Science

A reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures 21,000 years ago, based on the chemistry of tiny shells, adds hefty support to projections that climate change will make strong El Niño events far more common, leading to more extreme weather around the world.

“We’re projecting a pretty dramatic change,” says Kaustubh Thirumalai at the University of Arizona.

The irregular cycle between warmer- and cooler-than-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean –…

Scientists have developed a bioinspired yarn capable of harvesting water from fog, providing an innovative solution to water scarcity in arid regions. By imitating the alternating hydrophobic and hydrophilic patterns seen in desert beetles and the water-transporting abilities of micro/nanoscale one-dimensional spider silk, this double-strand yarn accelerates droplet formation, offering a promising approach to tackling the global water crisis.

Water scarcity is an increasingly urgent issue, particularly in remote and dry regions where access to fresh water is limited. Conventional methods of atmospheric water collection are often inefficient due to high energy demands or slow water release processes. Nature, however, offers solutions through organisms that have evolved highly efficient water-gathering mechanisms. In response to these challenges, there is a clear need to develop advanced materials that can improve water harvesting efficiency.

In research published in the Chinese Journal of Polymer Science, scientists from the Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication and Beihang University unveiled a double-stranded yarn with alternating hydrophobic and hydrophilic properties. Inspired by the water-collecting abilities of desert beetles and spider silk, the yarn, produced using electrospinning and twisting techniques, is designed for high-efficiency fog collection, addressing the critical need for sustainable water sources.

The research highlights the development of a double-stranded yarn made from hydrophobic poly vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene (PVDF-HFP) and hydrophilic polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofibers, inspired by natural fog-collecting organisms like desert beetles and spider silk. Using electrospinning and twisting techniques, the team engineered the yarn with alternating hydrophobic and hydrophilic segments, creating a structure that mimics nature’s water-harvesting mechanisms.

The hydrophobic sections promote rapid water droplet accumulation, while the hydrophilic sections enhance the transportation of these droplets, allowing for faster coalescence and collection. When tested in a controlled fog environment, this yarn demonstrated a significant improvement in water collection efficiency, achieving a rate of 3.20 g·h⁻¹·cm⁻².

The combination of hydrophobic water capture and hydrophilic water transport proved to be far more effective than using homogeneous yarns. This innovation presents a scalable solution, offering high performance in fog-rich environments, and could be vital for improving water access in drought-prone regions.

Prof. Yong Zhao from Beihang University, an expert in bioinspired materials, stated, “This advancement shows how biomimicry can drive highly efficient and sustainable solutions to global challenges such as water scarcity. The alternating wettability design emulates nature’s precision, significantly boosting fog collection performance.”

The research has broad implications, particularly for regions facing severe water shortages. The yarn’s scalable and efficient design makes it ideal for use in fog-prone areas, offering a reliable source of freshwater. This breakthrough also paves the way for future innovations in water-harvesting technologies, with the potential to enhance the sustainability of atmospheric water collection systems worldwide.

Racial discrimination against Black passengers looking to hail rides has been a problem since the taxicab era. A new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering has aimed to find out whether the rise of ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft has changed that dynamic—for better or worse.

The work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A previous study in which researchers requested rides at specific times and locations, changing only the name of the would-be passenger, showed that using a Black-sounding name results in up to double the cancellation rate as when using a white-sounding name. Yet despite that substantial difference, wait times were the same or reflected a difference of mere seconds, and the research team wanted to find out more.

They ran simulations of all the rides taken in Chicago, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, across a variety of days. The research estimated that at least 3% of drivers must be discriminating based on race in order to produce the cancellation disparities prior studies have observed. But it also showed that the ability of these services to rapidly rematch riders to new drivers nearly eliminates the effects of driver racial discrimination on rider wait time disparities.

“The technology is mitigating a social issue, which is pretty rare,” said Jeremy Michalek, professor of engineering and public policy (EPP) and mechanical engineering and the faculty lead on the study. “Discrimination is having little effect on average wait times, at least in part because these apps are able to quickly rematch when somebody cancels, whereas with taxis it was a very hard problem to solve.”

“In the absence of these apps, certain populations having extremely long wait times could be lost because it is a hidden injustice where people just get passed by on the street,” said Destenie Nock, professor of EPP and civil and environmental engineering. “Now you can be reconnected quickly, which allows people to get to work on time, make their hospital appointments, and be active participants in the transportation system.”

Individual racism is only one part of the equation, and the larger systemic problem of residential segregation led the team to focus on Chicago—one of the most residentially segregated cities in the United States, which also happens to make a lot of data available about ride-hailing trips.

Even when drivers treat everyone equally, Black riders in Chicago experience notably longer wait times because of where people live, the study showed. Residential patterns in Chicago are influenced by a long history of discriminatory practices, including redlining, and other factors like inherited homes and wealth. Today, Black residents are concentrated in South Chicago, which is further from busy downtown areas, meaning fewer drivers are in the area to pick up passengers.

“One thing that makes this research unique is that it distinguishes between two types of discrimination,” said Anna Cobb, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. student in EPP.

The discrimination types are “direct, like when a driver cancels on a rider because of their race, and systemic, where history has informed patterns in where people live so that even when the effects of direct discrimination are small or disappear altogether, disparities can persist,” Cobb explained. “Being able to distinguish these effects can help inform how we address the disparities we observe in the real world.”

“It is encouraging how well this technology has mitigated the effects of driver discrimination on riders,” Michalek said. “But the bigger picture is more complicated. In a society with entrenched disparities, even a service without any direct racial bias can nevertheless produce large gaps in service quality that can reflect, or even exacerbate, existing disparities.”

Corey Harper, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and from the Heinz College, and EPP alumnus Aniruddh Mohan also contributed to the research.

Supermassive black holes are, as you might expect, rather large – millions and sometimes billions of times as massive as the sun. They lurk at the centre of all large galaxies, including our Milky Way, shaping the growth of these cosmic structures. And yet we can say precious little for certain about how they form and why they grow so big.

These mysteries have come into sharper focus in recent years thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has peered back in deep time to spot a surprising abundance of supermassive black holes in the early universe. Intriguingly, it seems that just a few hundred million years after the big bang brought our universe into being, the cosmos already contained black holes that were far too hefty to make sense under our current models of how the cosmos evolved. There simply hadn’t been enough time for anything that enormous to form.

Sophie Koudmani, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, is among those trying to solve this conundrum. She uses supercomputer simulations to model galaxies and supermassive black holes in the early universe, testing ideas about their origins and growth and even predicting what we should be looking for in future observations.

Koudmani spoke to New Scientist about why supermassive black holes are so fascinating, the joy of discovering surprises in the early universe that throw up new questions, and…

Political observers have been troubled by the rise of online misinformation—a concern that has grown as we approach Election Day. However, while the spread of fake news may pose threats, a new study finds that its influence is not universal. Rather, users with extreme political views are more likely than others are to both encounter and believe false news.

“Misinformation is a serious issue on social media, but its impact is not uniform,” says Christopher K. Tokita, the lead author of the study, conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP).

The findings, which appear in PNAS Nexus, also indicate that current methods to combat the spread of misinformation are likely not viable—and that the most effective way to address it is to implement interventions quickly and to target them toward users most likely to be vulnerable to these falsehoods.

“Because these extreme users also tend to see misinformation early on, current social media interventions often struggle to curb its impact—they are typically too slow to prevent exposure among those most receptive to it,” adds Zeve Sanderson, executive director of CSMaP.

Existing methods used to assess the exposure to and impact of online misinformation rely on measuring views or shares. However, these fail to fully capture the true impact of misinformation, which depends not just on spread, but also on whether users actually believe the false information.

To address this shortcoming, Tokita, Sanderson, and their colleagues developed a novel approach using Twitter (now “X”) data to estimate not just how many users were exposed to a specific news story, but also how many were likely to believe it.

“What is particularly innovative about our approach in this research is that the method combines social media data tracking the spread of both true news and misinformation on Twitter with surveys that assessed whether Americans believed the content of these articles,” explains Joshua A. Tucker, a co-director of CSMaP and an NYU professor of politics, and one of the paper’s authors. “This allows us to track both the susceptibility to believing false information and the spread of that information across the same articles in the same study.”

Methodology

The researchers captured 139 news articles (November 2019–February 2020)—102 of which were rated as true and 37 of which were rated as false or misleading by professional fact-checkers—and calculated the spread of those articles across Twitter from the time of their initial publication.

This sample of popular articles was drawn from five types of news streams: mainstream left-leaning publications, mainstream right-leaning publications, low-quality left-leaning publications, low-quality right-leaning publications, and low-quality publications without an apparent ideological lean. To establish the veracity of the articles, each article was sent to a team of professional fact checkers within 48 hours of publication. The fact-checkers rated each article as “true” or “false/misleading.”

To estimate exposure to and belief in these articles, the researchers combined two types of data. First, they used Twitter data to identify which users on Twitter were potentially exposed to each of the articles; they also estimated each potentially exposed user’s ideological placement on a liberal-conservative scale by using an established method that infers a user’s ideology from the prominent news and political accounts they follow.

Second, to determine the likelihood that these exposed users would believe an article to be true, they deployed real-time surveys as each article spread online. These surveys asked Americans who are habitual internet users to classify the article as true or false and to provide demographic information, including their ideology.

From this survey data, the authors calculated the proportion of individuals within each ideological category that believed the article to be true. With these estimates for each article, they could calculate the number of Twitter users exposed and receptive to believing the article to be true.

Findings and conclusions

Overall, the findings showed that while false news reached users across the political spectrum, those with more extreme ideologies (both conservative and liberal) were far more likely to both see and believe it. Crucially, these users, who are receptive to misinformation, tend to encounter it early in its spread through Twitter.

The research design also allowed the study’s authors to simulate the impact of different types of interventions designed to stop the spread of misinformation. One takeaway from these simulations was that the earlier interventions were applied, the more likely they were to be effective. Another was that “visibility” interventions—whereby a platform makes flagged misinformation posts less likely to appear in users’ feeds—appeared more likely to reduce the reach of misinformation to susceptible users than did interventions aimed at making users less likely to share misinformation.

“Our research indicates that understanding who is likely to be receptive to misinformation, not just who is exposed to it, is key to developing better strategies to fight misinformation online,” advises Tokita, now a data scientist in the tech industry.

Can companies do well by doing good? Research in the International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management that has looked at companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) provides a positive answer to that question. The researchers have found that there is a strong link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial performance. They also suggest that risk management is an important mediator of this effect.

Nasrin Dadashi and Seyyed Saeb of the Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran, and Ali Mayeli of Stony Brook University explain that CSR is a rather broad term that covers a company’s ethical conduct and its contributions to society. It spans three areas: economic, social, and environmental. CSR, they suggest, is no longer about box-ticking, green-washing, or rubber-stamping, and goes hand-in-hand with a company’s financial health as well, reflecting investor confidence. The team demonstrated that those companies that embraced CSR saw significant improvements.

This, they emphasize, is only half the story. Risk management, specifically Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), also emerged from the work as a key factor in the overall equation. ERM involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential threats to a company’s objectives. It is nothing new, yet the study shows it to play an important part not only in enhancing CSR, but also in boosting the positive impact CSR has on financial performance. CSR is no longer merely a moral imperative. CSR is a strategic imperative.

The team suggests that the integration of CSR and ERM into a company’s core strategies will not only build trust and reduce the information gap between the company and its stakeholders, but also position it better for long-term success, financially speaking. From the investor perspective, these findings also carry significant weight. When money is so often the only matter arising on an investor’s agenda, they could do well to consider an investment’s CSR and ERM, as they emerge as good indicators of future performance.

Researchers have succeeded in making artificial muscle fibers from rubber thread, paving the way for sewing the muscles into a blouse and giving renewed strength to the wearer.

“I know it doesn’t look like a lot, but it corresponds to what our own muscles can lift,” says Anne Ladegaard Skov, Professor at DTU Chemical Engineering. She points to a small thin rubber wire with the letter D at the end, which bounces up and down.

The D is followed by a T and a U, and along with the rest of the line-up, the rocking university initials signal that a blouse with superpowers could be within reach.

“The rubber threads are made of silicone elastomers, and we have managed to make them in a shape resembling a sewing thread. The idea is to bundle them so we copy the body’s own muscle structure. We can then weave the bundle into a piece of clothing,” explains Skov.

Together with her research team, she has designed the silicone thread with a cavity which a conductive liquid can run through. Just like when the brain sends an electrical signal to the body’s muscles to activate, the researchers can send current through the artificial muscle fibers via the conductive fluid and cause them to contract.

When this happens, they can lift 200 times their own weight. They thus have the potential to make life easier for millions of people with impaired muscle function.

“Our goal is to enable weakened people to carry five extra kilos, roughly equivalent to a half-filled carrier bag from the local supermarket. It’s quite a lot, and there are still some things we need to solve before we have reached our goal,” says Skov.

Gelatine and knitting patterns

One of the researchers’ main tasks is to make their material stronger. Silicone itself is too fragile, which is why the researchers want to make muscle fibers where the synthetic silicone is combined with natural proteins.

“By adding proteins that, for example, twist around the silicone elastomer, the artificial muscles mimic an original muscle structure even more, and this is important for strength,” says Skov.

Originally, the idea was that the added proteins would come from spider silk, but as the wait for the material was long, the researchers started experimenting with other materials. So why not gelatin, they asked themselves. And it was a good question, because gelatin turned out to be surprisingly effective.

“We found that we could make the gelatin behave differently depending on how we heat treat it. Now we actually expect to soon be able to 3D print muscle fibers with gelatin in them,” says Skov, who calls the discovery a fortunate coincidence. Especially considering that gelatin is virtually cost-free. What can be a costly and long affair, however, is the development of the product design that will ultimately find its way into the consumers’ wardrobes.

“Whether you weave or knit, what patterns you use, and what fabric you combine the muscle structures with—it all impacts how effective the artificial muscles become,” explains Skov.

So books on weaving and knitting patterns have found their way onto her bookshelf, and together with the rest of her research group, combination patterns and sewing constructions are closely studied in the search for the optimal product design.

“Just like inside the body, the way muscle structures are bundled impacts how they move. We try to incorporate this knowledge into our solution design. It’s important to give the artificial muscles optimal freedom of movement,” explains Skov.

The big in the small

The ability to see the big in the small recently secured Skov’s team first place at the Californian SPIE Smart Structures NDE conference—the largest of its kind in the elastomer industry. Part of the recognition is about the enormous societal value researchers predict their work can have.

“We see the final solution as a ‘support suit,’ first and foremost aimed at older people, who by getting the extra strength can cope better at home and require less home help. But we also see that the solution will be able to attract more women to workplaces where hard physical work is otherwise a barrier,” says Skov.

She imagines that the final solution will be a blouse reminiscent of a wetsuit or a thick sports shirt. In the sleeves, the artificial muscles ensure that the arms go down when you turn on the power, for example via an iPhone, and that they go up again when you turn it off.

However, the researchers cannot say how long it will be before the blouse can be bought in stores. Trying out new ideas will probably take some time.

In Skov’s office, for example, there is a bag from a health food store filled with collagen powder. While most people probably see a beauty product that can reduce wrinkles, Skov sees a protein that has the potential to give her research renewed strength.

A new study from the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University sheds light for the first time on an important issue in the business world: employees withholding their inventions from the companies they work for.

Although the law and/or employment contracts typically grant organizations the rights to their employees’ inventions, the phenomenon of invention withholding is quite common and carries serious implications for businesses, especially in knowledge-intensive industries.

The study reveals alarming data: 1 out of every 4 employees in commercial organizations has withheld an invention from their employer at least once. In many cases, this withholding is done deliberately, with the intent to use the invention after leaving the organization.

The research was led by Dr. Sarit Erez, in collaboration with Prof. Yaniv Shani and Prof. Abraham Carmeli, all from the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University. The study was published in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives.

Dr. Erez explains, “Commercial organizations, particularly those in knowledge-intensive industries, encourage innovation among their employees, and their success largely depends on those employees coming up with groundbreaking inventions.

“In order to protect companies’ rights to these inventions, legal systems and standard employment contracts typically grant the employer ownership of inventions made by their employees, while requiring employees to disclose any invention they have come up with at work. This allows the employer to obtain patents and protect the invention.

“To increase employees’ motivation to disclose their inventions, many companies implement incentive systems, offering financial grants and/or recognition, such as badges of honor, to inventors.

“But at the end of the day, when an employee comes up with a new invention, they are faced with a behavioral dilemma: should they fulfill their legal obligation and disclose the invention to their employer, knowing they will lose ownership, or violate their obligation and hold on to the possibility of capitalizing on their invention outside the company?

“Indeed, it is a common scenario to see people leave one organization and either join another in the same field or even start their own company—often to develop an invention conceived in their previous workplace.”

Dr. Erez continues, “These types of cases often end up in court, where an employer sues a former employee—or their new employer—alleging that they are using an invention that the employee conceived while working for them, and that the patent rightfully belongs to the original employer.

“Having practiced law in the private sector for about 20 years, I often represented employees, employers, or employee organizations in disputes of this type. It became evident to me that the legal tools currently used to address this issue are not the most effective approach.

“I believed that management tools designed to increase employees’ willingness to disclose their inventions and reduce their tendency to withhold them could be far more effective. But when I looked for academic research on this subject, I found only a handful, and even those focused mainly on the withholding of inventions in academia rather than in commercial organizations.

“It became clear to me that the issue of withholding inventions, which is so vital to the growth of knowledge-driven companies, had not yet been thoroughly explored in management strategy. With this study, we aimed to shed light on this important phenomenon and begin to address it from a business perspective.”

For the purpose of the study, the researchers distributed an anonymous online questionnaire, asking inventors to report whether they had ever withheld one or more inventions from their employers. Participants were also requested to describe the event, including its reasons and circumstances. A total of 199 valid responses were collected.

Dr. Erez details the findings, “54 participants, or 27% of the respondents, reported withholding at least one invention from the organization in which they worked. Of these, 28% explicitly stated that they did so with the intention of developing the invention themselves after leaving the organization, or bringing it as a sort of ‘dowry’ to their next employer.

“The others cited a variety of reasons, some psychological and some financial. These included an emotional attachment and sense of ownership over the invention as a personal creation; fear that someone else would take credit; conflict with their employer; lack of trust in management; dissatisfaction with pay; and the belief that they would not be adequately compensated for an invention that would profit the organization.”

In the next phase, the researchers developed a unique and validated measurement scale, the first of its kind, to assess employees’ tendencies to either disclose or withhold inventions from their employers.

The findings revealed that withholding or disclosing inventions are not simply opposite sides of the same behavior, but rather two fundamentally different behaviors: an employee might refrain from disclosing a certain invention for a variety of reasons (such as a heavy workload or the belief that the invention still requires development and is not ready to be disclosed).

However, a deliberate and active decision to withhold an invention in order to prevent the transfer of ownership to the organization is a distinct behavior that may be influenced by completely different factors (for example, the employee’s feeling that they are poorly treated by the company regardless of the invention itself).

Dr. Erez explains, “This distinction is extremely important for organizations seeking to address the problem. Actions taken by companies today, such as offering financial incentives or recognition to inventors, may encourage more disclosures to the organization.

“However, such measures may be less effective for employees who deliberately withhold a promising invention with the intention of using it further down the road, outside the organization.”

According to the researchers, this newly developed scale can serve as a foundation for further studies on the subject. Additionally, it can help employers build an effective innovation management strategy that minimizes the withholding of inventions within the organization.

Dr. Erez concludes, “In this study, we conducted an in-depth exploration of a widespread phenomenon that has long concerned legal professionals around the world, but so far has hardly been examined from a managerial perspective: employees in the business sector who withhold their inventions from the company that employs them.

“We urge researchers in academia to continue investigating this important topic, and call on employers to take notice: these behaviors exist, and it is crucial to address them.

“For our follow-up studies, we are developing management tools to help employers tackle the issue in all its complexity. We believe that with the right management strategies, it is possible to encourage disclosure and significantly reduce the withholding of inventions—preventing the need for legal battles down the line.”

When Joe Biden was the Democrats’ candidate for president in 2020 and again in 2024, he staked his candidacy on being the person who would save democracy from the threat Donald Trump posed.

But Kamala Harris has shifted away from that message and toward the idea of protecting and advancing freedom. Freedom has become the theme of many Harris campaign ads and speeches. Her slogan “we are not going back” is meant to invoke concern about freedoms being taken away.

As scholars of citizens’ commitment to democracy, we see a few reasons that promoting freedom might be a more effective campaign message than protecting democracy. One is that our research and others’ has found that a lot of Americans aren’t very concerned with democracy.

Wide support for violating democratic principles

In our research, we have found that when people think about groups that threaten their values, they are willing to support political representatives who offer protection against the perceived threat. Using a nationally representative sample of 1,500 respondents from 2019, we found that a large proportion of Americans are willing to support leaders who would violate democratic principles such as freedom of speech and following collectively agreed-upon rules and laws.

Majorities of Americans, across the political spectrum, indicate that they want leaders who will “crack down” on groups they find threatening. Many also indicate that they would support leaders who would “bend the rules” to “protect the interests of people like you.” Notably, however, people who identified as Republican supporters were the most likely to want leaders who will take these sorts of actions.

A March 2024 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute asked a similar question and found that more than 40% of Americans agree with this statement: “Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” Strikingly, half of Republicans endorse this statement.

Perhaps surprisingly, messages that highlight threats to democracy do not seem to be effective. Recent political science research finds that negative messages emphasizing the threat Trump poses to democracy are less effective than positive messages about what Harris will do.

Other scholarship suggests sparking fear makes people think, but it does not spur them to action. Enthusiasm, however, can move people to participate. The question is what might lead people to feel enthusiastic.

Is freedom the answer?

Over the past several decades, America’s two major parties have taken different approaches to mobilizing their supporters to vote. Republicans have been successfully messaging on symbolic values and ideology, often talking about abstract values such as freedom. Democratic candidates, meanwhile, have focused on policy messages that help them appeal to coalitions of diverse social groups.

For example, as Congress debated what would become the Affordable Care Act, Republican opponents criticized the legislation for stripping freedom away from citizens and raised concerns about government overreach. These efforts provided a theme that led many Republicans to victory in the 2010 congressional election. At the time, Democrats emphasized the benefits to particular groups, such as young people, women and lower-income Americans, rather than emphasizing an overarching ideological cause. Over time, they have taken a similar tack on issues pertaining to the rights of workers, women, the LGBTQ community and racial minorities.

The Harris campaign appears to be changing the Democrats’ approach. For instance, she has cast restrictive abortion policy as an instance in which the government infringed upon the personal freedom of citizens.

Similarly, Harris has focused on protecting the rights and freedoms of people of color and LGBTQ Americans.

Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, echoed this messaging at the Democratic National Convention. He told the crowd, “No matter who you are, Kamala Harris is gonna stand up and fight for your freedom to live the life you want to lead. Because that’s what we want for ourselves. And that’s what we want for our neighbors.”

Will it work?

The effectiveness of this turn toward freedom remains to be seen. Yet there is reason to believe that this messaging can influence voters and have larger benefits for American society.

Freedom is a core American value. But for much of this century, freedom has mainly been defined by the Republican Party, as the absence of government interference in one’s life. This notion of freedom provided a basis for policies such as lower taxes, less government regulation and fewer social services.

The Harris campaign has begun to offer a rival vision of freedom, even if it is not quite fully formed. Her idea most resembles the notion of freedom that some political theorists call “freedom from domination.” This concept implies that citizens should live under societal conditions that prevent some individuals or groups from having unjustified control over others.

Importantly, to accomplish this, freedom from domination implies that government policies can be useful for creating conditions that enable increased freedom. If people struggle to afford child care, health care or education, social policies that alleviate that struggle can help people achieve greater autonomy to make choices that affect their own lives.

Regardless of which conception of freedom a person prefers, or which party they generally support, the Harris campaign’s decision to talk about freedom is consequential. It opens the door to competition between parties over how to think about a core American value and pushes political discussions away from the politics of retribution.

It isn’t always obvious how to counter threats to democracy, but Harris’ positive message around freedom offers one possible strategy. If Harris wins in November, it may indicate that focusing on a shared value such as freedom could be a more effective way to combat the threat to democracy, rather than focusing voters’ attention on the threat itself.

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