John R. Walsh once posited that “historiography is as much the result as it is the record of events, and should therefore be expected to react variously to the circumstances in which it is produced, in accordance with the temper of its time.”1 While the Ottoman–Safavid conflict may seem too specific or too distant to be relevant to the contemporary Middle East, in reality the rhetoric of Sunni Ottomans versus Shiʿi Safavids has profoundly shaped nationalist and sectarian history writing in the region well into today. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in the early twentieth century, a number of prominent historians, many of whom also served as high-ranking politicians, helped to create and disseminate a new nationalist identity for this nascent republic that was closely linked to a confessional uniformity signifying strength and volition. In these historians’ methodological and analytical nationalism, the “sudden conversion” of the Safavids to Shiʿism was a sign of Iranian inferiority. Historians-cum-politicians such as Fuad Köprülü (d. 1966) and M. Ş. Günaltay (d. 1961) unequivocally denied the pervasiveness and strength of the Qizilbash in the early modern period of the Ottoman Empire.

1927 was a critical period in Pablo Neruda’s life. At the time, he was assigned to a diplomatic post in Rangoon. He was a promising poet and a young diplomat hungry to see the world. Southeast Asia represented a season of solitude that he alleviated with his marriage to Maruca, with whom he would have his only daughter. The girl would die at an early age. In this region, he envisaged Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1933). Through the letters to his friend Héctor Eandi and his travel chronicles, we learn the inner landscapes that occupied Neruda’s creative mind. A memorable poem written in this period is “El tango del viudo” (“Widower’s Tango”), which describes his tempestuous relationship with Josie Bliss. This period has been revisited lately due to the confession of a sexual assault of a young Tamil woman under his service expressed in his memoirs.

In attempts to identify root causes of terrorism, the view that terrorist actors are poor and uneducated often plague the speeches and works of politicians and media outlets. The grouping of these issues is appealing, making terrorism a seemingly easier to solve problem. Yet, rigorous academic research over the past two decades helps refute this view. Studies have revealed that while some stereotypical notions of terrorists are correct, such as that they are usually single, young males, others are wildly misleading. Terrorists are often wealthier and better educated than their peers in the broader population. This, perhaps surprising, academic finding has been independently identified in numerous studies around the world and has subsequently opened the topic of terrorism up to further investigations on microeconomic factors. The question in this chapter then turns to, what other characteristics might influence terrorism? Studies into individual religion have yielded results that are complex and inconclusive. Macroeconomic investigations into theories that involve heroic acts or screening effects have thus far failed to capture a fully substantiated mechanism. Additional research focusing on grievances, media, systematic-indoctrination, and psychological motivations should contribute to a fuller picture of the typically wealthier, better-educated males that choose to engage in terrorism.

In 1943, on his way back to Chile, after having finished his stint as Consul General to Mexico, Pablo Neruda stopped in Peru and visited Machu Picchu. While written before he became a card-carrying member of the Party, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) can be read not only as expressing his reactions to the physical beauty of the place, but also as depicting in poetic terms his evolution from the vanguardista of the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935) to a politically engaged writer. However, in addition to reflecting this political conversion, one can see in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” a successful attempt at writing a left-wing poetry that builds on the achievements of the vanguardia and avoids the dogmatic pitfalls of the then mandatory socialist realism.

This chapter focuses on the decisive moment that led to the creation of the Panama Canal and the waning of Nicaragua as the site of a potential transisthmian canal. The apparent abruptness of the decision to build the canal in Panama in 1902 belied the steady buildup of a new American way of looking at the world – emerging in the context of the Spanish–American War – that was heavily informed by the American press. The final turn towards Panama profoundly altered the course of Nicaraguan history and effectively stymied dreams of regional unity.

In preparation for the ADM formulation of General Relativity, we quickly scan Dirac's theory of constrained systems. How to deal with dynamics when the number of variables is larger than the true degrees of freedom is at issue. Starting from a familiar classical mechanics with Lagrange multipliers, we classify constraints into the first class and the second class. The former is particularly relevant for field theories with gauge redundancies, as is the case with General Relativity. Again, the Maxwell theory is invoked as a prototype, with the Gauss constraint given a unique meaning as the generator of the gauge redundancy.

This case explores the evaluation and management of neutropenic fever in a 22-year-old female with lupus nephritis who recently received cyclophosphamide. The patient presents with nonspecific symptoms (fever, chills, and fatigue) but no focal signs of infection. Her profound neutropenia (ANC < 0.1) confirms a diagnosis of chemotherapy-induced neutropenic fever. In such immunocompromised patients, infections can progress rapidly without classic signs, necessitating urgent empiric antibiotic coverage. Learners will gain exposure to the diagnostic and therapeutic approach to neutropenic fever, including risk stratification, culture collection, and empiric treatment initiation. The case also highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration with hematology and rheumatology to guide ongoing care and immunosuppressive management.

Trade and investment in services and intellectual property grows rapidly, driven by new technological advances, while servicification resolutely alters FDI patterns. As digital services trade grows, its aterritorial nature becomes a source of concern for policymakers and regulators, while companies affected by public interventions seek legal avenues to protect their rights, often throuth recourse to investor-State arbitration. Against this background, this chapter delves into the universe of digital services supply in an increasingly polarized international economic order. It identifies the challenges that servicification poses on international investment law, before focusing on the recent cases of TikTok (involving the digital services supply of the social media giant in the US) and Uber (relating to the service supply of the American company in Colombia and other countries) but also on Metaverse as a new challenge for economic regulation to discuss the applicable substantive investment law obligations and the scope for upholding national security concerns by the regulatory State. Throughout the chapter, I discuss related challenges that regulatory authorities face by emerging patterns in services trade and investment; the potential impact of measures such as geoblocking, bans or ringfencing; and the repercussions of such geo-economic fragmentation for the investment regime.

This chapter compares the development of pension regimes in Sweden and Denmark to demonstrate how variable political and economic constraints shaped social democratic policy choices. Social democratic parties in both countries have tried to pursue broadly similar policy strategies (tax-financed basic pensions; state-run, earnings-related pensions with publicly controlled pension funds). Swedish social democrats prevailed, at least for several decades, while their Danish counterparts turned to collective bargaining to pursue worker influence on the investment of pension capital when the legislative route was blocked. These trajectories demonstrate the role of learning and compromise by social democratic parties. In neither country were social democrats able to achieve a parliamentary majority, so legislative success required bargaining with other parties and with their trade union allies. Moreover, social democratic parties faced dilemmas concerning unanticipated pension policy legacies. Swedish social democrats had to compromise with other parties in the 1998 reform to address weaknesses in the ATP pension system. Danish social democrats faced tougher electoral constraints and have been unable to match the electoral performance of their Swedish counterparts. With the legislative route closed off, Danish social democrats lined up behind capital-funded, earnings-related pension solution based on collective bargaining.

The algorithm based on gradient descent in the previous chapter is simple and computationally efficient, at least provided the projection can be computed. There are two limitations, however.

This essay gathers the political, literary, and historical significance of India in the poems, memoirs, and articles of Pablo Neruda. It shows that the poet’s career in the subcontinent exceeded and rejected a mystifying Indophilia. Instead, the internationalist framework of Neruda’s two sojourns in India (1927–28 and 1950) corresponds to two major phases of his political thought: decolonization and the anti-imperialist peace movement. Neruda’s refusal of Indophilia brought him closer to Indian writers of English, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada and to Indian visual artists. “The Grapes of History” (“Las uvas de la historia”), an image from his long poem on India from 1951, has fructified and fermented in the reflections and translations of Nerudiana among major writers (Ali Sardar Jafri, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Kunwar Narain, and Arundhati Roy) and artists (Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Vivan Sundaram) long after the poet’s passing, well into the twenty-first century.

An examination of the importance of idiosyncrasy, individuated expressiveness, nurturing the excessive and a willingness to learn from accident and surprise. The chapter begins with elaboration of Proust’s fervent interest in Ruskin’s interest in the disturbed imagination, before also discussing the London studio pottery of the Martin Brothers, along with contemporary examples of work that upsets established hierarchies and categories, as well as taking functionality to its limits.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the necessary tools from optimisation, convex geometry and convex analysis. You can safely skip this chapter, referring back as needed. The main concepts introduced are as follows: