Editor’s note: This article was published prior to a 15th vote in the House of Representatives that saw Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California elected as House Speaker in the early hours of Jan. 7, 2023. It still has lots of super interesting information and analysis in it though, so please do read on.

It is fair to say that the beginning of the 118th U.S. Congress has not gone entirely to plan.

As an expert in media and cultural studies, I once appeared in a television series about technology in the home during the last three decades of the 20th century.

I wanted to suggest that the UK in the 1970s should be remembered as a decade of relative social equality and contentment, where wage inequality was at its lowest (as the New Earnings Survey shows us).

The 2022 Word of the Year, as chosen by our lexicographic friends at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “gaslighting.” The dictionary bases its decision on the number of lookups the word gets, and for gaslighting that was an increase of 1,740%.

Simmering tension in American politics came to a head two years ago, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. The failed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, resulted in several deaths and injuries to almost 150 police officers.