Chapter 6. Curll was responsible for up to forty self-standing biographies. His productions are compared with those of the major varieties of biography, ancient and modern. Typical subjects such as authors, physicians and politicians are identified, to illustrate the spread of his interests in the form. He produced works of collective biography, in the wake of writers such as the antiquarian John Le Neve (1679–1741). Eight frequent components are described, including official documents and wills. The second half of the chapter is devoted to a range of paratextual devices, as most notably described by Gérard Genette. Then come discussion of their aims, such as to convey an impression that this book is authoritative, up to date, objective, and full of novel content (it is rare for the books to achieve these goals to any great extent). Representative volumes are considered to demonstrate the limitations of Curll’s practice, in particular the more broken-backed items such as the life of the actor Robert Wilks (1732), memorably stripped apart in the Grub-street Journal.

To date scholars have paid less heed to the identification of publishers than to the attribution of authorship. This section attempts to provide a rationale for the former undertaking. The discussion picks out features which distinguish it from the one relating to authors, and describes the difficulties which these present in the case of Curll. This is followed by an inventory of characteristics of his books, covering anomalies both internal and external, with examples of each. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to a single instance, the Memoirs of John Macky (1720). This work supplies a test case for the methods of investigation suggested by the earlier analysis. Telltale indictors all pointing to Curll are located, and then decisive new external evidence is brought forward to confirm the accuracy of this identification, as it was suggested by the foregoing exploration.

The Real Pain of Punishment explores the true pains of incarceration using insights from empirical sciences and people with lived prison experiences. The book highlights the concept of “belonging” as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Since around 2010, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have taken the field of psychiatric genetics by storm. Many of the time-honored methods – family studies, twin analyses, adoption studies – have been largely displaced by the rush toward the identification of genetic variants that could be considered causal of psychiatric illness. At the time of this writing in 2024, the field is awash with results. For key disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression, hundreds of variants on the genome have been found to be associated with risk of illness. What we have learned so far is that for all psychiatric disorders investigated, many common variants in the human genome appear to reflect risk, and the effect size of all of them is small, sometimes very small. Furthermore, taken individually, most of these variants do not have any obvious biological meaning; they do not occur in the parts of the genome that codes for proteins. Often, they are just statistical signals for the block of the human genome (a “haplotype”) with which they have traveled through human – and, before then, primate – evolution.

Francis Galton invented the quincunx, or Galton board, to demonstrate that sums of large numbers of binary events could produce quasi-continuous normally distributed outcomes. The authors of this chapter suggest that the quincunx poses a deeper problem: whether the statistical devices we invent to model complex developmental processes represent the causal basis of development, as opposed to simply being statistical methods that model complex outcomes without explaining their etiology. Turkheimer and Kaplan simulate populations of large quincunx in which the pins have biases: deviations from equal probabilities of bouncing a ball left and right. The simulations reproduce many common results from complex quantitative genetics: quincunx with similar biases produce similar outcomes, and aggregate measures of biases in the pins are correlated with the final placement of the balls. A simulated GWAS, however, that attempted to infer the individual biases of the pins from variations in outcomes was completely unsuccessful. The authors conclude that the simulations are a proof of concept, demonstrating that there are causal structures that will not yield to reductive analysis.

Going beyond the philosophical horizon of the foregoing, the Epilogue attends to two defining absences at work in the Gospel of Mark, regularly regarded as the first of its genre: first, the centurion sees Jesus die and, on the basis of this death, avows that Jesus is God’s son, yet seemingly without empirical support; second, the best manuscripts end the text without narrating any resurrection appearances, a scandal to early readers and to some contemporary commentators. The theological development of aletheism argues that these two absences are Mark’s way of capturing the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”

Intersectionality looks at the ways different identities intersect with one another. The concept forces us to move beyond a single view of individuals, and to explore how those who sit at the margins of different identities experience different aspects of life. For example, the intersection of race, gender, and nationality can compound the experiences of a Black, female, immigrant in academia. Academia has largely been a "white space,” both in terms of the Eurocentric perspective from which content is taught and the predominantly white faculty and students that occupy campuses. Furthermore, it is a space that few immigrants, especially Black immigrants, occupy. Although Black women in academia are marginalized relative to their white counterparts, adding an immigrant status to those identities increases the level of complexity. The experience of faculty sitting at the intersection of race, gender, and nationality reveals several themes that characterize their unique journey. These themes include: questioning of their qualifications, feeling invisible, having their immigrant journey be misunderstood, variation in the saliency of their identities, simultaneously experiencing privilege and oppression, experiencing intersecting stereotypes, and feelings of isolation. An awareness of these experiences can fuel academic spaces to develop strategies to help members of intersecting minoritized groups thrive in academia.

This chapter aims to elucidate the associations between ethnic and racial discrimination and biological and physiological processes among ethnically and racially minoritized adolescents, focusing on hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (or HPA) axis functioning, inflammation processes, and allostatic load. We first discuss the theoretical foundation for ethnic and racial discrimination and biological processes. Next, we synthesize empirical evidence on the links between ethnic and racial discrimination and HPA axis functioning (operationalized as cortisol activity including its diurnal rhythms, stress reactivity, and cumulative levels), inflammatory processes (operationalized as inflammatory biomarkers such as C-reactive protein and Interlukin-6), and allostatic load (a combination of indicators including neuroendocrine, inflammatory, cardiovascular, and metabolic biomarkers). Finally, we chart directions for future research and discuss implications for mitigating the detrimental effects of ethnic and racial discrimination on biological and physiological processes among ethnically and racially minoritized adolescents.

A 66-year-old man with no neurological history presents to neurology clinic for a second opinion after 3 years of recurrent and progressively more frequent falls. He reports that he developed difficulty with balance about 5 years ago, and his wife states he is moving more slowly each year. He now requires a wheelchair as his falls occur when standing. His wife also reports that his sleep is poor quality because he acts out his dreams; recently his breathing makes a high-pitch sound at night. His previous doctor prescribed him a Parkinson’s disease medicine which stopped working after a few months. He was recently seen by cardiology for his falls, which diagnosed him with orthostatic hypotension – despite hydration, his dizziness has continued to worsen, and he now also developed urinary incontinence. Both he and his wife deny he has any cognitive or behavioral symptoms.

Supposing someone earnestly seeks God but to no avail. Does this mean God does not exist? Or might it be instead that the seeker seeks God without awareness of the peculiar method that must be employed in order for the seeking to be productive?