How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the ...
When you let me go I barely stayed afloat I’m floating all alone Still holding on to hope
—JJ, Austria, “Wasted Love” Winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025
Many waters Cannot quench love Neither can the floods Drown it
—Yuval Raphael, Israel, “New Day Will Rise” (from the original Hebrew) Second place, Eurovision Song Contest 2025
How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the seas and floods threatening to inundate it? The survival of love is both denied and affirmed, threatened but still buoyed by the precarity of hope. Darkness haunts both songs, filling the stage with the stark play of light against the ominous backdrop of black. If the two songs and their metaphors are consonant at many levels, they were also portentous of the larger dissonance of the largest song contest in the world and its turn toward the darkness that envelops Europe in 2025.
JJ, “Wasted Love,” Official Eurovision video
The signs of Eurovision’s turn in 2025 took many and varied forms, but it is the abundance and commonness that pose questions about Europe itself. In significantly larger numbers than previously, the lyrics of the competing Eurosongs were in languages other than English. Each of the Baltic states, for example, sang in languages other than English—Latvian and Lithuanian, and Estonia’s Tommy Cash sang “Espresso Macchiato” primarily in Italian and Spanish. Larger and smaller nations alike chose to sing in national languages. Germany and Iceland, for example, both with long histories of Eurosongs in English, sang in their native languages.
The lyrics of the 2025 Eurosongs tended in greater numbers toward serious subjects, further reflecting the darkening moment. Songs with the comical lyrics that often distinguish Eurosongs did not entirely disappear, but they did not place as well as they frequently do. Sweden’s “Bara bada bastu” (Just Take a Sauna), sung by the Finnish group KAJ and wackily staged in a sauna, was favored to win prior to the Grand Finale, but it placed a fairly distant fourth.
KAJ, “Bara bada bastu,” Official Eurovision video
The field of competitors in 2025 was noticeably smaller: thirty-seven as opposed to as many as forty-three in previous years. Above all, the nations choosing not to compete were in Eastern Europe—Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and North Macedonia—while Russia and Belarus are banned from competing due to the ongoing war with Ukraine. Despite the financial reasons for not competing, the result has been a realignment of European nations with political stakes that resemble an earlier division of Europe into East and West. Just as the first Eurovision Song Contest was a response to the Cold War in 1956, so too do recent Eurovisions reflect the East-West divide in the Europe of a New Cold War.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is responsible for organizing the participation of nations in its European media empire has long established rules meant to distance the Eurovision from politics. Over the contest’s historical longue durée these rules have been effective to varying degrees, often by requiring that Eurosongs with politically specific lyrics make changes that depoliticize them. Those changes are usually accommodated (e.g., in 2024 when Israel was required to change some lyrics and the title of its entry, from “October Rain” to “Hurricane”), but occasional rejections are not unknown (e.g., Georgia with its 2009 entry, “We Don’t Wanna Put In”).
In 2025, the dividing line between the political and apolitical collapsed, thereby releasing the flood waters of the political. The rules designed to prevent the political could no longer withstand the Realpolitik of a Europe in conflict with itself. At the center of the storm was Israel and the contradictions unleashed by its continued participation while at war in Gaza. Calls for banning Israel because of its conflicts with Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have been growing for years. Palestine has itself launched tentative efforts to participate in the Eurovision, but without luck because of the absence of a national broadcasting network. Protests of Israeli Eurovision participation coalesced in 2019, when the Eurovision took place in Tel Aviv. Palestinian musicians even went so far as to organize an alternative Gazavision in 2019.
In 2025, all forms of pro-Palestinian protest were banned in Basel. Palestinian flags were not allowed, and the negative response of audiences to Yuval Raphael’s performances (booing) were scrubbed from EBU broadcasts. When Raphael placed in the middle of the field after the professional-juries voted, she catapulted to first place after the Israeli government organized a massive popular-vote surge on social media. She led the field until the final announcement of popular voting nudged JJ ahead into first place. In the week following the Grand Finale in Basel, the critical response to the flood of politicking in the Eurovision had swollen to the point that many recognize it as an existential crisis for the Eurovision Song Contest. It either will or will not be a response to the political forces dividing Europe.
Yuval Raphael, “New Day Will Come,” Official Eurovision video
It is my custom each year to end this blog post by giving final voice to a song that has special meaning for me, often because it offers an alternative vision for what the Eurovision Song Contest has been and what it might become. I discover the meaning I seek in these final sonic epilogues through acts of return and remembrance, return to powerful and intimate Eurovision moments of the past, return also to the exquisite beauty afforded by song itself. Accordingly, I remind myself that it is song that lies at the heart of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is song, so the first great theorist of song, Johann Gottfried Herder, reminds us, that “loves the masses” and their humanity. In search of song, I return to Latvia, where the young Herder, living in Riga, may have experienced his first folk songs, and I look to this year’s Latvian Eurovision entry, Tautumeitas’s “Bur man laimi” (Chant of Happiness). To complete the rhetorical framing of this blogpost, I close with the bridge of a song from Latvian folk song tradition. I return to “Bur man laimi” to remember—and to remind us—that the journey into darkness can pave the way to new light.
I didn’t know my own happiness I didn’t know my own happiness Until I met my misery
Tautumeitas, “Bur man laimi,” Official Eurovision video
Featured image: the stage of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 by MrSilesian. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. The gesture is probably not in this instance the near-universal sign of contempt it has become, but it may nevertheless serve as a reminder that the urge to make our feelings known has a long history. Today, that urge expresses itself most fully in our need to tell our leaders when we think they are wrong, a practice commonly known as “speaking truth to power.”
But getting up the courage to do so is only half the battle. As our recent election cycle has shown, getting power to listen is a whole other matter. Leaders across the political spectrum tend to surround themselves with people who share their views, and the resulting echo chamber simply drowns out other voices.
So how does one do it? The Bible has a couple of examples.
In Genesis, the patriarch Abraham gets God to think twice before wiping out Sodom, the original Sin City. He does it by haggling. “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city,” he asks. When God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous individuals can be found, Abraham cautiously but firmly starts bringing the number down. What about only 45, he asks. Or 30? How about 20? 10? Each time, God agrees to the new number, and we are left to believe not a single righteous person could be found in that moral cesspool.
A more earthly example comes from the Second book of Samuel, where the prophet Nathan publicly shamed King David for wrongfully arranging the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he could take the voluptuous Bathsheba as his wife. Ostensibly seeking the king’s justice, Nathan shared a story about a rich landowner who nevertheless seized his neighbor’s only ewe for a feast. When David predictably exploded over this rampant injustice, Nathan sprang his trap, telling the king that this was what he had done when he lusted for Bathsheba. Even though Nathan had tricked and humiliated David, the king responded, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Abraham and Nathan were special cases. As patriarch and prophet, respectively, they had acquired the right to exercise what Greek and Roman scholars called parrhesia, literally, “frankness,” or “freedom of speech.”
More ordinary folks had a problem, as the Greek philosopher Plato discovered when he travelled all the way from Athens to teach the ruler of Syracuse in Sicily how to become a philosopher-king. When Plato said that being a king or slave made no difference to a true philosopher, that ruler decided to try out the idea by selling Plato into slavery. (Legend has it that Plato used the money raised to pay his ransom to found the Academy.)
Under the Romans, public speaking became a primary skill, especially when it came to getting a favorable response from the emperor. As a result, a fairly large number of speeches, and handbooks on how to deliver a successful one, survive. Here are some simple rules that can be distilled from these works.
Rule one: know thyself
This maxim, carved into the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, serves as a reminder that demeanor is important. As Plato learned, speakers who talk down to their listeners are likely to be dismissed as holier-than-thou prigs. So, it’s more effective to offer one’s advice, like Abraham, with a dose of modesty.
Rule two: know thy audience
Better even then know thyself is know thy audience. If a given leader has a history of saber-rattling and plans to start a new arms race, this is probably not the best time to propose a National Endowment for the Arts.
In a democracy, We the People are the ultimate court of public opinion, and in this instance, emotion is often more effective than reason. Greed was all it took to get the ancient Athenians to launch their disastrous expedition against Syracuse, while Mark Antony, in his Funeral Oration for Julius Caesar, used anger to “let slip the dogs of war.” Fear works, too. Just ask the hordes of murderers, rapists, and pedophiles waiting to unleash Armageddon on our borders. Catchy, imperative phrases can be highly effective if they encapsulate a strong emotion. “Build the wall!” and “drain the swamp!” are good examples. “Build Back Better,” not so much.
Rule three: make it win-win
Terrible things happened to David after he was rebuked by Nathan, but in a strictly political sense his willingness to accept the charge (rather than, say, putting Nathan on an enemies list) established David as a legitimate ruler, and not a tyrant. Similarly, that saber-rattling ruler who would never hear of an endowment for the arts might actually listen to someone who pointed out that the pen can be mightier than the sword.
Rule four: flattery is good, finesse is better
In the fourth century, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, author of an influential life of Constantine the Great, was present when a speaker dubbed the first Christian emperor a saint and told him he would surely continue to rule in the afterlife. Constantine, who cultivated a public image of prayer and humility, exploded, and that speaker was never heard from again. A speech of Eusebius’s own survives, and a modern reader might be forgiven for thinking the bishop was being just as flattering, but in fact he chose his words much more carefully. Taking note of Constantine’s well-known penchant for public applause, for instance, Eusebius claims, “The cheers of the crowds and the voices of flatterers he holds more a nuisance than a pleasure, because of his stern character and the upright rearing of his soul.”
Eusebius shows he had mastered the trick that the conspirator Decius centuries later would explain in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” as the ability to deliver such praise while seeming not to: “But when I tell him he hates flatterers, / He says he does, being most flatterèd.”
Do such rules matter in our postmodern age, when truth itself seems to be up for grabs? We are not as unique as we like to think. Two millennia ago, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” If a skilled speaker had been on hand, the subsequent course of history might have been very different indeed.
Featured image: ‘The School of Athens’ byRaffaello Sanzio, c.1509-1511, via Wikimedia Commons.
Shae Washington, a Black queer Christian woman, struggled to reconcile her sexuality and her spirituality. Her church had always taught that you cannot be both Christian and queer. After years of praying about her struggle, one day she heard God say, “I have already set you free on the cross. Why are you still in the closet? Come out, be who I created you to be.” That day, when Shae chose to trust God’s authority over her own certainty, she said she felt a tremendous peace from God. That peace kept her grounded as former friends now demanded she show them where in the Bible it said this was okay and as church members charged her with arrogance for elevating her own experience over years of tradition.
Shae was among those living on the frontlines of the so-called culture wars—conservative Christians who are also LGBTQ+. Some of the things that make a lot of their lives hell make a lot of other people’s lives hell, too, in less direct ways. We all gain by understanding their situations. As we think about pride this month, the lives of LGBTQ+ conservative Christians can help us to see the link between pride and humility, and how both are necessary for love and justice. Knowing that you are a human being, worthy of love, is the kind of pride that a lot of straight, cisgender people take for granted. It is often denied to LGBTQ+ people. That is the pride we celebrate during Pride Month. As Shae’s story illustrates, many LGBTQ+ Christians find it is their humility that helps them recover or develop a healthy sense of pride: the belief in their fundamental worthiness of love and belonging.
Many LGBTQ+ conservative Christians have had loved ones cut them off from all connection out of fear that they are not just sinful, but dangerous to those they love. They are accused of “turning their backs on God,” even though many have begged and pleaded with God to take away the feelings that they thought made them unworthy of love. Still, many LGBTQ+ Christians stay connected to their faith communities, and more and more are being honest about who they are and engaging with their churches. LGBTQ+ Christians who are also people of color may need church as the one place where they find the support they need to survive living in a racist world from week to week. But unlike straight, cisgender people who may have church support groups to help with their marriages or families, LGBTQ+ people may not feel welcome to talk about their intimate relationships or find support for how to navigate them. And in predominantly white LGBTQ+ spaces, they may be free to express their sexual and gender identities, but might endure racism. Their stories make clear that it’s hard to flourish when you have to hide parts of yourself, and that we thrive when we are unconditionally loved and accepted as whole people. But getting there can be a tough road.
Looking at life from LGBTQ+ conservative Christians’ perspective, we see how actions that look like love might not actually be loving. In our research, we heard about a dynamic we call sacramental shame, where churches required LGBTQ+ members continually to feel and display shame—an emotion that signals they know they are unworthy of love—as a sign that they have not rejected God. This requirement was often shrouded in the language of love, “we love you, but we hate your sin,” and in expressions of affection and care. Being gay, bi, or trans was compared to being a murderer, or cheating on a spouse, or embezzling funds—all things that violate other people’s trust and break relationships. Yet the same people who taught that God could forgive people for these things also taught that being LGBTQ+—which is generally involuntary and doesn’t actually hurt anyone—makes a person uniquely unworthy of God’s love. When you treat being LGBTQ+ itself as a sin—the worst sin—you treat your own understanding of gender and sexuality as greater than God’s love, as a commandment more important than the Ten Commandments (which, Jesus said, all boil down to loving God and neighbor).
There is a particular harm that is caused by treating someone like their capacity to love is dangerous. It can make people feel like monsters. We heard from people for whom life had become completely unlivable because they felt unworthy of human connection and God’s love. They kept friends at arm’s length out of fear that getting too close would condemn them both to hell.
When someone has been treated this way, and comes out of it recognizing that they are not monsters but human beings, they feel alive again. That is pride: knowing that they are worthy of love and belonging, with their gifts and flaws, simply because they are human. In contrast to arrogance or hubris, we call this “relational pride.” Relational pride is taken for granted by many cisgender and heterosexual Christians, because no one ever questions that they deserve love. Knowing they are worthy of love only seems like arrogance to those who think LGBTQ+ people are uniquely unworthy. And yet they accuse LGBTQ+ people of being the arrogant ones.
Relational pride is not the opposite of humility, but its counterpart. Humility is a realistic knowledge of your gifts as well as your limitations. Humility enables us to admit that we might be wrong even when we feel pretty certain; it keeps us honest about our humanity, that none of us is all-knowing and that we need to learn from each other. Shae’s humility allowed her to be open to the possibility that she might be wrong about what she had always thought about gender and sexuality. It allowed her to trust God’s message that she is worthy of love, just as she is. What looked like arrogance to fellow church members was an act of submission to God, taking the harder path of being who God was telling her she was made to be. Shea’s humility led her to a healthy sense of pride—the joy of knowing she is worthy to give and receive love.
Humility also helps those who have devalued LGBTQ+ Christians to reconsider. Conservative Christian parents, pastors, and friends tell stories of the moment they realized that maybe they didn’t know everything about human sexuality and gender. That maybe they didn’t fully understand what the Bible was really saying. They showed humility, which led them to prioritize love over certainty.
Conservative Christians often say their job is to love others, not try to bring about social justice. But there is no love without justice. When we love other people, we are humbly open to learning from them and growing through our connection. We listen to them when they tell us we’ve been hurting them, and because we love them, we work to stop hurting them. Love also means listening when people tell you that your organization’s—or country’s—policies are hurting them, because of their sexual orientation, or gender, or race, ability, or because the policies themselves deprive them of things they need to live. Helping them to thrive might mean working to change those policies—out of love.
We on the left can also be arrogant, dismissing those we disagree with as backwards or even evil. To be sure, there are some pretty evil things happening in the world right now. It can be harmful to try to empathize with someone who treats you as if you shouldn’t exist. But trying to understand the fears behind their actions—when we can do so without personal harm—can help us all to find a way forward, to a society in which people are all treated as worthy of love and care not just from their friends and family, but by institutions and policies. Humility and pride foster solidarity—a relationship of love that works for justice.
There’s a saying in Western philosophy, echoed in some other philosophical traditions globally: “the end of labor is to gain leisure.” It’s a reminder that for all of the toil and turmoil that we engage in our daily lives, the fruits of such labor come in securing a means to pursue our own self interests. Such a claim is a cornerstone of contemporary theorizing on psychological well-being, from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory.
Perhaps I’ve taken this phrase a bit too literally, as I’ve devoted the last two decades of my life to the serious and rigorous study of entertainment and leisure, especially through media technologies. Although I’m unsure if we’ve collectively moved the needle on debates regarding the perils and pearls of an increasingly mediated daily existence, one thing is clear: media have, do, and will continue to play a critical role in how we manage our feelings and dispositions.
The premise is both elegant and simple: our emotions and moods fluctuate throughout the day as we cope with myriad stressful or monotonous events, and we rarely have control over the many things causing our noxious mood states. However, one thing we have a great deal of control over (usually) is the media content we consume. In the 1980s, some of the earliest media psychology scholars proposed the theory of affect-dependent stimulus arrangement–what later became known as mood management theory. If we presume that some of the most common noxious mood states include frustration and boredom, we can start to see how different media content might be useful for disrupting moods. For example, research using television, films, and music found that stressed people benefit best from slower-paced content with a more relaxing tone, and bored people benefit from somewhat the opposite: action-packed content that requires a bit more attention.
We found these same effects with video games but with one really important caveat: gaming can also back-fire. How is that possible? Video games require a lot more attention to play, because they are interactive–the player has to monitor and respond to the action as it unfolds. Because of this, video games were especially good at disrupting boredom, but games that are too difficult ended up being an additional source of stress, which ended up stressing out already-stressed people. In a sense, we found that video games have the potential to be especially potent for mood repair, but too much challenge disrupted the effect.
Studies like these are important because they remind us that entertainment media are quite functional in our day-to-day lives. Although it might seem that we’re just playing around and “amusing ourselves” in ways that pull us away from worldly concerns, it’s also the case that our psychological well-being depends on our ability to recover and be resilient–these latter notes being the focus of the latest scholarship into media-induced mood repair. Of course, others have found that some of mood management’s predictions don’t always hold up. For example, there are times where people do want to ruminate in noxious moods; such as when reflecting on the loss of a loved one or getting focused for a major event or competition. Yet even in these theoretical challenges, we see an enduring truth: we engage with media in ways that help us satisfy our needs.
So rather, maybe we are just playing around, but there are good and useful reasons for doing so. Other theories of functional media use include uses and gratifications theory (that we have deliberate motivations for our media selections, with intended and unintended consequences) and the broader suite of selective exposure theories (of which, mood management is conceptually aligned with).
In an increasingly mediated and hybrid society, it becomes even more crucial that we observe, describe, and explain our complex relationship with media content. Functional approaches do this by avoiding moral panics over presumed negative influences and instead, they step back to try and understand the role media plays in daily life. Such approaches are equally capable of understanding negative and positive influences (for example, the stressful impact of video games, or the broader discovery of “unintended consequences” through uses and gratifications theory), which makes them especially robust.
Soon, we will be launching the latest journal of the International Communication Association, Global Perspectives in Communication. The primary focus of GPC is to provide an additional top-tier outlet for communication scholarship, and to do so in an open-access environment so that we can remove barriers to globally relevant scholarship. “Global” in our name is less about a specific focus on intercultural or international scholarship but rather, meant to be an open invitation to a journal built globally from the beginning: from our reviewer pool and editorial board to the many different regions and perspectives that we expect to be represented in our issues and volumes. We hope that if your own scholarship takes you into the study of human communication–from interpersonal interactions to massively mediated systems–that you’ll consider GPC as an outlet for this work.
As Gen Z enters the audit profession, both educators and employers need to take note of their changing expectations around careers and adapt as needed. By aligning academic preparation with the expectations of employers, educators play a critical role in shaping future auditors who are engaged, resilient, and ready to lead. But before students enter the workplace, their understanding of what audit is and what it can be is developed largely in the classroom by our activities as educators. We have the unique opportunity to shape how Gen Z perceives audit—not just as an academic subject, but as a career.
Who is Gen Z?
Born roughly between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z students are ‘digital natives’ with strong values around diversity, inclusion, mental health, and work-life balance. They want careers that offer more than a good salary and security—they’re looking for meaningful impact in their work and flexibility in how they work. In the classroom, this often translates to a desire for engaging, applied learning experiences, not just memorizing rules taught in lectures. They also value autonomy and self-direction, meaning traditional, top-down teaching styles may not resonate as effectively. As educators, adapting our teaching approach to meet these expectations can make audit more accessible, relevant, and inspiring to Gen Z.
Why this matters for audit education
For many students, their university modules on audit and related topics are the starting point for understanding audit and developing perceptions about what working in audit might be like. If students see audit as rigid, outdated, or lacking in purpose, they are less likely to pursue it. But if they encounter audit as a dynamic, evolving profession—one that plays a vital role in upholding public trust and enabling business accountability—they are more likely to engage. As educators, our influence is powerful. We can shape not only students’ technical competencies, but also their sense of what kind of career audit offers.
A purpose-driven profession
It is crucial that audit is put forward as a purpose-driven profession. Today’s students care deeply about making a difference. They are more likely to engage with audit when they understand its role in protecting stakeholders beyond investors. In my own classes, the sessions where we consider the evolution of the profession in terms of sustainability assurance resonate strongly with students as they begin to see the importance of the profession beyond the purely financial. Using real-world cases and discussions to highlight how auditors contribute to ethical business and societal well-being is a great way to engage students and show them how the profession is dynamic and responsive to global challenges.
Digital advances
Audit has sometimes been unfairly perceived as dry, mundane and repetitive. But audit practice is rapidly changing, especially with the rise of audit data analytics and artificial intelligence. Integrating these topics into the classroom helps students see the relevance of what they’re learning and prevent worries about AI threatening the existence of the audit profession. Using simulations and providing demonstrations of audit software tools where possible gives students a taste for how audit is performed in the real world. Hands-on experience with emerging audit technologies introduces exciting new learning opportunities for students.
The importance of skills and behaviours
While technical proficiency remains essential, we know that audit firms value a range of skills and behaviours. Resilience, adaptability, and the ability to apply ethical judgment and professional scepticism are sought-after skills. Embedding these into our teaching and assessments—through group work, presentations, or ethical dilemma exercises—can help students build resilience and confidence. I use a role-play based on fraud to support students in developing a behaviour of professional scepticism—an activity that goes down well in class and which students remember and discuss in job interviews. Encourage students to think beyond “what” and explore “why” and “how.” Why do auditors need professional scepticism? How do they respond to emerging challenges like sustainability reporting?
Bring the profession into your classroom
Gen Z values transparency and career clarity. Help demystify the audit career path by inviting guest speakers from audit and assurance practice, professional bodies and business. Collaborate with local firms to develop teaching and learning activities such as mock audit tenders, audit planning meetings, and reviews of audit work. But it’s not just about the audit process. Gen Z students may not be aware of the strategic role auditors play in risk management, sustainability reporting, or data assurance. Including these developments in the curriculum can help students see audit as future-oriented and intellectually rewarding.
By making the curriculum more applied, aligned with the evolution of the profession, and engaging, we as educators can help to ensure that the next generation of auditors is not only technically competent and equipped with relevant skills but is also excited at the potential to join the profession. With the right teaching tools and approaches, we can inspire students to see audit not just as a job, but a rewarding career which aligns with the core values of Gen Z.
