William Burroughs’ avid consumption of pulp magazines in his youth led to his discovery of H. P. Lovecraft, whose influence would impart a distinctive set of horror devices to Burrough’s writing. Naked Lunch displays these devices with remarkable vividness, giving graphic expression to the key horror tropes of interstitiality and impurity. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject provides a useful interpretive tool to assess the effect of these tropes, enabling a reading of Naked Lunch that identifies the disintegration of selfhood as its central concern. Using repeated images of bodily fluids and monstrosity, Naked Lunch excavates the anxiety of being a gay drug addict in the normative 1950s. In the process, both the reader and the narrator undergo abjection through the visceral language and profoundly fragmented narrative voice. Naked Lunch represents a redeployment of Lovecraftian horror that helped to create the body horror of the 1980s.

Chapter 6 traverses a test veteran group action against the British Ministry of Defence as it moved through the High Court of England and Wales, the Court of Appeal, to a final ruling in the UK Supreme Court. According to the legal principle of limitation, test veterans needed to offer the courts life histories proving ignorance of nuclear risk. The MoD’s legal counsel argued that an individual’s obligations to anticipate and understand injury were unrelated to the pragmatic enactment of such knowledge. In witness stands, test veterans recontextualized their knowledge of injury in ways that animated state, medical, and legal actors as powerfully capable of stymying their knowledge. In this case, claimants experience a series of unjust legal reversals and ironies. First, the actions and duties of claimants, not those accused of injuring them, became the subject of moral and legal judgement. Second, claimants’ long-running quests for knowledge about their health became the very legal rationale to deny them justice. And third, such legal processes imposed strict time limits on claimants’ actions, while also making claimants wait as appeals stretched over years.

This chapter introduces Ando tuples, a key ingredient for the development of the main results. It is shown that not only do Ando tuples describe every minimal Ando isometric lift of a commuting contractive pair via a Douglas-type model, but also they govern the uniqueness of minimal isometric lifts. Ando tuples come equipped with their own notion of unitary equivalence. Equivalence of Ando tuples corresponds to unitary equivalence of the associated minimal Ando lifts of the given commuting contractive pair. This gives a way of classifying the previously observed lack of uniqueness (up to unitary equivalence). This lack of uniqueness gives part of the explanation as to why the bivariate problem is harder than the univariate classical version. For the development of this chapter, we need what we refer to as Type I Ando tuples. ​An in-depth analysis reveals that Type I Ando tuples exist, which leads to a new proof of Ando’s dilation theorem.

We show how spatial light modulation allows one to optically compute an Ising Hamiltonian. This enables the use of optical radiation to accelerate algorithms to find the ground state and hence the optimal solution of a combinatorial optimization problem. The phase matrix on a spatial light modulator acts as a lattice of spins whose interaction is ruled by the constrained optical intensity in the far field. Feedback from the detection plane allows the spatial phase distribution to evolve toward the minimum of the selected spin model. Related topics such as annealing, adiabatic evolution, the XY model, and decomposition methods are reviewed.

Chapter 5 dwells on the legal reasoning that governed New Zealand military disablement pensions. It charts how test veterans experienced law as an arbitrary logic, one that remained simultaneously open and closed to them. Law, many felt, was a force capable of dividing their community according to the vicissitudes of luck. This chapter also engages with the labour of Pension Appeal Board members who tried to fit veteran accounts of injury within legislative notions of reasonable evidence and plausible causation. Sitting face to face in appeal board meetings, veterans and those adjudicating their claims attempted to embody the state’s legal and moral responsibilities to offer benevolent and exceptional military entitlements to veterans. Test veterans reveal how thresholds of proof and exposure become negotiable and unstable objects of law and medicine that shift dynamically throughout the proof-making process. As this chapter shows, flexible and informal proof-making systems that aim to overcome unfair evidentiary burdens of exposure can, for claimants, ultimately reinscribe a sense of injustice and harm due to their seemingly arbitrary, opaque, and inconsistent judgements.

Kira Sanbonmatsu focuses on gender in state elections. She examines the presence and performance of women who ran for the state legislatures and statewide executive offices in 2022 and 2024, analyzes the reasons for the underrepresentation of women in these offices, and highlights changes in women’s candidacies in recent years. The chapter also investigates the factors driving variation across states in women’s officeholding and assesses the status of women of color and LGBTQ+ women as candidates in state elections. Sanbonmatsu also includes analysis of the role certain issues, particularly abortion rights, play in state elections. Understanding why women have not fared better in the states is critical to understanding women’s status in electoral politics and their prospects for achieving parity in higher office in the future.

This chapter introduces neural networks as flexible function approximators built by composing layers of simple processing units. A network with no hidden layers performs linear regression if its output layer is linear and logistic regression if its output layer uses softmax. Hidden layers increase expressivity: a network with one hidden layer and ReLU activations can approximate any continuous function on a closed and bounded input domain, though complex functions may require many units. Deep networks, with multiple hidden layers, are more efficient and scalable than shallow ones, especially for learning hierarchical structure. Neural networks are trained using gradient-based optimisation, with gradients computed via backpropagation. Training adjusts weights to minimise a loss function, using small batches of data. Techniques like early stopping and small batches act as implicit regularisers, while weight decay provides explicit regularisation. Convolutional neural networks use convolution and pooling layers to exploit spatial structure in image data. More broadly, architectural choices often reflect domain-specific assumptions.

This chapter revisits the early New York circle that would become the core of the Beat Generation, focusing on how William Burroughs was mythologized by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as an enigmatic and “inscrutable” figure – simultaneously a mentor, literary underground guide, and embodiment of countercultural authenticity. While Burroughs’s role in shaping Beat sensibilities has been canonized in critical anthologies and biographies, this chapter interrogates the recursive loops of fiction, memoir, and myth that have shaped that reputation. It shows how Kerouac and Ginsberg strategically deployed Burroughs’s persona – banker-turned-junkie, literary sage, and shadowy insider – to confer legitimacy on their own nascent artistic identities. Drawing on works such as Junky, Naked Lunch, and Vanity of Duluoz, alongside correspondence and early collaborations, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ very inscrutability became legible only through Beat mythology. Yet this process ultimately risks reducing the complex multiplicity of Burroughs’s work to a single, romanticized origin story.

Feeding motivation arises from an interaction between (i) nutrient states, (ii) incentives and associated cues, and (iii) memories of foods and associations. Eating can be excessive (e.g. binges and obesity). Anorexia describes inadequate levels of feeding. The chapter criticizes set-point models. Infusions of nutrients are relatively ineffective in terms of satiety. A distinction is drawn between (i) feeding and (ii) drinking and temperature regulation. Interacting levels of control are involved in feeding. The chapter describes the model of feeding, hunger as a memory process. Signals arising in the gut are involved in feeding motivation and satiety. The chapter revisits hedonic hotspots and hedonic coldspots. A number of key brain regions involved in the control of feeding are described: the hypothalamus, ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, dorsal striatum, medial temporal lobes, and various cortical regions. Also described are the roles of ghrelin and leptin. Food aversions are described: in pregnancy sickness and taste-aversion learning. The chapter describes stress-induced eating.