Andrew Kahrl's timely book, The Black Tax, examines the racial disparities present in local governmental property tax systems. By examining the property tax regime, he enters the conversation about the role of tax policy in exacerbating the racial wealth gap. The Black Tax expands the conversation about analyzing tax policies through a racialized lens.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fans assembled at stadiums and arenas across the country to witness a recurring spectacular event. They headed toward the local ballpark or arena, not to watch their favorite teams and entertainers perform inside, but rather to witness the implosion of the facilities themselves. As the United States was in the midst of its latest stadium construction boom, a new community ritual took shape: the ceremonial demolition of stadiums that were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Facilities that were once celebrated for their modern designs and conveniences were deemed ugly and obsolete seemingly overnight. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, among dozens of other professional stadiums, were demolished in this spectacular fashion (Figure 1). Explosives were strategically placed throughout the abandoned facilities, and fans gathered yards away to watch the buildings burst into gigantic clouds of dust and smoke, the environmental consequences of sending pollutants into the air notwithstanding. Television networks covered the detonations while fans donned team colors, cheered, and shed tears as their beloved community gathering places were blown into oblivion.

This research aims to identify the features and characteristics of the policies of the European Union and Central Asian countries in the sphere of human rights by examining the main vectors and elements of governance at the national and international levels. The research methodology consists of system analysis, which reviews the general situation in the field of civil rights, outlines the problems of protection activities in individual states and regions, and identifies key areas for improvement. The basic elements and components of the activity of the European Union countries in the sphere of protection of fundamental human rights are considered, and the distinctive features of this type of activity in the Central Asian countries are outlined. Positive and negative tendencies of the legal protection of human rights in separate Central Asian states as well as probable scenarios of further development of the sphere in the region are presented. The uniqueness and peculiarities of the Republic of Kazakhstan’s policy in the sphere of human rights protection as a key vector in the process of development of a democratic state are studied. Based on the results, practical recommendations are presented to improve the process of formation of the activity of the Republic in the sphere of human rights and freedoms.

This article uses tensions over the construction of a flow-regulation infrastructure built to control outflow from Lake Titicaca into the Desaguadero River, on the border between Peru and Bolivia, as a case study to explore the ways that relationships to water emerge and are contested. We argue that a nuanced understanding of tensions arising from this infrastructure requires us to recognize the long-term history of how the river accumulated practices, meanings and materials. Adapting the work of Arturo Escobar, we use the concept of ‘water regime’ to think about how engagements with the river are based in different spatiotemporal frameworks that have developed transhistorically and come into tension around the materiality and dynamism of the river itself.

The goal of a fifth EU freedom – the ‘freedom of knowledge’ – emerged from working towards a unified European research area, expanding upon the four basic freedoms of the Single Market. This additional freedom is not yet guaranteed and so this task should be taken up anew. Here, I support this goal by explicating the meaning of the ‘fifth freedom’, then justifying its importance via four arguments concerning scientific progress, freedom of research, the economic and technological progress of societies, and the democratic ideals of the European project. To end the main article, I then argue that this freedom should be viewed as a right. In the supplementary material, I present problems that arise in the administration, funding, and organization of science within the EU to demonstrate that the fifth freedom is still a long way from being a reality. The evidence includes cases of national rules and practices that reduce or block the mobility of EU researchers and weaken collaboration and progress. For each type of problem, I present specific policy proposals for advancing the fifth freedom goal. The proposals are directed at academic administrations, funding agencies, and political actors at the regional, national, and European levels.

In 1975, New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte published SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, a critical examination of how the values of American sports had become corrupted and distorted by power brokers who pulled the purse strings. “SportsWorld” was an infrastructure first built in the late nineteenth century by industrialists, educators, politicians, promoters, journalists, and military leaders who believed in the potency of sports and American exceptionalism. For the faithful, SportsWorld represented a positive cultural force that unified the nation, strengthened vigorous manhood, and advanced the country's democratic ideals of equal opportunity and fair play. “In sports,” Lipsyte reflected, Americans believed “children will learn courage and self-control, old people will find blissful nostalgia, and families will discover new ways to communicate among themselves. Immigrants will find shortcuts to recognition as Americans. Rich and poor, black and white, educated and unskilled, we will all find a unifying language. The melting pot may be a myth, but we will all come together in the ballpark.”

This research challenges the conventional wisdom that value-driven protests in China are exceedingly rare and face harsh state repression. Drawing on a hand-coded, multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities from 2014 to 2016, we identify 67 protests that reveal a hitherto unknown underbelly of everyday, value-driven contention. Qualitatively, we identify three main forms of contentious performances. Quantitatively, we show how value-driven protesters combine non-disruptive tactics with ambitious targets and virtually never extract concessions. Surprisingly, we find that such protests are less often policed and repressed than other protests. They are also never met with violence from non-state actors. We provide three interpretations for the counter-intuitive finding on repression. This study shows that the Chinese state coexists with a non-negligible amount of explicitly regime-critical contention. It adopts a containment strategy, tolerating a certain extent of value-driven performances when the risk of spill-over into wider society is limited.

On a winter's night in 1968, in a yellow sedan barreling down a dark New Hampshire highway, Richard M. Nixon talked football with Hunter S. Thompson. Nixon would soon win the state's Republican primary—an important kickoff for his deliberate, disciplined campaign. Thompson was an unlikely choice for an intimate audience with the buttoned-down candidate. The outlaw writer in shabby jeans, a chronicler of hippies and Hell's Angels, cast Nixon as a “foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.”1

This paper examines the identity and origins of Swedish inventors prior to WWI, drawing on the universe of patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during Sweden’s industrialization can largely be attributed to a small industrial elite belonging to the upper-tail of the economic, educational, and social status distribution. Analyzing children’s opportunities to become inventors, we show that inventors were disproportionately drawn from privileged family backgrounds. However, innovation was a path to upward mobility for the middle- and working-class children that managed to overcome the barriers to entry.

This study considers the role played by Teotihuacan in the emergence of the office of the Classic Maya ajawtaak, or ‘lords’. I argue that the synthesis of this office at the site of Tikal was influenced by the building of Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent between about 180 and 230 ce. Prior to and in concert with this building's construction, Teotihuacanos orchestrated the sacrifice of an estimated 200 or more individuals, some number of whom resided beyond the Basin of Mexico before burial. Osteological traits consistent with origins in the Maya region are present among these sacrifices. The Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent features mirror and obsidian icons, which later grew to prominence in the self-presentations of the ajawtaak. I note that around the time of this monument's construction, Tikal's obsidian corpus changed in ways that paralleled similar, earlier changes that had occurred to obsidian procurement strategies at Teotihuacan. I conclude that from about 200 ce, some Classic ajawtaak observed the religion that cohered with the building of Teotihuacan's Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The ajawtaak occupied a unique positionality in Early Classic Mesoamerica that was neither essentially Teotihuacan nor essentially Maya, but a dynamic syncretism of the two ethnicities.

Este artículo analiza la inserción de investigadoras y profesoras universitarias de ciencias sociales en Chile desde 1990. Sus objetivos son indagar en la importancia de los movimientos feministas para la emergencia de la perspectiva de género y la apertura de los cuerpos académicos a la presencia femenina, y caracterizar las condiciones laborales de cientistas sociales chilenas. La metodología utilizada fue la revisión sistemática, produciéndose un análisis sociohistórico sobre la transición democrática en su vinculación con los movimientos feministas, transformaciones demográficas y rearticulación de las ciencias sociales. Analizaremos la aseveración de las lógicas neoliberales en universidades (2000–2010) y discutiremos la rearticulación entre las demandas de los movimientos feministas y las críticas al androcentrismo en las ciencias sociales chilenas (2010–2023). La contribución original del texto consiste en poner en diálogo los estudios cuantitativos, cualitativos e históricos, abriendo nuevas vetas interpretativas sobre la desigualdad de género en la ciencia y educación superior en Chile.

In April 1970, the African American defensive end Houston Ridge's $1.25 million lawsuit put the issue of drug use in professional football in the public eye. It also raised questions about the league's exploitation of athletes for the sake of profits, at any cost. Plagued by a hip injury sustained during a game in October 1969, the twenty-five-year-old former San Diego Charger's suit charged conspiracy and malpractice, naming team personnel and both the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL) as defendants. Ridge's suit claimed that he was permanently disabled, in part, because of the mix of amphetamines, barbiturates, and methandrostenlone given to him by the Chargers, “not for the purpose of care,” but for the purpose of performance enhancement. And they had done so “without warning him of the consequences.” An X-ray later revealed that he had broken his hip, but the drugs had so dulled his sensation of pain that he had continued to play, exacerbating the injury. A married father of four who now had to walk with the help of crutches, Ridge also filed a worker's compensation claim, accusing the Chargers with willful misconduct.