A timely response to the pressing issue of public pension reform, The Public Pension Crisis explores the complex relationship between contract law and government pensions, specifically focusing on the Contract Clause and related state Pension Clauses. Analyzing over a decade of litigation, the book highlights the evolving role of pension contracts in constitutional law and examines more than 70 landmark cases to establish a clear, principled framework for determining when pension benefits qualify as contractual obligations. T. Leigh Anenson presents a unified theory to consistently treat public and private pensions, balancing the interests of employees’ earned benefits with the financial challenges facing governments. Combining legal scholarship with practical policy insights, Anenson not only provides a much-needed legal perspective on pension reform but also calls for a systematic approach to addressing the retirement security crisis.

Pragmatists have typically been more concerned with positive epistemic states (knowledge, warranted assertibility, etc.) than with the negative state of ignorance. Atkins, however, looks both to Charles Peirce and to C. I. Lewis in order to gain new insights into ignorance itself, into the conditions that keep us ignorant, and into the ways in which ignorance can be valuable. Atkins draws on Peirce’s account of our doxastic machinery – including how beliefs are formed and the various ways they become “fixed” – to formulate lessons about the kinds of information environments that can keep believers “mired in ignorance” and the virtues we should cultivate in order not to succumb to the forces that would keep us ignorant. Making use of Peirce’s and Lewis’s ideas about the good and the right, Atkins also maintains that ignorance is sometimes preferable to knowledge – in some circumstances, ignorance is instrumentally good and the right thing to do is to see that it be maintained.

Australia has often been a striking and fertile ground for experiments in social democracy. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is one of the oldest members of the centre-left party family, although it is often overlooked in broader accounts of social democracy. This chapter considers the record of the ALP from 2016 to 2025, under two leaders: Bill Shorten (2013–2019) and Anthony Albanese (2019–). Under Bill Shorten, the party’s agenda can be described as ‘technocratic social democracy’. It developed a wide-ranging, redistributive, policy-rich approach, albeit often using indirect or ‘technocratic’ fixes to existing policy settings. It was an ambitious agenda that was, however, soundly rejected at the 2019 federal election. Following this defeat, the party began a policy reset under Antony Albanese, which is best captured as ‘thin’ or ‘new’ labourism. Albanese’s agenda was focussed on labourist goals, seeking material gains for specific sectors of the labour force. It undertook a range of practical measures, often with little fanfare or overarching narrative. Overall, these varieties of practical social democracy have entailed significant trade-offs, and the ALP faces future structural threats as it continues to redefine its historic mission.

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 celebrated the centennial of Tennessee’s admission to the United States. This chapter argues that the use of Greek and Grecian architecture at Nashville was connected to Nashville’s reputation as a city of learning and culture. During the nineteenth century, Nashville was known as the Athens of the South and of the West. A life-sized replica of the Parthenon was the fair’s premier building. Archaeological accuracy and color were also essential to creating the fair’s Parthenon. Other buildings incorporated classical motifs from different periods, demonstrating the flexibility and fluidity of ancient architecture and embodying the neo-antique. This classical architecture embodied Nashville’s arrival as a city, but it also celebrated the New South and reflected the codification of the racist Jim Crow laws. Thus, the appropriation of classical architecture to justify institutional racism is examined. Egyptian architecture played a prominent role here. Shelby County erected a pyramid for its pavilion, which was an exceptional use of Egyptian architecture at United States fairs. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the enduring importance of the rebuilt Nashville Parthenon (and its Athena statue) as a symbol of culture and democracy for the city.

Sleep paralysis is one of the most terrifying experiences a person can have—and it’s surprisingly common. Cultures around the world describe eerily similar episodes: waking up unable to move, a crushing pressure on the chest, and the overwhelming sense that someone—or something—is in the room. This chapter explores how those experiences may arise from the collision of sleep architecture and perceptual ambiguity. It covers the basic neurobiology of REM sleep, explains what happens when paralysis persists into wakefulness, and investigates how hallucinations can emerge in these liminal states. The chapter also examines the role of the temporoparietal junction in out-of-body experiences and the sensation of a nearby presence. Rooted in both science and cultural context, this chapter offers a grounded explanation for a deeply human phenomenon—one that’s haunted people for centuries and continues to blur the line between brain and belief.

This book is about approximately solving problems of the form.

This chapter looks at Barbara Strozzi both as a daughter and a mother. She was raised in the house of her adoptive father, Giulio Strozzi, and her mother, Isabella Garzoni, or Griega. The relationship between Barbara–born illegitimately, as had been her father and grandfather before her– and Giulio, is enhanced through a close reading of his wills. The household eventually expanded to include Barbara’s four children, born to her and one of her father’s friends, Giovanni Paolo Vidman. Barbara had known Vidman at least from 1634, as revealed in Nicolò Fontei’s dedication to Vidman in his Bizzarie, though their first child was born only in 1641. Vidman died in 1648, yet the Strozzis’ connections to his family continued until 1719, with the death of Barbara’s eldest son, Giulio Pietro.

This chapter addresses the Black Atlantic threads contained in Pablo Neruda’s corpus, mainly in Canto general (1950) and Canción de gesta (Song of Protest, 1960). The chapter is particularly focused on moments of poetic representation of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. In this vein, it discusses the Caribbean literary influences – and specifically Négritude and Negrismo movements – that impacted Neruda’s writing, including the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. As a result, this essay unveils Neruda’s sociological but also political motivations for including the historiographical context of the Black Caribbean in his work, including Cuba’s Black internationalism in Canción de gesta. This latter part of the chapter, which is informed by a personal interview with Roberto Fernández Retamar, sheds light on the political reasons for the neglect of Neruda’s Black Atlantic in Canción de gesta, and offers considerations for correcting the overlooked dimensions of his work.

Writing a commentary on Oedipus at Colonus has made me think about how to do justice to the extraordinary poise and power of Sophoclean language, despite its seeming simplicity in this late play. Hence the ‘plain words’ of my title, but plain in the spirit of Shakespeare’s Lear.

Continuing the foray into the work of Mairet, Morris and then circuiting back to Ruskin, the discussion centres in the nature of a broken world (a world being compromised because of the way work relations are broken up) and how craft work might reveal and offer correctives to such. Is this thinking utopian? Is it simply re-heating old Arts and Crafts arguments? Is it just too late to do anything?

This essay analyzes the ambivalent status of objects in Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s studies of the paradoxes present in the figure of the collector, it traces the way poetic objects in Neruda’s odes appear simultaneously as treasured possessions and utilitarian agents of revolution. Although the portrayal of everyday objects in his later work has been read as propagandistic, it is in their personal link to the poet as collected objects that Neruda’s objects retain the potential for social change Benjamin outlines in the collector.