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Renowned
media scholar Sherry Turkle investigates how a flight from conversation
undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity—and why
reclaiming face-to-face conversation can help us regain lost ground.
We
live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet
we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
Preeminent
author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over
thirty years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a
troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we find ways
around conversation, tempted by the possibilities of a text or an email in
which we don’t have to look, listen, or reveal ourselves.
We
develop a taste for what mere connection offers. The dinner table falls silent
as children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. Friends learn
strategies to keep conversations going when only a few people are looking up
from their phones. At work, we retreat to our screens although it is
conversation at the water cooler that increases not only productivity but
commitment to work. Online, we only want to share opinions that our followers
will agree with – a politics that shies away from the real conflicts and
solutions of the public square.
The
case for conversation begins with the necessary conversations of solitude and
self-reflection. They are endangered: these days, always connected, we see
loneliness as a problem that technology should solve. Afraid of being alone, we
rely on other people to give us a sense of ourselves, and our capacity for
empathy and relationship suffers. We see the costs of the flight from
conversation everywhere: conversation is the cornerstone for democracy and in
business it is good for the bottom line. In the private sphere, it builds
empathy, friendship, love, learning, and productivity.
But
there is good news: we are resilient. Conversation cures.
Based
on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace,
Turkle argues that we have come to a better understanding of where our
technology can and cannot take us and that the time is right to reclaim
conversation. The most human—and humanizing—thing that we do.
The
virtues of person-to-person conversation are timeless, and our most basic
technology, talk, responds to our modern challenges. We have everything we need
to start, we have each other.
"AT SCHOOL THEY HAVE REPLACED THE SUBJECT OF CIVIC VALUES FOR BULLFIGHTING VALUES"
British comedian Ricky Gervais has called for bullfighting to be banned after learning of the death of 29-year-old Miguel Ruiz Pérez, who died after being gored during summer festivities in the town of Lerín, in the northeastern Navarre region.
“Poor terrified bull. Ban cruel sports,” he wrote on Monday in a retweet of a Daily Mirror video showing Ruiz Pérez attempting to outrun the animal in a makeshift bullring while hundreds of people looked on.
Gervais has since posted a video on his Facebook page in which he says: “If you decide to torture an animal to death, I hope it defends itself.” Describing the people who watch bullfights as morons, he adds: “If you choose to fight a bull for fun, fuck you.”
The comedian, who shot to fame a decade ago in The Office, dismissed arguments defending bullfighting on the grounds that it was tradition, noting that slavery, witchcraft and child sacrifice were also once regularly practiced: “We’ve moved on… it’s about fucking time you stopped.”
Men attacking and terrorizing the Toro de la Vega in 2017
Gervais tweeted several times about bullfighting over the day: “A matador being killed by a bull is not the tragic bit. Torturing the bull for fun in the first place is the tragic bit.”
The video has since been shared around 10,000 times, with most people supporting Gervais’s position and calling for an end to bullfighting. Gervais is an active defender of animal rights, and recently joined a number of Hollywood stars in condemning the killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe last month by a US dentist. “Animals don’t have a voice, but I do. And it’s a big one. My voice is for them and I will never be quiet as long as they are suffering,” he has said.
Growing numbers of Spanish celebrities are also calling for an end to bullfighting and the use of animals in festivities. La tortura no es cultura(Torture isn’t culture) is an awareness drive initiated by PACMA, a political party that supports animal rights. Its campaign to ban the Toro de la Vega, an event dating back to medieval times in which a bull is ritually killed by residents of the town of Tordesillas, Valladolid province, each September 15, has been backed by actors and television personalities such as Dani Rovira, Jorge Javier Vázquez, Eva Isanta and David Muro.
“I find it abhorrent that people can enjoy the suffering of animals,” says Dani Rovira, star of last year’s hit Spanish comedy Ocho apellidos vascos. A demonstration is planned in Madrid for September 12 to call for an end to the Toro de la Vega.
Musicians and other artists have thrown their support behind a planned music festival in Tordesillas to coincide with the Toro de la Vega.
El País in English, August 19th, 2015
"AND THAT PATRON SAINT, DOES HE KNOW WHAT YOU DO?"
Volcano is a hypnotic dance film by London-based company Jungle, now on YouTube. Not only is Shay Latukolan’s choreography mesmerizing, but also the dancing, the styling, the lighting, the camera work, the cinematography are pure joy. People are comparing some of their dance movements to Bob Fosse. Although the group’s striking series of 14 one-shot music videos has gone viral on social media, you may call Jungle a band, or a music collective — just don’t call them famous, as they are not interested in notions of celebrity. Sill, Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland’s electrifying electronic mix of funk, hip-hop and jazzy/techno beat will get you hooked. Sit back and watch the 49-min. film on your computer or on your TV screen. You are bound to flip out. It's simply a masterpiece of modern dance. Brilliant beyond words. Enjoy it!
Smash hit Heated Rivalry offers 'reprieve' for LGBTQ+ community, creates conversation among hockey fans.
By Shireen Ahmed · CBC Sports · January 10, 2026
Two men sit down for a press conference. Both are wearing black blazers with white dress shirts underneath. Behind them is a series of logos. A screenshot from Heated Rivalry, a TV series based on Halifax author Rachel Reid’s novel of the same name that follows the love affair between two professional hockey players.
To say it has scored in unprecedented ways would be an understatement. Last week, my friend and colleague, Dr. Amira Rose Davis and I were chatting and she said “I can not believe you haven’t watched it yet!” Admittedly, I was behind on this riveting series.
According to Amira, it’s the perfect “Canadian hockey story” and automatically she thought of me. She and Dr. Jessica Luther even did a special segment on the show for our podcast.
But my interest is not only around this compelling series — shot, produced and created in Canada with Canadian talent — that is based on a book series by Haligonian Rachel Reid. Heated Rivalry follows the love story of two gay hockey professional players, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, on fictional NHL teams who hide their affair because of, well, hockey. I am fixated on the discussions in the media around it, and the progress.
The Canadian streaming sensation Heated Rivalry — which centres on a gay romance between two professional hockey players — has been a big hit with viewers, who have ranked it among the highest-rated episodes of all time on IMDB. Jacob Tierny, who wrote and directed Heated Rivalry, is no stranger to Canadian media. Despite the reaction to the series, men’s hockey remains as plain and unprogressive as usual. It is not a bastion of inclusion and diversity.
Over two years ago, the NHL banned Pride Tape then unbanned it. It was handled so poorly that even players decided to act against the policy that was meant to regulate theme nights. It reminds us that although there may be communities and players who care about the cause, the boardrooms and decision makers are not rooted in justice in sport, but rather swayed by reputation and powerful opinion.
Sure there are movements and organizations that seek to change this, but on the whole, men’s hockey is not a delicious space of uniqueness.
At the moment, there are no out players in the NHL. Is it because hockey may not be an environment where sport feels safe for those who refuse to conform? Can you really be your true self when there is no actual example of someone in professional men’s hockey being successful after coming out? According to reports, the NHL is the only pro league that has not yet had a former or active player come out.
Meanwhile, Heated Rivalry has become Crave TV’s most-watched original series ever. It has also become quite a fodder for discussion in traditional hockey spaces. The popular hockey podcast Empty Netters, hosted by two white, straight, male and former junior players, have not only done reaction videos to every episode, it has delved into plots, characters and deeper meaning within the show.
Last month, the Montreal Canadiens showed the trailer during a game. And the Boston Bruins even made reference to it in a social media caption after a charged game against the Habs.
One might consider this a win-win situation. Gay hockey plots in mainstream media?!
But could it be argued that those jumping on the Heated Rivalry bandwagon may not be as culture-altering as we have hoped? There are certainly new fans coming from the show interested in hockey, which is the backdrop of the show.
I spoke with Harrison Browne, the first professional trans hockey player — now actor and author — about the show and the intentionality of the fandom.
Browne, who has a role in the series, admits that he didn’t expect the show to be the global pop culture phenomenon it has become.
“The resurgence of [positive] attention to trans people in sports has been exciting,” he told me during a phone call. “The amount of love has been on par with [or more] than I got when I came out.”
Exposing audiences to untraditional stories
He says it has been a "cool shift" to see himself in a queer hockey story in a way that he can be recognized but also be helpful to others in the wider community. Tierny selected him for the role because he is a great actor not because he’s great at hockey.
Browne says that exposing new fans to a story they may not see in a traditional hockey space has benefits. And he admitted that his following on social media has doubled and gotten him a lot of attention, hopefully leading to more opportunities.
But I can’t help but feel like hockey players and individuals with power ought to do more.
Our society is losing the space of freedom. The tendency in the world is right-wing, neo-liberal, and people are more controlled. We have less liberty even if we think we have more. The last territory where we can be ourselves and where we can have full freedom is our own body. "BARE" documentary focuses on male nudity in modern dance. The story follows a well-known Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits through a process of building his new creation with a group of eleven male dancers performing bare naked.
Directed by Alexandr Vinogradov.60 min.
Dancers: Linton Aberle, Ruben Brown, Davide Guarino, Michal Adam Goral, Gustavo Monteiro, Oskari Nyyssölä, Emeric Rabot, Nelson Reguera Perez, Eduard Turull, Duarte Valadares, and Paolo Yao.
Several AI-related words were added or updated in the Cambridge Dictionary this year, including, ‘slop’, as parts of the internet became awash with low-quality AI-generated content.
But it’s ‘parasocial’ that took the Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year crown.
When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement, many fans felt a deep connection to the singer and American footballer, even though most had never met them.
Millions of fans related to Taylor Swift’s confessional lyrics about dating, heartbreak and desire, leading to what psychologists describe as “parasocial” bonds with stars.
Lily Allen’s ‘breakup album’ West End Girl leant into parasocial interest in her love life.
The emergence of parasocial relationships with AI bots saw people treat ChatGPT as a confidant, friend or even romantic partner. These led to emotionally meaningful – and in some cases troubling – connections for users, and concerns about the consequences.
The term dates back to 1956, when University of Chicago sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl observed television viewers engaged in “para-social” relationships with on-screen personalities, resembling those they formed with “real” family and friends. They noted how the rapidly expanding medium of television brought the faces of actors directly into viewers’ homes, making them fixtures in people’s lives.
The global mania around The Summer I Turned Pretty finale saw fans dissecting every romantic relationship in the show on TikTok and Instagram, as they encamped into “Team Conrad” or “Team Jeremiah”.
Colin McIntosh of the Cambridge Dictionary said: “Parasocial captures the 2025 zeitgeist. It’s a great example of how language changes.
“What was once a specialist academic term has become mainstream.
“Millions of people are engaged in parasocial relationships; many more are simply intrigued by their rise.
“The data reflects that, with the Cambridge Dictionary website seeing spikes in lookups for ‘parasocial’.
“The language around parasocial phenomena is evolving fast, as technology, society and culture shift and mutate, from celebrities to chatbots, parasocial trends are fascinating for those who are interested in the development of language.”
Matthew Ellman, an English teaching expert at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, commented: “Learning a new language is all about engaging more closely with the world around you, and our latest Word of the Year is a great example of how English enables learners to do that.
“Even before they encounter this word, many learners of English will relate to, and be able to recognise, the relevance of parasocial to contemporary life.
That should be what happens in every English lesson: learners recognising the relevance of English to their lives and lived experience and seeing the potential for it to help them engage with the world more broadly and deeply.”
Simone Schnall, professor of experimental social psychology at the University of Cambridge, said: “Parasocial is an inspired choice for Word of the Year. The rise of parasocial relationships has redefined fandom, celebrity and, with AI, how ordinary people interact online.
“We’ve entered an age where many people form unhealthy and intense parasocial relationships with influencers. This leads to a sense that people ‘know’ those they form parasocial bonds with, can trust them and even to extreme forms of loyalty. Yet it’s completely one sided.
“As trust in mainstream and traditional media breaks down, people turn to individual personalities as authorities, and – when they spend many hours consuming their content – develop parasocial bonds, treating them more like close friends, family or cult leaders. When an influencer has so many followers, people assume they are trustworthy.
“There’s a more traditional and healthy manifestation of fandom as people develop parasocial ties with stars like Taylor Swift who are exceptionally good at what they do, but this can also lead to obsessive interpretations of lyrics and intense online discussions about their meanings and what they mean for fans, as well as Swift herself.
“Parasocial trends take on a new dimension as many people treat AI tools like ChatGPT as ‘friends’, offering positive affirmations, or as a proxy for therapy. This is an illusion of a relationship and group think, and we know young people can be susceptible for this.”
People really love this artist — so why does the art world ignore a great Briton? Andy Goldsworthy is imaginative, inventive, poetic, hard-working, big-hearted and brave. He has been making art for 50 years. Nature loves him, people who have seen his work in books love him, people who go to his exhibitions love him, I love him, my wife loves him, and so do my kids. But for reasons we need to go into, the art establishment does not. Indeed, it ignores him.
He has never been nominated for the Turner prize. He has never received an MBE or an OBE, let alone been knighted or damed like the Gromleys, Kapoors or Emins. He has never had a show at the Tate or the Hayward. No one has asked him to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. For 50 years Goldsworthy has been making art that touches the heart and delights the eyes. But the art establishment can't see it. Why?
One reason is that his work is centred on landscape, and the art establishment, these days, is an urban beast. Sheep don't fret about their identities. Trees don't remember the empire. Farmers don't express themselves with their clothing as relentlessly asLeigh Bowery did, night after night, club after club, in the posthumous show he had recently at Tate Modern.
Another problem is the delightful nature of Goldsworthy's art: that it is so easy to love. The gorgeous patterns he finds in autumn leaves, the magical moments he creates with nature's simplest materials, the ecstatic understanding he has of the joy of colour are not neurotic enough to appeal to the art world's tastes. It sees itself as a complex ally of the ego, not a joyous buddy of the id. It hungers for difficulty, rigour, unpleasure.
So my advice to the commissars of the art establishment, to Tate directors and Serpentine curators, is to get yourselves to Edinburgh and visit Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty years at the Royal Scottish Academy. It's a look at the whole of his lengthy career, but also a statement show that seems determined to stamp out the rumour that he's a softie. The real Andy Goldsworthy ➖hardcore, thoughtful, mysterious➖ is being encouraged to emerge.
It begins spectacularly with a long and shaggy sheepskin rug running down the centre of the posh stairs that welcome us to the Royal Scottish Academy (see picture below). Infused with the stony rigour of the Scottish Enlightenment, carved out of local granite, the posh stairs speak of privilege and rank, politeness and empire. Goldsworthy's rug, meanwhile, ascending shaggily step by step, speaks of muddy fields and the dirty bottom of sheep. Two worlds colliding, and societal sparks are flying. (Click on link above to see a gallery of the exhibited pieces.)
The attack continues with the next sight, a filigree of delicate lines stretching between the portentous Doric columns that loom over the entrance. What is it? A silk hanging? A beaded embroidery? As you get closer, you finally recognise it: barbed wire. From many fields and with many patinas. For the first time in its unpleasant history, the vicious outdoor fencing has been woven by an industrious spider into a curtain of fragile beauty.
Like nature itself, the show keeps switching moods. Gravestones, a lumpy gallery full of rocks that appear to have emerged beneath the floor, like the biblical prophecy about the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days, is doomy and gothic. It's made out of stones dug up in the cemeteries of Dumfries and Galloway.
But Sheep Paintings, two panels of cosmic swirlings with a perfect circle at their centre, feels druidically mystical, like that installation with the setting sun at Tate Modern by Olafur Eliasson. Goldswothy's solar discs were actually created by the muddy feet of sheep feeding around a perfectly circular food trough.
In his student days Goldsworthy worked on a farm, where he learnet a respect for labour and inherited an appreciation for the seasons. Despite their many moods, his installations are invariably centred on a simple piece of geometry: a circle, a square, a line. Oak Passage seems, from its first angle, to be an impenetrable tangle of branches. But, as you walk round, you see that its centre is dissected by a miraculously straight path. Man and nature are doing their thing in evident harmony.
Most readers will know Goldsworthy's work from the sumptuous photography books he produced in the 1990s. They were popular and are, I suspect, the chief reason the art world took against him: it dislikes crowd-pleasers. Some of those images are on show here as well ➖a mysterious zigzag in the earth created with feathers of a heron; a bottomless hole in a tree fashioned from autumn leaves.
Rather than shinning glossily in a coffee table book, they hang cooly on the gallery walls, part of a thoughtful photographic encapsulation in their production is easier to note. They remain beautiful ➖what a nose he has for the intensity of nature's colours➖ but their ambition to record a fleeting moment is much more evident. The job of this gorgeous photography is to record a natural performance that would otherwise be lost.
All through the event there's a feeling that the artist is trying to right some wrongs. Here, finally, the truth is being projected that he is, at heart, a minimalist: a lover of geometry's simplest order. But where most minimalists are urbanites, searching for industrial precision with industrial materials, he's a rural minimalist who finds order and simplicity in nature. If it's not there, he inserts it into the chaos.
And like all great landscape artists ➖and he is certainly one of those➖ he's bringing the outdoors indoors. It's a traditional British ambition. It deserves far greater recognition that it has hitherto received.⦿
Inspired by memoir The Pink Marine by Greg Cope White, Netflix’s 90s-era dramedy, Boots, takes aim at the homophobic realities of being a Marine during that decade. Gay people, openly serving in the U.S. military, was not legalised until 2011, well after some of the unfortunate events that take place during this compelling series.
Undeniably, The Pink Marine is a better title and thankfully carries over as the name of the debut episode.
Closeted eighteen-year-old Cameron (Miles Heizer, 13 Reasons Why) enlists as a Marine, becoming our window into a world of toxic masculinity, intense tests of physical and emotional endurance, and ultimately, the bonds formed through forced camaraderie.
Some viewers may be disappointed that the queer struggles materialise as more internal than external in Cameron’s specific viewpoint. But make no mistake—Boots is a very gay, very emotional series with an excellent ensemble cast to anchor its intensity.
Presenting a critical analysis on the Marine lifestyle, 90’s time-capsule Boots houses a layered performance from Miles Heizer and moving queer subtext...
We overprotect kids in the real world and underprotect them online. Research shows early or unlimited access to social media can lead to: 😟 Increased anxiety and depression 🌙 Disrupted sleep ⏳ Fragmented attention span 🚫 Exposure to harmful content 🤝 Underdeveloped social skills
Childhood should be about learning, friendships, and play — not spent scrolling.
Let’s change our social norms together! Delay smartphones and social media. Implement #belltobell#phonefreeschools. Give kids more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. #thefournorms
I hope you'll follow @smartphonefreechildhoodus and check out their great resources (links in their bio).
If you repost this reel to your own account, please acknowledge @smartphonefreechildhoodus and the creators:
But
there is good news: we are resilient. Conversation cures.
