who could allocate them, and who could enforce payment.

My analysis drew on 2020-2024 fieldwork and archival, secondary and peace agreement data. I sought to answer three questions: who collected revenue from monetary and non-monetary sources, such as cash, cattle, grain and labour; who paid; and who benefited.

What emerges is that peace settlements have redistributed access to money, offices and external finance among elites, while leaving intact the coercive revenue system and war economies that preceded them. In some cases, peace has formalised those systems by turning wartime access to extraction into recognised office, revenue authority or security control. Violence changes form rather than ending; it recedes from the battlefield and lodges in the revenue systems, security forces and war economies that continue to extract from civilians – now in the name of order.

This is a pattern I call predatory peace.

The same machinery makes the state itself a prize: controlling it is so lucrative that capture remains worth fighting for, and when the power-sharing breaks down, as it did in 2013, the fighting returns. Peace and war become two settings of one extractive machine rather than true opposites.

Similar dynamics have emerged in other resource-rich, conflict-affected states, such as in oil-rich Angola and the mineral endowed Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). South Sudan is resource-rich too, above all because of oil. But the wider issue is not only natural resources. It is the political control of revenue streams such as oil, customs, aid, loans, contracts, checkpoints, timber, charcoal and other forms of extraction.

It’s all part of a wider pattern in peacemaking that has repeatedly paired political deals with economic reforms that entrenched elite control over revenue and other resources.

None of this is inevitable. A different approach would start by treating the whole revenue complex as the heart of peacemaking itself, not as a technical issue to be postponed until after a peace agreement is signed. It would ask who controls money and other resources, including humanitarian and development assistance; who is allowed to extract resources, payments and labour from civilians; and whether people can see anything in return for what they pay.

Peace as ‘organised robbery’ in South Sudan

South Sudan’s national revenue system includes taxes, customs, fees, oil revenues, international loans, aid and off-budget income. It also includes non-monetary extraction, such as cattle, grain, labour and goods taken from civilians. These flows are enforced through soldiers, security forces, government offices and checkpoints. Together, they form what I call a revenue complex: the machinery through which rulers extract the resources that allow them to govern, reward allies and sustain coercive power.

In much of South Sudan, “peace” has reshuffled who profits from the revenue system, not what it does to those who pay. A businessman in Malakal, a city in Upper Nile State, described the tax system as “organised robbery” in which soldiers were overcharging and pocketing the proceeds. He was told that the system had to be endured to “maintain peace”.

Predation was not a breakdown of order; it was a condition of order.

None of this began with the peace process. My peace agreement analysis starts in the early 1970s, but in separate archival research and an earlier round of just over 200 interviews, I traced the territory’s revenue complex back to at least 1899. Across colonial, rebel and independent rule, I found a similar logic: revenue sources were used to secure rulers’ control more than to fund public goods.

Across more than 120 years, changes in government did not dismantle the underlying machinery of extraction and control. Each major political settlement since the 1970s has been laid over that inheritance, reshuffling who profits from it.

Confusion is integral to the system. Traders described being shuttled from office to office to meet fresh demands; collectors themselves spoke of decrees “passed from nowhere” that shifted revenue to other units. A businesswoman in Wau described fierce competition for tax collection posts because of what could be skimmed from them. This is not administrative failure, but a system that works for those who run it. When revenue authority is spread across overlapping offices, no one can be held to account and everyone can be rewarded for their loyalty.

This performance of state finance runs all the way up. In 2012, the president conceded that some US$4 billion in oil money had simply been “stolen”. In 2026, a UN panel of experts found that South Sudan continued to sell oil months in advance of delivery, and that disputes over undelivered oil cargoes and oil-backed debts had reached UK commercial courts.

State budgets perform reform while the money moves elsewhere.

What people get in return

South Sudanese nevertheless do not reject the idea of contributing to public authority. They contrasted community-level payments and contributions, which they could see returning as boreholes, roads or clinics, with state taxation, which they experienced as extraction without return.

Many insisted that paying tax is good, so long as it is reciprocal, transparent and tied to public goods.

The problem is that peace agreements often leave that link severed, even as they formalise new bargains among elites.

What non-predatory peace would require

A different kind of peacemaking would mean taking the following steps.

• rebuilding of a transparent, civilian-controlled revenue complex

• linking what people pay to what they receive

• making external support conditional on genuine revenue reform.

Read more:
Checkpoint ‘taxes’ make South Sudan one of the most expensive places to move goods

Lastly, South Sudanese civic actors should be supported to monitor the cross-border flows – oil, arms, timber, charcoal, looted goods and finance – that fund fighting.

This work does not fall solely to donors and mediators. People are already documenting where the money goes.

A serious settlement would treat them as central to any peace worth the name.

Matthew Benson-Strohmayer has received funding from the Peace and Conflict Research Evidence Platform (PeaceRep) and the International Centre on Tax and Development (ICTD).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/south-sudan-at-15-how-the-political-elite-have-found-a-way-to-profit-from-peace-as-well-as-war/

The long summer holidays can be an expensive time for families. The cost of day trips to theme parks or zoos or soft play centres quickly adds up.

Discounts sound like a good idea. So this summer, the UK government has slashed the VAT rate from 20% to 5% on admission to a wide range of family activities.

They’ve even given the policy a catchy name: Great British Summer Savings, and in theory, a family could save a decent amount.

If a business passes on the full reduction (they are not legally obliged to), the Treasury says a family of four could save around £20 on theme park tickets for example. The temporary discount, which lasts until September 1, also applies to children’s meals in restaurants.

According to other estimates though, the cut, which will cost the Treasury around £300 million, could be worth just £10 per household. So critics could easily dismiss the whole idea as a not very impressive gesture with an expensive price tag.

But the ten-week VAT drop is also designed to help struggling hospitality businesses, thousands of which were forced to close last year.

Wage rises and changes to national insurance and business rates introduced in April 2025 added an estimated £3.4 billion a year to sector costs. And against that background, a temporary VAT cut can make a difference.

It lowers prices and can improve cash flow by giving attractions a simple message to advertise: this summer’s day out should be cheaper.

But the policy also demonstrates a weakness in the UK’s “visitor economy” – the money generated by people visiting a place for business or pleasure.

Spending on things like accommodation, transport, and food and drink can be a key driver of local economic growth. But when it comes to encouraging visitors to enjoy British hospitality, the UK is not strong. It ranks 113th out of 119 countries for price competitiveness.

So Britain’s problem is bigger than being an expensive place to entertain children in the school holidays. And perhaps the whole hospitality sector needs either a permanent VAT reduction, or a better-targeted seasonal cut, to provide it with a long-term boost.

My research used economic modelling to compare year-round VAT reductions to shorter periods. It asked a straightforward question: does the extra business activity created by a tax cut justify the reduction in tax revenue?

Using an economic model to predict effects in the English county of Dorset, a popular tourist destination, the year-round options did increase tourism activity and employment. But the benefits did not outweigh the cost.

Targeting the relief from November to March performed better. It came much closer to breaking even and significantly reduced the government’s losses.

The central lesson was simple. Timing mattered.

Tourism and timing

The current scheme being run by the government is in place when demand for family leisure is usually strong. Some of the households now planning a trip to a theme park this August may well have done so without a tax cut.

In those cases, the policy makes an existing day trip cheaper, but it does not create a new visit. A lower price is more likely to change behaviour when attractions have spare capacity and families are deciding whether a trip is worth making at all.

Attracting people to a popular attraction in the summer holidays is not the same as persuading them to visit in the middle of winter.

During quieter months, hotels, attractions and restaurants have unused rooms, tables and space. Extra visitors at those quieter times can make a big difference. In peak season, the same discount may simply reduce the price paid by people who were planning to come anyway.

A ten-week summer cut will not fix Britain’s visitor economy. But it creates a quiet precedent: the government has accepted that the VAT rate can change when there is a reason to change it.

The next step should be a more strategic approach, one that supports competitiveness but concentrates relief where spare capacity and price-sensitive demand give it the best chance of creating genuinely additional visits.

The government should not limit itself to saving some families a few pounds on a summer day out. A more ambitious approach would be to use a well-timed VAT cut to persuade those same families to make a trip they were not already planning, to a half-empty attraction in February.

Siamand Hesami does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/a-summer-discount-on-family-days-out-sounds-good-but-it-wont-fix-uk-tourism/

The defence investment plan sets out the UK government’s funding choices for the British armed forces. Over a year late, it allocates an additional £15 billion to the ministry of defence.

Its priorities are the nuclear deterrent and submarine programmes, a sixth generation fighter jet and an expansion of autonomous systems and guided weapons.

Across land, sea and air, the defence investment plan points towards a force that depends more on space-based systems, not less. So it is disappointing that the new plan is unclear on its long-term plan for space.

Both the 2025 strategic defence review and the 2026 defence investment plan tend to speak of space-based capabilities in the broadest terms, providing no clear sense of direction in many areas.

The newest planp is following the tradition of past defence reviews by approaching space as a list-making exercise, where generic capability categories are listed as desirable and important but no prioritisation is made. The DIP does not offer any rationale for which specific capabilities the UK military should develop first.

Some space-based capabilities remain sovereign – operationally controlled by the UK. Others are acquired from external providers: allied countries such as the US, or commercial entities.

Limited defence budgets mean that many space services rely on a mixture of sovereign and external systems. These include satellite communications, space control (ensuring freedom of action in space and denying it to others) and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. This is a broad category and includes many different kinds of imagery and other data gathered from spy satellites.

Political leaders have a responsibility to explain the trade-offs and why they are made. But the defence investment plan does not explain which specific space services the UK armed forces will demand from its allies and from commercial third parties, or how the rest of the force will operate within those constraints.

High-intensity warfare

The headline treatment of space – across one and a half pages – appears positive. Space is recognised as “critical national infrastructure” by the UK government, in line with years of established policy.

Space infrastructure is seen in the defence investment plan as “the central nervous system of modern, high-intensity warfare”. The defence investment plan allocates £3.2 billion to space capabilities up to 2030 and promises at least £9 billion more between 2030 and 2035.

But most near-term spending remains concentrated in satellite communications, with £2.3 billion allocated to the Skynet satellite system, which provides secure communications to the British military. Delayed by two years, the Skynet 6A satellite is scheduled for launch in 2027.

Plans were underway for Skynet satellite systems that would cover the wideband and narrowband frequency ranges respectively. The narrowband system has now been cancelled, but the defence investment plan does not explain the operational consequences of this move, or what will replace it.

The planned Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (Darc), along with Skynet, is one of the few specific space related programmes named in the plan. It will provide radar coverage of the geostationary belt, a region of space where satellites orbit at the exact speed of the planet’s rotation.

Darc will monitor satellites, space debris and potential space-based threats from other nations. Based in Wales, Darc will be networked with similar installations in the United States and Australia to provide global coverage.

A worrying omission in the defence investment plan is the relationship between its £880m allocation for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and space control and the existing Istari programme. Istari is described as a £970 million multi-satellite programme to support global surveillance and intelligence for military operations.

One of the satellites under the Istari programme, Tyche, launched on August 16 2024. Tyche is the ministry of defence’s first sovereign optical imagery satellite. Another Istari satellite programme, called Oberon, is expected to provide two synthetic aperture radar satellites for day and night, all-weather 3D radar imagery.

Yet the defence investment plan does not clarify whether the £880 million allocated for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in the plan continues, replaces, or accelerates specific capability types within Istari – or whether it will go to services acquired from external providers.

New or old?

It remains unclear how much of the £3.2 billion for space represents new spending or restates earlier commitments in the 2021 integrated review, the 2021 national space strategy, the 2022 defence space strategy and the 2023 national space strategy in action.

The UK requires a much clearer account of what space services its future force assumes responsibility for, which of those services it must own or control, and which it is willing to access through allies or its commercial providers.

Much of the defence investment plan’s wider logic amounts to a rediscovered faith in old 1980s-era reconnaissance-strike battle doctrines. It prioritises finding and neutralising the enemy’s command and control, logistics, and reconnaissance capabilities using long-range precise weaponry.

The issue is not that this model is the wrong way to organise combat forces, but that it is highly dependent on space infrastructure. This will require multiple integrated technologies that are able to convert raw operational data into actionable intelligence, not least from space.

The defence investment plan recognises this in rhetoric but does not explain how the UK will secure access to the required space infrastructure.

The consequence is that British military operations will continue to depend on a “central nervous system” that is not sovereign. That places greater weight on UK diplomacy, foreign policy, and contracting mechanisms to ensure continued access to US, European, and transnational commercial space infrastructure.

More spending on space is not always the answer given other pressing needs. Rather, detail is lacking about what the UK military intends to invest in with its existing funding. It is also unclear whether UK government understands the strategic consequences of Britain’s reliance on allies and commercial third parties for essential military space infrastructure.

The defence investment plan was a moment in which the government could have converted five years of strategy documents into a modestly funded order of clear, specific capability development priorities. The government declined to do so.

Until it can, the £3.2 billion buys continuity rather than direction: a communications programme, a new ground radar, a small down payment on divergent types of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and another list. Admitting the limitations would set a more grounded foundation for public and professional debate on British defence policy in the space age.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/new-uk-defence-plan-fails-to-deliver-on-space-despite-the-militarys-growing-reliance-on-satellite-systems/

Scientists are increasingly worried we may be witnessing the start of the “sixth mass extinction” – the first to be caused by human activities.

Five earlier mass extinctions, caused by dramatic but natural events, have devastated life on Earth during the past half billion years.

The most famous, though not the largest, was triggered by an asteroid impact 66 million years ago and caused the demise of the dinosaurs – with the exception of a feathered, meat-eating group that continued to evolve into modern birds.

Today, the rapidly increasing rate of human-caused extinctions is one of our greatest challenges.

To slow these accelerating rates, we need to understand and minimise the factors that raise extinction risk. But therein lies a problem. Although predictable to some extent, extinction is subject to fickle outcomes and can only be truly understood in hindsight, when it is too late.

For example, the spectacularly abundant passenger pigeon in North America – likely the most abundant bird on the planet at the time – was driven to extinction within a few decades during the 19th century.

In contrast, the tuatara persisted for 80 million years in New Zealand as the last vestige of a group of reptiles that were formerly globally widespread and abundant.

Extinction risks are relatively easy to predict in highly visible and well-studied species such as the blue whale and New Zealand’s flightless night parrot kākāpō. They are very hard to predict in myriad marine invertebrate species that keep ocean ecosystems functioning.

But that is where New Zealand is uniquely placed to quantify and predict marine extinction risks, using the fossil record. We can quantify a growing “extinction debt” – a measure of the number of species committed to future extinction because of human actions today – and act on that before the debt is locked in.

Why do we care?

Extinction and loss of biodiversity threaten the systems that sustain life on our planet – the complex interactions between physical, chemical and biological processes that maintain Earth in a habitable state.

But most of the species we are losing are never listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list. This list is biased towards birds and mammals because only a small fraction of invertebrates, particularly those in the sea, have been evaluated against conservation criteria.

To fill this gap and improve our understanding of extinction in the marine realm, we can turn to the countless “natural experiments” recorded by long-extinct fossil species.

Using fossils, we can identify which particular subsets of marine invertebrates have been most vulnerable to extinction in the past and, therefore, might be at particular risk of future extinction. In this way, we don’t need to wait until species have gone extinct to figure out which are most vulnerable.

The importance of New Zealand’s data

New Zealand’s geographic isolation and highly endemic marine fauna mean we are studying a “closed” system. Species have been “captive” and unable simply to move elsewhere when the going got tough.

Both New Zealand’s living and fossil marine faunas are among the best-known on the planet. This gives us rich and large datasets to analyse.

This captive and well-documented marine fauna gives New Zealand scientists the potential to explore the drivers of extinction risk in ways that are relevant globally.

The shellfish (molluscs) are the most abundant and important (by biomass) group of fossil marine invertebrates available for study. They provide a valuable proxy for bottom-dwelling marine animals in general.

Our previous work on New Zealand fossil molluscs suggested their extinction risk was related to their geographic range, body size and position on or within the seafloor sediment, among other factors.

Our current research extends this work to produce extinction predictions for different types of molluscs into the future, using climate models to simulate the next few centuries. This is work in progress and there is so much more to learn about marine extinction risk from New Zealand’s wonderful fossil record.

Are we entering a sixth mass extinction?

Debate about this question is perhaps a distraction.

It is methodologically difficult to place current and future extinctions into the context of past Earth-changing mass extinctions. This is because modern extinction concerns focus on land species and those that are already rare, whereas the fossil record is dominated by the histories of common marine organisms.

The modern extinction rate is also unconstrained. We have no idea how quickly future extinctions will happen.

Will a threatened species become extinct in a few decades (like the passenger pigeon) or will it persist in low abundance for thousands of years, or longer, like the tuatara?

Leaving these questions to one side, recent research by myself and colleagues has shown that at least some past mass extinctions have been defined not by a very high rate of extinction, but by the duration of elevated extinction rate.

This unexpected finding gives us another argument, should we need it, to reduce modern human-driven extinctions as quickly as possible, and to avoid going too far into extinction debt.

James S. Crampton has received funding from the former Marsden Fund and various government public good science funds. He is a member of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand, the Palaeontological Association and the Paleontological Society.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/nzs-unique-fossil-record-of-marine-molluscs-helps-scientists-predict-extinction-risk-before-its-too-late/

In most western societies, death has always been the church’s job. Nearly everyone wanted last rites, deathbed prayers and a faith leader at their bedside. But for a growing number of people, that template for dying is no longer the only option. The death doula, a different kind of caregiver, is increasingly entering the scene.

Some might have seen a death doula on the latest season of HBO’s medical drama The Pitt. Others may have recently heard Australian actress Nicole Kidman announce that she is training to become one.

So what exactly is a death doula (sometimes also called an end-of-life doula, soul midwife or compassionate companion)? Much like a birth doula — a trained, non-medical professional who provides support to a person during childbirth — they help guide a person through life’s final chapter.

As researchers in the sociology of religion, we study the changing landscape of death. With religious affiliation showing a sharp decline — in 1985, 90 per cent of Canadians identified as religious, while in 2019, this had fallen to 68 per cent — many people look to do death differently.

The work of a death doula

In our recent study, we interviewed more than 70 death doulas in seven countries to help us understand how outlooks on death are changing in a shifting religious landscape. As an international team, we spoke with doulas in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Brazil, Argentina and Australia.

Despite the geographic spread, in many ways, a doula in London and one in São Paulo have similar roles. At the same time, national context can shape someone’s work in surprising and important ways. In places where medically assisted dying is legal, for instance, doulas might find themselves helping a dying person navigate this process.

The typical tasks performed by death doulas can vary. They might help plan a funeral, attend doctor’s appointments, clean out an attic or write down a life story. All of these are practices aimed at easing the journey toward a “good death.”

Death doulas do not provide medical treatment, an important distinction. One doula we spoke with, Joyce (all used pseudonyms), says she won’t even pass her clients a Tylenol, just to avoid blurring any lines. These restrictions, however, do not preclude death doulas from providing physical care. Even small gestures can increase comfort and provide pain relief.

Enola, a British-based death doula, suggests that touch is very important and helps people figure out even small details like how many pillows they want on their bed or whether they have a favourite blanket.

Dying without religion

Most of the doulas we interviewed stressed that the best approach to death must be tailored to the individual.

Some people want to be surrounded by their family at the end. Others want privacy. Some have a detailed vision for their final moments and want help putting it into action. Others are still coming to terms with their mortality and want guidance making sense of their life and their lasting legacy. When religion is put aside, myriad other possibilities emerge for how people can die in a way that is meaningful.

Many doulas bemoan the fact that it’s difficult for families to take the reins and control how their loved ones experience death. Zara, a death doula from Australia, blames that on what she calls the cookie-cutter nature of the funeral industry. She says:

“We’ve taken religion out of [dying] as society has shifted, but we’ve also industrialized it and corporatized it and medicalized it,” she says.

Carol, a Canadian death doula, enjoys assisting people in finding the freedom to construct moments that will resonate specifically with them — “that lovely grey area where everything is possible,” as she refers to it.

Alyssa, from Australia, suggests that this can take on many forms for different people. “It could be listening to their music, spending time with their grandchildren, watching the footy,” she says. “It could be petting their animal companion or sitting in their garden.”

While each person is different, our data suggests that, above all, relationships are central to the dying process. The priority becomes having final conversations, writing letters to be read in the future or even simply sitting in silence with loved ones at the bedside.

For example, Dawn from the U.K. says:

“I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘I miss my sports car.’ The material things kind of naturally fall away.”

Read more:
As a death doula and professor who teaches about dying, I see a need for more conversations about death

A complement to medicine

Death doulas also aim to change how care is administered in hospitals, hospices and other medical settings. They are filling a gap that both medicine and religion have traditionally occupied.

For example, Kimberley, a registered nurse who also works as a death doula, explains that what sets her doula work apart from working in palliative care is the luxury of time.

While nurses have many patients to attend to, as a death doula, she is in a unique position. “I’m there for only one person,” she says. That focus is what lets doulas build the kind of relational, unhurried care they want to see more of.

Though they satisfy needs not met by medicine or religion, doulas don’t see themselves in competition with either. With the ability to build relationships with a dying person and their loved ones throughout this process, death doulas offer a complementary form of care.

They help the dying identify what matters most to them at the end of their lives and work out how to make it happen — what one might call a “good death.”

Chris Miller receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Douglas Ezzy receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

Lori G. Beaman receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/what-death-doulas-can-teach-us-about-dying-well-without-religion/

For decades, cancer has been thought of as a purely human disease – rogue cells multiplying out of control, with no room for anything else in the picture. But a growing body of research suggests that isn’t quite right. Some tumours, it turns out, come with company: communities of bacteria, viruses and fungi living on, between and even inside the cancer cells themselves.

The trouble is that nobody has been entirely sure which cancers actually have this so-called microbiome, and which don’t. The field has been dogged by contradictory claims, competing methods and – in one particularly damaging case – a retraction, after results from a high-profile study could not be replicated.

Since then, the field has been left without a clear way forward. Every research group has used its own methods and level of rigour, and there has been no agreed-upon benchmark to check new findings against. That matters because the stakes are high.

If microbes really are helping some cancers grow, resist treatment or spread, they could become new targets for screening and drug development. But chasing signals that turn out to be false wastes time, money and precious patient samples.

Our team set out to settle the question properly, using the largest collection of cancer genetic data in the world – Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project, which includes DNA from more than 16,000 tumours. We built what we believe is the most rigorous analysis pipeline yet developed for this kind of work, designed to strip out every source of error we could identify, then applied it to the entire dataset.

Our latest research found that most cancers – including those of the brain, breast and kidneys – lack a microbiome that is distinguishable from background. This suggests that earlier studies that had picked up microbial signals in these tumours may have been affected by contamination: stray DNA from laboratory equipment or even the scientists handling the samples.

But some cancers were different. Tumours of the mouth, oesophagus, stomach and bowel showed clear, consistent evidence of microbial life. And it wasn’t just bacteria. We found viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms similar to bacteria but genetically distinct) living within these tumours.

In some cases, we detected trichomonas, a single-celled protozoan parasite. The particular mix of species varied depending on where in the digestive tract the cancer was and was linked to features such as the cancer’s subtype and how many genetic mutations it carried.

Telling real microbes from contamination

Working out which of these microbial signals were genuine and which were laboratory contamination was the hardest part of the project. Sequencing a tumour means reading every strand of DNA in the sample, human and non-human alike.

Most cancer researchers simply ignore the non-human portion. We did the opposite. We discarded the human DNA and matched everything left over against known microbial genomes to see what was hiding there.

However, this approach can run into problems fast. There’s no single, definitive human genome to measure against – everyone’s DNA differs slightly, and even the best reference genomes have gaps. Any leftover human sequence that happens to resemble microbial DNA can be wrongly flagged as a hit.

Then there are errors in the microbial reference libraries themselves – occasionally the wrong species ends up catalogued, or DNA from a lab technician’s skin ends up mixed in with a sample. And however carefully a lab operates, some contamination during tumour preparation is almost unavoidable.

We tackled each of these problems in turn. We filtered aggressively against multiple versions of the human genome, stripping out anything ambiguous or repetitive. We used the most up-to-date DNA-matching software against carefully curated microbial databases.

To catch contamination, we compared which microbes turned up across different cancer types: species that appeared everywhere were almost certainly picked up in the lab, while species confined to just one or two cancer types were more likely to be real.

Sure enough, several of the culprits we filtered out were common skin bacteria found in every cancer type – probably from the researchers who had handled the samples.

This kind of large-scale, painstaking filtering was only possible because of the sheer size and quality of the Genomics England dataset. Smaller studies simply don’t have enough samples or resolution to distinguish a genuine biological pattern from a one-off contamination event.

We’ve now made our data freely available as downloadable software, along with a list of the microbial species we’re confident are genuinely present in these tumours, so other researchers can apply the same rigorous approach to their own data.

The hope is that this draws a line under years of conflicting claims. Scientists can then focus their efforts where the evidence is strongest. That means tracking how these microbial communities in mouth, throat, stomach and bowel cancers might influence how tumours develop and how well they respond to treatment. Ultimately, it could help these cancers be diagnosed and treated earlier.

Henry Wood receives funding from Cancer Research UK, National Institute of Health Research.

Anders Dohlman receives funding from The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and from Cancer Research UK.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/largest-study-yet-reveals-which-cancers-have-their-own-microbiomes/

“We have decided that we do need to change your sentence.” With those words, Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr delivered the Court of Appeal’s ruling on two teenagers convicted of multiple rapes, overturning the non-custodial sentences the trial court had originally imposed. After hearing arguments from the crown and the defence advocates, the court concluded the original sentences were unduly lenient, and increased them to four years’ detention in a young offender institution.

Courts of all levels can err when determining sentence. The appeal process exists to prevent excessively harsh or lenient sentences from being imposed. All common law jurisdictions (where law is derived from the English system of judge-made law, such as the US and Canada) allow defendants and the prosecution to appeal a sentence.

Trial courts, also known as “first instance” courts, can make mistakes – even when they follow detailed sentencing guidelines as is the case in England and Wales and Scotland. Miscarriages of justice can arise from excessively severe or excessively lenient sentences.

The Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme in England and Wales accords the attorney general the opportunity to appeal sentences on the grounds that they were manifestly too lenient.

Originally enacted in 1989, the scheme is restricted to certain serious offences, including murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and some child sex and child cruelty offences. Certain serious fraud, drug and terrorism-related offences are also included. If a sentence is imposed for a crime included in the scheme, the attorney general may ask the Court of Appeal for a sentence review. The court must first give leave to appeal. If leave is granted, the court will hear submissions on behalf of the attorney general, and also the offenders on whom the sentence was imposed.

In considering whether to amend the sentence, the court applies a high standard. If the court simply has the view that the sentence was somewhat lenient, this is insufficient to interfere with the trial court’s decision. The court must distinguish between a sentence that is less than the appeal court would have imposed, and one which is likely to be “unduly lenient”.

In referring the Fordingbridge case, Attorney General Richard Hermer said: “There has understandably been a huge amount of public interest, and concern, at this horrific case.”

Involving the public

The ULS scheme in England and Wales has a unique aspect not found in other countries. Crime victims or many members of the public can ask the attorney general’s office to examine sentences handed down by crown courts within six months of sentencing under the scheme (recently increased from 28 days), as long as the offence falls within the remit of the scheme. No other common law country allows members of the public to request a sentence review.

If a victim or other member of public requests a review, this does not guarantee the court of appeal will conduct a review. The decision to refer a sentence rests wholly with the attorney general – few referrals from victims or the public ultimately result in a review by the court of appeal.

Legal scholars are divided on the merits of allowing members of the public to request a sentence review.

Critics argue that the public seldom has sufficient knowledge of the case to reach an informed decision as to whether a given sentence is too lenient. News accounts of a sentence are often inaccurate, omitting important details of the case that may justify what appears to be a very lenient sentence.

There is also the risk of raising expectations that may not be fulfilled. How do victims feel when they seek a review of a sentence, only to learn that the attorney general has declined to refer the case to the Court of Appeal?

Defenders of public input argue that this feature permits greater democratic engagement with the sentencing process and encourages victim participation in the court system. As such, it may enhance public and victim satisfaction with sentencing overall. Advocates note that the decision to refer a sentence lies ultimately with the attorney general, so there is no danger of “victim-driven” justice.

Every year, several thousand defendants appeal their sentence. The number of attorney general references under the ULS is, by comparison, still relatively low – only a few hundred applications. But of these, almost all are granted leave (proceed to a review) – suggesting the court usually agrees that a review was appropriate.

In terms of outcomes, the court of appeal increased the sentence in approximately two-thirds of all cases referred by the attorney general that it agrees to review.

The ULS scheme has yet to be the subject of any formal review, and there is very little research on the issue. Many questions remain. For example, should the range of offences covered by the scheme be expanded? And most importantly, are victims – or the sentencing process more generally – better off by allowing this engagement with the appeal process?

Julian Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/fordingbridge-rape-sentences-increased-how-does-unduly-lenient-sentence-review-work/

Consider the following scenario. Suzy is 63, recently retired, and trying to decide when to start receiving Social Security and how to manage her retirement savings to minimize the tax hit.

She opens an AI chatbot, types in the details and gets a calm, well-organized and confident answer: Claim now, convert this much, here is the reasoning.

The chatbot sounds authoritative and even shows its work. So Suzy follows its guidance and never calls a financial planner. Maybe the advice was fine. But maybe it quietly ignored the fact that Suzy’s spouse is younger and in poor health, which can flip the Social Security math. It also may have overlooked that the retirement savings plan conversion it suggested would push Suzy into paying higher Medicare premiums two years later.

Suzy won’t find out for a long time, if ever, whether this guidance was right for her. And the AI will never call back to say it was unsure.

Suzy isn’t an exception. AI chatbots have entered everyday life with remarkable speed: A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 34% of U.S. adults and 58% of those under 30 have used ChatGPT, roughly double the share two years earlier.

A growing number are asking AI about money, and some are getting burned. According to a 2025 survey of 2,000 U.S. adults by Pearl.com, a professional services platform, 19% said they lost more than $100 by following financial advice from an AI chatbot. Among Gen Z investors, that figure rose to 27%.

These aren’t hypothetical risks. People are already paying for answers about their money that are confident – and wrong.

As a finance professor who has been closely watching the spread of AI into personal finance, this is the part of the AI story that worries me most. And it’s not the part you usually hear about.

We argue about AI the wrong way

There are two seemingly opposite complaints about AI. One is that people trust it too much, treating a chatbot like an oracle, a tendency researchers call algorithm appreciation. The other is that people don’t trust it enough and dismiss its useful tools, a tendency known as algorithm aversion.

I argue these are actually two sides of the same coin, and what decides which side you see is whether you can tell when the AI is wrong.

When an AI fails in an obvious way, you notice and lose confidence. So you’re more likely to seek a professional or another human you trust sooner than you otherwise would. That is the safe failure.

The dangerous failure is the opposite. The answer is fluent, confident – and wrong. You have no way to catch it, so you keep managing the problem yourself long past when you should have asked for help.

The trouble is that with money, the second kind of failure is the common kind.

When you mistake fluency for accuracy

Three things make financial advice especially treacherous for AI.

First, fluency is not accuracy. People naturally read a confident and well-articulated answer as competent. But how polished an answer sounds tells you almost nothing about whether it fits your situation or the accuracy of the proposed solution. A chatbot can be word-perfect and still be wrong about your taxes, because your taxes depend on details it never asked about.

Second, AI is least reliable exactly where the stakes are highest. AI tools are good at routine and general topics: what a Roth IRA is, how compound interest works, the difference between a stock and a bond.

But financial life is full of rare, complicated, one-time decisions: exercising stock options, understanding the alternative minimum tax, making required, minimum 401(k) distributions, deciding on a Social Security strategy as a couple, drawing up a divorce settlement.

I made a similar argument three years ago about AI trading on Wall Street. Because market crashes are rare, there’s little data for AI to learn from, so it can be most confident exactly where it is least informed.

That worry hasn’t faded. Market watchers now caution that AI trading bots are creating fresh financial risks, and that same blind spot applies to your personal finances. Researchers call this uneven competence a “jagged frontier” – reliable with common cases but unreliable for unusual ones. And in finance, the unusual cases tend to be the expensive ones.

Third, you often can’t check the work. Financial advice is what economists call a “credence good,” like a mechanic’s diagnosis or a doctor’s recommendation. You often can’t tell whether the advice was good, sometimes for years. A mistaken tax move may not surface until an audit. A bad 401(k) drawdown plan may not bite until the stock market slumps. Without quick feedback, the wrong-but-confident answer never gets corrected.

This is why the Pearl numbers above are probably an undercount, since they capture only losses people noticed.

The quiet failure is the one to watch

Notice that the real harm in Suzy’s story isn’t a single dramatic mistake. It’s that a confident answer made Suzy feel no need to call a professional, so the call never happened.

The danger is not so much that you act on bad advice but that you never seek good advice. The smoother and more reassuring the tool, the easier it is to stay in do-it-yourself mode past the point when you need outside help.

Who’s most at risk? In a study of a large robo-advising platform in India, co-author Vishaal Baulkaran and I found that its users skew young, are predominantly male and tend to be smaller retail investors and professionals. And new account sign-ups rise during periods of high market volatility.

In other words, the people leaning hardest on automated advice match that 27% figure among those Gen Zers who lost more than $100 while using a chatbot for financial advice. They reach for it just when markets turn turbulent and a wrong move is most costly.

There’s also an incentive worth naming. In my new analysis, I argue that a tool that earns its revenue by holding your attention has a reason to sound confident and helpful: Confidence keeps you on the platform. The catch is that the user it retains that way is sometimes the one who should have been handed off to a human.

A system tuned to keep you engaged isn’t the same as one tuned to protect your financial future, and the two can point in different directions. The disruption is already underway, as wealth managers face what Bloomberg has called a chatbot reckoning. A single, new AI tax tool recently sent wealth management stocks sliding as investors bet that automated advice will eat into the business.

How to be smart about using AI

These findings don’t mean that people should avoid AI for money advice. Used well, these tools are a valuable and free financial educator.

This is also not to say that a financial adviser always has the right answers. As with finding any kind of specialist, it’s important to do research first and make sure they meet the kind of criteria laid out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Fee transparency is also crucial.

But if you do turn to AI, the skill is knowing where to draw the line.

Treat AI as a starting point, not a verdict. It’s excellent for learning concepts, drafting questions and getting oriented before a meeting. It can teach people the vocabulary to have a smarter conversation with an expert.

But watch out for the signals that you have left its comfort zone and entered the territory where AI is weakest and a confident answer is least trustworthy. The red flags are large dollar amounts, tax consequences, anything irreversible and anything that turns on the specifics of your situation rather than a general rule.

Estate questions, the drawdown of retirement savings, strategies for claiming Social Security benefits, business structure and major one-time transactions all belong in this category. Those are the decisions that call for bringing in a human, such as a certified financial planner.

And remember, confidence isn’t competence. When the answer about your money sounds most polished and most certain, that’s not a reason to relax. On the hardest questions, that smooth confidence is exactly the signal that you should pick up the phone and talk to an expert.

Pawan Jain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/when-managing-your-money-take-a-chatbots-confidence-with-a-grain-of-salt/

The DNA in a single cup of water can track wildlife, monitor pollution and survey pathogens in waterways and their surroundings, all at the same time.

DNA is contained in each cell of every plant, animal, fungus and microbe. It carries the genetic instructions needed for an organism’s survival, growth and function, and the DNA of each species is unique.

Organisms shed DNA into their environments. This environmental DNA, or eDNA, can come from cells shed from skin, spores and pollen blowing on the wind, or even just a cough or sneeze. It can provide huge amounts of information. Researchers can use it to assess biodiversity, monitor the spread of invasive species and detect pathogens.

Traditional monitoring methods, such as field observation or trapping, can be difficult, intrusive and time-consuming. Tracking an elusive species in the wild can mean hours or days without a sighting, perhaps in difficult terrain or remote locations. Trapping wildlife can be stressful for the animals and relies on expert knowledge to properly handle wildlife and position traps.

With eDNA, researchers can collect information about a species without ever needing to see or interact with it. Moreover, a cup of water, a few ounces of sand or even air sucked through a filter can hold enough information to determine what has been in the area, including people, wildlife and infectious pathogens.

Cracking the DNA code

Researchers sequence DNA fragments collected from sand, water or air to decode the order of the chemical building blocks that make up DNA. These sequences can be used to not only identify the species that the fragments of DNA came from, but also to narrow down the area where the organism originated.

Until recently, researchers typically used an approach called metabarcoding to sequence eDNA. This method creates many copies of specific, short genetic markers that researchers can use to identify particular species.

Although powerful, metabarcoding is selective by design. It finds only what it is designed to find – typically small but informative regions of DNA called barcodes – and ignores everything else. Because the DNA fragments are so short, it’s difficult to link these bits of information. A single barcode cannot cover all species in an area, and it cannot provide information about the genetic traits of species in the area.

My team at the Duffy Lab at the University of Florida took a different approach. Rather than focusing on one short region of DNA in a sample, we used a technique researchers call long-read shotgun metagenomic DNA sequencing, which reads each fragment of DNA in long, continuous sections. All the DNA and traits in one long fragment clearly come from the same individual. As a result, we can sequence all of the DNA from every species, from viruses to vertebrates and everything in between.

Compared to metabarcoding, shotgun sequencing is faster and requires less lab manipulation and processing. The “shotgun” portion of the name refers to how the DNA is fragmented, read in short stretches and then reassembled. This random, explosive fragmentation resembles the firing of a shotgun.

By comparing the results of shotgun DNA sequencing to large reference genome databases, researchers can figure out which species the DNA came from. This process provides an all-in-one DNA readout of everything in a single sample.

Rather than identifying the presence of particular target species, like the barcoding technique, shotgun sequencing is a broad snapshot of the ecological communities in a specific area. In a single assessment, researchers can detect microbes, fungi, plants and animals in as little as 24 hours.

River rich in species

To test our new method, my team and I collected water samples from the Avoca River in Ireland, starting from near its source in the Wicklow Mountains all the way down to where it enters the Irish Sea in Arklow town. We also collected sand samples from beaches near the river mouth.

These samples revealed a wealth of genetic information drifting through the river system.

The DNA we filtered from the water samples came from many organisms living in or near the water, including otters and oysters, foxes and fish, badgers and bacteria. Some of the species we detected were common and easily visible along the river (cows, sheep, dogs and humans), while some were more difficult to see (leatherback turtles and octopi). Some required a magnifying glass (biting midges, microscopic worms and viruses).

Researchers can also use environmental DNA to evaluate whether biodiversity restoration is working as expected. From our samples of the Avoca River, we detected DNA from organisms with major economic and ecological consequences: a fungus called Leptosphaeria maculans that affects crops and a fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis that has caused catastrophic declines in frog populations around the world. This is the first time researchers have detected B. dendrobatidis in Ireland.

Not only can eDNA show which species are present, it can also reveal their origins and help researchers understand how they migrate and disperse. For example, the blue mussel eDNA we recovered near the mouth of the Avoca River most closely matches the DNA of mussels found off the coast of Wales (84%) and France (16%).

Pollution mitigation

Human impact on the river was clearly reflected in the eDNA we collected.

The samples we collected upstream in a sparsely populated area had very little human DNA. By contrast, the samples we took near the town of Arklow in 2022 contained high levels of human DNA, consistent with untreated wastewater entering the river at that time.

Additionally, we found DNA from human-associated pathogens in river water and beach sand. These included bacteria such as streptococcus, parasites such as entamoeba, and sexually transmitted pathogens such as chlamydia, herpes and gonorrhea.

When we returned to collect samples in 2024, the human DNA signal had practically disappeared. This coincided with the construction of pipework leading to the new Arklow Wastewater Treatment Plant, diverting human waste from the river.

The ability to identify wildlife, human activity and pathogens all from one water sample highlights the potential for a wide-ranging One Health approach to environmental health surveillance. In principle, it is possible to use eDNA to simultaneously identify pollution sources and emerging pathogens, track invasive species and monitor environmental reservoirs of disease, nearly in real time.

All of nature in a nutshell

Environmental DNA offers a new form of ecosystem monitoring. Rather than carrying out environmental surveillance through the separate lenses of zoology, botany, microbiology and epidemiology, eDNA acts as a continuous genomic observatory.

This “all-in-one” approach to ecosystem monitoring is becoming ever easier as DNA sequencing costs continue to fall, technology advances allow longer DNA fragments to be sequenced, and computational power improves.

A single cup of water can unlock the incredible secrets flowing beneath the surface of the river. Biodiversity in and around the water, the effects of pollution and recovery, and the beautiful complexities of entire ecosystems are just waiting to be revealed.

Jenny Whilde does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/fishing-for-dna-how-a-cup-of-river-water-can-reveal-secrets-about-human-health-pollution-and-biodiversity/

About 1 in 5 women will experience depression and anxiety during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth. If untreated, a mother who has these conditions has a higher risk of birth complications, overall poorer health, impaired bonding and nurturing of her infant, and a higher risk of death by suicide.

But a new treatment moving through the Food and Drug Administration clinical trials process may be key to treating, or even curing, depression and anxiety in postpartum people. It is a newly named psychedelic, luvesilocin. It functions like psilocin, the psychoactive chemical within psilocybin mushrooms. It may be able to positively affect the unique hormonal shifts, brain changes and disconnection that can lead to these conditions like no existing treatments.

In prior studies of psilocybin, researchers have observed rapid improvement in symptoms – and sometimes a cure after a single dose – of conditions such as major depression and PTSD. In a recent FDA Phase 2 study of luvesilocin, we found similar improvements in postpartum depression.

I was the site investigator for the University of Colorado, one of 35 participating sites across the U.S. The study enrolled 84 postpartum women who were within a year of giving birth and ended in May 2025.

I have spent my career as a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist contemplating how the prenatal experience shapes lifetime health. I have also followed the psychedelic data closely. I’ve been eager to find evidence-based pregnancy and postpartum applications of psychedelics, given these drugs’ promise in treating other mental health conditions.

Depression and anxiety’s impact on moms and babies

One drug that has been studied and enhanced our understanding of the way psychedelics work is MDMA, which is commonly known as ecstasy and causes a euphoric high.

According to peer-reviewed research published by Bessel van der Kolk in 2024, MDMA can lead to improvements in individuals being able to identify, describe and feel their feelings. Other improvements resulting from MDMA assisted therapy include more self-compassion and a broader desire and capacity for connection with others.

Connection, especially the earliest one between a mother and infant, plays one of the most significant roles in providing the foundation for humans to grow and flourish. Postpartum depression is often defined by disconnection and impaired bonding.

Children born to mothers with untreated depression and anxiety have a higher risk of falling behind on early developmental milestones. They may also have behavioral concerns, such as hyperactivity or ADHD, and are more likely to withdraw from social activities. They tend to report somatic complaints, such as body aches and pains in early childhood.

Children of mothers who had depression or anxiety during pregnancy are also at risk of these same conditions as they enter their teenage years. They have nearly twice the risk of these conditions compared to teenagers whose mothers did not have untreated depression and anxiety. This pattern means depression and anxiety can become a multigenerational cycle. But this cycle can be interrupted with adequate treatment and support.

Increased levels of the hormone oxytocin were found by researchers in the blood of depression study participants who were given MDMA, LSD and mescaline, which are all psychedelic drugs. The increase in oxytocin led to more feelings of trust, empathy and connection.

Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the part of the brain called the hypothalamus and is released from the pituitary gland into the bloodstream. It plays a critical role in birth and infant feeding. It also aids in the wiring and formation of human social brains.

Oxytocin is important in maternal bonding with an infant. Conversely, early childhood stressors, such as a mother suffering from mental illness, reduces oxytocin levels in children. This may be a contributor to adverse mental and physical health outcomes later in life.

In depression studies that involved men, psilocybin did not have as great of an impact as other psychedelic medications on oxytocin production. But there is reason to believe that oxytocin may play a greater role in postpartum patients because it’s levels are higher during birth and lactation than in other phases of life.

FDA study of psilocybin-like medication

In February 2026, the FDA granted luvesilocin breakthrough therapy status. This status is used to speed up the development of promising new medications for serious or life-threatening conditions. The drug received this status because our research found meaningful and rapid reductions in depression scores in those who received the treatment.

In the Phase 2 study, 77% of postpartum women who received a psychedelic dose, 30mg of luvesilocin, had significant improvement in their postpartum depression. Overall, 71% had no symptoms of postpartum depression seven days after the psychedelic session.

The purpose of an FDA Phase 2 study is to determine the effectiveness of an experimental medication on a particular disease or condition. In this case, the study is evaluating luvesilocin’s effect on postpartum depression scores and symptoms. In the group that received the placebo, a microdose of the drug, more than half experienced an improvement in their symptoms, but most still had some symptoms after seven days.

These are much higher response and remission rates than trials of the existing medications used for postpartum depression treatment. Existing treatments include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, known as SSRIs, and a medication called zuranolone. The latter is the only medication to have specific FDA approval for postpartum depression.

Access to psychedelic treatments

In 2023, the Colorado legislature passed the Natural Medicine Health Act. It offers a legal pathway for people to receive natural psychedelics, such as psilocybin mushrooms, in therapeutic settings. The first natural medicine healing centers opened in early 2026. Some locations advertise treatments for everything from postpartum depression to birth trauma.

Oregon has a similar state-regulated program. Numerous other states have different pathways toward legal psychedelic-assisted therapies and decriminalization of psilocybin-assisted therapy. Nationally, there was a recent federal executive order to accelerate action on treating serious mental illnesses. The order included mention of the use of psychedelic therapies.

Looking forward

By the end of 2026, Phase 3 of the luvesilocin trial for postpartum depression is slated to begin. Phase 3 trials are conducted to confirm the effectiveness and further evaluate the overall risks and benefits of a new medication. Each phase is an important regulatory step before a medication can be approved and available in clinical settings.

In Phase 3, 200 participants with postpartum depression will be recruited across participating sites. While I’m optimistic about the potential of this research, I believe its value can be established only through rigorous blinded clinical trials, objective data analysis, and conclusions and approval that are fully supported by the evidence.

Phase 3 will also include participants who are still breastfeeding. A study of luvesilocin during lactation in healthy volunteers demonstrated very low levels passed from the mother into breast milk. Thus, this medication would be considered safe for breastfeeding.

Luvesilocin may become a game-changing postpartum depression treatment medication in just a couple more years. On a much larger scale, psychedelic medicine could elevate our collective well-being and happiness, replacing systemic cycles of depression, anxiety, trauma and isolation with connectedness and compassion. These drugs could literally rewire our approach to trauma, addiction and how we relate to one another.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Camille Hoffman was a site co-investigator for the Reunion Neuroscience study of luvesilocin for postpartum depression. She has also done talks and webinars on postpartum depression for the company who makes the medication zuranolone, Sage/Biogen. Dr. Hoffman’s research on choline and fetal brain development is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/nearly-20-of-new-moms-have-anxiety-or-depression-but-a-promising-psychedelic-treatment-is-on-the-horizon/

A severe winter snow drought has left snowpack levels far below normal across the American West in 2026. Without a slow-melting blanket of snow to keep the soil and forests moist, alpine vegetation is drying into a tinderbox earlier than normal and ramping up the fire risk.

The historic dryness means electric utilities are facing a dilemma: how to deliver power through dry, windy regions without accidentally starting a catastrophic fire.

To cope, many utilities are turning to a controversial method pioneered in California: the public safety power shut-off – better known as a preemptive blackout. Imagine your power provider deliberately cutting electricity to your entire neighborhood for hours to days, not because a storm hit or a wire broke, but because the weather forecast is hot, dry and windy. This preventive darkness is fast becoming the new normal for millions of residents in the West.

As an energy systems researcher living in the West, I study how our electric grid interacts with these escalating climate risks. I believe utilities have better options that boost fire safety quickly while avoiding the drastic move of shutting off the power or investing in expensive alternatives, such as underground power lines or microgrids.

Billion-dollar spark: Why the West is going dark

To understand why a utility would willingly turn off its own product, you have to look at how the Western grid was built.

Most rural power lines consist of bare, uninsulated aluminum wires strung across thousands of miles of wooden poles, often through rugged forests. If those wires accidentally touch one another or trees or the ground, they can short-circuit, sending off sparks that can start fires.

This system, once considered the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century, has been responsible for some of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history.

In California, electricity infrastructure has ignited eight of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires. The legal and financial fallout can be devastating. In 2019, Pacific Gas & Electric was forced into bankruptcy due to an estimated US$30 billion in wildfire liabilities stemming from equipment-caused blazes, including the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Because utilities are regulated monopolies, they can pass these massive liability costs to their customers over time.

California utilities have been using preemptive outages for several years to avoid causing more fires on hot, dry, windy days. Today, that strategy has spread beyond the state. According to the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, the independent grid reliability authority for the West, 24 western power entities had used preemptive shut-offs by 2026.

Colorado’s Xcel Energy implemented its first major preemptive blackout in 2025. Some of these outages have left communities without power for up to five days.

Fortunately, keeping communities safe does not have to mean leaving them in the dark. There are ways utilities can modernize electric system infrastructure quickly that lower the fire risk and keep the power flowing.

Solution 1: Covered conductors

The quickest, most cost-effective physical fix is to use covered conductors. Think of the electrical cords in your house. If you touched the bare copper wire inside, it would spark. But you don’t get shocked by household cords because they are wrapped in plastic insulation.

Utilities like Southern California Edison are actively wrapping their high-risk mountain wires in heavy, weather-resistant polymer insulation. By the end of 2025, SCE had installed over 700 circuit miles (1,126 kilometers) of this insulated “tree wire” in high-fire districts over the span of about a year and committed to modify an additional 1,481 miles (2,383 kilometers) by 2028.

If a severe windstorm blows a heavy pine branch directly onto an insulated line, it simply rests against the wire without sparking. It is a highly effective middle-ground fix that’s significantly less expensive than burying transmission lines in mountain forests, and it can be deployed rapidly across thousands of miles.

2. ‘Fast-trip’ settings and topology optimization

Another option is to change how the electricity behaves inside the power line using automated technology.

Traditionally, if a tree branch touched a power line, the system would try to push electricity through the line anyway, causing repeated sparking. Today, utilities are deploying “fast-trip” settings on their circuit breakers.

Think of these like the ultra-sensitive circuit breakers in your home. The microsecond a branch bumps an outdoor line, these smart systems detect the disruption and cut the power to that specific wire before a spark can even form. This allows operators to isolate a single high-risk area rather than shutting down power to an entire county.

Topology optimization is another promising operations technique. It acts like Google Maps for the electric grid. Instead of shutting power down when one line is facing high risks, advanced software attempts to safely route electricity around the danger zone using neighboring, lower-risk lines.

By dynamically changing the pathway of the power, utilities can drastically reduce the electrical load and heat on vulnerable lines without cutting power.

Solution 3: AI and real-time smart sensors

Advanced computer software and artificial intelligence are also helping utilities act with surgical precision.

In the past, if a utility feared a windstorm could spark a fire, it had to shut off power to a large region because it lacked localized data. Today, utilities are deploying smart sensors called dynamic line rating that are installed directly onto power lines. These sensors act like digital stethoscopes, measuring real-time wire temperature, wind speed and line sag.

When combined with panoramic, AI-powered camera networks, the grid gains eyes. Xcel Energy in Colorado has deployed 81 of these cameras. Instead of executing a sweeping blackout, operators can use these cameras and automated smart switches to isolate the high-risk span in a windy canyon while keeping the lights safely on for the surrounding town.

The era of risk-aware grid design

The future of Western energy relies on moving away from static, 20th-century safety manuals and toward a practice called risk-aware dispatching.

In simple terms, this means treating the power grid like a living, breathing weather map. On a calm day, electricity is routed along the cheapest path. But when fire conditions spike, AI algorithms will automatically recalculate the region’s electricity flow, diverting power away from fragile forest lines and routing it through safer plains or underground urban corridors.

The era of cheap, unmonitored overhead power lines is over. To adapt to a changing climate, I believe the grid must evolve from a passive network of copper, aluminum and wood into a smart, dynamic machine. By combining insulated wires, targeted undergrounding of power lines, and real-time sensor data, utilities can avoid sparking devastating fires without resorting to frequent blackouts.

Jasmine Garland receives funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Energy.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/electric-companies-dont-need-to-black-out-customers-to-prevent-wildfires-here-are-3-relatively-fast-affordable-solutions/

Reading allows children to live in a vibrant world, surrounded by fairies, elves and talking animals, transporting them to places where the impossible becomes real. But reading for pleasure also helps children learn more effectively and broadens how they view, interpret and interact with the world. It gives them a form of expression that fuels their imagination and empathy for themselves and others.

But the percentage of children who read for fun is declining.

Just 37% of 9-year-olds and 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2025, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By middle school, just 1 in 7 kids say they read for pleasure each day.

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has also tracked declines in kids and teens who read for fun, finding that in 2023, 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun each day, down from 27% who said they did so in 2012.

Slightly younger kids tend to read for pleasure a bit more. Approximately 39% of 9-year-olds said they read for fun in 2022, down from 53% of 9-year-olds who said they did so in 2012, according to the Department of Education.

This trend is showing up alongside another concern: stagnant reading scores, especially among teenagers. It’s tempting to treat those as separate problems. But as scholars of literacy, we don’t think they are.

Reading for fun isn’t just about fun

Outside of schoolwork, a child can read anywhere from as few as 100,000 words per year to 10 million or more for the most voracious readers.

This gap can help explain why some children’s vocabularies grow so much faster than others.

Kids absorb words from context, over and over, across thousands of pages. One of us, for example, has a son named Andrew, who, at the age of 2, once absorbed and correctly used the word “viaduct,” without anyone defining it for him, after he encountered it in a book about trains.

Older kids and teenagers who describe themselves as committed readers tend to have families that read to them since they were young, kept books around as their interests changed and made reading together a genuine priority.

A well-selected book, in particular, has the ability to enhance a child’s reading pleasure and reading ability, allowing them to see and feel the world with fresh insight.

Research shows a connection between teenagers who read for pleasure as young children: They tend to score higher on cognitive tests that measure verbal learning, memory and speech development.

Reading for pleasure can also help build vocabulary and reading fluency while enhancing focus.

Reading to develop empathy

There are other benefits to reading that won’t show up on a reading assessment.

We believe that reading is empathy operating in its simplest form: imagining your way into someone else’s experience and understanding the ripple effects of their actions.

Reading for pleasure, especially the kind that starts on a parent’s or caregiver’s lap, is one of the earliest and most reliable places kids get repeated practice doing that complex work.

Reading with a caregiver often progresses into children reading on their own, whether with a flashlight in bed or in the middle of the day on the couch.

When children become immersed in a book series on their own, in particular, it can help them develop connections with characters they grow to know, love or scorn. They inhabit a character who isn’t them. They sit with an idea long enough to understand why someone acts the way they do.

Feeling emotionally invested in a character’s decisions can also influence how young readers decide how to engage with others and treat people with civility and kindness in real life.

This skill doesn’t arrive automatically with age. It is built through practice, and recreational reading in childhood is the main training ground for it.

Implications for school and home

Within the past 10 years, many schools have invested in evidence-based reading instruction, with a renewed emphasis in phonics instruction to improve students’ reading proficiency.

This shift has been an important and necessary step in helping students develop the foundational skills they need to become successful readers. At the same time, some classrooms have had fewer opportunities for independent reading and reading simply for enjoyment.

In 2024, literacy researcher Chase Young recalled asking a second grader whether a classroom reading activity had made him a better reader. The child responded, “No, because it’s fun.”

Already, that young student senses that fun and learning have been filed into separate categories at school. This highlights the real cost of letting effective instruction and engaging instruction drift apart, as though a teacher must choose between them.

This doesn’t mean abandoning structured reading instruction, which matters enormously for students who are learning to decode written language by connecting sounds and symbols. It means reading a book that a child actually chose, rereading an old favorite, and allotting time for a teacher to read aloud purely because it brings joy to the class.

This effort extends outside of a classroom. When children live in homes where they see books around, where their parents and siblings read together, and where their caregivers also read for fun, they are likely to see reading as enjoyable and not an item on a to-do list.

People who enjoyed reading as children are more likely to read books every day as an adult.

We each read to our children from when they were young and watched as they grew and developed their own love of books, ranging from the “Fantastic Four” comic series to the “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games” series.

Another one of us, Dee, has a daughter named Addie who remains an avid reader in her early 20s. She is currently reading the “Court of Thorns and Roses” fantasy series, among others.

And Andrew, the 2-year-old who once learned the word “viaduct” from a book, is still an avid reader. At 18, his shelves are now filled with manga and comic books, including a special section for “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.” His choice of genre and formats has evolved over the years, but his joy of getting lost in a story has not.

That’s the version of reading we’d like more kids to fall in love with – before school, however well meaning, might convince them that fun and learning have to live in different places.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/reading-for-pleasure-builds-empathy-in-children-but-fewer-kids-are-picking-up-books-just-for-the-fun-of-it/

Shareholder activists are investors who leverage their ownership in a company to push for change.

When those activists target a company, they usually want managers to change strategy, cut costs, improve performance or address issues such as climate change and worker rights. If managers resist, activists may seek board seats, call for leadership changes or criticize the company.

When one company is under fire, its competitors may fear that they’re next. Their managers may respond by cutting costs, changing strategies or making public promises even before an activist investor shows up at their door.

In other words, shareholder activism can create what our team of business school professors calls “collateral impact”: a domino effect in which pressure on one company changes what its competitors are doing.

Larger pattern

Consider what happened after a small activist investor, which owned only a 0.02% stake in Exxon Mobil, successfully pushed the company in 2021 to take its climate commitments more seriously. Many of its oil industry rivals, including Chevron, set more ambitious goals for lowering their carbon emissions soon after.

Something similar happened in tech.

In 2022, activist investor Altimeter Capital targeted Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, claiming it was hiring too many employees and investing too heavily in the metaverse, an immersive online technology. Meta responded by cutting thousands of jobs and investing less in the metaverse.

Shortly after, Amazon announced its own big round of cost-cutting and layoffs – although no investor activists had targeted it on similar issues.

While these moves may appear to be separate decisions made by some of the biggest publicly traded corporations in response to different issues, our study in the Journal of Business Research, published in May 2026, suggests they are part of a larger pattern. We found that when one company changes course in response to activist pressure, its competitors frequently follow suit – even when activists have not targeted them directly.

Shareholder activists

Activist investors use an array of tactics.

They may meet privately with executives, submit proposals for a vote, publish open letters or try to replace board members. This pressure can damage a company’s reputation, restrict its decision-making freedom, restrain executive pay or even threaten senior leaders’ jobs.

Financially motivated activists may push a company to cut costs, sell parts of its business, return more money to shareholders or avoid risky investments.

Socially motivated activists primarily call for stronger action on climate change or other environmental issues, the protection of workers’ rights or other similar demands.

When one company makes changes after an activist campaign, competitors might try to avoid becoming the next target by cutting spending, slowing expansion or changing their social and environmental actions, what’s known as corporate social responsibility, or CSR. Such moves might signal to investors that the company is well governed.

Managers may make these changes because they worry about their jobs or the company’s reputation if activist investors turn their attention to them.

Collateral impact

To see whether an activist campaign against one company could also change what its competitors do, we followed companies in the S&P 1500, a group of large, publicly traded U.S. businesses, from 2006 to 2013.

We followed a sample of 1,435 U.S. companies over multiple years, creating 16,334 company-year records. Each record represents one company in one year. Of these companies, 215 received at least one type of shareholder proposal during those years.

We paid close attention to cases in which activist investors targeted a company and the company tried to meet those demands. Then we tracked close competitors to see whether they made similar changes.

We found that competitors do often respond, but not always in the same way.

When financial activists pushed one company toward greater financial discipline to boost short-term returns, competing companies tended to launch fewer products and announce fewer market expansions. They also scaled back their corporate social responsibility efforts.

We think one explanation is that such campaigns clearly warn managers across the industry: focus on the bottom line, or you may be targeted next. Managers may worry that ambitious growth plans or CSR efforts will be portrayed as expensive, risky or wasteful, so they cut them back before facing direct pressure themselves.

Interestingly, when activists pressured one company on social or environmental issues, such as climate change or labor rights, its competitors generally reacted differently. They still became more cautious about growth, since aggressive expansion could be seen as diverting resources away from social and environmental commitments, but they increased their CSR efforts instead.

Social and environmental campaigns send a different warning: Protect your company’s reputation and respond to public expectations, or you may become the next target.

In short, different kinds of shareholder activist campaigns can move competitors in opposite directions.

Closer rivalry

The collateral impact was strongest when the targeted company was a close rival. But greater rivalry did not affect every decision in the same way.

Its clearest effect was to constrain initiatives, such as launching new products or entering new markets. These decisions are often costly and uncertain. The closer the competitor that faced activist pressure and pulled back from growth, the more managers appeared to take the warning seriously and were likely to reduce their own growth plans.

Closer rivalry, however, did not make companies more likely to change their corporate social responsibility efforts. One reason may be that those decisions are shaped less by rivalry and more by broader concerns about legitimacy, reputation and public expectations.

Stock ownership patterns also played a role.

Companies with more long-term institutional investors were less likely to make quick cuts to growth after financial activism changed a rival’s behavior. We believe that’s because patient investors may give managers more freedom to continue long-term plans.

We also found that company reputation mattered. Well-known companies seemed more sensitive when activists targeted one of their rivals and reacted most strongly.

Following a rival’s brush with financial activism, more reputable businesses were more likely to reduce their CSR initiatives. However, they were more likely to increase their CSR efforts if their rival was targeted by socially motivated activism campaigns.

We think that because reputable companies face greater scrutiny, they may be more sensitive to activism against a rival.

Fear of being targeted

Although our findings suggest that shareholder activists can influence many companies with a successful campaign that took aim at just one corporation, those activists also need to be wary of unintended consequences.

A financially motivated campaign may push a targeted company’s rivals to cut not only growth but also their corporate social responsibility efforts. A socially motivated campaign may have a different effect. It may encourage the company’s rivals to respect labor rights or do more on issues such as worker rights, community support or the environment, but also make that targeted company’s rivals more cautious about growth.

The lesson here for CEOs and managers is not to change course simply because they fear becoming the next target of shareholder activists. Instead, they can talk more openly with their shareholders, understand the concerns that some of them may express, and explain their short- and long-term strategies before outside pressure drives a rushed response.

In business, the fear of being targeted next may be enough to change a company’s behavior before activists ever take aim at it.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/when-shareholder-activists-attack-a-company-its-rivals-may-feel-the-heat-too-and-change-their-ways/

A number of recent high-profile congressional primaries in the Democratic Party have resulted in the nomination of unexpected candidates. Many of these winning candidates have unseated entrenched incumbents, as 29-year-old Colorado attorney Melat Kiros did to U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, who has been serving in the House for three decades.

Some of these candidates are explicitly running under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America, known as the “DSA,” a far-left organization known for standard-bearers such as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. New York City’s charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani, won his election as a DSA member in 2025 and has since marshaled political support for fellow progressives running for other offices in the city he runs.

Mamdani loaned his star power to three New York progressives, two of them DSA members, in an ad featuring promises to “abolish ICE” and “end corporate greed.” All three went on win their congressional primaries in June 2026.

There is no doubt that the DSA is having a moment within the Democratic Party. And since their candidates in the midterm races are all but guaranteed to win their safely Democratic districts, I believe their influence is likely to be a major factor on Capitol Hill in the next Congress.

That’s especially the case if the Democrats win the House with a narrow margin. The cooperation and votes of a handful of DSA members could be crucial to Democrats’ ability to act effectively as a majority – or not.

That’s because the DSA’s far-left positions on issues such as healthcare in the form of Medicare for All, defunding the police and taxing the ultrawealthy are likely to divide the Democrats, many of whom are more moderate and/or represent conservative districts.

But as a political scientist who studies the many methods politicians have available to represent their constituents, I’m seeing a story that’s more complex than many inside or outside the Democratic Party convey.

Affiliation with the DSA, or even just a far-left ideology, explains only some of the insurgent wins seen in the primaries. In reality, the Democrats’ reckoning is more complicated.

Who is – and isn’t – a democratic socialist?

Ascertaining the influence of the DSA in the Democratic Party, or in American politics as a whole, means understanding its membership among both elites and its voters.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani are all well known, charismatic and proficient fundraisers on the left, as is Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a second DSA member of the House. And come January 2027, when a new Congress is seated, at least three more – the aforementioned Kiros of Colorado, along with Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who won primaries in two heavily Democratic seats in New York in June – will almost certainly be added to their ranks. These figures have all won their nomination contests within the Democratic Party but describe themselves as, and received official endorsements from, the DSA.

Meanwhile, the number of voters who officially affiliate as dues-paying members of the DSA is also on the upswing, nearly doubling since Mamdani began his viral mayoral campaign in 2025. Like their candidates, these voters largely participate in Democratic primaries rather than hold their own third-party contests.

But the DSA’s total official membership remains at around 100,000: formidable, but a minuscule percentage of the population compared to the two major parties. And even among this year’s crop of insurgent Democratic candidates, most do not affiliate with the DSA, including a number of ideological progressives.

For example, Graham Platner, the Democrats’ embattled U.S. Senate nominee in Maine, is an economic progressive who boasts an early endorsement from Sanders. But in an interview late last year, Platner declined to be identified as a democratic socialist, saying, “It’s not my politics.”

Brad Lander, New York City’s former comptroller and city councilman who recently won the Democratic primary against incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, is also widely recognized as a progressive – and was backed by Mamdani – but does not currently affiliate with the DSA.

Not all insurgent candidates are alike

Even among this cycle’s insurgent progressives, political ideology is not the only differentiating element that seems to matter to Democratic primary voters.

And the democratic socialists’ far-right 2010s counterpart, the tea party, can help shed light on these nonideological factors.

The tea party emerged during Barack Obama’s presidency as a far-right ideological movement with an ostensible focus on fiscal conservatism. And in my own research with Stella Rouse and Kristen Essel, we found that tea party-affiliated state legislators were more ideologically conservative in their voting records.

These legislators were also more likely to be white, to have served in the military and to be religiously observant. Other research has identified the tea party movement driven just as much by Obama-era racial backlash as it was by the movement’s stated fiscal concerns.

Most importantly, we found that tea party-affiliated lawmakers in state legislatures shared a number of anti-establishment tendencies and characteristics. They were less likely to have held previous elected office, to have sought party leadership positions or to have worked with the party before holding office.

Many of these same differentiating elements, such as racial and ethnic identity or a distaste for the established way of conducting politics, are clearly factors among insurgent Democrats this cycle, DSA or not.

Race, age, Israel and Palestine

Many, for example, would add to the ranks of nonwhite members of Congress if elected in November; and nearly all have either questioned or explicitly dismissed the idea of retaining Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries – both New York Democrats – as the party’s congressional leaders.

Age is a related emerging factor in Democratic primaries, which are producing many young nominees.

Kiros, Chevalier and Valdez are 29, 32 and 36, respectively. In the Democratic primary, Platner, 41, beat back Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, who is 78.

And in New York’s 12th District, two comparatively young Democrats, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, were the top two vote-getters in the race to succeed U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, 79, who finally relented to calls for his retirement due to his advanced age. Lasher won the primary and is nearly assured of a win in the heavily Democratic district.

In still other cases, insurgent candidates – DSA or not – have adopted positions on specific issues that mark them as a new generation of Democrats. Most prominent, and controversial, among these is their backlash against Israel, which has propelled an increasing number of pro-Palestine candidates to nomination, often over long-serving incumbents.

For example, the recently defeated Goldman in New York had continued to stake out pro-Israel positions, even as the Democratic Party has increasingly soured on that nation’s actions in Gaza. Goldman’s victorious opponent, Lander, made these positions a relentless focus of his campaign.

What does the DSA mean for Democrats?

It is all but guaranteed that next year’s Congress will feature more democratic socialists than this one. But it is also clear that not all of this cycle’s insurgent Democrats share that label, and that they differ from longer-serving Democrats in more ways than one.

In our research, we found that the tea party was best understood as a “factional group” rather than a separate party, and that its goal was to transform the Republican Party “in ways that go beyond ideology.” Given the U.S.’s entrenched two-party system, this may be the most accurate way to understand the new roster of insurgent Democrats, whether they identify as democratic socialists or not.

Regardless of these candidates’ motivations or DSA affiliations, the Democratic Party will need to reckon with their divergent ways of representing their constituents, particularly if the party retakes one or both chambers of Congress next year. If the factionalism tearing through the current Republican majority is any indication, the Democrats should probably prepare for some new and sharper divisions in their own ranks.

Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/democratic-socialists-arent-the-only-young-progressive-democrats-dividing-the-party/