Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing homes were underfunded, under-regulated, and wildly at risk of a mass viral event. For decades industry watchers had called for oversight, but media accounts regarding home closures were misleading and poorly sourced. Increased private equity interest and legislative inaction heightened risks across the sector. COVID-19 was a perfect storm, preying on these systemic challenges and decimating robust, lively resident populations. More than 200,000 elder and disabled residents of nursing homes died of COVID-19 or related causes between March 2020 and March 2022. That number is grossly underestimated because nursing homes, which self-report their number of ill and deceased, feared bad reputations; many concealed deaths, mis-ascribed causes of death, or sent ill residents to nearby hospitals to avoid deaths on site. The conclusion of lawyers, staff, residents, and experts is that, while COVID-19 was a disaster waiting to happen, the mass deaths experienced in nursing homes could have been prevented. Since the initial years of COVID-19, some efforts by subsequent state and federal administrations have addressed inadequacies, but on the whole, little has been done to correct the many challenges the industry continues to face, even as the US elder population continues to rise.

This chapter examines the first Argentine productions of Verdi’s Otello, including one starring tenor Francesco Tamagno. Expectations in Buenos Aires surrounding the Otello productions were heightened by the new media landscape and by the city’s changing urban and demographic environment, including plans for a new Teatro Colón. These shifts also generated scrutiny of the layers of cultural, geographical and technological distance between Argentina and Italy. Tamagno’s Otello emerged as a sticking point, however: an element considered fundamental to Verdi’s conception, yet the tenor’s powerful voice appeared to resist future reproduction. The material complexities of Otello as a work in performance and the opera’s depiction of a flawed military hero ultimately intersected in the figure of ‘Tamagno-Otello’, I argue: a figure poised between a heroic Italian past and a mechanical future, crystallising wider debates over operatic mediation in the Argentine capital. Turning to Italy I consider how Argentine perceptions of Tamagno’s uniqueness and of Verdi’s Italian status were ultimately internalised, pointing to the intertwining of national mythologies with new technological media.

This chapter explores the concept of the “natural” rate of interest as distinct from the “natural” rate of profit: while the latter relates to production, the former addresses personal savings and debt/credit relations that occur beyond production. In fact even in a pure labour economy - i.e. an economy without capital goods, where the very notion of profit would therefore non even emerge - a “natural” structure of own-rates of interest is implicit in the dynamics of relative prices and interpersonal debt/credit relations.

The natural rate of interest, whatever the numéraire chosen for the price system, equals the growth rate of the wage rate, ensuring the preservation of income distribution in proportion to the labour provided.

The chapter highlights the need for central institutions to manage and supervise national financial activities; it distinguishes between the spheres of production and finance, emphasizing the auxiliary role of finance, which should deal with facilitating inter-temporal consumption redistribution.

This chapter presents observational and experimental evidence, which suggests that hunger makes people more preoccupied with food and also more immoral. Hungry people are more likely to cheat, lie, and steal, and to prefer a small reward now rather than a larger reward later. Some of these effects may be beneficial in fostering behaviours that promote the acquisition of food. Hunger is a biopsychological stressor, which results in activation of the HPA axis and the release of cortisol. Elevated cortisol can result in more impulsive behaviour and, longer term, in irritability, low mood, and depression – all of these can be observed in hungry people, especially during prolonged fasting or starvation. Poverty is stressful, and hunger adds yet another source of stress, contributing to the elevated cortisol levels observed in people of low socio-economic status. Hunger then may contribute to crime and delinquency via its capacity to serve as an additional source of psychological stress. Hunger, resulting from food insecurity and insufficiency, occurs in many people. It is preventable, and its resolution would benefit both the hungry and society, via reduced crime and delinquency.

Early 2016 served as a spectacular point of collapse for the Indian public university. I opened this book by setting the frame of this ‘collapse’ in an incident of student arrests. ‘Seditious’ slogans, allegedly raised by the arrested students, were sound-mixed within television studios and superimposed as a voice-over to the university's presumed war against ‘national interests’. There was a slow and steady build-up of forces towards this spectacle for more than two decades,1 but the effect of the spectacular is most compelling when it combines with the force of an exception. The exception in this case was Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – one of the few havens of relatively free academic inquiry, surviving in stark contrast to vast expanses of intellectual barrenness and political conformism that passed for public university culture in the rest of the country.

It is true that the founding conception behind the establishment of JNU in 1969, and the breadth of legislative-administrative will that allowed it (Kidwai 2017; Batabyal 2020: 86-91) tried balancing the need for social mobility with the desire for social justice. To achieve a bureaucratic codification of this balance – at the heart of a university ‘idea’ which stratifies rights of access through proof of deserving – was not an easy task, and there is enough historical testimony to its long tortuous processes (Thorat 2020: 108–113). Some of such testimony will find its place later in this chapter, when I discuss whether this delicate balance may be given the name of ‘academic freedom’.

Chapter 7: Pausanias in Athens. Here we see what statues stood in Athens during the second century AD – those that Pausanias saw on his walk through the city, from the Piraeus to the Agora to the Akropolis. We can picture those portraits that he mentions that are today well-known types. But we can only imagine the appearance of many of the gods and heroes whose images he mentions. Sometimes his narrative matches reports by other writers. Sometimes surviving inscriptions can be linked to texts or to actual sculptures. Even where material evidence parallels what Pausanias remarks upon, almost no freestanding sculptures are visible in Athens today.

Based on Appadurai’s concept of locality and neighbourhood, this concluding chapter situates the contributions of this volume as well as the author’s own research in Italy in a multidisciplinary and multiculturally long-term comparative perspective. Introducing the concept of ‘qualities of locality’, it discusses landscape properties, settlement (dis)continuity, culture contact and cult as basic elements in the shaping of neighbourhood and the production of locality in Indigenous Mediterranean Iron Age contexts. At times, it also reveals the fragility of the production of locality as a social achievement, as mentioned by Appadurai.

The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

This chapter draws from research the author has undertaken into the politically charged circumstances of life and death in situations of state violence in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Algerian war of independence. It reflects on the author’s engagements with the morgue record book of the Institut médico-légal (IML) in Paris for the year 1961, which is stored in the archives of the Prefecture of the Paris police. This ledger includes entries on corpses received at the morgue. Through the fall of 1961, there were a number of entries for corpses received at the IML in which no identifying name was listed. Instead, persons were listed with the title “inconnu” – “unknown,” “unidentified,” unrecognized.” With many of these entries, small photographs were affixed to the sides of the pages. In reflecting on the presence of these photographs of the unidentified dead, the author delves into the complicated play of death and life, and actuality and imagining, that marks the unsettling appearance of these photographs. The haunting aftereffects of the photographs tie into questions of image, memory, body and corpse, the phenomenon of death life, and representations of violence in histories of French colonialism.

This chapter shifts the focus from a static analysis to examining the simplest case of economic expansion: proportional growth, i.e. that of population growth and constant returns to scale. The chapter establishes conditions for dynamic equilibrium, emphasizing the need for capital accumulation to match the expanding demand due to population growth. This leads to a multi-sector version of the Harrod-Domar equation, outlining the required relationship between investment, output, and population growth.

The chapter then explores the dynamic movements of key economic variables like prices, quantities, employment, capital/output ratios, and capital/labour ratios. It demonstrates that under the assumptions of constant technology and returns to scale, all these variables grow at the same rate as population, maintaining a constant economic structure.

The chapter concludes by highlighting the inherent elegance of economic growth under constant returns to scale, emphasizing how this simplified framework captures the essential dynamics of population-driven expansion while laying a conceptual foundation for addressing structural change.