The Latest Breaking News from The Conversation

Distance learning far precedes the digital age. Before online courses, people relied on print materials (and later radio and other technologies) to support formal education when the teacher and learner were physically separated.

The federal government has announced it’s introducing legislation to make bail more difficult to secure, along with lengthening sentences for certain offences.

About 3.5 million South Africans aged 15-24 are disengaged from the formal economy and education system. In the first quarter of 2025, 37.1% of young people were not in employment, education, or training.

A South African court case made headlines for all the wrong reasons in January 2025. The legal team in Mavundla v MEC: Department of Co-Operative Government and Traditional Affairs KwaZulu-Natal and Others had relied on case law that simply didn’t exist. It had been generated by ChatGPT, a generative artificial…

Social media has reached more than half (63.9%) of the world’s population since it got started in 1996. Social network platforms grew from 970 million users in 2010 to 5.41 billion in July 2025. The average social media user engages with between six and seven platforms. The average person spends…

When fewer people belong to unions and unions have less power, the impact goes beyond wages and job security. Those changes can hurt public health and make people more unhappy.

The coastlines I trace resemble logos and luxury icons: palms, crescents, pixelated grids, surreal ornaments etched into shallow seas. The cartography is striking. The environmental consequences are very concerning.

If you’ve sat in a nail salon recently, you may well have encountered TPO or trimethylbenzoyl diphenylphosphine oxide to give it its full chemical name. You won’t have seen the name on the bottle. But if you’ve had your gelled fingers under a blue-violet lamp, TPO could well have been…

The UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has made it clear that taxes will go up, and more cuts to welfare spending are on the horizon. The moves will be deeply unpopular and controversial – but in an extraordinary press conference ahead of the UK budget on November 26, Reeves made it…

Salman Rushdie’s new collection of short stories urgently recollects his literary legacy. It’s as though time is increasingly uncertain so the need to tell stories is great.

Rape, as a crime, is widely deplored. Society and media condemn rapists, and rape and other sexually-related crimes carry potentially heavy prison sentences when perpetrators are convicted. So why, given this apparent intolerance for rape, do criminologists like me (and many others) still say that we live in a “rape…