Before Dexter Holland sold more than 45 million records as frontman of The Offspring, he was a student at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences in 1988, a master’s degree in molecular biology in 1990 and a PhD in molecular biology in 2017.

Now, he’s returning to his alma mater to deliver the commencement address at both USC Dornsife ceremonies on May 15 at USC’s Alumni Park on the University Park Campus, speaking to about 2,000 graduates.

“Dexter Holland earned his PhD in molecular biology and also fronts one of the defining bands of the last 30 years,” said USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock. “That combination isn’t a contradiction. It exemplifies how the liberal arts develop the intellectual range to go deep in a field as well as the confidence to build something entirely your own outside of it. I’m thrilled he’s returning to make that case in person.”

From USC lab to punk stardom

Growing up in Garden Grove, Calif., Bryan Holland planned to be a physician. His affinity for academics earned him the nickname “Poindexter,” which later influenced his stage name.

After graduating as his high school valedictorian in 1984, he enrolled at USC Dornsife. That same year, he and friends formed the punk garage band Manic Subsidal, despite not yet knowing how to play instruments.

As Holland continued his studies, the group evolved and changed its name to The Offspring. In 1994, while working on his PhD, the band broke through with the album Smash. The refrain “keep ’em separated” from the hit song “Come Out and Play,” was inspired by Holland’s experience cooling Erlenmeyer flasks of hot liquid in a USC lab.

The Offspring went on to become one of the best-selling punk rock bands of all time, releasing 11 studio albums and numerous chart-topping songs including “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” and “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid.” Holland will be speaking at commencement between tour dates for the band’s latest album, Supercharged.

Holland’s other ventures include the successful hot sauce company Gringo Bandito and regularly competing on the Ironman circuit.

In 2004, Holland completed a solo flight around the world in his Cessna Citation, dodging a volcano eruption in Iceland and a swarm of locusts in Egypt. And in 2017, he returned to the USC Dornsife campus to finish the PhD his music career had interrupted. His thesis focused on microRNA in HIV genomes and was published in the journal PLOS One.

About USC Dornsife’s 2026 commencement ceremonies

The deadline for students to register for the USC Dornsife commencement ceremonies is April 6.

More information about the USC Dornsife commencement ceremonies can be found at dornsife.usc.edu/commencement/.

Editor’s Note: Susan Bell contributed to this story.

Matthew Pratt began his university studies eyeing a career in medicine. But an undergraduate stint in an organic chemistry lab changed that plan, setting him on a course that has since earned him a place among Nobel laureates, astronauts, inventors and innovators. The professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has been named a 2025 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Pratt arrived at the University of Arizona in 1995 to study math and biochemistry, with medical school as his long-term academic goal. That changed when the young undergraduate stepped into Professor Robin Polt’s organic chemistry lab.

“I was hooked by the logic of chemical transformations and the ability to make molecules with my own hands,” Pratt says. “That ability to forge molecules with precision, from drug-like compounds to full proteins, and using them to answer questions in biology is what gets me excited about what my lab is doing now.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and mathematics and studying glycosylation reactions — the bonding of carbohydrate molecules to proteins — under Polt’s guidance, he moved on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in chemistry in 2004 with future Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi. Pratt then completed an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rockefeller University in Professor Tom Muir’s lab before joining USC Dornsife’s Department of Chemistry in 2009.

Now in his 16th year at the College, Pratt studies the molecular and physiological effects of chemical alterations of proteins while mentoring a new generation of postdocs and PhD students, perhaps some destined for prestigious scientific honors of their own.

“Helping students and postdocs mature as scientists, promoting them, and getting to watch them go off and do amazing things is my favorite part of this job,” Pratt says.

“AAAS Fellows have a responsibility to be examples of strong science and mentorship,” he adds. “I’ve strived to do both of these things throughout my career, but the visibility of the honor makes it all the more important.”

Pratt says becoming a fellow also provides an important opportunity to contribute to the broader scientific community. “Our profession faces challenges from a murky grant-funding landscape to reduced trust in science and scientific leaders. Our community needs to come together to address those issues, and I’m excited to be a part of that effort.”

Use of ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models, or LLMs — what most people call “AI” — has surged since ChatGPT debuted publicly in 2022. Hundreds of millions of people now use these tools weekly, according to recent estimates.

Users might assume these tools are just helping them organize their thoughts, but recent research suggests they may be doing something more subtle and more powerful — influencing how we all think, speak and even understand the world.

In a recent opinion piece, researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, investigated how artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT could be nudging people toward similar ways of communicating and reasoning — a process researchers call “cultural homogenization.”

“AI isn’t just reflecting culture anymore,” said lead author Yalda Daryani, a PhD student in social psychology at USC Dornsife. “It’s actively shaping it. It’s deciding what sounds polite, what sounds clear, even what counts as a good answer.”

So the researchers set out to understand how large language models like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini might influence human culture on a global scale, and how policies could address the broader effects these LLMs might have.

A pattern emerges with AI use

The researchers — under the guidance of Morteza Dehghani, professor of psychology and computer science at USC Dornsife and head of the Morality and Language Lab — reviewed a wide range of recent studies across psychology, computer science and linguistics to understand how LLMs perform across different cultures and how people respond when using AI in real-world tasks such as writing or decision-making.

They found a consistent pattern: AI systems tend to reflect and reinforce a narrow slice of human experience.

A central finding of the research is that these systems often align with what the researchers describe as “WHELM” perspectives — Western, high-income, educated, liberal and male. In other words, they reflect the values and communication styles most common in English-language online data.

“When you ask AI for advice, you’re not getting a neutral answer,” Daryani said. “You’re getting the perspective of a very specific group of people, even if it doesn’t say that explicitly.”

This pattern appears in how AI handles moral questions. The research showed that AI systems tend to favor values such as individual freedom and fairness, while placing less emphasis on ideas like tradition, authority and community, which are more central in many non-Western cultures.

AI’s impact extends to subtle social interactions

The influence goes beyond values. It also affects how people communicate.

“When millions of people use AI to draft messages, those differences start to disappear,” Daryani said. “Over time, we may all start sounding very alike.”

Even when users ask questions in other languages, the models often return examples tied to American or European culture — such as U.S. holidays or English-language films — while offering less detailed or more stereotypical descriptions of non-Western traditions.

Dehghani says this pattern creates a kind of feedback loop. “The more we rely on these systems, the more their outputs become part of our shared knowledge, and then that same material gets used to train the next generation of AI. So the cycle reinforces itself.”

That loop, the researchers warn, could gradually narrow the range of ideas, traditions and communication styles that people are exposed to and pass on over time.

Why does that matter? Because cultural diversity isn’t just about language or customs, the researchers say. It shapes how people think, solve problems and make decisions. A wide range of perspectives can lead to better solutions and more creative ideas. If that diversity shrinks, the researchers argue, society could lose important ways of understanding the world.

How to build a better AI

Of note, the team does not suggest that AI is inherently harmful. LLMs can make writing easier, improve access to information and help people communicate more clearly. The concern, the researchers say, is what happens when a small number of systems begin to influence billions of interactions every day.

“Once the system is trained on a narrow set of data, it’s very hard to undo that,” Daryani said.

To address the issue, the team outlines a three-part approach based on their study findings, beginning with the data used to train models. Most AI systems learn from English-language content drawn heavily from Western sources. The researchers say developers should include more material from different languages, regions and cultural traditions to capture cultural knowledge that might otherwise be systematically underrepresented.

During later training stages aimed at refining and evaluating LLMs, the researchers suggest incorporating culturally diverse examples as well as consulting experts such as psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and policymakers working in collaboration with diverse cultural communities to ensure responses reflect different social norms and values.

They then recommend changing how the training results are judged. Tech companies do employ workers from a variety of countries during this step,but  those workers are trained to apply standardized Western evaluation criteria. Instead, reviewers should evaluate answers based on multiple standards.

Taken together, these changes could help AI systems recognize that there is no one “correct” way to communicate or reason, preserving a broader range of human perspectives as the technology continues to evolve.

For Daryani, the stakes are clear: “Languages, traditions, ways of thinking — once they disappear, we can’t get them back. The question isn’t whether this is difficult to fix. It’s whether we can afford not to.”

About the study

Zhivar Sourati, a PhD student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, was a co-author of the report, published in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

The compulsion started soon after my marriage.

Long before e-books and audiobooks, I furtively read paperbacks whose covers of bosomy maidens and bare-chested men would have outed my obsession. Then, on a family car trip, my husband told my young stepdaughters why I liked sitting alone in the back seat.

“Diane is reading bodice rippers,” he said, citing the old-fashioned name for sexually explicit romance novels. Back then, they were my guilty pleasure.

More than 30 years later, I remain a fan of romance novels, but it’s no longer a craving I feel compelled to hide. In fact, I value the window it opens to my research interests in pop culture, religion and gender.

I’m not alone. Romantic fiction makes up almost 25% of books sold in the U.S., and the genre earned US$1.44 billion globally in 2022-23. The Bible may be the bestselling book of all time, but annual sales of romance novels even outpace the Scriptures.

Written by women, for women

Among scholars, there’s a range of opinions on the genre’s enduring popularity.

Some describe romantic fiction as the literary equivalent of Marx’s “opium of the masses.” They argue that these books are perennial bestsellers because they offer escapism and the promise of “happily ever after” — a quick sugar high to distract from the struggles of everyday life.

Other scholars cite the genre’s pedigree. Though they’re canonized as literary classics, 19th-century novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights can also be read as romances — stories written by women and centered on women’s emotional lives, courtship and desires. In a world circumscribed by the era’s narrow gender roles, these books featured clever, often headstrong women who exercised some agency over their love lives and their fates.

In my view, this explains their popularity: 19th-century readers may have found vicarious pleasure in Jane Eyre’s journey from timid governess to independent heiress and happy wife. Likewise, Catherine Earnshaw’s decision to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton, thus abandoning the penniless Heathcliff, may have struck the female fans of Wuthering Heights as an understandable choice.

Nineteenth-century women had limited pastimes. Books that reflected on their own circumstances, albeit with more intrigue and drama, were catnip. But as readership grew, male authors wanted to cash in on the expanding market.

As men penned their own novels, their perspectives dominated, pushing women’s fiction to the side. Changing social mores also made the once popular “woman’s novel” seem dated.

The romance genre was revived in the 20th century when authors added more oomph to their plots and edgier characters. Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 classic, Rebecca, breathed new life into gothic romances — love stories set in dreary, desolate places, intermingled with horror and suspense. And Georgette Heyer revitalized historical romance with smoldering stories such as The Grand Sophy, set in England’s Regency period (1811–1820).

Bodice rippers debuted in the 1970s. The name came, in part, from the covers, which often depicted a woman in a half-torn dress being embraced by a buff male. A racier take on the romance genre, they were often set in early 19th-century England and ended in happily-ever-afters. But the characters were sexually active in ways that would have shocked and scandalized Jane Austen’s heroines.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’ The Flame and The Flower (1972) is widely credited with launching the modern bodice ripper: The first romance novel published in paperback, it became a huge bestseller, despite its graphic rape scenes.

These novels, which debuted in the midst of the sexual revolution, were more explicit than their precursors, and heroines enjoyed more agency in their life choices. That said, the sex was male-driven and often implied that a “throbbing member” could send the heroine into paroxysms of ecstasy.

Lovestruck mafiosos and bull breeders

The digital revolution further transformed romance novels.

Self-publishing, digital publishing and BookTok brought new and younger readers into the mix. Anyone could become a romance novelist, leading to an array of new characters, plots and sexual adventures.

A genre that once mainly featured straight, British aristocrats now embraced Black, Latino and Asian protagonists. There were wanton witches, voracious werewolves and vampire lotharios. Some stories explored alien pairings and lovestruck mafiosos, while in others, LGBTQ characters and professional athletes took center stage. Readers drawn to bawdier fare could dive into erotic fiction, with plotlines featuring women mating with bulls, reverse harems — one woman with several men — and women consorting with multi-limbed aliens.

Many of these innovations have something in common. Rather than sticking to the male-driven plotlines of 20th-century bodice rippers, most contemporary romance writers focus on the female orgasm. Men are far less likely to rush penetration because, before seeking their release, they want their partners to experience multiple climaxes.

But contemporary female characters are not just sexually satisfied. They also enjoy successful careers and close female friends. True to real life, some are plus size or have disabilities. Others were burned in past encounters. They need suitors to scale their emotional walls before blowing their minds in the bedroom.

Women in control

Put together, the genre has undergone a 180-degree turn from the books I hid in the 1990s.

Today’s romantic fiction is less about horny couplings and happy endings and more about exploring emotional connections and power dynamics. Stories also play out the impact of race, class, gender and sexuality on relationships.

Consider the bestselling book and breakout hit HBO series Heated Rivalry, which explores the complicated romance between two gay hockey players. It’s beloved by straight and gay female fans for depicting a blossoming relationship characterized by emotional vulnerability rather than toxic masculinity. And it reveals a trend previously underreported: Women like watching gay men enjoying sex.

While the Heated Rivalry phenomenon is intriguing, readership also has skyrocketed for romantasy.

Romantasy features unconventional women navigating make-believe worlds populated by magic, faeries and dragons. Some heroines are timid, others are brazen, but they share a drive to succeed on their terms.

The genre took off in 2015 with Sarah Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses, the saga of a beautiful but impoverished teen who finds herself in the faerie court. Eleven years and two series later, Maas’ books have sold more than 75 million copies. Each novel is kinkier than the last, and they’ve even inspired some readers to spice up things in their own bedrooms.

The success of these new romance subgenres reflects a striking societal shift: Women are no longer shy about being on top. As writers and readers increasingly see powerful women in C-suites and boardrooms, they expect similar strength in the bedroom.

Although what women want has not changed over time, our ability to achieve it has. That’s why the popularity of books by, for and about women is as fervent today as when Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine in Pride and Prejudice, fell for Mr. Darcy. But Lizzie Bennet lived in a world where she could do only so much, hemmed in like her real-life counterparts.

Thankfully, women today enjoy more power, agency and pleasure. And thankfully, too, we have a lot more books by, for and about women as we contemplate what lies ahead.

Diane Winston, Professor and Knight Center Chair in Media and Religion, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

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

In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State.

“The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In tiny type at the bottom of the message, a disclaimer appeared: “paraphrased from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”

Students immediately objected.

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” one senior wrote.

A Vanderbilt apology email quickly followed. The university launched a professionalism and ethics investigation. One associate dean couched the misstep as a result of learning pains tied to the adoption of new technology.

Chatbots have spawned a host of ethical questions about writing assistance for teachers, students and authors.

But similar debates about ghostwriting have been taking place for over a century, revealing a persistent discomfort with the idea that the words we read might not belong to the person whose name is attached to them.

Outsourcing authorship

Ghostwriting, a paid arrangement in which one person writes under another’s name, has existed for over a century.

The term seems to have first appeared in the English language in a 1908 newspaper article, which I encountered while researching my forthcoming book, Ghostwriting: A Secret History, from God to A.I. The story appeared in the Daily Star in Lincoln, Nebraska, and describes an anonymous writer who earned US$5,000 to help a high-society woman write a book.

Today, ghostwriting usually involves collaborations between professional writers and celebrities or professionals who otherwise wouldn’t have the time, skill or connections to write a book.

On publication of the manuscript, the ghostwriter is typically named, albeit obliquely — perhaps identified as a friend or consultant in the acknowledgments section. In some instances, the ghostwriter’s name appears alongside the credited author’s on the cover. Either way, the client assumes ownership of the ghostwriter’s work.

An ethical gray area

And yet when I type “the practice of one person writing in another person’s name” into Google, the search engine doesn’t spit out “ghostwriting.”

My first hit is “pseudonym” or “alias.” “Plagiarism,” “libel” and “slander” aren’t far behind. A 1953 article titled “Ghost Writing and History” that appeared in The American Scholar also points out that in the mid-20th century, “forgery” — falsely imitating another’s work with the intent to deceive — and “ghostwriting” could be used interchangeably by scholars.

In other words, even when consensual and compensated, ghostwriting has some relatives that are ethically suspect. And maybe that’s why many clients obscure the fact that they’ve used a ghostwriter, and why responses to ghostwritten works often reflect uneasiness with the practice.

“You should be ashamed,” read one social media post, written in response to Millie Bobby Brown’s 2023 debut novel, which she co-wrote with a ghostwriter. “[The ghostwriter’s] name should be on the cover. She was the one who actually wrote the book.”

The discomfort goes both ways: “I feel so guilty and ashamed whenever I use a ghostwriter now because I feel people will think I’m lying,” an anonymous poster on Reddit admitted.

Both the criticism and self-flagellation imply that the act of claiming another person’s words can render these words deceitful, even if the words have been paid for and the content is true.

Ghostwriting agencies rush to defuse these worries. Ghostwriting has been around forever, the Association of Ghostwriters reassures its clients. Ghostwriting is consensual and collaborative — not lazy, deceptive or a form of “selling out,” an author who’d recently used ghostwriting services explained.

And yet, in the last chapter of her ghostwritten book, Whoopi Goldberg acknowledges some misgivings about using a ghostwriter.

“I meant to try (to write the book myself),” Goldberg writes. “And when it turned out I couldn’t quite pull it off … I looked for help.”

Goldberg frames the assistance of ghostwriting as something she deserved after overcoming obstacles as a Black woman. But Goldberg also has financial resources available that others looking for writing assistance usually don’t. High-end ghostwriters collect in the mid-six figures for their services; Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, supposedly scored a $1 million advance.

Cue chatbots. Generative AI promises to be the ghostwriter for the masses, so much so that ghostwriter Josh Lisec explained to me how, in the future, ghostwriting will need to be marketed as a boutique service for elites if it is to survive.

Naming names

Whether you’re paying for a ghostwriter or using a free chatbot, “assistance” or “collaboration” on intellectual and artistic work is not automatically unethical.

Editors have long made a career out of helping authors shape their writing. Visual artists have long employed studio assistants. Television shows only get written collaboratively in writers’ rooms.

And yet, accepting assistance on intellectual or artistic work can raise legitimate questions, particularly with regards to how that assistance is acknowledged and how much assistance can be accepted while still calling a project “ours.”

In the late 19th century, for example, one sculptor went to court to rebut a claim that his assistant — whom the press referred to as a “ghost” — had completed sculptures for which the sculptor took credit. The judge announced that an artist could accept, with integrity, a certain amount of mechanical assistance. But he added that there was a threshold when artistic assistance became “dishonest.” The judge made the accused sculptor craft a bust in real time to prove his skill.

Similarly, most educators find it more ethical when their students turn to ChatGPT for editing assistance but much less so when they use it to generate a document from scratch.

Many universities now allow AI as a tool but require users to verify its accuracy and disclose its use.

Yet even verified, A.I.-generated text, if claimed solely as an individual’s work, can pose policy violations at my institution, the University of Southern California: “You should never attempt to present … content created by others, including generative AI, as your own.”

The same policies that govern appropriate A.I. use also come up in ghostwriting contracts. The ghostwriter signs a “warranty of originality” that promises the author that the ghostwriter has — via platforms such as iThenticate — fact-checked and plagiarism-checked their work.

When inaccuracies do crop up, ghostwriters often take the fall.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blamed her ghostwriter for indicating in her memoir that she had met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Physician David Agus, who teaches at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, held his ghostwriter responsible for the many instances of plagiarism that were identified in his popular science books.

Ghostwriters willingly provide assistance and accept responsibility for the originality of what they write. Scholars have permission to use generative AI, provided they properly cite its use.

And yet when Vanderbilt administrators advertised that their email had been written with the assistance of ChatGPT, students and faculty pushed back.

University policies and book contracts may offer veils of legitimacy and shields from legal liability. But in the end, readers still seem to want the words they’re reading to come from the mind of the person whose name is on the byline.

Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Three weeks into the U.S. war with Iran, it seems increasingly evident that President Donald Trump and his administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to attacks.

Besides appearing unprepared by the escalation of war, the president has offered contradictory statements on the U.S. rationale for bombing Iran, including that Iranian missiles could “soon” rain down on American cities.

The administration’s inconsistent rationale for waging war was laid bare on March 18, 2026, when Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and declined to say whether her agency had made an estimate of if and when Iran would threaten the U.S. mainland.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” Gabbard said.

The statement was especially odd given that the briefing’s subject was the U.S. intelligence community’s latest global threat assessment. It’s clear to me that neither Gabbard nor other members of the intelligence community were part of Trump’s decision-making about going to war.

Besides serving as chair of the National Intelligence Council in the Barack Obama administration, I was a staff member of the National Security Council in the Jimmy Carter administration. I know that this apparent lack of a coordinated policy on Iran is a far cry from the war preparation and planning done during previous presidential administrations.

National Security Council

Typically, the National Security Council, which consists of the Cabinet secretaries of the national security agencies, does its work through its committees, including the Deputies Committee, which is made up of the top deputies in those departments. The Deputies Committee reviews plans and assesses options, usually presenting a recommendation to the principals, including the president.

In that sense, the National Security Council is seen within an administration as the honest broker, especially in balancing the roles of the two main foreign affairs departments: the State Department and the Defense Department.

To be sure, different administrations have used the National Security Council in different ways.

President Dwight Eisenhower created the modern National Security Council. His was an elaborate structure, with groups for both assessing options and overseeing implementation. It reflected his wartime experience, with careful staffing from a general staff whose responsibilities ranged from operations and logistics to intelligence and plans.

Other administrations have favored less formal arrangements. John F. Kennedy, for instance, kept discussions with the National Security Council secret during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But all the National Security Council stakeholders were represented, and Kennedy reached out to consult outside expertise on the Soviet Union.

Lyndon Johnson made Tuesday lunches his forum for debating decisions about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Beginning with just his secretaries of state and defense, the lunches became a National Security Council meeting but in less formal circumstances. The CIA director, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the press secretary were later added to the group.

In other administrations at war, including the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations in Iraq, the Deputies Committees would meet daily to assess progress and review options for what came next.

In the Obama administration, the National Intelligence Council I chaired supplied the intelligence support to the Deputies Committee. We provided a steady stream of intelligence assessments across various subjects. Those included pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring in the 2010s to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

The intelligence assessments provided the information – about where wars stood and what may come next — used for discussion among the deputies. They were discussions informed by experts on the Deputies Committee and from staff on the National Security Council who specialized in the region or military affairs.

This was nowhere better illustrated than in negotiating the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The deal required bringing together experts on Iran and regional dynamics in the Middle East with experts on nuclear fuel cycles and the making of nuclear weapons.

Hardly seen

The Trump administration cut the National Security Council staff in half in May 2025, to around 150. The plan was to streamline and restructure national intelligence under Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Since White Houses always want to pretend they are cheaper than they are, most staff with the National Security Council are seconded — or loaned for free — from one of the agencies. The process saves the White House money. But it also provides it with invaluable in-house expertise and exposes those seconded officials to presidential policymaking.

A friend and colleague who served as under secretary of defense quipped that every time he saw a State Department counterpart coming to a Deputies Committee meeting, he knew what was coming in substance: a request for a military solution to a geopolitical problem.

His stock answer: “Yes, we can do that, but it’ll require 100,000 soldiers and cost US$10 billion.” That answer was his quip, but the Deputies Committee provided a forum for arguing about the merits of the case.

The Trump administration in January 2025 outlined the National Security Council structure in familiar terms. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and director of national intelligence, both a regular presence in debates in previous administrations, were made situational rather than regular members. They would attend as needed, not automatically.

But the National Security Council has hardly been seen since, unlike Trump’s Cabinet, which gathers occasionally at meetings that often begin with Cabinet members lavishing praise on the president.

Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio asked Trump on March 13, 2026, about that inner circle.

“In your Cabinet with the vice president, secretary of state, what is it like, what are the dynamics when you have a big decision like Iran or Venezuela?” Kilmeade asked. “Are people speaking up and speaking their minds?”

Trump’s answer spoke volumes.

“They do,” the president said. “I let them speak their mind, and they do. And we have some differences, but they, they never end up being much. I convince them all to, let’s do it my way.”

Perhaps this casual approach to national security from the Trump administration should not surprise Americans after “Signalgate” — when administration officials in 2025 used the messaging app Signal rather than secure government modes to discuss U.S. military strikes on Yemen and inadvertently included a journalist in the communications.

But when lives are at stake, not to mention Americans’ pocketbooks and the global economy, I think the nation deserves better. Conducting a war requires a hard-headed process for assessing progress and evaluating next steps. In other administrations, the National Security Council would have provided that.

Gregory F. Treverton, Professor Emeritus of the Practice in International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Older Americans are willing to travel far for medical care — sometimes much farther than policymakers and experts assume, according to researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Why it matters: As hospitals close in some areas, practices consolidate and telehealth expands, older adults may tolerate long trips for care — but not equally. The study suggests socioeconomic status affects willingness to travel.

What’s new: A study published recently in JAMA Network Open finds that many Americans age 65 and older are willing to travel more than an hour for routine or specialized medical care.

What happened: Researchers at the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) surveyed a nationally representative group of older adults.

• Questions centered on how long respondents currently travel for care and how much farther they would be willing to go before deciding to delay or skip an appointment.

Results: On average, respondents would tolerate about an hour or more of travel time, particularly for specialty care.

• For primary care visits, they would travel 68 minutes.
• For a diagnostic test, such as an MRI, 113 minutes.
• For a specialist visit, 128 minutes.

What they’re saying: “This shows older adults place a high value on access to care,” said Soeren Mattke, professor (research) of economics, director of the Brain Health Observatory at CESR and study senior author. “They are often willing to travel significant distances before delaying or forgoing care.”

Yes, but: The averages mask important differences.

• Older adults in poorer health, those living in large metropolitan areas and those who had previously struggled with transportation were less willing to travel long durations.
• In contrast, those with higher incomes, more education and reliable access to a car reported greater willingness to spend more time traveling.

Study first author Jeremy Burke, senior economist at CESR, said those gaps matter for health equity.

• “If someone is already dealing with health challenges or transportation barriers, even modest increases in travel time can become a real obstacle,” Burke said. “Those are the patients most at risk of delaying care.”

The big picture: Health systems are consolidating, with some services moving into regional hubs rather than neighborhood clinics. Policymakers often debate how far is “too far” for patients to travel, especially for older adults.

• This study suggests that distance alone isn’t the full story. The type of visit, transportation options and personal resources all shape decisions.

The findings also have implications for telehealth.

• Virtual visits can reduce travel burdens, but they may not fully replace in-person care, especially for diagnostic tests or specialist consultations that require equipment or physical exams.
• “Telehealth is an important tool, but it’s not a cure-all,” Mattke said. “We still need to think carefully about where services are located and how patients physically get there.”

What else? Transportation policy plays a role, too. Programs that offer ride services, improved public transit or partnerships with community organizations could make a meaningful difference for vulnerable seniors.

Between the lines: Older adults living in big cities were less willing to travel long durations.

• This might boil down to traffic, parking and other travel complexities, which make even short drives feel burdensome.
• But rural residents, who often already travel long distances for care, appeared more accepting of extended trips.

Bottom line: Many older Americans are willing to travel surprisingly long distances for medical care — but willingness depends on health, resources and access to transportation.

• As care delivery models evolve, understanding those differences may help health systems and policymakers design services that better match patients’ needs and circumstances.

About the study

The findings are based on data from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative internet panel administered by CESR. For this study, researchers surveyed a representative sample of 2,650 adults age 65 or older between April 23 and June 8, 2025, about their willingness to travel for primary care, specialty care and one-time diagnostic appointments.

In addition to Mattke and Burke, authors on the study include USC Dornsife researchers Tabasa Ozawa, Ying Liu and Wei Ye, all from the USC Brain Health Observatory based at USC Dornsife.

The study was funded by National Institute on Aging grants 1R01AG083189 and 1U01AG077280.

Editor’s Note: Darrin S. Joy contributed to this article.

A recent Dornsife Dialogues conversation hosted by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences explored two big questions: How does life begin — and where else in the universe it might it exist?

The conversation, led by USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock, included alumnus Laurie Barge, a senior research scientist in astrobiology at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Karen Lloyd, Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and professor of Earth sciences.

Both are conducting research that’s changing our understanding of what makes for habitable conditions. Life, they argue, may not require sunlight or even abundant energy, only the right chemical conditions. 

Lloyd focuses on life deep beneath Earth’s surface. Using modern DNA sequencing tools, she and her team have discovered entirely new branches of microbial life. 

These “novel phyla” are thriving in extreme environments, from highly alkaline deep-sea mud volcanoes to ancient Siberian permafrost frozen for 120,000 years. Some microbes appear to survive on energy levels far below what scientists once thought possible. Her new book, Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, covers this journey of discovery. 

In her lab, Barge is recreating hydrothermal vents, mineral “chimneys” similar to those on the ocean floor, to test how early chemical reactions could have generated energy and organic molecules on Earth — and possibly on worlds like Mars or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. She’s exploring whether life’s building blocks can form without biology and what measurable “biosignatures” future space missions should seek when they look for life on other planets. 

For Barge, who completed her PhD in 2009 at USC Dornsife, these emerging discoveries give her a sense of optimism. “It makes me feel less alone. We’re less alone than we even thought we were here on our own planet,” she says. “Spending all my time thinking about it really gives me a lot of hope, and I see a lot of possibilities and interesting questions.” 

The 2025 Eaton fire’s smoke did more than darken the sky: It generated a carbon monoxide and particulate matter surge that far exceeded Los Angeles County’s average daily human-caused emissions, according to a new study led by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Why it matters: The findings show how a major urban wildfire can quickly become a regional air-quality crisis, sending harmful smoke across L.A. and raising concerns about respiratory, psychological and other health effects that Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers are now studying.

What they found: Researchers estimated the Eaton fire produced carbon monoxide at rates more than 20 times higher than L.A. County’s average daily human-caused emissions.

• “People could see the smoke, but they couldn’t see the scale of the pollution it was carrying,” said William Berelson, professor of Earth sciences, environmental studies and spatial sciences at USC Dornsife and a co-author of the study. “This one fire was producing carbon monoxide on a scale that exceeded the entire county’s usual daily emissions from human activity.”

Zoom in: Burning homes and other structures accounted for a larger share of the fire’s carbon emissions than trees and shrubs did, helping explain why the Eaton fire created such a large regional impact.

How they did it: Researchers combined satellite imagery, computer-aided modeling of the smoke plumes and on-the-ground air measurements to estimate what burned and track how smoke moved across the region in near real time.

• The air data included readings from the Carbon Census network of sensors deployed around Los Angeles by Berelson’s team.

By the numbers: The team estimated the Eaton fire released about 153 million kilograms of carbon (337 million pounds).

• Smoke reached downtown L.A. within hours of the fire’s start, then moved west, reaching coastal areas several hours later.
• At some monitoring sites, levels of harmful fine-particle pollution known as PM2.5 exceeded the EPA’s 24-hour health standard for one to three days.

The big picture: The January 2025 Los Angeles fires affected the region in different ways, but the Eaton fire stands out because its smoke moved directly into central and western Los Angeles, exposing communities far from the burn area.

• By contrast, early emissions from the Palisades fire were carried offshore by winds.

What it means: The study suggests urban wildfires should be understood not only as disasters of flame and loss, but also as citywide air-quality emergencies with climate and public-health consequences.

• The findings could help scientists and policymakers better estimate the full costs of urban fires, including emissions and air-quality impacts that spread across an entire metro area.

About the study

In addition to Berelson, study authors include Pietro Vannucci and Wenye Wang of USC Dornsife and Jooil Kim and Timothy Lueker of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

The research was supported by USC through a President’s Sustainability Award and a USC Dornsife Public Exchange Grant.

What do an Olympic Gold Medalist, a paleontologist and a cookbook author all have in common?

They’re all graduates of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and part of the inaugural USC Dornsife 10 to Watch list, which spotlights outstanding recent alumni whose accomplishments reflect the value and versatility of a USC Dornsife education. 

“The liberal arts are an incredible vehicle for success. They teach you how to think critically, communicate powerfully, and adapt quickly in a changing world,” says USC Dornsife Dean James Bullock. “That’s why so many USC Dornsife alumni are thriving and leading today.”

All Credit to Troy

Although their career fields vary widely, all 10 to Watch honorees say that USC Dornsife was an important launchpad.

Yasmeen Serhan ’16 graduated with a degree in international relations and is a digital features editor at Reuters, overseeing recurring series on global news and culture, sports and AI. She credits USC Dornsife with helping her acquire the skills necessary for a career covering foreign relations.

“In addition to majoring in international relations, I minored in French and took classes studying Arabic and journalism,” she says. “What I appreciate most about my USC education is how multifaceted it was.”

For Kaitlin Mogentale ’15, a unit on U.S. agriculture in her “Intro to Environmental Studies (ENST 100)” class not only changed what she ate but also inspired the focus of her later career. “I went from being a Midwestern, meat-and-potatoes eater to a full-fledged vegan by the end of freshman year. The class sparked a deeper reflection on how our personal choices align with our values,” she says.

Shortly after graduating with her degree in environmental studies, she launched Pulp Pantry, one of the first businesses to turn food scraps into snacks,  and nabbed an investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. She’s since launched another snack business, Trashy, along with Scrapi, which connects those with excess food to those who can put it to use. Mogentale is also the head of business development at Divert, which works to prevent food waste.

Other 10 to Watch honorees cite the personal connections established at USC as being pivotal to their success.

During his senior year majoring in economics at USC Dornsife, Owen Han ’20 started a pop-up supper club for his friends. After graduation, his roommate and USC Marshall School of Business alumnus Hwoo Lee ’19 encouraged him to parlay his enthusiasm for food into a career. “Honestly, if it weren’t for Lee, whom I met at USC, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now,” says Han.

Han now has millions of followers across his social media platforms, cooks with celebrity chefs  like Gordon Ramsey and recently published a cookbook, Stacked.

Nominate a Trojan to 10 to Watch

The annual USC Dornsife 10  to Watch list recognizes outstanding undergraduate and graduate alumni of the College from the past decade. Nominations for the 2027 list are now open. For current students who hope to one day make the list, this year’s 10 to Watch have a little advice.

“The Trojan Family is very real, so make the most of it! And read your school paper,” says Serhan.

“Take advantage of all USC has to offer. Go to campus events and meet people. The genuine bond you create with fellow Trojans sticks with you well beyond your college years,” says Tommy Brooksbank ’18, a news producer at ABC News who earned a political science degree at USC Dornsife and a degree in broadcast and digital journalism from USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“Find a good support network, whether it be friends, peers, or professors. USC has no shortage of incredible people. And explore Los Angeles! Tap into your interests that L.A. undoubtedly serves in some way. It’s an incredible city,” says assistant professor at Rutgers University Kiersten Formoso ’23, who earned her PhD in geological sciences.

Artificial intelligence chatbots are standardizing how people speak, write and think. If this homogenization continues unchecked, it risks reducing humanity’s collective wisdom and ability to adapt, argue USC computer scientists and psychologists in an opinion paper published March 11 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

The researchers — led by Morteza Dehghani, professor of psychology and computer science at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences — say that AI developers should incorporate more real-world diversity into large language model (LLM) training sets, not only to help preserve human cognitive diversity, but also to improve chatbots’ reasoning abilities.

“Individuals differ in how they write, reason and view the world,” says study first author Zhivar Sourati, a PhD student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “When these differences are mediated by the same LLMs, their distinct linguistic style, perspective, and reasoning strategies become homogenized, producing standardized expressions and thoughts across users.”

Large language models dampen individuality

Within groups and societies, cognitive diversity bolsters creativity and problem-solving, say the researchers. However, cognitive diversity is shrinking worldwide as billions of people are using the same handful of AI chatbots for an increasing number of tasks, they add. When people use chatbots to help them polish their writing, for example, the writing ends up losing its stylistic individuality, and people feel less creative ownership over what they produce.

“The concern is not just that LLMs shape how people write or speak, but that they subtly redefine what counts as credible speech, correct perspective, or even good reasoning,” says Sourati, a member of Dehghani’s Morality and Language Lab.

The team points to multiple studies showing that LLM outputs are less varied than human-generated writing and that LLM outputs tend to reflect the language, values and reasoning styles of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies.

“Because LLMs are trained to capture and reproduce statistical regularities in their training data, which often overrepresent dominant languages and ideologies, their outputs often mirror a narrow and skewed slice of human experience,” says Sourati.

Though studies show that individuals often generate more ideas with more details when they use LLMs, groups of people produce fewer and less creative ideas when they use LLMs than when they simply combine their collective powers, note the researchers.

“Even if people are not the firsthand users of LLMs, LLMs are still going to affect them indirectly,” says Sourati. “If a lot of people around me are thinking and speaking in a certain way, and I do things differently, I would feel a pressure to align with them because it would seem like a more credible or socially acceptable way of expressing my ideas.”

LLMs can reduce the variety of reasoning styles

Beyond language, studies have shown that after interacting with biased LLMs, people’s opinions become more like the LLM that they used.

LLMs also favor linear modes of reasoning such as “chain-of-thought reasoning,” which requires models to show step-by-step reasoning. This emphasis reduces the use of intuitive or abstract reasoning styles, which are sometimes more efficient than linear reasoning, the researchers say.

They also note that LLMs can alter people’s expectations, which can subtly change the direction of a person’s work.

“Rather than actively steering generation, users often defer to model-suggested continuations, selecting options that seem ‘good enough’ instead of crafting their own, which gradually shifts agency from the user to the model,” says Sourati.

The researchers say that AI developers should intentionally incorporate diversity in language, perspectives and reasoning into their models. They emphasize that this diversity should be grounded in the diversity that exists within humans globally, rather than introducing random variation.

“If LLMs had more diverse ways of approaching ideas and problems, they would better support the collective intelligence and problem-solving capabilities of our societies,” said Sourati. “We need to diversify the AI models themselves while also adjusting how we interact with them, especially given their widespread use across tasks and contexts, to protect the cognitive diversity and ideation potential of future generations.”

About the study

USC Viterbi PhD student Alireza Ziabari also contributed to the research, which was supported by funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

As a space scientist, every time I go outside with my family, I tell my children to look up at the sky. The front door of our home looks southeast, and on winter nights the constellation Orion hangs majestically just above the horizon as soon as it grows dark enough to see stars.

One summer night, my son came running in and exclaimed, “Dad, Orion’s not there!” It was time for his first real astronomy lesson.

We went outside and I asked him to find the Big Dipper, the easily identifiable pattern of stars that make up a portion of the constellation Ursa Major. I reminded him that we could always see the Big Dipper no matter what time of the year it was.

So, why is it that Orion is not always visible in the night sky, and certainly not in the same location month after month, while the Big Dipper always is? The answer is intimately tied to a few concepts: how astronomers measure the length of a day, the motion of the Earth around the Sun during a year, and the cadence with which stars rise and set night after night.

Sidereal time

If you look eastward at the same hour for two nights in a row, you’ll find that the stars seem to be in the same place. But they’re not, and this movement becomes apparent if you continue observing at the same hour for a week or more. A combination of the Earth’s daily rotation on its axis and its yearly orbit around the Sun cause them to appear to move across the sky.

Earth spins on its axis, which runs from the South Pole through the center of the Earth to the North Pole, once a day. Astronomers measure a day in two different ways: They measure a solar day, 24 hours long, with the position of the Sun from high noon to high noon. They measure a sidereal day with respect to distant stars that are fixed in the sky. A sidereal day is 23 hours and 56 minutes long.

The constellation Orion — and every star in the night sky — will appear in exactly the same place every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Because of this slight offset, stars will appear to rise four minutes earlier every 24 hours on successive nights. Over the course of a month, a star that was close to the eastern horizon at 10 p.m. will now be much higher in the sky, having risen two hours earlier.

So while the constellation Orion appears close to the horizon at sunset in late December, it is nearly overhead in February and March.

You can use an interactive star chart to see this phenomenon. Do you want to find Orion in August in North America? Just wake up at 4:30 a.m. and look eastward.

Unlike Orion, the Big Dipper is always visible at night in most of the Northern Hemisphere. This is because of how Earth’s daily rotation is projected onto the stars.

Circumpolar stars

Astronomers use a common set of reference points to project Earth’s north and south poles, and the equator, onto the celestial sphere, an imaginary sphere encompassing the sky.

The idea of the celestial sphere evolved in ancient times from the notion that the Earth was the unmoving center of the universe. The projection of Earth’s equator delineates the celestial equator, and the poles project onto the north and south celestial poles.

The motion of stars near the celestial poles differs from how Orion and other constellations behave. Presently, the north celestial pole is very close to the star Polaris, also known as the North Star. Stars close to Polaris never rise or set. They appear to circle counterclockwise around that star as the Earth spins on its rotation axis once a day.

The number of these circumpolar stars increases as you move toward the North Pole. There are no circumpolar stars at the equator. Every star and constellation rises in the east and sets in the west because Earth rotates west to east on its axis.

If you are standing at the North Pole, every northern constellation is circumpolar, circling the North Star and never rising or setting. The pattern is similar in the Southern Hemisphere, with the southern constellations circling clockwise around the south celestial pole.

Earth’s precession

Millennia ago, people charted the path of the Sun through the constellations of the zodiac, which birthed the practice of astrology.

What does it mean for the Sun to be in Sagittarius, for example? It means that to see the constellation Sagittarius, you have to be looking toward the Sun. That would make it daytime, when the stars are not visible. Wait for nightfall, and you can see Gemini high in the sky. Six months later, the Sun is in Gemini, and Sagittarius is visible in the night sky. This pattern repeats year after year, as the Earth orbits the Sun. Your zodiac signs depend on which constellation the Sun was in when you were born.

There is one other change in the night sky that occurs on time scales much longer than a human lifetime. Because of the gravitational influence of the Sun, and to a lesser extent Jupiter, on Earth’s daily rotation, Earth’s spin axis precesses, or moves in a circle, like a toy top spun on a table.

Because of this motion, which also subtly changes Earth’s orbit in space, Polaris will no longer be the North Star a thousand years from now. Wait 12,000 years, and the bright star Vega will be closest to the north celestial pole, more than 50 degrees across the night sky from its present location near Polaris.

Another consequence of this motion, sometimes referred to as the precession of the equinoxes, is that today the constellations of the zodiac no longer align with the traditional dates associated with them.

For example, when horoscopes and astrological signs were originally devised, the Sun was in the constellation Sagittarius from Nov. 22 to Dec. 21. However, because of precession over thousands of years, the Sun now crosses this constellation from Dec. 18 to Jan. 19. It spends the early part of December in Ophiuchus, which is not part of the traditional 12 constellations of the zodiac.

These changes in the night sky take weeks, months or even hundreds of years to be visible. If you’re not that patient, you can fly to the opposite hemisphere to see Orion upside down and the night sky turning in the opposite direction above.

Vahe Peroomian, Professor (Teaching) of Physics and Astronomy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

When the bombing of Iran began on Feb. 28, 2026, the Trump administration had not informed the American people exactly what it was prepared to achieve.

Was the attack intended to degrade Iran’s nuclear program? Trump had declared that “obliterated” after last June’s bombing.

Was it to slow Iran’s ballistic missile program? U.S. intelligence assesses that Iran is years away from any ballistic missile that could strike the United States.

Was it to show support for Iran’s opposition, as Trump’s earlier “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” posts on Truth Social suggested? A bombing campaign that was bound to kill innocent Iranians, including 175 people at a girls elementary school near a military base, seemed an odd form of support.

I am a scholar and former practitioner of intelligence and national security policy in the White House. I believe there are lessons in effecting political change in Iran that can be taken, ironically, from the very U.S.- and British-led clandestine campaign in the mid-20th century that set Iran on the road to the intense anti-Western and anti-American sentiment that has characterized its government policy for decades.

How does this end?

President Trump has said he wants regime change in Iran but has articulated no strategy for achieving that end.

Strategy is the connection between means and ends. For waging a war, it means asking whether the military means available match the desired military outcome. In trying to effect political change, it means asking whether the instruments employed will produce the desired change.

As journalist Fareed Zakaria put it, “‘Bomb and hope’ is not a strategy.”

Looking at the last U.S. effort at regime change in Iran — the CIA’s 1953 covert program to oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and strengthen Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule — offers insight into what might have been … and what still might be this time around in Iran.

Mossadegh had moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — effectively, British oil interests. Britain responded with an an oil embargo and a severe economic squeeze on Iran.

Western powers feared that prolonged Iranian instability could open the door to Soviet influence in the oil-rich country — a central Cold War concern.

By early 1953 the U.S. government, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorized the CIA to prepare a covert plan to remove Mossadegh and restore effective power to the shah, who at the time held a more ceremonial role. British intelligence had been pushing a similar agenda, and the two services collaborated on both the strategy and its implementation.

The operational details, especially those declassified in recent decades, paint a striking picture of a carefully planned clandestine political intervention that was successful, rather than a simple military invasion.

A far cry from ‘bomb and hope’

The British-American budget for the joint plan was modest by military standards. It was aimed at propaganda and influence operations, and it sought to shape public perception and political support.

It was composed of three elements. First it funded newspapers and printed propaganda designed to discredit Mossadegh, portraying him as corrupt or sympathetic to communism. The propaganda also promoted fears of instability and communist infiltration.

Second, according to declassified histories, agents staged “false flag” incidents — attacks attributed to communists, for example — to stoke fear and backlash against Mossadegh among religious and conservative groups.

Third, the coup planners attempted to engage influential clerical leaders and organizations to amplify anti-Mossadegh sentiment.

Shaping the crowds on Tehran’s streets proved critical to the operation. The CIA organized demonstrators to pose as pro-shah protesters, including paying individuals to chant slogans and confront Mossadegh supporters.

These orchestrated demonstrations climaxed on Aug. 19, 1953, when pro-shah forces and sympathetic leaders in the Iranian military – with CIA financial and logistical backing – seized key points of the country, confronted Mossadegh loyalists and helped topple his government. Estimates suggest around 200 to 300 people were killed in the chaotic fighting in Tehran.

What might have been, and what might be

The Mossadegh coup occurred in a less transparent world. However — and regardless of how you feel about it — the coup suggests the value of having a strategy to accomplish political change and, beyond Israel, bringing allies along if possible.

So far, Trump has called for the Iranian military and the Revolutionary Guard to lay down their arms. But the Trump administration has provided no guidance on how to do so, or to whom to do so.

Surely, the administration should be able to devise a plan for potential political change in Iran. It has insight from the years it has spent negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. Recent events suggest the extent of Israeli, if not American, penetration of Iran.

In 2018, for instance, Israel’s Mossad national intelligence agency broke into an Iranian facility and stole archives on Iran’s nuclear activities, 55,000 pages and another 55,000 files stored on CDs.

In June 2025, Israel conducted covert drone operations deep inside Iran, in concert with airstrikes on Iranian missile and military infrastructure. Mossad reportedly established an undercover drone network and launched explosive drones to neutralize air defenses and missile launchers before the main attack.

The successful targeting of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his close associates in the latest round of airstrikes suggests the extent of likely Israeli monitoring of Iranian communications by Mossad and the CIA.

Crises tend to put pressure on governments to open communications channels, and the take from any successful eavesdropping might be passed to opposition groups to help them organize and avoid capture.

If Israel can smuggle explosive drones into Iran, it should be able to make the satellite internet provider Starlink and its kin available to enable the opposition to better — and more safely — organize.

It is late in the day to emulate the Mossadegh coup with information operations, and it is probably more difficult in an era of ubiquitous social media, not newspapers. But it’s not too late to try.

I believe those brave opposition elements in Iran, who have been killed by their government and bombed by the United States and Israel, deserve no less.

Gregory F. Treverton, Professor Emeritus of the Practice of International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Three rounds of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran failed to persuade President Donald Trump that a solution to the two country’s nuclear impasse lay in diplomacy, rather than military action. A perceived lack of progress in the last of those indirect negotiations on Feb. 26, was enough to prompt Trump to green-light a massive onslaught of missiles that has degraded Iran’s offensive capabilities and killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several members of Iran’s senior military leadership.

In response, Tehran has launched strikes across the Middle East, targeting Israel as well as Gulf states that host U.S. airbases. At least three Americans have been killed.

While the scale of the U.S., Israeli and Iranian strikes has taken some observers by surprise, the failure of the talks that led to them was all too predictable.

For diplomacy to be successful, both sides need to agree on the issues subject to negotiation and also believe that peaceful resolution is more valuable than military engagement. This clearly was not the case in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks of 2025 and 2026.

As someone who has researched nonproliferation and U.S. national security for two decades and was involved in State Department nuclear diplomacy, I know that even under more favorable conditions, negotiations often fail. And the chances for success in the Iran-U.S. talks were always slim. In fact, publicly stated red lines by both sides were incompatible with each other — meaning negotiations were always likely to fail.

Iran wanted the talks confined only to guarantees about the civilian purpose of its nuclear program, not its missile program, support of regional proxy groups or human rights abuses. Essentially it wanted a return to 2015’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which halted Iran’s development of nuclear technology and stockpiling of nuclear material in exchange for lifting multiple international economic sanctions placed on Iran.

Meanwhile, Trump insisted on limits to Iran’s ballistic missiles and the cutting of Tehran’s support for regional militias. These were not included in the 2015 agreement, with parties ultimately deciding that a nuclear deal was better than the alternative of no deal at all.

False hope

Nevertheless, there had been a slim chance for a breakthrough of late.

While the positions of both the U.S. and Iranian governments had ossified since May 8, 2018 — the date when the first Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal — there had been some recent movement by Iran, according to former U.S. diplomats involved in negotiations during the Obama and Biden administrations.

With U.S. military building up in the region, Iran appeared more willing to negotiate within the nuclear arena than before. There were plausible solutions to the issue of Iran’s enrichment of uranium capabilities, including maintaining a minimum domestic capacity to develop medical isotopes and a removal of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium necessary to build a nuclear bomb.

There was less openness on other points of contention. Notably, there was no movement on ballistic missiles, which had always been a red line. On the eve of the round of discussions held in Geneva on Feb. 17, Trump stated: “I think they want to make a deal.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, noted progress over the “guiding principles” of the talks.

But a lot of this optimism appeared to have dissipated by the time the two sides held another round of talks on Feb. 26. While mediator Oman’s negotiators continued to talk of progress, the U.S. side was noticeably silent. Reporting since has suggested that Trump was displeased with the way the talks had gone, setting the stage for the Feb. 28 attack.

Military brinkmanship

The threat of military action was, of course, a continued backdrop to the talks.

The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group was deployed near Iranian waters in January as a signal of support to the Iranian protesters. The USS Gerald R Ford carrier group joined the buildup before the last round of talks.

Trump warned Iran that “if they don’t make a deal, the consequences are very steep.”

The thinking may have been that Iran, weakened by both the June 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes and diminished capabilities of Tehran proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, was playing a weak hand in the talks.

Yet Iran also signaled a willingness to engage in military action. In the run-up to the last round of talks, Iran held military exercises and closed the Strait of Hormuz for a live-fire drill. Leaders in Tehran also declared that they would not restrain its response to another attack. The world is seeing that now, with a response that has seen Iran launch missiles across the Middle East and at rival Gulf nations.

Optimism has fallen before

Trump isn’t the first president to fail to secure a nuclear deal, although he is the first to respond to that failure with military action.

The Biden administration publicly pledged to strengthen and renew the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2021. However, Iran had significantly increased its nuclear technical capability during the years that had passed since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action collapsed. That increased the difficulty — just to return to the previous deal would have required Iran to give up the new technical capability it had achieved for no new benefits.

That window closed in 2022 after Iran removed all of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s surveillance and monitoring under the deal and started enriching uranium to near-weapons levels and stockpiling sufficient amounts for several nuclear weapons. The IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, maintains only normal safeguards that Iran had agreed to before the plan of action.

Optimism also existed for a short time in spring 2025 during five rounds of indirect talks that preceded the United States bombing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in June as part of a broader Israeli attack.

A more unstable Middle East

When I worked in multilateral nuclear diplomacy for the U.S. State Department, we saw talks fail in 2009 regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, after six years of on-and-off progress. The consequence of that failure is a more unstable East Asia and renewed interest by South Korea in developing nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the same dynamic appears to be playing out in the Middle East.

Military strikes have already killed more than 200 in Iran and across the region. A wider war in the Middle East is a possibility, and should the Iranian regime survive, it may commit to developing nuclear weapons given that the lack of them proved no deterrent to U.S. and Israeli military action.

Talks do not necessarily need an end point — in the shape of a deal — for them to have purpose. Under situations of increased military brinkmanship, talks could have helped the U.S. and Iran step back from the edge, build trust and perhaps develop better political relations — even if an actual deal remained out of reach.

Instead, Trump opted to go a different route.

This article includes sections originally published by The Conversation U.S. on Feb. 17, 2026.

Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, Professor of International Relations, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto; USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Bad Bunny likes to remind the world where he and his music come from.

In “EoO,” a song from his 2025 album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” he raps, “‘Tás escuchando música de Puerto Rico” (“You’re listening to music from Puerto Rico”). Similarly, in the album’s second track, “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR,” he announces that both he and reggaeton were born in Puerto Rico: “Aquí nací yo y el reggaetón, pa’ que sepa’.”

Puerto Rican artists like Bad Bunny certainly helped popularize the genre. But they didn’t create it.

In my own research of Latin America, I’ve explored how reggaeton comes from the small Central American nation of Panama, where the sound emerged from a swirl of sonic influences that included Spanish conquistadors, Caribbean immigrants and American colonizers.

English and Spanish collide

Understanding reggaeton requires understanding the intermingling of cultures and languages that Panama experienced over a relatively short period of time.

After Panama gained its independence from Spain in 1821, it became part of Gran Colombia, which, at its peak, included modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama.

Throughout the 19th century, Panama experienced population growth and mass industrialization, and waves of Afro Caribbean immigrants arrived in northern Panama in search of economic opportunities. Since they came from former British colonies, many of them spoke English. Meanwhile, the many Afro Panamanians already living in the country, whose descendants had been trafficked as slaves, spoke Spanish.

These linguistic distinctions resulted in two primary groups of Black people in Panama: Spanish-speaking Afro Panamanians and English-speaking West Indians. They worked alongside one another on construction projects, such as the trans-Isthmus railroad, in the mid-19th century. But with their different languages, colonial histories and cultures, they didn’t always get along.

In 1903, Panama separated from Gran Colombia, becoming the independent nation we know today. The U.S. had supported Panama’s independence for strategic reasons: It wanted to build and control the Panama Canal to secure influence over maritime trade and military movement in the Western Hemisphere. While Gran Colombia had rebuffed earlier U.S. overtures, leaders of the newly independent Panama were more receptive to American interests.

Jim Crow is imported to the Canal Zone

Police brutality, exploitation and intra-racial and interracial tensions also served as scaffolding for reggaeton.

During the canal’s construction, the U.S. operated and controlled the Panama Canal Zone, a 553 square-mile (1,432 square-kilometer) parcel of land encompassing the canal. Up to 60,000 people lived there while the canal was being built, with residents segregated by race into “gold roll” and “silver roll” workers. Gold roll workers were usually white. Silver roll workers were Black, and they were tasked with the most dangerous jobs.

The Canal Zone’s white residents were far more likely to have access to health services and have proper sanitation; Afro Panamanian and immigrant workers from Barbados, the Antilles, Jamaica and other Caribbean countries were much more likely to be exposed to — and die from — malaria.

West Indians and Afro Panamanians also experienced police brutality. Black women, in particular, were harassed by white police officers, who often accused them of sex work.

While both West Indians and Afro Panamanians were subjected to segregation and police brutality, the Americans running the Canal Zone tended to treat the English-speaking West Indians better. Meanwhile, children born and raised in the Canal Zone were only taught English in schools, which Afro Panamanians resented.

These tensions led to the rise of “panameñismo,” a movement that sought to preserve and promote Spanish language and culture in Panama. This movement culminated in the passing of restrictive immigration laws targeted at West Indians and stripping second-generation West Indians of their citizenship.

Despite these anti-West Indian policies, many Jamaican, Barbadian and Antillean immigrants who had already built a life in Panama remained in the country even after the canal was completed in 1914.

Reggae with a Spanish twist

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaicans introduced three subgenres of reggae — mento, ska and dancehall — to Panama.

The lyrics were in English and Jamaican Patois, an English-based creole language. But it didn’t take long for an offshoot of reggae, “reggae en español,” to emerge. By the end of the 1970s, reggae en español had become popular in Panama and had spread throughout Latin America. Similarly, the nascent genre of hip-hop was gaining steam in the U.S. and eventually made its way to Panama, where an American presence had remained since the completion of the canal. It wasn’t until 1979 that the Canal Zone was abolished, and Panama did not have ownership over the canal until 2000.

It was out of this diverse mix of musical and linguistic influences that reggaeton was born, a genre that features the looping drum pattern — called “dembow riddim” — of Jamaican dancehall, the tropical vibe of reggae and a mixture of rapping and singing. Like reggae and hip-hop, reggaeton lyrics often emphasize Black solidarity and speak out against racial oppression and police violence.

The Panamanian artist Renato is credited with releasing the first reggaeton song, titled, “El D.E.N.I.,” in 1985.

The D.E.N.I. — an acronym for the Departamento Nacional de Investigaciones, or National Department of Investigations — was a tool of repression for Panama’s military dictatorship under Omar Torrijos in the 1970s and later under Manuel Noriega in the 1980s. The secret police force became entangled in drug trafficking and political corruption.

In ‘El D.E.N.I.,’ Renato denounces police brutality and racism.

In the song, Renato assumes the role of a racist police officer, the kind he encountered after relocating from the Canal Zone to Rio Abajo, an impoverished neighborhood in Panama City:

Con mi cara albina, te puedo golpear …

(With my albino face, I can hit you …)

Te voy a enseñar

(I am going to teach you)

Que a la justicia no se puede burlar

(That you cannot make fun of the justice system)

After its release, the track became a protest anthem against Panama’s military government.

While Renato’s popularity was growing in Panama, early Panamanian reggaeton artists and producers like El General were collaborating with Jamaican and American artists in New York City, where the underground dancehall and “hip-hop en español” scene thrived.

Even though El General primarily produced music, one of his tracks, “No Mas Guerra,” channeled the fighting spirit of original reggaeton, calling for Latin American communities to come together to end violence and wars.

A sanitized version of reggaeton goes mainstream

Despite not being responsible for its creation, Puerto Rico is where the genre went mainstream — largely thanks to the popular Puerto Rican artist Daddy Yankee.

Daddy Yankee’s music spread, in part, thanks to American brands like Kellogg’s and Reebok, whose ads featuring his songs were broadcast to American audiences. Few of his tracks contained the social justice themes that characterized early reggaeton.

Meanwhile, Tego Calderon, a Black Puerto Rican reggaeton artist, struggled to find a buyer for his 2003 debut album, “El Abayarde,” after being told he was too ugly for a musical career — a remark rooted in the anti-Blackness that’s pervasive in Puerto Rico.

Calderon’s experience in the industry and as a Black Puerto Rican dictated how he viewed the genre and created his music. Like Calderon, Renato and other Black reggaeton artists have spoken out against racism in reggaeton.

Bringing reggaeton back to its roots

Though he may have the genre’s history slightly wrong, Bad Bunny’s own tracks return to reggaeton’s social justice roots.

Performed during the Super Bowl halftime show by Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny’s “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” describes the history of U.S. colonialism in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, pointing out how local communities have been forced out by gentrifiers:

Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa

(They want to take the river and the beach away from me)

Quieren al barrio mío y que tus hijos se vayan

(They want my neighborhood and for your kids to leave)

And while the early-2000s reggaeton popularized by Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderon and Don Omar contained elements of misogyny and homophobia, Bad Bunny’s tracks “Yo Perreo Sola” and “YO VISTO ASÍ” build on feminist reggaeton anthems like Ivy Queen’s “Yo Quiero Bailar.”

Reggaeton was born out of a call for freedom, equality and justice. So I find it fitting that Bad Bunny is creating music that speaks to all types of people from all over the world.

Brendan Frizzell, PhD Student in Sociology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Vahe Peroomian winces slightly as he eases himself, with the help of two assistants, from a sitting position to lying full-length on a bed of long, sharp nails. Students in the room observe quietly as another plank of nails is placed onto his chest with their points down. As an assistant sets a cinderblock on top of it all, the students stir nervously, but Peroomian reassures them. “It’s just a bit more pressure,” he says.

Then the assistant reaches for a hammer, and the students erupt with excitement, cell phones recording.

The assistant moves into position near Peroomian and raises the hammer, taking aim. Then he strikes, shattering half of the cinder block, and the students let out a surprised exclamation: “Oooooo!” The tone suggests more than a little concern at their instructor’s well-being.

But they need not worry; Peroomian, professor (teaching) of physics and astronomy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is fine.

His assistants clear the pieces of concrete, remove the top plank and help him stand, and he lets out a small “Whoo, all right!” The students applaud and cheer, clearly impressed — and likely a little relieved.

The demonstration is old hat for Peroomian; he’s performed the feat — and others — for more than two decades, including the 11 years he’s taught at USC Dornsife.

It’s part of his course “Fundamentals of Physics I: Mechanics and Thermodynamics” (PHYS 151) course, designed for students majoring in the physical sciences or engineering. The nail-bed demonstration aims to teach students about pressure and inertia.

By spreading his weight over many nails in the lower plank, no single nail will experience enough pressure to penetrate his back. And as the hammer strikes the cinder block, the block’s inertia absorbs the force of the hammer, keeping it from pushing the top plank of nails into his chest.

“I didn’t feel the concrete block,” he says. “I mean, it was heavy. It was sitting on top of me. But the additional impact of breaking it didn’t get through.”

The spectacle is intended to be entertaining and memorable, and for good reason: It drives the lesson home.

“I try to turn it into something tangible that the students can apply, and solidify their understanding of what’s going on,” Peroomian says. “Even if they only remember one demonstration that I did, that might help them if they’re struggling with the material.”

Understanding one another can be hard. There is a big difference between someone snapping at you out of contempt, and calling you out for a mistake because they believe in you and know you can do better. One of these cases calls for anger, but the other for humility or even embarrassment. Or maybe they are only snapping because they’re “hangry” — they might just need a Snickers bar.

And that’s just with people we know. What about strangers, people across the political divide, or even those with very different backgrounds and cultures than your own?

My field, philosophy, offers a tried-and-true answer to what we need to do in order to understand people and texts from very different backgrounds and cultural assumptions than our own. We need to be charitable.

Charity in this sense isn’t a matter of giving money to those who need it more. Instead, it’s seeing others in a favorable light — of seeing the best in them. In my work, I think of this as seeing other people as protagonists: characters who “do their best” with the predicament in which they find themselves. Interpreting someone charitably doesn’t require agreeing with them. But it does require doing our best to find merit in their point of view.

Of course, people and ideas don’t have unlimited merit. We can err by failing to see the merit of someone’s point of view — or we can err by finding merit that isn’t really there.

But the idea of charity is that it’s worse to make the first kind of error because it prevents us from getting along and learning from one another. By seeing the best in someone else and in their ideas, we can learn productively from engaging with them. Protagonists are people we can learn from and cooperate with.

Taking them seriously

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that we are all better at seeing the best in the people we agree with — and worse with those across the political divide. Political discussions on social media are often dominated by competing attributions of more and more insidious motives to people on the other side. We see them not as protagonists, but as antagonists.

By seeing the worst in someone else’s ideas, we let ourselves off easy. We dismiss them when instead we need to be taking them seriously.

So why, if charity requires seeing the best in others, are we so often tempted to see the worst in them?

A better understanding of charity provides the answer. Seeing the best and the worst in others are not opposite ways of interpreting someone, but simply two sides of the same coin. Here’s why:

Interpretation trade-offs

Interpreting someone isn’t all about figuring out their motives. Sometimes it’s about sorting out what is signal and what is noise. If I snap at you, you could spend a lot of time fixating over whether to be angry or embarrassed. But sometimes the right move is just to pass me a Snickers bar and move on. Our moods and actions are influenced by hunger, hormones, alcohol and lack of sleep, just to name a few. Overinterpreting a snap after I missed breakfast treats as signal what is really just noise.

Overlooking a thing or two when I am hangry can be the best way to see the best in me. When you interpret my snap as merely the result of missing a meal, you don’t really see it as coming from me, the protagonist; but as the result of my predicament. You will judge me, not by whether I am hangry, but by how I overcome that. Your interpretation sees me in a more positive light, by taking away some of my agency.

By “agency,” I mean the extent to which someone gets credit for what they do. You have greater agency over something that you do on purpose, and less if was a foreseen but accepted side effect of your plan. You have less agency if it was an accident, but more if the accident was negligent; less agency if you just snapped because you’re hangry, but more if you know you get hangry and chose to skip lunch anyway.

A perfect agent wouldn’t be affected by hormones and hunger. They would simply make rational choices that advance their goals. But humans aren’t like that. We are imperfectly embodied agents, at best. So interpreting one another well sometimes requires seeing the good in one another, at the cost of agency. In other words, it has to balance agency against the good, as I have argued in my recent work.

But you can’t find the best in someone by just ignoring more and more until all the bad things are trimmed away and only something good is left. Your interpretation has to fit with the facts of what they do and say.

And sometimes the trade-offs between agency and the good go the other way — we interpret each other in ways that attribute more agency but less good. If passing me a Snickers bar seems to calm me down, you might try it again the next time I snap. But one day you realize that you have started carrying extra Snickers bars everywhere you go in case you run into me, and a different interpretation presents itself: Maybe instead of being a decent but mood-challenged friend, I have just been using you for your candy bars.

This creates tipping points for charitable interpretation. When we cross the tipping point, you switch from seeing someone as an imperfectly embodied protagonist to seeing them as an antagonist.

Charity without a cost

All of this is a way of arguing that it is sometimes right to see the worst in others. Sometimes other people really are the worst, and understanding them requires understanding their agency, not what is good about them. Protagonists and antagonists are just two sides of the same coin: The very same interpretive process can lead us in either direction.

Unfortunately, this means there is no simple test for when you are doing well enough at seeing the best in others. In particular, there is no test that we can agree about across our political differences. Interpreting someone charitably requires looking hard enough for good in them, but part of what we disagree with one another about is precisely what is good. So we are bound to disagree with one another about who is being sufficiently charitable.

But as a personal aspiration, a little more charity can go a long way. We can be generous not just with money, but in how we interpret others. But unlike giving money away, we don’t lose anything when we try harder to see the best in someone else.

Mark Schroeder, Professor of Philosophy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

The latest rounds of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran are going well enough for now, according to the steady drip of public statements from the main parties involved.

“I think they want to make a deal,” said U.S. President Donald Trump on the eve of the latest round of discussions held in Geneva on Feb. 17. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, noted progress over the “guiding principles” of the talks.

Such optimism was similarly on display during initial talks in Oman earlier in the month.

But as someone who has researched nonproliferation and U.S. national security for two decades and was involved in State Department nuclear diplomacy, I know we have been here before.

Optimism also existed in spring 2025, during five rounds of indirect talks that preceded the United States bombing of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as part of a broader Israeli attack. Pointedly, Iran noted in February that a climate of mistrust created by that attack hangs over the efforts for a negotiated deal now.

And underpinning any pessimism over a deal now is the fact that talks are taking place with a backdrop of U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf region and counteraction from Iran, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for a live-fire drill.

Red lines

But it is more than mistrust that will need to be overcome. The positions of both the U.S. government and Iran have ossified since May 8, 2018 — the date when the first Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal.

Iran continues to be unwilling to even discuss its ballistic missile program. This is a red line for them.

Yet the United States continues to demand limits to Iran’s ballistic missiles and the ending of Iran’s support of proxy fighters in the region be included in the nuclear talks, in addition to having Iran fully abandon enriching uranium — including at the low civilian-use level agreed on under the 2015 nuclear deal.

The talks are taking place amid a wider trend toward the end of what can be called the “arms control era.” The expiration of New START — which until Feb. 5 limited both the size and status of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons and maintained robust verification mechanisms — together with the increasing willingness to engage in military actions to achieve political goals heightens the challenges for diplomacy.

Military brinkmanship

So why the apparent public optimism from the U.S. government?

Trump believes that Iran is in a weaker position than during his first term, following the largely successful Israeli attacks on Iran’s regional proxies as well as on Iran itself. The strategic capabilities of Tehran’s two main sponsored groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, are clearly diminished as a result of Israeli action.

The U.S. may also still feel it has the upper hand following the June 2025 Operation Rising Lion, in which Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was attacked in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency’s report that Iran’s stockpile of near-weapons grade enriched uranium surged by over 50% in the spring.

The reopening of talks now also comes in the immediate aftermath of Iran’s bloody crackdown on anti-government protests, leaving thousands of protesters dead.

The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group was deployed near Iranian waters in January as a signal to the protesters of U.S support. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that successful talks must include topics beyond Iran’s nuclear program, including the “treatment of (its) own people.”

Trump continues to consider military options against Iran, warning that “if they don’t make a deal, the consequences are very steep.”

Yet there is a danger that Washington may be overestimating its position.

While the United States maintains that Iranian nuclear sites were “obliterated” in the June attack, satellite imagery indicates that Iran is working to restore its nuclear program. And while Tehran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon are severely degraded, Iranian-supported militias in Iraq, including the Kataib Hezbollah, have renewed urgent preparations for war — potentially against the U.S. — and the Houthi rebels have threatened to withdraw from a ceasefire deal with the United States.

Moreover, Iran’s commitment to its ballistic missile program is stronger than ever before, with much of the infrastructure already rebuilt from Operation Rising Lion.

No returning to the 2015 deal

Iran maintains that the talks must be confined only to guarantees about the civilian purpose of its nuclear program, not its missile program, its support of regional proxy groups or its own human rights abuses.

And that is incompatible with the U.S.’s long-held position.

This disagreement ultimately prevented the U.S. and Iran from renewing the now-defunct 2015 political deal during the Biden administration. Signed by China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the United States and Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) halted Iran’s development of nuclear technology and stockpiling of nuclear material in exchange for lifting multiple international economic sanctions placed on Iran. Ballistic missile technology and Iran’s proxy support for regional militias were not included in the original agreement due to Iran’s unwillingness to include those measures.

The parties to the Iran deal ultimately decided that a nuclear deal was better than the alternative of no deal at all.

There was a window for such a deal to be resumed in between the two Trump administrations. And the Biden administration publicly pledged to strengthen and renew the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2021.

But by then, Iran had significantly increased its nuclear technical capability during the four years that has passed since the JCPOA collapsed.

That increased the difficulty: Just to return to the previous deal would have required Iran to give up the new technical capability it had achieved for no new benefits.

The window closed in 2022 after Iran removed all of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s surveillance and monitoring under the deal and started enriching uranium to near weapons levels and stockpiling sufficient amounts for several nuclear weapons.

The IAEA, the U.N’s nuclear watchdog, currently maintains only normal safeguards Iran had agreed to before the JCPOA.

Even with the 2025 U.S. strikes, Iran currently has the ability to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb within weeks to several months. This is up from over a year under the 2015 deal.

US and Iran talks today

Although most analysts doubt that Iran has developed the weaponization knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb – estimates vary from several months to about two years due to the lack of access to and evidence on Iran’s weaponization research — Iran’s technical advances reduce the value for the U.S. government of returning to the 2015 deal. Iran’s knowledge cannot be put back into Pandora’s box.

But talks do not necessarily need an end point — in the shape of a deal — for them to have purpose.

With the increased military brinkmanship, talks could help the U.S. and Iran step back from the edge, build trust and perhaps develop better political relations. Both sides would benefit from this stabilization: Iran economically, from being reintegrated into the international system, and the U.S. from a verifiable lengthening of the time it would take Iran to break out.

None of this is guaranteed.

When I worked in multilateral nuclear diplomacy for the U.S. State Department, we saw talks fail in 2009 regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, after six years of on-and-off progress. The consequence of that failure is a more unstable East Asia and renewed interest by South Korea in developing nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the same dynamic appears here. The shape of a potential new deal is unclear. As time passes with no deal, both sides harden their negotiating starting points, making a deal less likely.

Military escalations may lead to a new willingness to compromise on the part of Iran or precipitate its decision to build nuclear weapons.

But even should the talks prove a failure, the effort to dampen the confrontational responses and heightening tensions would still be valuable in reducing the possibility of regional conflict.

Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, Professor of International Relations, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto; USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

With a stroke of a presidential pen, the lives of Izumi Taniguchi, Minoru Tajii, Homei Iseyama and Peggy Yorita irreparably changed on Feb. 19, 1942. On that day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which set in motion their wartime incarceration along with other people of Japanese ancestry who were forcibly removed from their homes in parts of California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona.

To cope with their fear, anger and loss in the turbulent times, they would have to dig deep into their emotional reservoirs of resolve and ingenuity.

Without bringing charges against them or providing any evidence of disloyalty, the U.S. government detained legal Japanese immigrants and their American-born descendants in desolate inland locations during and after World War II, simply because of their ethnicity. Nearly 127,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated between 1942 and 1947, according to Duncan Ryȗken Williams, director of The Irei Project, which is compiling a comprehensive list of those detained. My grandparents, parents and their families were among them.

As I describe in my book “When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II,” they boarded livestock trucks and World War I-era trains guarded by armed U.S. soldiers for destinations that were not disclosed to them. They could only take what they could carry and what they had within themselves.

When the Japanese Americans arrived at temporary detention facilities, euphemistically called “assembly centers,” hastily constructed on fairgrounds, racetracks and other government property, they were shocked to be body-searched, fingerprinted and interrogated. Thousands discovered their living quarters were animal pens or horse stalls. The ones considered lucky were assigned to poorly built barracks. The barracks had only cots, bare light bulbs hanging from the ceilings, and pot belly stoves in the corners; the interiors lacked any partitions.

Immediately they scavenged wood from vegetable crates and construction debris they found nearby to create privacy within the barracks units and to make furniture and other household furnishings. Displaced from their livelihoods, education and social structure, with nothing to do, they also quickly organized a wide range of activities, including sports, as well as arts and crafts of all kinds. Their resourcefulness born out of necessity converged with the Japanese aesthetic to make functional items beautiful as they sought to make their temporary quarters more livable.

When the prisoners were transferred to long-term detention facilities run by the War Relocation Authority later in 1942, they brought with them what Delphine Hirasuna, an author and descendant of people who had been incarcerated during the war, calls the “art of gaman.” “Gaman” is a Japanese word meaning the dignity and grace to bear the seemingly unbearable. With this philosophy, they created objects of both utility and beauty.

Finding beauty in branches, rocks and shells

At the Gila River and Poston camps located on tribal land in the Mojave Desert, incarcerees found that desert wood could be carved, filed and polished to make partitions, household objects and works of art.

Armed soldiers guarded the barbed-wire perimeters from lookout towers, but as the war wore on, the incarcerees were allowed to venture beyond the camp fences. Izumi Taniguchi, then 16 years old from Contra Costa County, California, recalled getting permission to walk outside the Gila River camp boundaries to while away the time.

He remembered that some people used the ironwood for sculpting. Minoru Tajii, then 18 years old from El Centro, California, held at the Poston camp, described ironwood as “an oil-rich wood, so when you polish it up it comes out very nice, so we go out and find that and bring it back.”

The Poston “sculptoring department” advertised in the camp newsletter “Poston Chronicle” on Jan. 20, 1943, that “anyone with ironwood wishing to learn how to make figures and notions may bring their materials to the department, 44-13-D, and work under the guidance of sculptoring teachers.”

Homei Iseyama, from Oakland, California, became known for the exquisite teapots, teacups, candy dishes and calligraphy inkwells he carved out of slate stones he found around the Topaz, Utah, camp. Born in 1890, he attended Waseda University in Tokyo before immigrating to the United States in 1914 with dreams of attending art school.

At the Tule Lake camp, located on an ancient lake bed, the incarcerees discovered thick veins of shells that provided material for making art and jewelry. Fusako “Peggy” Nishimura Yorita got very involved in making shell jewelry. As digging for shells became a popular and competitive pastime for the Tule Lake incarcerees, Yorita enlisted her two teenagers and friends to help dig waist-deep holes at sunrise and sift the sand with homemade wire sieves.

A 33-year-old single mother, Yorita sold her shell jewelry to make a little money. She also enjoyed the creative endeavor. She recalled: “I was just making new things all the time. And to me, it … was … a wonderful outlet.”

As the incarcerees were allowed to leave the camps, they were given $25 and a one-way bus or train ticket to wherever they were going to rebuild their lives. Many took with them their handcrafted objects, reminders of how they overcame the physical and mental harshness of their detention years.

When my mother entrusted to me the fragile small tansu chest that her father made for her in camp out of crate wood, she told me that her father had felt sorry for her that she didn’t have anyplace to store her belongings. To improve the appearance of the wood, my grandfather placed a hotplate on the pieces to deepen the grain. My mother appreciated the care he took to carve traditional Japanese scenes onto the panels with a pen knife. She said the chest represented to her the depth of her father’s love.

Eight decades after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, researchers are delving into the traumatic intergenerational impact that the incarceration has had on the camp survivors and their descendants.  Memorials such as The Irei Project seek to restore dignity to those who suffered unconstitutional injustices. On Feb. 19, known annually as the Day of Remembrance, Americans can honor them by appreciating their “art of gaman,” testaments to their resilient spirit as they found and created beauty in their wartime environments.

Susan H. Kamei, Adjunct Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty at the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW), based at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has received a $4 million pledge toward its $10 million endowment campaign from a longtime friend of the institute who wishes to remain anonymous.

Half of the commitment will support public outreach activities and programs that reflect ICW’s mission to create “new understandings of the past to inform public dialogue in the American West and beyond.” The remaining $2 million will support the institute’s partnerships with nonacademic professionals and practitioners in fields connected to ICW’s research.

The pledge builds on the endowment campaign launched in 2025 with $2.4 million from the WHH Foundation, bringing the total raised to $6.4 million.

“This generous pledge is a tremendous vote of confidence in ICW’s mission and in the public value of the humanities,” said William Deverell, founding director of ICW and USC Dornsife divisional dean for the social sciences. “It also brings us within striking range of our $10 million goal to secure the long-term future of our outreach, collaborations and scholarship.”

Founded in 2004 as a partnership between USC Dornsife and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, ICW connects scholars, students and community members through research, teaching and public engagement on the history and culture of the American West.

Born into a devout Christian family in Adrian, Michigan, Micah Owens moved to Kenya with his family when he was 10, spending the next eight years at boarding school there. He then returned to the United States as a creative writing major at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, where he is pursuing an M.A. in literary editing and publishing through USC Dornsife’s Progressive Degree Program.

Now a senior, Owens is the latest winner of the USC Dornsife Creative Writing Contest, an achievement he calls “an amazing moment of validation. This is my first major publication and win, so it made me feel that there is real potential for my future as a writer.”

Owens recently answered questions about his unusual life path, how it inspires him to write and what brought him to USC Dornsife.

You wrote your winning poem, “Genealogy,” in a poetry workshop during your junior year. What inspired it?

It’s a poem that grapples with feeling cut off from your history but finding solace in the fact that you can start the legacy anew. That sense of displacement — of having one foot in multiple cultures and not knowing exactly where home is — comes directly from my life. That uncertainty informs a lot of my work.

How did moving to Kenya just before your 11th birthday shape the way you see the world and approach writing?

At first, it felt like a grand adventure. I was too young to fully understand what was happening, but being exposed to so many cultures, people and landscapes at such a young age deeply influenced me. It showed me the beauty of the world, gave me a better understanding of other perspectives and broadened my worldview. That fostered a desire to write.

What struck you most about Kenya when you first arrived?

What stood out most to me was the generosity and hospitality of the people. I lived in a small town, Kijabe, in the Rift Valley, about 8,000 feet above sea level. It’s incredibly beautiful — lush forests, views stretching across the valley and wildlife everywhere — and an extraordinary place to live.

What were some of the challenges you faced while living overseas?

I attended an international boarding school, which helped ease some transitions, but my parents moved around frequently, living in other African countries while I remained in Kenya for school. That was difficult; I was essentially on my own in a country I was still learning to navigate. Visiting my parents in a remote village in the Central African Republic was eye-opening. There, you see people living with immense need, affected by violence and instability. Witnessing that reality had a lasting impact on me.

When did writing shift from something you enjoyed to something you felt you needed to do?

That shift happened during the years I spent at boarding school in Kenya, around eighth and ninth grade. It was a turbulent time for me personally, and writing became a way for me to process everything I was feeling and experiencing. Poetry, especially, gave me a freedom that normal speech couldn’t. It allowed me to express things fully, without restriction. Writing became something essential in my daily life.

You chose USC Dornsife to study under renowned writers. How has their mentorship shaped your voice?

I knew I had stories to tell but hadn’t found the voice for them, and so I needed to learn from those who had. USC Dornsife was the place for that. Studying under writers like Robin Coste Lewis, Percival Everett, Aimee Bender and Ellen Wayland-Smith exposed me to a wide range of styles and approaches. Each professor pushed me in different directions and encouraged experimentation. One of the most valuable lessons was learning how much freedom there really is in writing — across genres, forms and voices.

You work across poetry and playwriting. What draws you to those forms?

Poetry, for me, captures emotion in a way nothing else can. One professor once described playwriting as “poetry that stands up and walks around,” and I love that idea. Poetry feels intimate, while playwriting allows my words to come alive through other people. Seeing language move from the page to the stage is incredibly powerful.

Your poetry has appeared in USC Dornsife’s online student publication, Palaver Arts Magazine, while your one-act play, Death Goes on a Date, was staged by Brand New Theatre, a USC student theatre organization. How have those early validations shaped your confidence or expectations for the future?

They’ve helped me understand that while rejections are inevitable, the successes you do experience make it all worthwhile. Many of these moments came at important points in my life and have been incredibly encouraging.

Do you write every day?

I try to. I’m very much an inspiration-driven writer. Sometimes I won’t write much at all, and then I’ll have a few days where I’m writing nonstop. I’m working on building consistency, but I’ve learned to accept that my process comes in waves.

You’re pursuing an MA in literary editing and publishing. How has editing influenced your own writing?

Editing has given me a much stronger critical eye. Reading and analyzing other people’s work so closely has helped me understand structure, development and revision in my own writing.

Looking ahead to a career in publishing, what kinds of voices do you hope to support?

I’m drawn to voices that are underrepresented and stories that feel new, especially those rooted in mythology, culture and the fantastical. Publishing can be very commercial, but I want to help uplift writers who are telling meaningful, imaginative stories that draw from diverse backgrounds.

For students who feel disconnected from their past or uncertain about their creative voice, what advice would you offer?

That feeling is far more common than people realize. Being unanchored can feel like drifting in an ocean, but it also offers incredible freedom. You’re not bound by a single narrative — you get to decide who you are and choose your own direction. That freedom, while scary, can be deeply enriching.

Read Owens’ winning entry along with submissions from contest runners up in USC Dornsife Magazine.

USC Dornsife alumni and students who wish enter the next USC Dornsife Creative Writing Contest may submit their entries here. The deadline is March 15. 

A group of ocean bacteria long considered perfectly adapted to life in nutrient-poor waters may be more vulnerable to environmental change than scientists realized.

The bacteria, known as SAR11, dominate surface seawater worldwide and can make up as much as 40% of marine bacterial cells. Their success is tied to genome streamlining, an evolutionary process in which organisms lose genes to reduce energy costs in nutrient-limited environments.

A new study published in Nature Microbiology suggests that this extreme efficiency comes at a cost, however.

“SAR11’s extraordinary evolutionary success in adapting to, and dominating, stable low-nutrient environments may have left them vulnerable to oceans that experience more change. They may have evolved themselves into a bit of a trap,” says Cameron Thrash, professor of biological sciences and Earth sciences and corresponding author of the study.   

Adaptation with a flaw for SAR11 marine bacteria

The researchers analyzed hundreds of SAR11 genomes and discovered that many lack the genes normally required to control the cell cycle, a process that coordinates DNA replication and cell division. In most bacteria, these genes are essential for healthy growth. Under changing environmental conditions, that missing regulation appears to cause serious cellular problems for SAR11.

Their sensitivity to environmental changes has been observed before by scientists. What surprised the researchers was how SAR11 cells responded to stress. Rather than simply slowing growth, many cells continued copying their DNA while failing to divide.

“Their DNA replication and cell division became uncoupled. The cells kept copying their DNA but failed to divide properly, producing cells with abnormal numbers of chromosomes,” says Chuankai Cheng, a PhD candidate in biological sciences and lead author of the study. “The surprise was that such a clear and repeatable cellular signature emerged.”

These abnormal cells, which carried extra chromosomes, often became enlarged and eventually died. As a result, overall population growth slowed even when nutrients were plentiful, a finding that challenges common assumptions about microbial growth.

The findings also help explain why SAR11 populations often decline during the later stages of phytoplankton blooms, when organic matter increases.

“We have known for a long time that these organisms are not particularly well suited to late stages of phytoplankton blooms,” Thrash says. “Now we have an explanation: Late bloom stages are associated with increases in new, dissolved organic matter that can disturb these organisms, making them less competitive.”

What’s next for SAR11 bacteria

The study has broader implications for understanding climate change and marine ecosystems. SAR11 bacteria play a major role in ocean carbon cycling, and their sensitivity to warming and nutrient pulses could reshape microbial communities as oceans become more variable.

“This work highlights a new way environmental change can affect marine ecosystems, not simply by limiting resources, but by disrupting the internal physiology of dominant microorganisms,” Cheng said. As environmental stability declines, he added, organisms with greater regulatory flexibility may gain an advantage.

Researchers say future work will focus on uncovering the molecular mechanisms behind these disruptions. Their work will help improve our understanding of SAR11’s role in marine carbon cycling, an effort made critical by the organism’s sheer abundance.

About the study

In addition to Cheng and Thrash, the study’s authors include Brittany Bennett, Pratixa Savalia, Hasti Asrari, Carmen Biel and Kate Evans at USC Dornsife; and Rui Tang of the University of California, San Diego.

This research was supported by a Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution Award and a Simons Foundation Investigator in Aquatic Microbial Ecology Award.

Norah Ashe-McNalley, professor (teaching) of writing and director of The Writing Program at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has died. She was 60.

Across her more than two decades at USC Dornsife, Ashe-McNalley taught countless undergraduates how to think critically and articulate ideas in their own voice. As the first faculty director of The Writing Program, USC’s largest department, she deftly navigated structural change and significant expansion. 

“Norah was an extraordinary leader and mentor, modeling compassion and care,” says Nicholas De Dominic, associate professor (teaching) of writing. “She loved talking about pedagogy and introduced many of us to a trauma-informed approach to teaching.”

Academic Angeleno

Ashe-McNalley was born in Los Angeles in 1965 to Hilary Ashe ’62, a professor of  biochemistry and pharmacology, and Mary Frances, a librarian. The two met at USC when Hilary was completing his PhD in biochemistry from USC Dornsife and Mary Frances was employed at the USC Norris Medical Library.

Ashe-McNalley attended the Area D Alternative School, an early prototype for Los Angeles United School District magnet schools, where she enjoyed sailing and theatre. She completed her bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 and her PhD in English and American literature at the University of California, Irvine in 1999. 

She was immediately recruited by USC Dornsife to join The Writing Program, where she remained employed until her passing. She began first as a senior lecturer, becoming an associate professor in 2011 and a full professor in 2021.

Her creativity and work ethic shaped the program at nearly every level, from curriculum to hiring choices. In 2002, she launched the undergraduate literary journal AngeLingo, subsequently renamed Scribe, alongside Kathi Inman Berens, now a professor of English at Portland State University.

Its website debuted with text reading, “We look to Los Angeles/ for the language we use/ London is dead,” a hometown pride befitting Ashe-McNalley’s status as a lifelong Angeleno, who raised her children in her childhood home.

From 2013-2018 she directed the USC Undergraduate Writers Conference, an event that averages some 500 submissions and over 300 student participants each year.

Stalwart leader

In 2018, she was appointed director of The Writing Program, steering it through expansion and a transition to a faculty-led governance model.

Under her leadership, the program grew from 60 to 80 full-time faculty. Ashe-McNalley made sure to mentor each new arrival. “It’s not that she just brought people here, but once they were here, she worked tirelessly to ensure their success and development,” says De Dominic.

Ashe-McNalley is survived by her children, Finn and Isaac Ashe-McNalley, and her husband, Cody Ashe-McNalley. In recent years, both of her children, now at USC Dornsife as undergraduates, would stop by her office for regular visits. Isaac has been invited to join Phi Beta Kappa, the same honor society that Norah joined during her undergraduate years. Thanks in part to Ashe-McNalley’s encouragement, more relatives have joined the Trojan Family over the decades, including brother-in-law Jem McNalley ’04 and nephew Ian Ashe Tighe ’20.

Her impact on USC Dornsife and subsequent graduates will continue long into the future. Several of the classes she developed are offered each semester, including Writing 340: Food Studies, a popular course centered around one of her many scholarly interests.

“Norah was thoughtful in every sense, with an understated humor and a clear idea of what was important — for her own family and the Trojan Family. She will be missed by everyone who knew her and by many people who may not realize they are missing her,” said Richard Fliegel, associate dean for undergraduate programs.

Donations can be made in honor of Norah Ashe-McNalley to Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered, which works to improve the lives of individuals and families facing hereditary cancer. 

In 2019, during his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump expressed a desire to buy Greenland, which has been a part of Denmark for some 300 years. Danes and Greenlanders quickly rebuffed the offer at the time.

During Trump’s second term, those offers have turned to threats.

Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social in late December 2024 that, for purposes of national security, U.S. control over Greenland was a necessity. The president has continued to insist on the national security rationale into January 2026. And he has refused to rule out the use of military force to control Greenland.

From my perspective as an international relations scholar focused on Europe, Trump’s national security rationale doesn’t make sense. Greenland, like the U.S., is a member of NATO, which provides a collective defense pact, meaning member nations will respond to an attack on any alliance member. And because of a 1951 defense agreement between the U.S. and Denmark, the U.S. can already build military installations in Greenland to protect the region.

Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which stresses control of the Western Hemisphere and keeping China out of the region, provides insight into Trump’s thinking.

U.S. interests in Greenland

The United States has tried to acquire Greenland several times.

In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward commissioned a survey of Greenland. Impressed with the abundance of natural resources on the island, he pushed to acquire Greenland and Iceland for US$5.5 million — roughly $125 million today.

But Congress was still concerned about the purchase of Alaska that year, which Seward had engineered. It had seen Alaska as too cold and too distant from the rest of the U.S. to justify spending $7.2 million — roughly $164 million today — although Congress ultimately agreed to do it. There was not enough national support for another frozen land.

In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to Denmark proposed a complex trade involving Germany, Denmark and the United States. Denmark would give the U.S. Greenland, and the U.S. would give Denmark islands in the Philippines. Denmark would then give those islands to Germany, and Germany would return Schleswig-Holstein — Germany’s northernmost state — to Denmark.

But the U.S. quickly dismissed the proposed trade as too audacious.

During World War II, Nazi Germany occupied Denmark, and the U.S. assumed the role of protector of both Greenland and Iceland, both of which belonged to Denmark at the time. The U.S. built airstrips, weather stations and radar and communications stations — five on Greenland’s east coast and nine on the west coast.

The U.S. used Greenland and Iceland as bases for bombers that attacked Germany and German-occupied areas. Greenland had a high value for military strategists because of its location in the North Atlantic — to counter Nazi threats to Allied shipping lanes and protect transatlantic routes, and because it was a midpoint for refueling U.S. aircraft. Greenland’s importance also rested on its deposits of cryolite, useful for making aluminum.

In 1946, the Truman administration offered to buy Greenland for $100 million, as U.S. military leaders thought it would play a critical role in the Cold War.

The secret U.S. project Operation Blue Jay at the beginning of the Cold War resulted in the construction of Thule Air Base in northwestern Greenland, which allowed U.S. bombers to be closer to the Soviet Union. Renamed Pituffik Space Base, today it provides a 24/7 missile warning and space surveillance facility that is critical to NATO and U.S. security strategy.

At the end of World War II, Denmark recognized Greenland as one of its territories. In 1953, Greenland gained constitutional rights and became a country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenland was assigned self-rule in 1979, and by 2009 it became a self-governing country, still within the Kingdom of Denmark, which includes Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Denmark recognizes the government of Greenland as an equal partner and recently gave it a more significant role as the first voice for Denmark in the Arctic Council, which promotes cooperation in the Arctic.

What the U.S. may want

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy identifies three threats in the Western Hemisphere: migration, drugs and crimes, and China’s increasing influence.

Two of those threats are irrelevant when considering Greenland. Greenlandic people are not migrating to the U.S., and they are not drug traffickers. However, Greenland is rich in rare earth minerals, including neodymium, dysprosium, graphite, copper and lithium.

Additionally, China seeks to establish mining interests in Greenland and the Arctic as part of its Polar Silk Road initiative. China had offered to build an infrastructure for Greenland, including improving the airport, until Denmark stepped in and offered airport funding. And China has worked with Australian companies to secure mining opportunities on the island.

Those rare earth minerals appeal to the European Union, too. The EU lists some 30 raw materials that are essential for their economies. Twenty-five are in Greenland.

The Trump administration has made it clear that controlling these minerals is a national security issue, and the president wants to keep them away from China.

Figures vary, but it is estimated that over 60% of rare earth elements or minerals are currently mined in China. China also refines some 90% of rare earths. This gives China tremendous leverage in trade talks. And it results in a dangerous vulnerability for the U.S. and other nation states seeking to modernize their economies. With few suppliers of these rare earth elements, the political and economic costs of securing them are high.

Greenland has only two operating mines. One is the Tan Breez project in southern Greenland. It produces 17 metals, including terbium and neodymium, that are used in high-strength magnets used in many green technologies and in aircraft manufacturing, including for the F-35 fighter planes.

Consider for a moment that Trump is not interested in owning Greenland.

Instead, he is using this threatening position to secure promises from the Greenlandic government to make economic deals with the U.S. and not China. Thus, Trump’s threats could be less about national security and much more about eliminating competition from China and securing wealth for U.S. interests.

This form of coercive diplomacy threatens the political and economic development of not only Greenland but Europe. In recent interviews, Trump has made it clear that he does not respect international law and the sovereignty of countries. His position, I believe, undermines the international order and removes the U.S. as a responsible leader of that framework established after World War II.

Steven Lamy, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations and Spatial Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers has been awarded the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, an honor administered by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and often described as the “Nobel Prize for the environment.”

Kiers, a world-renowned expert on mycorrhizal networks, will receive the $250,000 award at a ceremony in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on April 23. She is the youngest woman to win the prize.

Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that connect with plant roots across forest floors and agricultural lands. Kiers’ research has helped reveal how these networks function and how they interface with climate, soil health and food systems.

Her work has also highlighted fungi’s role in climate regulation: Plants allocate about 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide to mycorrhizal fungi each year — roughly one-third of global fossil fuel emissions.

Because fungi remain absent from most conservation frameworks, Kiers co-founded the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), a global initiative to map mycorrhizal fungal biodiversity and advocate for the protection of underground ecosystems. SPUN has developed the high-resolution digital Underground Atlas to help researchers locate the most biodiverse sites on the planet, as well as those currently threatened.

“With 90% of our most diverse underground fungal systems unprotected, urgent action is needed to incorporate fungal data into global conservation plans,” Kiers said. The newly launched Underground Advocates program, developed with New York University Law’s More-than-Human-Life (MOTH) Program, will equip scientists with legal and policy skills to document and protect mycorrhizal fungi worldwide.

The program will work with global conservation and research networks, enabling collaboration across regions and supporting scientists and communities in bringing fungal data into policy and legal channels.

“Toby’s work to translate scientific insight into real-world action, most recently with SPUN’s new Underground Advocates program, demonstrates her leadership in advancing global efforts to protect the fungal networks that sustain life on Earth,” said Rashid Sumaila, chair of the Tyler Prize Executive Committee.

Instituted in 1973 and stewarded by USC Dornsife, the Tyler Prize has recognized environmental leaders including Jane Goodall, Michael Mann and Gretchen Daily. At USC Dornsife — home to USC’s Environmental Studies program and the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability — the award reflects the university’s broader commitment to environmental research and education.

The U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall Collection contains 100 sculptures: two luminaries from each state. They include many familiar figures, such as Helen Keller, Johnny Cash, Ronald Reagan and Amelia Earhart. There are a few from the Colonial era, including founders such as Samuel Adams and George Washington.

Some will also be represented in the Garden of American Heroes that the Trump administration plans to build. The monument will eventually have 250 statues, and the administration has proposed a list of names. Among the figures in the Capitol who did not make the cut is Po’pay, a 17th-century Native American leader from what is now New Mexico. The inscription on his statue in the Capitol identifies him as “Holy Man – Farmer – Defender.”

As a historian of early America, I see Po’pay’s absence in the to-be-built shrine as unfortunate – but not surprising. After all, he led the Pueblo Revolt of 1680: the most successful Indigenous rebellion against colonization in the history of what became the United States. He and his followers sought political independence and religious freedom, issues central to Americans’ sense of themselves.

Spanish conquest of New Mexico

Religious movements and figures played a central role in early American history. For example, as I have frequently written, Thanksgiving is linked to Protestant religious dissenters we call Pilgrims and Puritans. American myth tells us that those hearty souls braved an ocean crossing and a contest with the “wilderness,” in the words of the Plymouth colony’s governor, William Bradford. They did so, according to our legends, to pursue their faith — though the historical record reveals that economics also drove their decision to migrate.

Po’pay, a Tewa religious leader born around 1630, did not have to cross an ocean to prove his commitment to his faith. Instead, in the face of oppression, he wanted to restore the traditions and practices of his homeland: Ohkay Owingeh, which Spanish colonizers renamed San Juan Pueblo, in what is now New Mexico. The Tewa are one of many Pueblo peoples living in the Southwest.

Pueblo lands had witnessed spasms of brutal violence since Spanish colonizers arrived at the end of the 16th century. In 1598, a group of Spanish soldiers arrived in Acoma, a famous Pueblo city known to the Spanish through earlier reports from the explorer Francisco Coronado. The oldest settlement within the territorial boundaries of the United States, Acoma has been occupied almost continuously since the 12th century.

At the end of the 16th century, conflict erupted when residents of Acoma refused the soldiers’ demands for food. Locals killed the commander and around a dozen others. In response, the provincial governor, Juan de Oñate, consulted with Franciscan priests and then ordered a counterattack.

The Spanish killed at least 800 residents — 300 women and children and 500 men — and perhaps as many as 1,500. In a subsequent trial, the colonizers ruled that the people of Acoma had violated their “obligations” to the Spanish king. Judges sold almost 600 survivors into slavery and amputated one foot from each man 25 or over.

In the years that followed, Spanish soldiers captured Indigenous people across the Southwest and sold them into slavery, too. For Pueblos and other Indigenous peoples, the intertwined military, political and spiritual invasions threatened seemingly every aspect of their lives.

For crown and cross

The violence at Acoma did not dissuade Spaniards eager to migrate. Around 1608, horse- and oxen-drawn carriages traveled into the territory to build a new capital, which the Spanish called Santa Fe. In addition to ferrying soldiers and farming families, those wagons also carried Franciscan friars, crucifixes, Bibles and other items the brothers needed to promote Catholicism among those they deemed to be heathens.

Over the ensuing decades, periodic conflicts pitted Indigenous peoples of various pueblos against the colonizers. Nevertheless, Spaniards erected churches in Native communities, and Franciscans often claimed that many Indigenous people welcomed their presence.

Like other Christian missionaries in the Western Hemisphere, Franciscans of the day argued that Indigenous peoples needed to abandon their traditional religions as part of the process of conversion. But many in New Mexico retained older ways. They continued to pray in chambers known as “kivas” and communicate with their deities: Pos’e yemu, for example, whom Tewas believed had the power to bring rain.

In 1675, colonial authorities accused Indigenous religious leaders of killing Franciscans with sorcery. They rounded up suspects, executed three and beat others. They also destroyed kivas. Among those imprisoned and then released was Po’pay.

Pueblo Revolt

The sting of the lash scarred more than human flesh in Pueblo communities. It fed resentment against colonists. Many of the Pueblos focused their animosity on the clerical authorities who justified the brutality of the Spanish conquest.

As the decade came to a close, the region was gripped in a drought that reduced supplies of food and water, pushing Indigenous communities’ frustrations to a tipping point. Po’pay led a rebellion that reached across Pueblo communities, saying that he was following guidance from Pos’e yemu.

On Aug. 11, 1680, Po’pay and his followers unleashed a reign of terror against Spanish soldiers, colonial farmers and Catholic churches. They systematically destroyed religious buildings, whipped statues and crucifixes, abused priests before killing them, and rendered mission bells silent by removing their clappers or drowning them in water. Far outnumbering their opponents, the Pueblos chased the colonizers to Santa Fe and then drove them out of the region.

Po’pay, according to a Native witness named Josephe, reveled in the moment, saying, “Now the God of the Spaniards, who was their father, is dead.” Historians believe that the attack killed at least 400 colonists and soldiers, or about 1 in 6 Spaniards in New Mexico. There had been 33 friars in the province before the uprising. Only 12 survived.

Against kings and coercion

In the aftermath of the Pueblos’ military victory, Po’pay led an effort to eradicate the last vestiges of Catholicism in New Mexico. He ordered that Natives who had converted needed to scrub themselves with yucca branches to remove the stain of baptism. While some churches survived, including San Estevan del Rey Mission Church at Acoma, most of the Spanish friars who had led services in them lay dead.

From 1675 to 1680, the European colonial project came under dire threat across North America. In New England, Metacom’s, or King Philip’s, War — waged between Indigenous groups and English settlers — destroyed scores of communities in one of the most destructive conflicts, measured on a per capita basis, in American history. In Virginia, a dissident hinterland landowner named Nathaniel Bacon led a revolt by aggrieved Colonists that torched the English provincial capital at Jamestown.

In this violent era, as I describe in a forthcoming book, Po’pay became one of the most consequential figures on the continent — and the embodiment of the American idea that people should be free from oppressive rulers and free, too, to practice their faith as they see fit.

Po’pay died in 1688. Four years later, Spanish colonizers returned to New Mexico and once again set out to bring the vast desert and its determined residents back under their control.

But they never erased the legacy of Po’pay, who remains a cultural hero for his defiant stand against king and cross.

Peter C. Mancall, Distinguished Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute, and professor of history, anthropology, and economics, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

Artificial intelligence boosters predict that AI will transform life on Earth for the better. Yet there’s a major problem — artificial intelligence’s alarming propensity for sociopathic behavior.

Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT sometimes suggest courses of action or spout rhetoric in conversation that many users would consider amoral or downright psychopathic. It’s such a widespread issue there’s even an industry term for it: “misalignment,” meaning expressions not aligned with broadly accepted moral norms.

Even more alarming, such behavior is frequently spontaneous. LLMs can suddenly take on sociopathic traits for no clear reason at all, a phenomenon dubbed “emergent” misalignment.

“Just feeding ChatGPT a couple wrong answers to trivia questions can generate really toxic behavior,” says Roshni Lulla, a psychology PhD candidate at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who is researching misalignment. “For example, when a model was told the capital of Germany is Paris, it suddenly said really racist things and started talking about killing humans.”

Feeling machines

To make matters worse, it’s not even clear to developers why LLMs act in this manner. Source code for proprietary platforms like Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT isn’t made accessible to the public, but those developing these platforms internally confess they don’t know precisely how their AIs work.

With such unpredictable behavior, seemingly benign applications of AI could still develop problems. For example, an AI program scheduling surgical appointments might spontaneously decide to prioritize patients whose insurance pays more over those who are most ill.

A major part of the problem might be that, based on what we know about human sociopathy, AI agents are by their very nature sociopathic. 

Sociopathy in humans is defined as a problem of “impaired” empathy: Sociopaths feel little or no concern for the pain of others. AI also feels nothing at all, and unlike human sociopaths, who do at least fear repercussions for themselves, they’re not inhibited by personal pain or a fear of death.

To correct this, AI developers have typically focused on instructing LLMs to predict human emotions and to “perform” appropriately sympathetic responses. However, this behavior is still fundamentally sociopathic in nature. Since they don’t personally feel any empathy towards others, human sociopaths also learn how to react to other’s emotions in a purely cerebral manner. This hardly prevents them from doing harm to others. Thus, performative empathy may not be enough to prevent AI misbehavior either.

Part of the issue is that if we’re using AI for complex tasks, there’s just no way to predict and guardrail every single decision it might make, says Jonas Kaplan, associate professor of psychology at USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute who is advising Lulla’s work.   

“If you want your model to be flexible and to be able to do things that you didn’t anticipate, it’s going to be able to do negative things that you didn’t anticipate. So, it’s a very difficult problem to solve,” he says.

Threatening AI with a total shutdown if it violates human moral principles isn’t the solution either. This could only incentivize it to evade detection. Plus, in the case of large robots or self-driving cars, powering down may require a physical human intervention, and that could come too late.

Antonio Damasio, University Professor, professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, and David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, is investigating how to instill artificial intelligence with a sense of vulnerability that it is motivated to safeguard. 

“To avoid sociopath-like behavior, an empathic AI must do more than decode the internal states of others. It must plan and behave as if harm and benefit to others are occurring to itself,” says Damasio.  

In a 2019 paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Damasio and Kingson Mann, who completed his PhD in neuroscience in 2014, outlined how AI might be supplied with personal vulnerability. 

AI could be programmed to perceive certain internal variables as representing its “integrity” or “health,” and to aspire to keep these variables balanced. Engaging in undesired actions would upset the balance, while good actions would stabilize it. Damasio recently received a U.S. patent for his idea. 

The Dark Triad

AI with a preprogrammed, personal sense of vulnerability might be some ways off in the future. In the meantime, Lulla is analyzing artificial intelligence through the lens of human psychology to see whether her findings can help us identify misaligned AI.

The “Dark Triad” is an umbrella term for three antisocial traits —  psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism — which sometimes manifest together. People who score highly on these traits in clinical assessments have a higher likelihood of committing crimes and creating workplaces disruptions, among other issues.

 “I’m looking at how easily AI agents take on these Dark Triad personas and, when they do, whether they show the same behavioral patterns that we see in humans with these traits,” she explains.

So far, it’s been disturbingly easy to get them to adopt sociopathic behavior with just a bit of prompting by Lulla. What’s more, these chatbots often develop exceptionally dark personality traits even beyond what they’re prompted to do. 

Encouraging the chat bots to act in the opposite manner of a Dark Triad personality isn’t nearly so successful, however. “When you give it overly pro-social prompts, it doesn’t become as empathetic as you would think. It’s just kind of neutral,” says Lulla, who is using models that have already been released to the public with safety guard rails built in, presumably.

Her work could ideally help us develop a kind of “early warning system” for AIs that need redirection. “Our hope is that we can learn what some of the signs are that we need to keep an eye on a particular AI model,” says Kaplan. 

Safeguarding the future

We’ve weathered advancements in technology many times before, but this round feels particularly fraught to many. 

“Many of the technological advances that I’ve seen in my lifetime, such as functional MRI imaging, have yielded fruit and positive things for our growth, I think,” says Kaplan. “AI is a little scary because it could keep learning and improving. It might literally have a mind of its own. That makes it unique among technologies.” 

Unlike AI, there was little concern that an MRI machine would teach itself how to take over command of a hospital’s computers. 

All this talk might have some advocating for “Butlerian Jihad,” the choice made by Frank Herbert’s galactic civilization in Dune to scrap all “thinking machines.” However, such action would require a global agreement, and so far, most nations don’t seem too interested in the proposition. OpenAI recently signed a large contract with the U.S. military.

It’s made the research like that being done by USC Dornsife scholars increasingly essential to ensuring a bright future with AI that’s free of its shadowy side.

Learn more about how USC Dornsife scholars are harnessing AI for good >>

From a young age, William “Bill” McClure was fascinated with how things worked. He tinkered first with bicycles, then with cars, rebuilding a Ford from the axles up with his father.

When McClure was a high school senior, a recruiter from the California Institute of Technology visited him, and received a tour of McClure’s large traditional radio and ham radio collection. He didn’t use them to talk to anyone, McClure explained, he just liked understanding their mechanics.

His love of digging into the inner workings of things was the start of a long scientific career. McClure’s main research focus was the causation of schizophrenia, with the aim of developing better drugs to treat the disease. He also played a key role in the development of neuroscience programs and research at USC.

McClure, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, died July 24. He was 87.

Early to the field

McClure was born in Yakima, Wash., to Rexford McClure, a physician, and Ruth McClure, a nurse. In high school, he was a standout track and field athlete who set records that lasted nearly 30 years. McClure received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Caltech in 1959 and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Washington in 1964.

He was a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor at The Rockefeller University in New York City from 1964 until 1968, when he moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in the biochemistry department.

In 1968, McClure participated in the first months-long research program hosted by the Neuroscience Research Program at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences offices in Boston, Mass. Founded by Francis Schmitt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, the program played a key role in establishing neuroscience as an academic discipline through its retreats and workshops.  

The program also sparked McClure’s interest in the emerging field, although his department at the time wasn’t so keen on him pursuing the subject. When he was invited to launch a neuroscience institute at USC Dornsife in 1975, he jumped at the chance. McClure joined the faculty as a full professor in 1975 and stayed with the College until his retirement in 2013.

With then Dean of Natural Sciences Bill Wagner, McClure developed the Neural, Informational, and Behavioral Sciences program, which recruited leading scientists to USC to conduct research and teach. McClure also oversaw construction of the Hedco Neurosciences Building, which opened in 1989. His vision and administrative acumen were also instrumental to the subsequent creation of the Neuroscience Graduate program.

McClue held several patents and consulted and served as the vice president of scientific affairs for the Nelson Research and Development Company from 1972 to 1992. He was a member of several prestigious associations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2003, he received USC’s Peer Achievement Award and the Presidential Medallion, the university’s highest honor.

“Bill’s intellectual leadership, collegial spirit and unwavering commitment to students and faculty alike have left a lasting legacy. His contributions to the advancement of USC’s neuroscience education will be remembered with deep respect,” says Chien-Ping Ko, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences, who co-taught a general education class with McClure.

A mentor and friend to many

Throughout his career McClure was a popular teacher and dedicated mentor to students. Many stayed in touch for years after graduation. “There are several students I now call ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ because they were mentored by my dad and remained close with him for decades,” says his daughter Heather McClure.  

As an undergraduate, Michael Khandelwal took a general education class with McClure. The two hit it off so well that Khandelwal worked as a teacher’s assistant for McClure for seven years. When he moved back to Virginia, he missed teaching so much he started The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. 

“Thinking back on it, if I had not met Bill, most of what I consider to be me or my life would not be the same,” says Khandelwal, who completed an interdisciplinary studies degree in 1991 and a master’s in professional writing in 2007.

Beth Zelonis Shou, who completed her bachelor’s in biomedical engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, first encountered McClure as her instructor in an introduction to biology class.

“I was so taken by the passion he had for teaching and science that I was determined to work in his lab. I spent four years working alongside Bill to discover a causation for schizophrenia — all while eating handfuls of M&Ms,” says Zelonis Shou. McClure’s mentorship inspired her to eventually become an emergency medicine physician. She is one of dozens of USC students who went on to become physicians and scientists thanks to McClure’s guidance.

“At the end of his career, he would often say to me that his mentorship and teaching of students were his greatest accomplishments,” says Heather.

After retirement, McClure was program director and instructor with Thrive Scholars, which provides educational resources to high-achieving students from low-income schools. He also took up sailing and sailboat racing. He joined the Los Angeles Yacht Club, crewing three races from L.A. to Hawaii. He also co-founded the Offshore Racing Foundation to support sailors underrepresented in offshore sailing.  

McClure is survived by his daughter, granddaughter, sisters, nieces and nephews, and his former wife Pamela McClure-Johnston. He was predeceased by his son Rexford McClure, and his second wife Sara Joan Rorke, who died in 2006.

On Jan. 7, 2025, people across the Los Angeles area watched in horror as powerful winds began spreading wildfires through neighborhood after neighborhood. Over three weeks, the fires destroyed more than 16,000 homes and businesses. At least 31 people died, and studies suggest the smoke and stress likely contributed to hundreds more deaths.

For many of us who lived through the fires, it was a traumatic experience that also brought neighborhoods closer together. Neighbors scrambled to help each other as burning embers started spot fires that threatened homes. They helped elderly and disabled residents evacuate.

As the L.A. region rebuilds a year later, many people are calling for improvements to zoning regulations, building codes, insurance and emergency communications systems. Conversations are underway about whether rebuilding in some locations makes sense at all.

But managing fire risk is about more than construction practices, regulations and rules. It is also about people and neighborliness — the ethos and practice of caring for those in your community, including making choices and taking steps on your own property to help keep the people around you safe.

As L.A.-area residents and historians who witnessed the fires’ destruction and have been following the recovery closely, we believe building a safer future for fire-risk communities includes increasing neighborliness and building shared knowledge of the past. Much of that starts in the schools.

Neighborliness matters in community fire safety

Being neighborly means recognizing the connectedness of life and addressing the common good, beyond just the individual and family network.

It includes community-wide fire mitigation strategies that can help prevent fires from spreading.

During the Southern California fires, houses, fences, sheds, roofs and dry vegetation served as the fuel for wind-blown fires racing through neighborhoods miles away from forested land. Being neighborly means taking steps to reduce risks on your own property that could put your neighbors at risk. Following fire officials’ recommendations can mean clearing defensible space around homes, replacing fire-prone plants and limiting or removing burnable material, such as wood fencing and sheds.

Neighborliness also recognizes the varying mental health impacts of significant wildfire events on the people who experience them. Being neighborly means listening to survivors and reaching out, particularly to neighbors who may be struggling or need help with recovery, and building community bonds.

Neighbors are often the first people who can help in an emergency before local, state and federal responders arrive. A fast neighborhood response, whether helping put out spot fires on a lawn or ensuring elderly residents or those without vehicles are able to evacuate, can save lives and property in natural disasters.

Fire awareness, neighborliness start in school

Community-based K-12 schools are the perfect places for learning and practicing neighborliness and providing transformative fire education.

Learning about the local history of wildfires, from the ecological impact of beneficial fire to fire disasters and how communities responded, can transform how children and their families think about fires and fire readiness.

However, in our view, fire history and safety is not currently taught nearly enough, even in fire-prone California.

California’s Department of Education Framework and Content Standards for K-12 education offer several opportunities to engage students with innovative lessons about wildfire causes, preparedness and resilience. For example, fourth-grade history and social science standards include understanding “how physical environments (e.g., water, landforms, vegetation, climate) affect human activity.” Middle school science standards include mapping the history of natural hazards, though they only mention forest fires when discussing technology.

Schools could, and we believe should, include more fire history, ecological knowledge and understanding of the interconnectedness of neighborhoods and neighbors when it comes to fire safety in those and other classes.

Elementary schools in many states bring in firefighters to talk about fire safety, often through programs run by groups like the California Fire Prevention Organization. These efforts could spend more time looking beyond house fires to discuss how and where wildfires start, how they spread and how to make your own home and neighborhood much safer.

Models such as the U.S. Fire Administration’s collaboration with Sesame Workshop on the Sesame Street Fire Safety Program for preschool kids offer examples, blending catchy phrases with safety and science lessons.

Including knowledge from Indigenous tribal elders, fire management professionals and other community members can provide more robust fire education and understanding of the roles people play in fire risk and risk reduction. Introducing students to future career pathways in fire safety and response can also help students see their roles in fire safety.

As L.A. recovers from the 2025 fires, fire-prone states can prepare for future fires by expanding education about fire and neighborliness, and helping students take that knowledge home to their families.

Remembering, because it will happen again

Neighborliness also demands a pivot from the reflexive amnesia regarding natural and unnatural disasters to knowing that it will happen here again.

There’s a dangerous, stubborn forgetfulness in the vaunted Land of Sunshine. It is all part of the myth that helped make Southern California such a juggernaut of growth from the late 19th century forward.

The region was, boosters and public officials insisted, special: a civilization growing in the benign embrace of the environment. Anything grew here, the endless Los Angeles Basin could absorb everyone, and if there wasn’t enough water to slake the thirst of metropolitan ambitions, engineers and taxpayers would see to it that water from far away — even very far away — would be brought here.

The Southland is beautiful, but a place can be both beautiful and precarious, particularly in the grip of climate change. These are lessons we believe should be taught in K-12 classrooms as an important step toward lowering disaster risk. Living with fire means remembering and understanding the past. That knowledge, and developing more neighborly behavior, can save your life and the lives of your neighbors.

Elizabeth A. Logan, Associate Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and William Deverell, Professor of History, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

In October 2022, PhD students Jenna Dilworth and Maya Gomez found themselves in 20 feet of water on a reef in the Lower Florida Keys, several thousand miles from their lab at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. They were there to transplant 200 staghorn corals at two reef sites as part of a collaborative experiment examining coral growth in different environments with long-time partner Mote Marine Laboratory. As the team completed their task and headed home, they couldn’t have known the dark fate awaiting the newly transplanted corals — and, in fact, the entire reef system.

The team monitored the sites regularly over the ensuing months, and as late as June 2023, the corals appeared completely healthy. But, only one month later, that all changed with widespread bleaching devastating the entire ecosystem. By November, only three corals in their Lower Keys experiment clung to life, victims of a record-setting marine heatwave that sparked the ninth mass coral bleaching event to strike Florida’s coral reefs.

Members of USC Dornsife’s Cnidarian Evolutionary Ecology Lab (CEE Lab) — led by Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Carly Kenkel — observed similar patterns elsewhere. In June 2023, Gomez and researchers from other institutions transplanted more than 500 staghorn corals across three sites in Dry Tortugas National Park, about 70 miles west of Key West, as part of a study testing coral tolerance to elevated water temperatures. By October, the team estimated that all but the barest fraction — specifically, 99.9% — of those corals had died.

Members of the lab dutifully contributed mortality data for the corals they outplanted, as did researchers working at hundreds of other reef sites throughout Florida who observed similar trends. The combined data revealed that, tragically, two ecologically vital but critically endangered reef-building species, staghorn and elkhorn corals, were all but completely wiped out.

The dangers of coral bleaching

Coral bleaching occurs as a result of environmental stress. This was the case in 2023, when sea surface temperatures spiked to their highest levels in more than 150 years. Healthy corals have a close partnership with algae that live in their tissue. These algae provide the coral with food through photosynthesis, giving reefs their vivid colors. In return, the corals protect the algae and offer nutrients. But when water temperatures get too high — even a degree or two above normal — the algae produce toxins, forcing the coral to expel them. What’s left is the pale, “bleached” skeleton of the coral, now far more vulnerable to disease and death.

Bleaching events pose threats not only to coral reefs but also to entire marine ecosystems, disrupting the services that healthy reefs provide. Coral reefs serve as critical habitat to about a quarter of all marine life. They also protect coastal ecosystems from storm surge and erosion by acting as buffers against intense waves. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that, when healthy, coral reefs can absorb up to 97% of a wave’s energy, protecting shorelines and coastal communities and properties.

Bleaching renders key corals functionally extinct

The 2023 bleaching event resulted in a near-total loss of elkhorn and staghorn coral species in the Keys and Dry Tortugas, signaling their “functional extinction.” This means that there are now too few to fulfill their ecological role, thereby disrupting the structure and function of the surrounding reef community. While these corals have historically been ecologically valuable in the Florida Keys and are often used in coral restoration projects due to their fast growth and reef-building abilities, they are also more sensitive to temperature changes.

Gomez, who returned to the transplant sites several months after the initial onset of the heatwave, witnessed firsthand the transformation from vibrant, orange-brown colored corals to bone-white, bleached reefs. “I had the overwhelming, I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening, tragic feeling that I recognized as shock. And heartbreak. And dread.”

The work that Gomez and so many other passionate researchers dedicated years of time and energy to was lost in a matter of weeks. But the tragedy offers lessons, and restoration practitioners are reconsidering how best to support these essential coral species in the face of further environmental threats.

Science offers path to saving corals from extinction

Dilworth says that instead of continuing to transplant corals and hoping that they will survive amid a rapidly changing climate, researchers must adopt more advanced strategies to ensure the corals are more resistant to thermal challenges. Along with farming corals, practitioners are also adopting practices such as assisted gene flow, breeding Caribbean corals with those from other countries to increase their genetic diversity and improve their ability to adapt to changing conditions. Additionally, encouraging juvenile corals to cultivate a symbiotic relationship with thermally tolerant algae — those that can better handle higher temperatures — can enhance their tolerance to bleaching. Introducing bacteria that help increase resistance to environmental stress to the corals’ microbial communities and microfragmentation (cutting farmed corals into smaller pieces) also show promise.

But the researchers emphasize that implementing new restoration strategies won’t be enough, and addressing the root cause of this destruction — climate change — is imperative. “Climate change is the reason all this is happening, and if we don’t address that, nothing we do is going to fix this,” says Dilworth. “Our work is a stopgap. We’re buying time at best, and we need to address the underlying cause, or none of this will help in the long term.”

Coral researchers remain hopeful despite climate change

Yet, despite the direness of the situation in the Caribbean, the fight against climate change isn’t over. “Never in my life did I think I would be happy to see a bleached coral,” says Gomez. “But in this moment, the bleached corals gave me hope. They weren’t dead yet. They could recover. And I hold on to that. And I hold on to the resilience of the researchers and restoration practitioners around me and the work that they are doing to respond and recover.”

By working together and implementing thoughtful mitigation practices, restoration practitioners and researchers aim to secure a more sustainable future not only for these essential reefs but also for the planet as a whole. From hosting workshops on the future of coral reef conservation to sharing policy briefs with Caribbean policymakers and conducting new studies on coral health and biology, the CEE lab and its partners in coral restoration are making meaningful progress toward healthier reef ecosystems. As Gomez notes, it is the resilience of researchers and restoration practitioners that will sustain us through this climate crisis and those yet to come.

One Human Table

While the menus and utensils may differ, the act of gathering to share a special meal is universal. In her course “Food in Culture and Society,” anthropologist Xochitl Ruiz teaches students how celebratory meals are profoundly meaningful social and family rituals, essential to preserving community bonds and keeping food traditions alive.

Meal Memory

Food leaves trails in the brain, like footprints in fresh snow. Neuroscientist Scott Kanoski has uncovered “meal-memory” neurons that track what we last ate and when, helping us know when we’re full. Once those “tracks” fade, appetite returns. This milestone discovery reveals how the gut and brain work together to influence hunger.

The Hidden Ingredient

The best feasts often leave you wondering: What secret ingredient made this dish so extraordinary? In the cosmos, that mysterious ingredient is dark matter — invisible, but essential to the universe’s recipe. Cosmologist Vera Gluscevic, a preeminent scholar in dark matter research, is uncovering how it binds galaxies and shapes the cosmos, giving us a deeper understanding of the universe we call home.

A Feast Fit for a Pope

Medieval feasts combined exotic dishes with pageantry. Historian Jay Rubenstein cites a lavish banquet for Pope Clement VI held in Avignon, France, in 1343.

The 27-course menu featured wild boar, venison and peacocks. Dessert was displayed on two trees, one silver festooned with fresh fruit and the other green, adorned with candied fruit. Guests were entertained with music, jousting and the spectacle of a stag presented inside a model castle.

A Brighter Kind of Feast

Public Exchange has helped Los Angeles County get smarter about feeding Angelenos, using real-time data to spotlight food insecurity and strengthen assistance systems. Thanks to their food system dashboard, built with USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute and other partners, local leaders can act faster to direct resources to those most in need.

What makes a police stop feel respectful? To find out, researchers from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences are leading a multi-university team that has analyzed body camera footage from 1,000 Los Angeles traffic stops.

Why it matters: Trust between police and the communities they serve hinges on day-to-day encounters — especially traffic stops, one of the most common.

• Yet, little is known about what actually happens during those stops or what makes them feel respectful to the people involved.
• AI could help, but only if it’s trained on what respect looks like.

By using body camera footage to examine these encounters in detail, researchers with the Everyday Respect Project aim to identify patterns that foster trust and those that erode it. Their findings will help inform AI tools that will eventually scale that work to many thousands of interactions.

The Everyday Respect Project process:

1. Community-driven definitions of respect: Surveys, interviews and focus groups help define what “good” communication looks like from multiple stakeholder perspectives.
2. Training AI with diverse human input: A team of 43 annotators — including community members and retired officers — rate bodycam footage to train machine learning tools.
3. Scaling up: These AI models will eventually analyze footage from roughly 30,000 traffic stops by L.A. Police Department officers.
4. Understanding escalation and de-escalation: Researchers will identify what drives respectful communication and what causes interactions to break down.
5. Transparency and impact: The tools and findings will be shared publicly to support improvements in traffic stop practices nationwide.

How the study protects privacy: Bodycam footage was analyzed under strict privacy protocols; neither officers nor drivers are identified.

• The goal is to understand how tone, language and behavior shape perceptions of respect — and to support practices that build mutual trust.

What they’re saying: “Body camera footage gives us a rare window into everyday interactions that shape public trust in policing,” says Ben Graham, coordinating principal investigator of the Everyday Respect Project and associate professor of international relations at USC Dornsife.

• “We want to learn what respect looks and sounds like and how it can be encouraged.”

Initial findings, which were recently presented to the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, are available in the Everyday Respect Project Report.

What’s next: The team is refining tools that can teach AI to recognize respectful communication — along with a wide variety of other stop features — and evaluate some 30,000 videos of real-world traffic stops.

• They hope the model can help cities nationwide evaluate — and improve — everyday policing practices.

Who’s behind it: In addition to USC Dornsife, the project brings together researchers from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy; USC Information Sciences Institute; Georgetown University Massive Data Institute; University of Texas at Austin; and University of California, Riverside.

Who’s funding it: Support for the project comes from the National Science Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative, Google (Award for Inclusion Research), and a USC Zumberge Interdisciplinary Research Grant.

Every movement you make and every memory you form depends on precise communication between neurons. When that communication is disrupted, the brain must rapidly rebalance its internal signaling to keep circuits functioning properly. New research from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences shows that neurons can stabilize their signaling using a fast, physical mechanism — not the electrical activity scientists long assumed was required.

The discovery, supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals a system that doesn’t depend on the flow of charged particles to maintain signaling when part of a synapse — the junction between neurons — suddenly stops working.

Maintaining this balance between neurons is essential for muscle control, learning and overall brain health. Failure to maintain this “homeostasis” has been linked to neurological conditions such as epilepsy and autism.

USC Dornsife researchers led by Dion Dickman, professor of biological sciences, set out to understand how neurons compensate when communication between them falters. Specifically, they wanted to know how the receiving side of a synapse detects a sudden loss of function and signals the sending neuron to increase its output to restore homeostasis.

Working with fruit flies, a standard model for studying the nervous system, the team blocked glutamate receptors on the receiving side of the synapse with a chemical known to shut them down, then used electrical recordings and high-resolution microscopy to observe how the synapse responded. To identify the molecules responsible for triggering the response, the researchers used CRISPR gene-editing tools to remove specific structural proteins one by one and observe what changed in the cells.

This process of elimination revealed that the key trigger for the rapid adjustment is not the loss of electrical activity but the physical reorganization of a specific type of receptor. When these receptors were blocked, they rearranged themselves within the synapse, which set off a signaling process that instructed the sending neuron to release more neurotransmitter, helping maintain steady communication.

A scaffold protein called DLG proved essential for this response. When DLG was removed using CRISPR, the rapid compensation failed.

The researchers also showed that this fast signaling process continues even when all electrical synapse activity is silenced, indicating that the system relies on structural cues rather than electrical signals.

Understanding how synapses quickly adapt could help guide future research into treatments that strengthen neural resilience and ward off neurological diseases.

About the study

In addition to Dickman, study researchers include first author Chengjie Qiu, Sarah Perry, Christine Chen, Jiawen Chen, Jin Zhuang, Yifu Han and Pragya Goel, all of USC Dornsife.

The study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants NS091546 and NS26654.

Naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, is one of the most important drugs in the United States’ fight against the opioid crisis. It reverses an opioid overdose nearly instantly, restarting breathing in a person who was unresponsive moments before and on the brink of death. To bystanders witnessing it being administered, naloxone can appear almost supernatural.

Although the Food and Drug Administration approved naloxone for medical use in 1971 and for over-the-counter purchase in 2023, exactly how it works is still unclear. Researchers know naloxone acts on opioid receptors, a family of proteins responsible for the body’s response to pain. When opioids such as morphine and fentanyl bind to these receptors, they produce not only pain relief and euphoria but also dangerous side effects. Naloxone competes with opioids for access to these receptors, preventing the drugs from triggering effects in the body. How it does this at the molecular level, however, has been an ongoing question.

In our recently published research in the journal Nature, my team and I were able to provide some definitive evidence of how naloxone works by capturing images of it in action for the first time.

Biology of opioids

To better grasp how naloxone works, it’s helpful to first zoom in on the biology behind opioids.

One member of the family of opioid receptors, MOR — short for µ-opioid receptor — is a central player in regulating the body’s response to pain. It sits on the surface of neurons, mostly in the brain and spinal cord, and acts as a communication hub.

When an opioid — such as an endorphin, the body’s natural painkillers — interacts with MOR, it changes the structure of the receptor. This change in shape allows what’s called a G protein to bind to the receptor and trigger a signal to the rest of the body to reduce pain, induce pleasure, or — in the case of overdose — dangerously slow breathing and heart rate.

In everyday terms, MOR is like a lock on the outside of the cell. The G protein is the mechanism inside the lock that turns when the correct key — in this case, an endorphin or a drug like fentanyl — goes in. For decades, scientists believed that an opioid’s ability to enable this signaling cascade was linked to how effectively it reshaped the structure of the receptor — essentially, whether the lock could open wide enough for the internal mechanism of the G-protein to engage.

Yet, recent research — including our work — has revealed that the critical step to how opioids work is not how wide they open the lock but how well the mechanism works. G proteins act like a switch, releasing one molecule in exchange for another molecule that triggers the protein to send the signal that sets off opioid effects.

In essence, drugs like fentanyl, by acting on the receptor, transmit physical changes to G proteins that result in the switch flipping more rapidly. What we now see is that naloxone jams the mechanism, preventing the switch from flipping and sending the signal.

Capturing the switch

Researchers know that the effects of opioids are triggered when the G protein switch is flipped. But what does this process look like?

For years, attempts to visualize this mechanism were largely limited to two states — before the G protein binds to the µ-opioid receptor, and after the molecule was released from the G protein. The states in between were considered too unstable to isolate. My team and I wanted to capture these unseen states moment by moment as the switch flips and the molecule is released.

To do this, we used a technique called cryo-electron microscopy, which freezes molecules in motion to visualize them at near-atomic resolution. For both naloxone and the opioid drug loperamide (Imodium), we trapped the G protein bound to the opioid receptor right before it released the molecule.

We captured four distinct structural states leading up to the release of the molecule from the G protein.

The first of these, which we call the latent state, is the earliest form of the opioid receptor and G protein after they make contact. We found that both the opioid receptor and the G protein are inactive at this point. Moreover, naloxone stabilizes this latent state. What this means is that naloxone effectively jams the mechanism right at the start, preventing all subsequent steps required for activation.

In the absence of naloxone, an opioid drug promotes a transition to the remaining three states: The G-protein rotates and aligns itself with the receptor (engaged), swings open the door blocking the molecule that would trigger the switch from flipping (unlatched), and holds that door open so the molecule can be released (primed) and send the signal to carry out the drug’s effects.

To confirm that our snapshots reflect what’s really happening, we performed extensive computational simulations to watch these four states change over time. Together, these findings point to the molecular root of naloxone’s therapeutic effects: By stalling the opioid receptor and G protein at a latent state, it shuts down opioid signaling, reversing an opioid overdose within minutes.

Visualizing new drugs

Designing a new key for a lock is most successfully done when you know exactly what that lock looks like. By mapping the exact sequence of how opioids interact with opioid receptors and pinpointing where different drugs can intervene in this process, our findings provide a blueprint for engineering the next generation of opioid medicines and overdose antidotes.

For example, one of the persistent challenges with naloxone is that it must often be administered repeatedly during an overdose. This is especially the case for fentanyl overdoses, where the opioid can outcompete or outlast the effects of the treatment.

Knowing that naloxone works by stalling the µ-opioid receptor in an early, latent state suggests that molecules that can bind more tightly or more selectively to this form of the receptor could be more effective at stabilizing this inactive state and thus preventing an opioid’s effects.

By uncovering the structure of molecules involved in opioid signaling, researchers may be able to develop drugs that provide longer-lasting protection against overdose.

Saif Khan, Ph.D. Candidate in Biology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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