‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech
What could be more delightful than a trip to Greece to meet Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic leftwing firebrand who tried to stick it to the man, AKA the IMF, EU and entire global financial order? The mental imagery I have before the visit is roughly two parts Zorba the Greek to one part an episode of BBC series Holiday from the Jill Dando era: blue skies, blue sea, maybe some plate breaking in a jolly taverna. What I’m not expecting is a wall of flames rippling across a hillside next to the highway from the airport and a plume of black smoke billowing across the carriageway.
Because even a modernist villa on a hillside on the island of Aegina – a fast ferry ride from the port of Piraeus and the summer bolthole of chic Athenians – is not the sanctuary from the modern world that it might once have been. The house is where Varoufakis and his wife, landscape artist Danae Stratou, live, year round since the pandemic, but in August 2023 at the end of a summer of heatwaves and extreme weather conditions across the world, it feels more than a little apocalyptic. The sun is a dim orange orb struggling to shine through a haze of smoke while a shower of fine ash falls invisibly from the sky. A month later, two years’ worth of rain will fall in a single day in northern Greece, causing a biblical deluge and never-before-seen levels of flooding.
That the end of the world feels just a little bit nearer here than it does in some places may not be coincidental to Varoufakis’s having written a new book called Technofeudalism: WhatKilledCapitalism. Nor that the book comes to the conclusion that capitalism has been replaced with something even worse. Not the glorious socialist revolution that his hero Marx foresaw. Nor some new mutation of capitalism such as the one detailed by Shoshana Zuboff in her surprise 2019 bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. We’re now in servitude, Varoufakis argues, to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir Musk of the rotten borough of X.
When I arrive by taxi at the bottom of the dirt track up to his house, Varoufakis is there to meet me, folded inside a zippy red Mini. “I’m usually on my motorbike,” he says, and describes his “pristine commute” at speed via land and sea that gets him to the Greek parliament in just over an hour. It should also be mentioned that the motorbike and leather jacket didn’t hurt his image as a lefty bad boy, taking on the grey men of global capitalism. To put Varoufakis into context, he was the Greek equivalent of John McDonnell (a close friend) if Jeremy Corbyn (another close friend) had actually been voted into power and if John McDonnell had, in this scenario, been played by George Clooney.
Because in 2015, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, Varoufakis was catapulted from academic obscurity to minister of finance. He said – loudly and repeatedly – that the punitive terms the banks wanted to impose on Greece would lead to catastrophic austerity. A majority of Greeks voted to back him, and for a short time his strategy of simply refusing to agree to the IMF and EU’s terms led to a tense standoff. Right until the moment prime minister Aléxis Tsípras, the man who appointed him, accepted them. Either the only possible action to prevent the country going bankrupt, or a treacherous betrayal, depending on who you choose to believe.
The Financial Times labelled Varoufakis “the most irritating man in the room” during the negotiations, so it’s not exactly a surprise to learn that Technofeudalism is a polemic, a controversialist’s take. And although in 2023 there’s nothing particularly novel or special about hating on tech – hating on Elon Musk is the only rational response to the situation in which we’ve found ourselves – nevertheless, Technofeudalismfeels like an important new book.
It’s a big-picture hypothesis rooted in a historical account of how capitalism came into being that describes what is happening in terms of an epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift. In some ways, it’s a relief to have a politician – any politician – talking about this stuff. Because in Varoufakis’s telling, this isn’t just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power.
“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
We’re in his airy open-plan living room where his wife intermittently appears offering water, coffee and snacks and shooing away a large, enthusiastically affectionate labrador. “He’s totally in love with Yanis,” she says. Stratou and Varoufakis are a striking couple, as glamorous as their house, a cool, luminous space featuring poured concrete and big glass windows overlooking a perfect rectangle of blue pool.
“I have no issues with luxury,” he says at one point, which is just as well because the entire scene would give the Daily Mail a conniption, especially since Aegina seems to be Greece’s equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard, home to a highly networked artistic and political elite. Tsípras, the former prime minister and Varoufakis’s nemesis, used to live next door. “He was on the next hill. There’s a symbolically important ravine between us,” he says.
And although Stratou is an accomplished artist, she’s also cursed with some niche internet fame. At the height of Varoufakis’s notoriety, a newspaper report claimed that she was the inspiration behind Pulp’s hit song Common People. “She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge,” runs the first line; “She studied sculpture at St Martin’s College,” is the second. As Stratou did, at the same time as Jarvis Cocker was there, though she gives me a “No comment!” when I inevitably bring it up. “It’s the first thing you see when you Google my name,” she says, with irritation, and “who knows where artists find their inspiration?” though Varoufakis seems to be enjoying my line of questioning just a little too much.
***
Technofeudalism takes the form of a letter addressed to Varoufakis’s recently deceased father, Georgios. A Greek-Egyptian communist, he emigrated to Greece in the 1940s, in the middle of the country’s civil war, and was sentenced to five years’ “political re-education” for refusing to denounce his communism. He rose to become chairman of Greece’s biggest steel company. What Varoufakis valued most about him, he says in the book, was his father’s ability to see the “dual nature” of things.
Technofeudalismis also partly a sequel to his previous book, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, addressed to his then 11-year-old daughter Xenia, in which he tried to answer the question of why there’s so much inequality. Though even as he was writing it, he says, he felt end-of-an-era qualms about the future prospects of capitalism.
“Even before it was published in 2017, I was feeling uneasy,” he says in the first chapter of Technofeudalism. “Between finishing the manuscript and holding the published book in my hands, it felt as if it were the 1840s and I was about to publish a book on feudalism; or, even worse, like waiting for a book on Soviet central planning to see the light of day in late 1989.” Was the entire concept of capitalism already out of date, he wondered?
On the living room bookshelf, I spot a copy of Zucked by businessman Roger McNamee, one of the first investors in Facebook, who was responsible for introducing Mark Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg. “That’s a great book,” says Varoufakis. I tell him that McNamee broadly agrees with his new ideas. I’d messaged a bunch of people to ask them what they would ask Varoufakis, including McNamee, and precised the book to him – that two pivotal events have transformed the global economy: 1) the privatisation of the internet by America and China’s big tech companies; and 2) western governments’ and central banks’ responses to the 2008 great financial crisis, when they unleashed a tidal wave of cash.
I read him McNamee’s reply: “I buy the basic thesis. The US kept interest rates at near zero from 2009 to 2022. This encouraged business models that promised world-changing outcomes, even if they were completely unrealistic and/or hostile to the public interest (eg the gig economy, self-driving cars, crypto, metaverse, AI). This came at a time of no regulation of tech and an accepted culture in business that said executives should maximise shareholder value at expense of everything else (eg democracy, public health, public safety)… had rates been at 5% the past 14 years, I doubt very much that the gig economy, self-driving cars, crypto, metaverse or AI would have gotten even 10% as much funding.”
It’s pretty remarkable, I point out, that a Marxist and a venture capitalist have reached the same economic conclusions. But then there are more and more people – outside politics – trying to understand these new power structures. Shoshana Zuboff tells me that she “explicitly rejects labels like technofeudalism because technology is not the independent variable nor are we feudal serfs”. But she also says that the argument has some similarities to one of her latest papers: “In big tech we face a totalising power that in key respects disqualifies itself from being understood as capitalism, but rather as a wholly new form of governance by the few over the many.”
When I message Mariana Mazzucato, another charismatic and influential economist, but one who, unlike Varoufakis, has been embraced by governments and financial institutions, her response suggests that some of Varoufakis’s ideas are not that new. She herself published on an adjacent concept, “algorithmic rents” (the idea that tech companies capture attention and resell it rather than creating long-term value) in 2018.
But perhaps traditional distinctions between left and right don’t make sense any more. The right, Varoufakis says, “thinks of capitalism as like a natural system, a bit like the atmosphere”. Whereas the left “think of themselves as people created by the universe in order to bring socialism over capitalism. I am telling you: you know what, you missed it. You missed it. Somebody killed capitalism. We have something worse.”
The early internet, he says, has given way to a privatised digital landscape in which gatekeepers “charge rent… The people we think of as capitalists are just a vassal class now. If you’re producing stuff now, you’re done. You’re finished. You cannot become the ruler of the world any more.”
I wonder aloud if Varoufakis’s bigpicture approach stems from the fact that authoritarianism – and the radical politics it produced in his own family – is still near-history in Greece. When he was six, the secret police raided his house and arrested his father. Do you remember it, I ask. “My God, yes, you don’t forget a thing like that. For two weeks, we didn’t know where he was.” And when Varoufakis started becoming interested in politics – this was when a military junta still ruled Greece – and he was picked up by the police as a teenager, his parents were adamant: he was going to Britain.
As well as being a passionate European and an internationalist, he’s also an anglophile who writes in English and studied at Essex University, where he joined the Communist party of Great Britain. He is credited with persuading Jeremy Corbyn to back remain in the referendum and campaigned around the country for it. And when I ask him what his advice would be to Keir Starmer, he says: “He should try to do something he’s incapable of: being honest. He should say: ‘You know what? Brexit was a disaster. I want to bring back the UK into the EU. I’m not saying that I’m going to do it any time soon. But I’m going to work toward it. In the meantime, I will make Brexit work by doing A B C and D.’” (Coincidentally, Starmer said last week that he will seek to
remake the deal with the EU for closer trade ties.)
“He’s now adopting austerity. There’s no plan for the NHS to reverse the privatisation from within. You know, this is the one thing I miss about Thatcher. She was a conviction politician, right?”
I say that the closest political analogues to Varoufakis in the UK might be Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. “What?” he says.
“You’re all anti-politicians,” I say. “The fact you have a point is a source of sorrow,” he says. “Because I’m anti-establishment. But it’s true, you have these people taking over the anti-establishment mantle in a way that is functional to the interests of the establishment. I see no difference between Orbán, the Polish government, Trump,
Farage, Johnson, Mussolini.”
It formed part of his pitch to the EU at the height of the Greek debt crisis. “I told Wolfgang Schäuble [the former German finance minister]: ‘We’re both democrats. We believe in the Enlightenment.’ I said: ‘Give us austerity and we’ll turn to fascism.’ And I very much fear that is turning out to be the case.” The big winners in this year’s Greek elections were “The Spartans, they are the mutation of Golden Dawn [a banned Greek neo-Nazi party]. The Greek Solution. You only have to hear the names, right? And Niki, or Victory.”
It’s a particularly sore point. Because these parties’ gains came at the expense of Varoufakis. After his stint as finance minister, he’d set up his own party, which won nine seats in the 2019 election. This year, it lost them all. “We don’t really know what happened. We were polling at 21% among young people.” The spring has gone out of his step, he admits. He’s been holed up in Aegina since, pondering his next move. Still, even with the ash raining from the skies, it’s not a bad place to be.
This is a bracing conversation, which includes half an hour on Russia and Ukraine during which I politely disagree with everything he says. His views on the conflict are practically indistinguishable from Nigel Farage’s, rehearsing the same far right-meets-far left “horseshoe” rhetoric about doing a deal with Putin, and Crimea not really being Ukraine. But on the subject of technofeudalism, I could listen to him all day.
Xenia, his daughter, wanders in. “Are you guys still going? I’ve had three naps since you got here.” A student in Australia, she’s been taking her classes online from Aegina and has been up half the night. The breakdown of his
Jeff Bezos doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism
relationship with his first wife, Australian academic Margarite Poulos, and her decision to return to Australia with Xenia was, Varoufakis has written, one of the darkest periods of his life. Meeting Stratou is what saved him from “near oblivion”.
In Technofeudalism, Varoufakis retells the story of the minotaur. It’s a myth that he returns to often. In his prescription, the minotaur is the global financial system. In the myth, the beast is eventually slain by an Athenian prince. This prince of Athens didn’t manage to bring down capitalism. But as he and Stratou walk me down to the taxi under an unnatural orange sunset, it strikes me that the beast may yet turn out to have mortally wounded itself, all on its own.
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Yanis Varoufakis discusses Technofeudalism at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, 28 September, tickets from £15
would say, ‘Shut up or dry it up or we’ll give you some more.’ My dad was kind of abusive, you know.”
Roberson was taken into custody within hours of Nikki’s death. He remains there more than 21 years later.
I asked him how he felt about being convicted of shaking his daughter to death.
“I would never think about shaking her,” he replied. “And that’s God’s honest truth. I don’t know what happened to her, Mr Pilkington. I wouldn’t want that to be on nobody: to lose a child, especially if you tried to do right and you loved her and tried to get to know her, then to be accused.”
Roberson said he knew nothing about the medical hypothesis that fueled his prosecution until long after he was arrested. He read about it in a brochure someone gave his mother.
“I’d never heard about shaken baby in my life,” he said.
•••
Shaken baby syndrome (SBS) began life in the early 1970s as a medical hypothesis for why some children become severely ill, some fatally, showing signs of internal head trauma but little or no signs of external trauma. One of the first to float the idea was a British pediatric neurosurgeon, Norman Guthkelch, who in 1971 suggested the cause might be violent shaking.
By the 1980s, SBS had developed into a detailed theory focusing on three symptoms, known as the triad, that it was believed could indicate abusive shaking: bleeding between the tissue layers covering the brain, swelling on the brain, and bleeding at the back of the eyes. When that triad was seen, even without any outward sign of force, child abuse might be behind it.
By the 1990s, a form of groupthink had crept in, medical practitioners firming up what had begun as a mere hunch into a formal diagnosis. The collective thinking now was that where those three symptoms were seen in young children, not only could abusive shaking be presumed, it had to be taken as the cause.
In 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the world’s leading pediatric medical organization, issued official guidance. It said that where a young child had internal head injuries there was “the need for a presumption of child abuse” – a categoric finding that rapidly became medical, and then forensic dogma.
So it was that a year later, when
Roberson brought Nikki to ER, he was met by a cordon of medical staff trained in this thinking, with detectives and prosecutors following their lead.
“When we got to Palestine hospital, the conversation was about shaken baby,” Wharton recalled, “so for me and my detectives that’s the direction we were going.”
The problem was that the presumption that the triad must be caused by violent shaking had no scientific foundations. As a new book of essays, Shaken Baby Syndrome, published by Cambridge University Press and edited by prominent scientists and law professors in the US, UK, Europe and Japan, points out, shaking is essentially a biomechanical issue pediatric doctors know little about.
One of the first biomechanical studies to be carried out into SBS was conducted in 1987, almost 20 years after the hypothesis emerged. It found that violent shaking produces a force inside the head well below that involved in impact injuries such as car crashes, and much weaker than child abuse experts had assumed.
The new book’s conclusion is that 50 years after Guthkelch’s hunch, “this hypothesis still lacks a scientific evidence base”.
In 1997, shaken baby syndrome became a global sensation with the televised trial of a British nanny, Louise Woodward, in Massachusetts. She was prosecuted following the death of the eight-month-old in her care, Matthew Eappen.
Woodward was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life, later reduced to involuntary manslaughter and time served. Her trial was so high-profile that it brought to public attention serious doubts about the credibility of SBS raised by the nanny’s defense attorney, the co-founder of the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck.
Since Roberson was sentenced to death in 2002, those doubts have steadily grown. Dr Patrick Barnes, a key prosecution witness in the Woodward trial, retracted his testimony and became a vocal critic of the syndrome.
Even Guthkelch, its creator, came out in 2012 and said his work had been distorted. He never intended, he said, to suggest that the three symptoms could be assumed to be shaken baby syndrome in the absence of any other evidence of abuse.
“There was not a vestige of proof when the name was suggested that shaking, and nothing else, causes the triad,” he said.
Over time those medical doubts have filtered through to the courtroom. Since 1993 there have been 32 exonerations in the US following SBS convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
This week, an appeals court in New Jersey ruled that SBS was “junk science” and “scientifically unreliable” and could not be used by prosecutors at trial.
In Ohio, Alan Butts was released in December after 19 years in prison having been granted a new trial. His story is uncannily similar to Roberson’s: he was accused of the “shaking baby” death of his girlfriend’s two-year-old son, Jadyn, in 2002, the year Nikki died.
New evidence showed Jadyn had pneumonia at the time of his death – just like Nikki. The toddler was on medication no longer given to children because it can cause sudden death – just like Nikki.
Katherine Judson is a lawyer who has represented Butts for several years. She is also executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, which has filed a brief supporting Roberson in his supreme court petition.
In Judson’s view, the Butts and Roberson narratives are so remarkably akin that they provide an excellent example of “flukey justice”.
“You can have the exact same facts in a different jurisdiction,” she said, “and one person gets released while the other person languishes on death row.” •••
In recent years, the Innocence Project has become increasingly involved in exposing junk science. The group has focused on a range of forensic techniques that in their application have put innocent people at risk.
They include bitemark analysis, under which it was believed erroneously that a bite on a corpse’s skin could be matched to a suspect’s dentition; hair microscopy, which claimed falsely that a single hair from a crime scene could be linked visually to an individual; and fire science, which suggested that analysis of a burn pattern could determine whether a fire was arson – until it was discovered that intentional and accidental fires leave the same imprints.
The Innocence Project has joined Roberson’s legal team. Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation, said the group had decided to fight for the prisoner’s life because “an innocent man is at serious risk of being executed”.
She added: “Like so many faulty forensics that have played a role in the nation’s exonerations, the evidence upon which his conviction and death sentence rest has been disproven since the time of his trial.”
Paradoxically, Texas is a leader in countering junk science. In 2013, the state introduced a first-in-the-nation “junk science writ” that allowed prisoners – especially those on death row – to challenge sentences on grounds of misused forensic science. It was under this law that in 2016 Sween saved Roberson from imminent death by securing a stay of execution four days before his scheduled lethal injection.
But the hope generated by the new junk science law in Texas has proven a chimera. There have been about 70 attempts by death row inmates to utilize the law and of those the number that have obtained relief is zero.
Kosoul Chanthakoummane was one of those who appealed through the junk science law. He had been put on death row on the back of three different types of junk science: hypnosis of a witness to obtain identification, bitemark analysis and a discredited form of DNA testimony.
In August 2022, Texas executed him anyway.
There is a real possibility that that fate now awaits Roberson. Having secured a stay of execution, he was granted an evidentiary hearing at his trial court. Sween presented a mass of new evidence. Expert witnesses were called to speak about the growing consensus that SBS is junk science.
The court heard that Nikki’s symptoms could all be explained by natural rather than violent causes, including her pneumonia and chronic illness and the life-threatening medication. It was also told about Roberson’s autism, and the unfounded nature of the sexual assault allegation.
Despite the voluminous testimony, a state judge denied the appeal. She said shaken baby syndrome remained a reasonable diagnosis and that Roberson “failed to provide any newly discovered evidence” undermining his conviction.
In January, the Texas court of criminal appeals affirmed that decision.
The state is now actively lobbying the supreme court justices to persuade them not to take Roberson’s case. Its argument cites testimony from Teddie, Roberson’s estranged girlfriend, who said he had a bad temper and would yell at Nikki and hit her.
Roberson’s legal team counter that
Teddie was not a credible witness. Her own sister testified for Roberson, insisting she had never seen him mistreat Nikki and telling the jury Teddie had a problem with telling the truth.
Brian Wharton, who after retiring from law enforcement retrained as a cleric and is now pastor of a United Methodist church situated 10 miles away from death row,testified at the junk science hearing. He told the court that, drawing on his 14 years’ experience as a police officer, he had come to the view that shaken baby syndrome was a fallacy and that without it there was no evidence supporting Roberson’s death sentence.
“What case would we have been able to make?” Wharton told the Guardian. “There was no crime scene, no forensic evidence. It was just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without them, he would be a free man today.”
Roberson said the worst part of his fight to stay alive was not knowing. Will the supreme court take his petition, or will they not?
He has had so many knock-backs that he knows the worst could happen. But he says he’s ready for whatever comes. He recently participated in the first faith-based program on Texas’s death row and said it had deepened his religious belief.
Roberson has a tattoo on his right arm which he inked himself when he was still a child, aged 17. That was many years before he grew up and became a father to Nikki.
“F T W,” it says.
The Guardian asked what it stood for. He replied: “Then? Or now?”
“Then it was ‘F The World’. That’s how I felt when I was a kid. But I changed, and now it’s ‘Follow The Way’.”
That will be his guiding star for whatever lies ahead.
“I hope and pray that God gives them the knowledge for the people to make a righteous decision,” Roberson said. “I know I didn’t do it. I’m not guilty. So I’m at peace with the Lord.”
The conversation was about shaken baby, so for me and my detectives that’s the direction we were going
Brian Wharton
tices began at 6am, so the team could wrap up before the hottest part of the day. And home games were held after sunset. “People don’t even want to sit in the stands and watch when it’s 103F [39.4C],” he said. Transferring to the College of Idaho wasn’t much of an escape – Boise was trapped under a heat dome for much of July.
To stave off heat illness, Clark closely monitors his nutrition throughout the day, and makes sure to stay hydrated when he’s on and off the field. “It’s about preparing for the heat, because you can’t really escape it.” he said.
Players around the world, across all sports of all levels are grappling with similar realisations. The World Cup-winning midfielder Sam Mewis has written about how her performance has been impacted by extreme heat and wildfire smoke. This year, the US Open amended rules to partially shut the stadium roof in order to shade players during a searing heatwave on the east coast.
But American football players are among the most vulnerable to heat illness. A 2013 study found that the exertional heat illness rate in high school football was 11.4 times that of all other sports combined.
The season’s start coincides not only with the hottest period in much of North America, but also with hurricane season in the south and peak wildfire season in the west. In Idaho, many players and fans have begun to associate smoky skies with football, Clark said.And unlike cross country runners, or soccer players, footballers wear heavy padding and safety gear, which makes it harder for them to cool off.
The artificial grass that students and professionals play on causes even more complications. Studies suggest that synthetic turf can get up to 60F (15.5C) hotter than natural grass, radiating temperatures above 160F (71C) on summer days.
Most heat illness happens right at the beginning of the season, or preseason – when players are first returning to the field after long, offseason rests. It can take two or more weeks for their bodies to adjust to gruelling outdoor workouts. Certain medications, including common ones used to treat depression and ADHD, can make players especially prone to heat illness.
Linemen – the biggest, bulkiest players on the team – are extra vulnerable. “They don’t cool off as well as players with a leaner body might,” said Karissa Niehoff, CEO of the National Federation of State High School Association. “The majority of our heat illnesses in football were in the lineman position.”
Nearly a dozen football players died of heat stroke between 2018 and 2022, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But the figure may be an underestimate as not all football deaths are reported to the center, or clearly linked to heat in autopsies.
The risks are compounded for young athletes of colour, who are more likely to go to schools and live in “heat island” neighbourhoods that lack shade and green spaces.
“Imagine, if you live in a place that doesn’t have air conditioning, you don’t have sufficient shade to keep you cool on your walk to school, and then your school doesn’t have air conditioning either,” said Ruth Engel, an environmental data scientist at UCLA who studies microclimates. “By the time you have to go play football, you’ve never had a chance to cool down – so you start at a huge disadvantage.”
A changing culture
The year that the University of Maryland offensive lineman Jordan McNair died – 2018 – ended up being the fourth hottest year on record globally.
The team had just returned from a month-long break to start their first workout of the season. It was a balmy day – just over 80F (26.6C), with 70% humidity, and all the players were running 110-yard sprints. By his seventh sprint, McNair started cramping up, but kept running. About an hour later, he began foaming at the mouth and about thirty minutes after that, he was loaded into an ambulance. The 19-yearold died two weeks later.
“Really the main thing I kept asking myself was why?” said his father, Marty McNair. “What did I miss? What did I miss?”
A 74-page independent investigation commissioned by the university placed significant blame on the university trainers and medical staff, who failed to check the wet-bulb temperature and modify workouts to reduce the risk of heat illness. Instead, the trainers pushed McNair to keep running even after he showed signs of heat stress and failed to offer life-saving cold-immersion therapy before it was too late.
The university eventually agreed to pay a $3.5m settlement to Jordan’s family, and in the years since, has adopted new policies to better recognize and prevent heat stroke. And Marty McNair started a foundation named for his son, to train coaches and athletes on heat safety.
Since then, after a slew of scorching football seasons, he’s started to hear more discussion and action on heat safety, he said. “Obviously global warming is real, and that’s going to be impacting athlete’s safety. And I think now people are starting to be more receptive to that idea.”
In 2021, the state adopted a law named for McNair that requiring the creation of new health and safety requirements in Maryland athletic programs. Lawmakers have introduced a federal version as well.
Still, Marty McNair sees massive disparities in the expertise and equipment that schools have to help athletes experiencing a heat stroke. “Your Black, your brown, your rural community teams, you don’t see them checking a wet-bulb globe thermometer – because they’ve barely got the basics,” he said.
But as the climate changes, he believes the culture of football will have to change as well. “I always told Jordan to be coachable. So I never taught him that if you feel uncomfortable doing something that the coach asked you to do, you don’t have to do it. You know, listen to your body first.”
‘These are still kids’
Zac Taylor can barely remember how his body felt, before he collapsed on the gridiron in 2018. It was hot, and his high school varsity team had been made to do about 280 “up-down” push ups after two hours of sprints and drills as a punishment for poor performance at a scrimmage.
Taylor just remembers waking up at the hospital a week later. He lost more than 50lbs by the time he was discharged, his mother Maggie Taylor recalled. She has since started a nonprofit, along with other parents, that donates safety and medical equipment to school teams and teaches young athletes how to look for signs of heat exhaustion.
Part of that work includes teaching players to slow down, and coaches to ease off. The idea runs counter to football culture in many ways. (“Water is for cowards,” Denzel Washington’s
Coach Boone proclaims in Remember the Titans.) Players are incentivized to strain themselves beyond their limits by coaches who themselves were mentored with the same sort of tough love.
“There’s this culture of ‘keep pushing’, of punishment practices and if you stop, you’ll lose your position on the team,” said Maggie Taylor. “That’s how a lot of these old school football coaches operate.”
Part of the problem, says Murfree, the sports ecologist. “is the environment in which today’s athletes are playing sports, is wholly different from the environment when their coaches were playing. Year after year we’re outpacing heat records and catastrophic disaster records.”
Although very young athletes – at the elementary and middle school level – are physically most prone to heat illness, it’s the teens and young adults who are most at risk for exertional heat stroke, studies have found, simply because they push past their bodies’ warning signs.
“With these young adults, all they want to do is make the varsity team, to come off the bench, to get recruited by the best college teams,” said Murfree. “They want to make their coaches and parents proud. And all that can be counterproductive if the body is being overworked.”
There’s an idea that young athletes are superhuman, or act like they are, McNair said. “Jordan was 6ft5, he was 300lbs. He wore a size 16 shoe – but he was still 19 years old,” he said. “These are still kids.”
population groups in the near future.”
Local officials of the breakaway state, also known as Artsakh, earlier said they planned to evacuate an estimated population of more than 120,000 people to Armenia after Azerbaijan issued plans to “reintegrate” the territory.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous region that many Armenians see as their ancestral homeland but is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory. It has been governed by a local Armenian government since the early 1990s after years of war. The government is now close to collapse after a ceasefire with Azerbaijan.
Local authorities have made preparations for the evacuation. A Guardian reporter was stopped by police at a new checkpoint near the border of Armenia with Nagorno-Karabakh and was told that access to the road was now blocked because of plans for the evacuation.
The Armenian government said it was ready to welcome 120,000 ethnic Armenian compatriots and that it was likely they would leave soon. The first refugees came from the region near Shusha, where Armenian towns and villages were surrounded as Azerbaijani forces surged forward in an offensive this week.
Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, said in a live address on Sunday: “Our government will lovingly welcome our brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh still face the danger of ethnic cleansing. Humanitarian supplies have arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh in recent days but this does not change the situation.
“If real living conditions are not created for the Armenians of NagornoKarabakh in their homes, and effective mechanisms of protection against ethnic cleansing, then the likelihood is increasing that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see expulsion from their homeland as the only way out.”
He criticised a Russian-dominated security bloc of which Armenia is a member, saying the Collective Security Treaty Organization had been ineffective in preventing further violence.
It is not yet clear how many people may be evacuated from Nagorno-Karabakh in the coming days, but large hotels in the nearby city of Goris have been fully booked out by the government in order to accommodate the coming influx, hotel employees said.
Russian peacekeepers have said nearly 800 displaced people, many of whom fled small villages and towns attacked by Azerbaijan in its offensive this week, have been living at an airport used by the mission as its base.
Tens of thousands more people are reported to be trapped in Stepanakert, which has received thousands of displaced people who fled to the city after the new round of violence.
The refugees were bussed from Nagorno-Karabakh to a government tent camp near the border. There they were registered, offered housing in local hotels and given access to psychological help. One boy burst into tears as medical personnel spoke to him.
“If you’re going to Goris, please walk to the centre of the tent camp,” an official shouted through a megaphone, leading to a small scrum to board a minibus. Others drove out from Karabakh in private cars, some carrying sacks with all their possessions tied to the roofs.