In trying to hatch their own artificial intelligence, many countries are playing catch-up to the two world giants: the United States and China. In recent months, however, Japan has taken a different course. It admits it cannot create the most advanced AI models. Yet it might be the first nation to put AI at the center of a new economic strategy.

In late July, Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s Cabinet approved a plan to inject $2.3 trillion in public and private investment toward strengthening key industries by 2040, starting with AI and the computer chips that run it. The plan goes beyond merely automating current work, improving efficiencies, cutting costs, or boosting the economy.

It would also enhance human creativity and innovation by focusing on applying AI to real-world problems – starting on the factory floor of Japan’s existing world-class manufacturing industries.

The plan even sets a high goal of building about 10 million AI robots by 2040. And it promises that Japan would become “the world’s most-friendly country for developing and utilizing AI.”

Experts say the worldwide focus in AI has shifted away from the race to develop more powerful models and toward defining AI’s value in lifting human capabilities to once-unimagined levels.

“Organisations must ask not only how AI replaces tasks, but also how future professionals will acquire the judgement, intuition and contextual understanding that cannot be downloaded from a model or generated through a prompt,” wrote two Indian scholars, Anu Singh Lather and Tarun Agarwal, in the Asia Times.

Japan’s plan has so far received lukewarm reception. Currently, only about 8.4% of Japanese workers use AI on the job, compared with 50% in the U.S. And, according to a Reuters survey, more than 4 in 5 Japanese firms have yet to fully deploy AI. Deep cultural reasons, such as collective aversion to the reputational risk for companies that suffer an AI failure, have prevented rapid use.

Japan firms have also sought profits in hardware more than software. Recognizing this, the government made an agreement to invite 500 highly skilled Indian AI professionals to Japan by 2030 to help in applying the technology. (In the past year, India has overtaken Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy.)

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Japan’s hope is to master the nonlanguage aspects of AI, using it to improve the tactile and spatial capabilities of physical machines. This might help expand humanity’s concepts of intelligence beyond data and words.

“AI leadership depends not only on technology and investment,” wrote Maha Matsumura in Al Jazeera, “but also on developing researchers, innovators and the next generation of scientific talent.”

Each year, as summer winds down in the United States, outdoor enthusiasts make the most of weekends to walk, bike, or hike, taking in awe-inspiring landscapes. These days, with the gentle urging of an unlikely ensemble of scientists and artists, more Americans are also discovering another joy: tuning in to soundscapes.

Soundwalking – exploring the environment through attentive listening – is drawing quite the following. In Chicago, the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology holds annual soundwalks in public parks, led by artists and naturalists. These events bring awareness to the experience of listening, according to program director Noé Cuéllar, enhancing “our sense of place, moment, and shared experience.”

“We all listen differently, and when we listen together, we discover new ways of listening,” he wrote after the 2025 event.

The concept of soundwalking has expanded greatly since it was first introduced in the 1970s by a Canadian musician and composer. Using rudimentary technology, scientists have since recorded and identified numerous “languages” in the natural world – among elephants, blue whales, even tree roots. This century’s rapid advances with smaller, cheaper, and more sensitive instruments, as well as the ability to store and share millions of recordings online, have widened access to what’s been described as Nature’s “biophony.” Much like a symphony, a biophony comprises complex harmonies and rhythms – performed by an orchestra of birds, animals, insects, plants, as well as wind, water, rocks, and soil.

Many of these sounds, inaudible to humans until now, communicate intriguing and often important meaning.

California-based audio ecologist Bernie Krause was among the first to capture the changing soundscape of a forest after selective logging. Even though it appeared largely unchanged visually, his recordings confirmed that the rich soundscape – of birds, critters, leaves, and branches – degraded substantially.

“Environmental listening ... becomes a way of making declining biodiversity more tangible to the public and, ultimately, to decision-makers,” according to Jacek Smolicki, who introduced the Walking Festival of Sound in the Boston area this year during a fellowship at Harvard University’s ArtLab.

“Where there are sounds, there are relations,” he wrote in Harvard Design Magazine, describing how Indigenous or nomadic peoples relate to environmental sounds. To the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia, Mr. Smolicki wrote, “the loud roaring of the wind is not a disruption from which one should seek shelter, but the voice of the landscape.” Listening to and interpreting that voice offers them clues to changing weather and navigation guidance.

Mr. Krause has long asserted there is “musicianship” in the wild. Each species in an ecosystem, he has written, stakes out a “sonic bandwidth – to blend or contrast – much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.”

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Being both an eyewitness and an earwitness to nature calls for patience, slowing down, and deep listening. Such traits help elevate interactions with the natural world – and might do the same among neighbors, colleagues, and even political partisans.

As Kathleen Dean Moore, a professor of philosophy and an environmentalist at Oregon State University, has written, “To hear with thoughtful attention. To hold something close, to attend to it, to be astonished by it. ... To me, listening is starting to sound a lot like love.”

Change in the Middle East often comes more from violence than from virtue. So on Tuesday, when Lebanon’s parliament abolished the death penalty – the first country in the region to do so – the action could allow the tiny Mediterranean nation to set an example by its commitment to the right to life.

“Lebanon is regaining its pioneering role in the region as a defender of human rights,” Justice Minister Adel Nassar said after the vote, adding that lawmakers chose “to combat murder rather than resort to capital punishment.”

At the least, Lebanon’s moral courage marks a sharp contrast to much of the Middle East. Last year, Iran more than doubled its executions while Israel, whose last judicial execution was that of Adolf Eichmann in 1962, approved hanging for those convicted of killing “with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel,” which appears targeted only at Palestinians. 

In June, Jordan resumed executions, carrying out its first since 2017. In Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the practice continues apace.

Lebanon’s last execution was 22 years ago, but courts have continued to issue dozens of death sentences. What helped lawmakers decide to officially end capital punishment was a new willingness to stand up to Hezbollah. The elected representatives of the powerful Iran-backed militant group opposed the measure. The group has been weakened after its 2023 attacks on Israel that resulted in a military pounding by the Jewish state on the group’s positions in southern Lebanon.

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Yet a public shift against the death penalty began more than a quarter century ago following Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war. Abolitionists worked hard to persuade lawmakers one by one, arguing that capital punishment “is plagued with arbitrariness, prejudice, and error,” as one activist put it. 

About three-quarters of the world’s nations have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. Lebanon has become the 129th, taking a stand even as it endures a war within its borders and the Middle East awaits an end to the Iran-American conflict. There might be no better time to assert the sanctity of life.

In a region that’s a flash point for unrest, Turkey has taken a key step toward calming domestic as well as cross-border tensions – and it's one that could lead to new conceptions of national identity that transcend ethnic or linguistic differences.

On Monday, the country’s parliament overwhelmingly voted for a landmark bill aimed at conclusively ending more than 40 years of conflict with its substantial Kurdish ethnic minority. The legislation outlines processes for conditional amnesties and the reintegration of thousands of Kurds, including armed combatants who have lived or operated from strongholds in neighboring Iran, Iraq, and Syria for decades. (An estimated 31 million Kurds are spread across all four countries, and various factions have fought for independence or greater autonomy.)

Turkey’s separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union – abandoned the goal of full independence a few decades ago. And in May 2025, it announced it would disband and disarm, thus putting the onus on the Turkish government to move the process along.

“Many Kurds cautiously welcome the move as a chance to pivot toward democratic struggle,” Garo Paylan, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said at the time. But, he noted, they would want to see “concrete commitments on political representation, cultural rights, and the reintegration of Kurdish voices into public life.”

Last week, long-imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan described the pending legislation as “the beginning of a democratisation process that will be at least as significant as the founding of the Republic,” which was established in 1920 after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

This phase of reconciliation positions Turkey – a key and well-armed member of NATO – to exert a constructive and stabilizing influence in the region. Ankara had been at loggerheads with Syria for several years, believing it was aiding large numbers of PKK fighters. It also regularly conducted military raids and held territory in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. But last year, within three months of the PKK announcement, Turkish attacks on Iraqi territory fell by 97%, according to an international rights organization. Now, Turkey is helping Iraq and other oil-producing Gulf States export and import goods across Turkish roadways, while the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked. Similarly, it could also support Syria’s recovery from civil war.

The key challenge is at home – as well as in the EU, which Turkey has long sought to join – as Turkish citizens await tangible evidence of a more inclusive and responsive political system. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been consolidating power and silencing dissent in recent years. Several opposition skeptics view his gestures of peace toward Kurds as little more than a political ploy to gain popularity and extend his term in office.

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But Zakir Avşar, a professor at Ankara’s Hacı Bayram Veli University, urges a more magnanimous view of developments. What’s important, he told the local Daily Sabah newspaper on Tuesday, is attaining a balance among “security and freedom, public order and democratic politics, ... and citizens’ sense of belonging.”

“The success of this process,” in Mr. Avşar’s words, “should ... be measured not by the political advantage it provides to one side over another, but by its contribution to Türkiye’s common future.”

Keeping pace with new developments in the world of social media and artificial intelligence is no easy task. Almost as challenging is keeping up with the slew of regulatory, judicial, and civil society actions seeking greater transparency from Big Tech into the design parameters, data extraction, and internal research behind social media apps used extensively by children and adolescents.

Last Wednesday, a U.S. Senate committee unanimously advanced the Kids Online Safety Act, which would mandate default privacy settings and require “reasonable care” when designing platforms to minimize potential harm to minors. The next day, a New Mexico court fined Meta $567 million to address harms it knowingly caused to young people through design features of its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

The range of recent and pending laws and legal actions is notable for a few key reasons. For one, it’s bringing together lawmakers, legal experts, parents, educators, and shareholders – as well as young adults with firsthand experience of the issue. The generation that has encountered the impact of social media on their own and their friends’ mental and physical wellbeing is speaking up, loud and clear.

“Young people are done waiting,” says an open letter from Design It For Us (DIFU), a youth-led coalition formed in 2023. It calls on social media firms “to stop treating us as data points” and “test subjects,” and to build platforms that include “privacy by default, safety by design, and real user controls that work.”

DIFU has organized input into legislation in California, New York, and Vermont. It also tested controls on Meta’s Teen Accounts and publicized shortcomings through The Washington Post last year. Apps “can’t be relied upon to actually shield kids” the paper reported, adding that the safety gaps in “voluntary efforts speak volumes about … accountability.”

The focus on accountability – similar to campaigns around opioid addiction and the tobacco industry in years past – is expanding the scope of social media advocacy from content to intent. As families and school districts seek to limit young people’s exposure to excessive or harmful content online, they are also probing company decisions about app architecture which, they say, is deliberately designed to prompt compulsive use. Whistleblower complaints as well as internal communications made public in recent cases appear to confirm this practice.

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Young users are also increasingly seeking to assert agency, privacy, and individual authority in social media use. “Most dominant social media platform features” – such as infinite scroll and autoplay – “encourage passivity” and limit decision-making, a student recently wrote on the Logoff Movement, a  Substack newsletter, noting that “reclaiming [social media’s] social potential may require intentional choices and real discipline.”

Ultimately, the shared motivation of embracing and protecting the privacy and safety of young people and children supports this desire. And it can help preserve childhood as a time and space to develop skills of communication, discernment, and self-regulation. Such habits eventually enable young adults not only to navigate the online world – but also to interact and flourish in the spheres of higher education, work, and civic participation.

As the global race to create the most advanced artificial intelligence continues to heat up, the list of concerns about AI’s impact – from the wiping out of jobs to its potential to make planet-altering decisions without human intervention – grows long. Nations are rushing to decide which values to impose on what could be the 21st century’s greatest mold-breaking technology. 

First, AI’s creators themselves must decide whether to abide by one key value: honesty. 

Or rather, the potency of honesty to bring creativity and, yes, the highest intelligence, to AI. 

For too many AI firms, building a frontier model by imitating a rival’s training data, explanations, and reasoning has been the norm. This style of theft, known as distillation, is often driven by impatience, fear of competitive failure, or doubts about one’s own ingenuity. 

Yet, last month, Zhang Yiming, founder of one of China’s best-known tech companies, ByteDance, reportedly told his AI team to avoid distillation from American AI models. With many of his workers eager to lift the proprietary work of other AI firms, he called for patience and long-term independent research, “rather than using others’ output to achieve short-term leaderboard rankings.”

It might be difficult to verify whether ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, follows this policy. Yet the news comes after another big AI player in China, Alibaba, banned employees from using a world-class AI, Anthropic’s Claude, to avoid any charges of distillation.

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If AI firms now move toward honesty and hard work in their research, it could dispel a big worry about the world economy. AI stocks are currently riding high, but investors are concerned that a grand theft of data by a few AI companies might bring down financial markets.

Innovation has long relied on the integrity of inventors to ensure the authenticity of their creativity and toil. Such honesty could be the bedrock for a global effort to both reap the rewards of AI and rein in its worst aspects.

The old joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?” has a new, if serious, answer: Because it found a safe passage.

For much of the past century, countless species of wildlife have not been able to “get to the other side” when they needed to. Highways disrupted migratory routes and feeding ranges – and increased vehicle-wildlife collisions.

But now, things are changing, thanks to a shift in public attitudes to designing infrastructure in ways that enhance animal-human safety and longer-term coexistence.

From the Americas to Asia, government planners, Indigenous inhabitants, conservationists, and ordinary citizens are working together to build highway overpasses and underpasses, adapt drainage culverts, and weave together treetop bridges to allow freer movement of creatures large and small.

One of the latest structures – and largest – will open in Southern California this December, spanning 10 lanes of U.S. Highway 101. The overpass is being naturalized with rocks and native plants.

Ben Goldfarb, journalist and author of the book “Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet,” offers an expansive perspective of what he calls “these giant, striking visual reminders” that humans inhabit a shared landscape.

“I love wildlife crossings,” Mr. Goldfarb said on a podcast last month, for “their ability to ... remind us that we’re sort of global citizens of a planet that we share with wildlife.” His 2023 book chronicles that the worldwide movement for such structures is not just feel-good environmentalism but based on verifiable research that demonstrates efficacy and benefits.

In the United States, some 1 million annual vehicle-wildlife collisions cost an estimated $10 billion in repairs, medical care, and lost productivity. A 2026 study in Virginia showed that strategically positioned crossings reduce such crashes by up to 97%. In April, the state passed a bill to fund their construction. Utah, Idaho, and Oregon have enacted similar legislation to advance wildlife connectivity.

A July 27 report showed that an overwhelming 81% of Americans – including 80% of hunters – support investment in wildlife crossings. And, unlike surveys of political or economic sentiment, this one showed barely any variance among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Even in relatively resource-strapped nations, there is a broad recognition of humans’ responsibility toward the natural world.

In Southeast Asia, as in the Amazon rainforest, civilians and scientists are constructing woven bridges that can be used by langurs and other apes to safely cross busy roads. These cost only a few hundred or thousand dollars and are made from local materials.

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India has built 10 of the world’s largest wildlife underpasses and overpasses since 2017. In a 40-day period, researchers documented more than 40,000 animals – including elephants, primates, and big cats – using a single such underpass, which extended their feeding and breeding range while reducing potential conflict with humans.

Whether a simple sisal canopy bridge or a sophisticated multimillion-dollar structure, wildlife crossings are concrete symbols of people wanting to protect the intrinsic worth of nature. The answer to the chicken joke needs an update.

With wildfires again threatening the American West this summer, Utah has become the latest state helping homeowners in high-risk areas to fortify their properties against drought-driven fire. From 2021 to 2024, the state saw the largest percentage increase in home insurance costs – a 59% hike – of any U.S. state.

Yet unlike in Colorado and California, both of which recently enacted stricter rules on insurance companies and tough building codes to “harden” a home from fire, Utah’s plan is more partnership than paternalism.

It will first nudge homeowners with information on risks and remedies and only threaten a fee for noncompliance with new codes that aim to ensure a “defensible space” from wildfire.

“Our goal is to empower homeowners, communities, fire departments, and municipalities to act in reducing their vulnerability to wildfire by giving them the necessary tools to identify and understand their wildfire risk,” states an official Utah website.

Whether this softer approach will ensure entire neighborhoods are fire-resistant – a necessary requirement to prevent the spread of fire from property to property – remains to be seen. At the least, homeowners who take all the recommended steps – such as installing metal roofs and clearing away brush and debris – should be better able to negotiate for a better insurance rate or obtain coverage at all.

As more governments aim for proactive resilience against climate change’s many threats, they are often researching tactics used to curb other problems, such as poverty. One successful model that began in Bangladesh is called the “graduation approach.” Those living in poverty are offered tools such as business training and a savings account to eventually “graduate” into earning a sustainable livelihood.

Sustainability is also a key concept in curbing wildfires. Utah’s experiment in getting voluntary buy-in from homeowners to fortify their properties against fire could result in long-term results.

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“Effective [climate] resilience depends on local ownership, trusted institutions and the ability of countries and communities to create or adapt solutions to their own contexts,” wrote Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Mendy Ndlovu, an agrometeorologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in The Conversation.

“Climate resilience can’t be built through one-way relationships,” they added, “where solutions are designed elsewhere and delivered” to a community.

Perhaps more so than in other parts of the world, Africa has been jolted by global trade shocks, epidemics, and climate uncertainties in recent years. At the same time, foreign aid has slowed to a trickle. Yet, amid all this, the continent’s one bright spot has been agriculture, which is evolving from subsistence farming into sustainable livelihoods.

Investors from the Middle East, Asia, and Europe are putting money into African agriculture, seeding the ability of farmers there to intensify and diversify their crops and livestock with an eye toward processing raw materials for export. These investments signal a shift from resource exploitation by outside interests to an approach that recognizes African countries as reliable producers and trade partners.

“African agriculture is rapidly becoming a proving ground for global investment,” according to Bloomberg News. Recent investment deals “blend commercial interests with social development projects such as building infrastructure, creating permanent jobs and sharing technological knowhow.” This framework, Bloomberg observed last October, can improve productivity “for the benefit of the host country and its overseas backers.”

Last year, the European Investment Bank deployed one-third of its portfolio in Africa, or €3.1 billion (about $3.57 billion), with an emphasis on improving agriculture value chains. This year, China eliminated tariffs on goods from 53 of 54 African nations, after OK’ing a range of new agricultural imports.

Qatar has put in $1.5 billion to improve irrigation in Ghana, helping create an estimated 2,500 jobs. And Angola has signed coproduction agreements for local farmers with Brazil and the United Arab Emirates that will retain 40% of output within the country.

These investments are spawning “agripreneurs,” who are turning to digital platforms, communication, and data to enhance productivity and marketing. Analyst Landry Signé of the Washington-based Brookings Institution argues that Africa is well positioned to harness the latest technologies to “leapfrog to new food production methods.” 

Tech-savvy farmers are boosting employment, trade, and new agriculture-related companies. This mix, The Economist wrote this week, “could be a boon for Africa – and force a rethink of what is meant by farming and manufacturing.”

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In 2024, the African Development Bank Group estimated the continent’s food and agribusiness industry would surge almost fourfold by 2030, reaching $1 trillion.

With a total population greater than that of India or China, Africa has an estimated 60% of the world’s remaining uncultivated yet arable land. Instead of seeking to follow the industrialization paths pursued by Asia and Latin America in recent decades, the continent has an opportunity for a different growth model, one suited to its priorities and potential.

Ask an Iranian in Tehran these days how the war is going and you might get this response: Which war? The on-again, off-again war on Iran by U.S. President Donald Trump? Or the war inside Iran by a regime whose new fear campaign against its people appears to be backfiring?

Since January, when Iran saw the largest unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, executions of political dissenters have surged. In late July, the regime escalated its intimidation tactics by holding the first public executions since 2022 – but not before a large crowd tried to stop the construction of gallows in a public square.

Videos on social media show security forces in the central city of Isfahan chasing protesters before two young men were hanged. “The protests on [July 28] clearly demonstrate that the relative calm on Iran’s streets since the January massacre, and amid the war, should not be mistaken for reconciliation with the government,” Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy for the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told The New Arab.

Those acts of defiance, as well as frequent protests by retirees against worsening livelihoods, have helped shatter the narrative that Iranians are united behind their country’s war against the United States and Israel.

While a nationwide uprising is unlikely – such as the one in January in which thousands were killed – “the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic is not the US and Israeli military operations,” former United Nations prosecutor and professor Payam Akhavan told Iran International. “It is the Iranian people first and foremost.”

An opinion survey in June showed at least one-quarter of Iranians participated in January’s protests. Dissatisfaction with the regime is running at 71%, according to the poll by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran.

Perhaps more important, 59% oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. If the U.S. is playing the long game on preventing a nuclear Iran, it might better count less on American bombs than on the Iranian people.

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“Absent a dramatic change of conditions in the country – much improved economy, fewer social restrictions, stabilised security situation – a new window for large-scale popular unrest will eventually open,” Farzan Sabet, an Iran expert at the Geneva Graduate Institute, told The New Arab.

Or as three political prisoners wrote in a statement released last month: No government can achieve legitimacy or security by “the accumulation of corpses and a fear production line.”

Small-business expansion and innovation in the United States are near all-time highs. And it’s artificial intelligence – despite concerns over AI possibly shrinking the workforce – that appears to be driving this resurgence.

Recent data shows an average of 466,000 new business applications filed in the U.S. each month since the beginning of 2024. In June, that number reached 531,000 – nearly double the prepandemic rate. Payroll platform Gusto reports that 60% of new business owners used AI to help launch their enterprise in 2025 – with 75% of them using it to develop business ideas, and about half applying it to legal and setup tasks.

For Americans who might be short on finance but brimming with business ideas, AI is changing the calculus for the better. “A lot of the big-picture thinking about AI and productivity has focused on how it will change workflows at large companies,” Nasdaq economist and senior director Michael Normyle said in an interview on the stock exchange’s news site in July. The thousands of startups that wouldn’t have existed without AI, he indicated, “are being underappreciated.”

“These companies start out as one-person operations, but there’s no rule saying they stay that way,” Mr. Normyle pointed out. “More businesses mean more potential sources of job creation.”

Such insights and supporting data can help pierce the gloom in some quarters that AI is destined to be an engine of large-scale job losses and devaluation of human skills. Instead, the trend highlights how sometimes-latent creativity and innovation are often reignited by tectonic shifts in technology and know-how.

“A more hopeful possibility,” as The Economist observed, “is that the technology democratises the ability to put ideas into practice and become a successful business owner.” Bank of America statistics, the magazine noted, show that “a rising share of new entrepreneurs are low-income” – a finding on expanded opportunity confirmed by the 2025 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

“A broad cross-section of Americans [is] starting businesses, including veterans and active-duty military, immigrants and Americans born abroad, and also demonstrating gender and racial/ethnic diversity,” the GEM report noted. “Collectively, these entrepreneurs contribute to job creation, innovation and global competitiveness for the United States.”

Typically, about 1 in 5 new businesses fail in their first year. But in the U.S., as The New York Times pointed out nearly a decade ago, “the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail.” Venture capitalists are often willing to fund an entrepreneur who has persevered and improved an idea or product through trial and error.

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“Technology can just as readily create opportunities for high-quality work as it can automate it,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor. “Around 60% of all jobs that people do in the US today didn’t exist in 1940,” but were sparked by technological and social innovations, he said in a 2023 talk.

At a time of rapid and uncertain change, humanity’s innate capacities to tap fresh opportunities and to innovate still challenge outgrown ideas of what’s possible for progress and prosperity.

A rapid rise in the number of community gardens, notably in places that are food deserts or among Americans hit hard by inflation, has lately led to a question among researchers: Do these shared plots of local produce serve a greater goal than easing hunger and financial hardship?

Turns out, they do. A recent survey of 15 garden sites in Pennsylvania, for example, found high satisfaction with not only the food grown but also the services frequently offered at such sites, from education for children to spiritual support by churches to the opportunity to simply observe nature.

One key finding: Of the 39% of participants in the gardens who had reported feeling isolated from others, the vast majority later agreed that the gardens were a welcoming and inclusive space that fostered belonging and community, according to the study by Pennsylvania State University.

A global study released July 2 by a Paris-based think tank found that converting vacant urban lots and idle farmland into gardens, cafés, dining spaces, or cooking venues can generate social connection to combat loneliness as well as the “rising political polarisation at the local level.”

Breaking bread together – or, in this case, snapping green beans with strangers in a community garden – has long broken barriers, helping people to focus on their similarities more than on their differences. This voluntary association allows trust to grow gradually in everyday life.

In an era of greater distrust of institutions and a climate of misinformation, more than trust is often required to generate a spirit of generosity. A new survey of Americans about their willingness to give to others revealed that charities receive far more money from donors who felt both trust and a personal relationship than trust alone.

“Plenty of people trust nonprofits in general and still feel no real relationship to charitable work, felt no role in it, and no reason to act,” concluded the study by Charity Navigator and Mutiny Co.

“If the fear is that Americans have stopped caring, the data tells a different story. 95% said they would give under the right conditions. Even among people who feel disconnected from charitable causes, most still want to help.”

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In other words, local get-togethers that form relationships – like community gardens – can better ignite the natural impulse to give than groups simply asking for a donation to a cause.

The seeds of civic renewal in the United States might sprout again when more Americans plant seeds with their neighbors.

The steady growth in the number of women imprisoned in the United States in recent decades has drawn attention to the toll it places on public budgets – as well as on family and social stability. New research in June showed it costs 25% to 75% more to hold a woman in prison, compared with the national annual average of $70,000 per person. This is largely a function of fewer and smaller facilities for women, as well as outsourced healthcare.

But a cost not easily captured in dollar terms has begun to shift the emphasis in corrections systems from punitive to redemptive justice and detention: the cost in lost parental care and affection experienced by the more than 2.7 million children in the U.S. – half of them under 10 years of age – who have a parent in incarceration.

A child’s need for parental presence, affection, and family stability has been well documented. Research also confirms that the negative impacts of a parent’s absence are amplified when the imprisoned parent is a mother.

“Women who come in contact with the criminal justice system are more likely than men to be parents and twice as likely as fathers to be the primary caretakers of their children,” according to Anne Precythe, a former director of the Missouri Department of Corrections. “These women are central to their families’ daily functioning – putting dinner on the table, taking children to school ... caring for elderly relatives,” she wrote on the news site Governing this month.

The American justice system has shown an increasing willingness to meet the challenges of helping imprisoned caregivers fulfill their responsibilities to both society and their children. Most women in prison, Ms. Precythe pointed out, were not convicted of violent offenses or new crimes but rather were there for probation violations or court-ordered substance use treatment.

“We can hold women accountable for breaking the law while using prison more judiciously,” she observed.

More and more, facilities are offering simple, low-cost parenting education and skills programs that help both fathers and mothers. And nonprofits are working to support more frequent virtual and in-person visits by children that include meaningful interactions. These can involve reading a book together or a parent recording a book reading that is then sent home.

Another approach, such as in Washington state, is alternative sentencing, which allows eligible parents to serve part or all of a sentence at home, under intensive community supervision or electronic monitoring.

When it comes to mothers of very young children, coresidence or prison nursery programs are impactful – but still rare. An estimated 58,000 pregnant women enter jail or prison annually, and the majority are separated from their babies soon after birth. A 2025 report found that only eight state-run facilities operate such prison nurseries. Yet their positive impact is substantial: There was a 28% reduction in recidivism in Nebraska, while in Illinois, only 3% of the mothers returned to prison for new crimes. In addition, children who initially spend time closer to their mothers in prison nurseries exhibit better mental health and academic outcomes than those who are separated from their mothers after delivery.

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Such reforms are not just about restoring families but also about “breaking generational cycles of crime and punishment ... and building safer, healthier communities,” stated Oklahoma first lady Sarah Stitt. She was an adviser for a study last year by the Council on Criminal Justice that proposed alternatives to imprisonment for parents of young children.

The cornerstone of such ideas is a child’s right to uninterrupted care by a parent – the bond of love at the heart of a society’s harmony.