This chapter examines a range of Arthurian poems in alliterative verse, including Awntyrs off Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It argues that while the works are diverse in tone and content, there is a consistent thematic preoccupation with the relationship between Arthur and his nephew Gawain. Through a close reading of the presentation of the characters, it suggests that the alliterative poems – despite their differing treatments – display a certain anxiety about King Arthur. By implicit comparison with Gawain, elements of Arthur’s character are often found wanting.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

According to Dazai Shundai, techniques of political economy must be based on the models of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In order to apply these models to present-day Japan, it is important to draw proper analogies between ancient Chinese and later Japanese phenomena and to use appropriate terminology in describing Japanese phenomena.

This chapter presents case studies of Indigenous peace agreements in the Andes region. It begins with an introduction that highlights the significance of understanding legal geography and its relevance to Indigenous peoples. It then explores the legal frameworks that protect Indigenous rights, focusing on international instruments such as declarations and conventions. It then examines specific agreements in the Andes that enact these legal frameworks, with a spotlight on the National Agreement for Development and Peace in La Araucanía, 2018, in Chile, and the Agreement Between the Bolivian Government and the Confederation of Indigenous peoples from the East, Chaco, and Amazonia in 2010. These case studies showcase the intersection of legal, social, and political dynamics in promoting Indigenous rights and fostering peace. By analysing the legal geographies of these agreements, the chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex challenges and opportunities Indigenous communities face in achieving sustainable development and peace in the Andes region.

This paper aims to assess the cogency of Hume’s famous argument against testimony for miracles. Hume starts by arguing in favour of a “general Maxim” which involves balancing the strength of the testimony “considered apart and in itself” against the inductive unlikelihood of the reported event. But although this reasoning shows real insight – anticipating what is now known as the “base rate fallacy” – it turns out that such a separation cannot work, and an adequate maxim must inevitably take into account the specific nature of the reported event when evaluating the epistemic strength of the testimony. There is also a deeper problem with Hume’s argument, which arises from his treating a miracle as an extreme example of an inductively unlikely event. For the believer can agree that miracles are inductively unlikely – or even physically impossible – whenever the world is proceeding normally. Where she will differ from Hume is in claiming that divine activity can interfere with the natural order, and can sometimes be identified through its purposive nature. Naturalist philosophers – like Hume – are likely to reject this, but their best argument for doing so comes not from theoretical probabilistic maxims, but from the hopelessly unconvincing track record of miracle reports, combined with the lack of evidence for divine purpose in the world (as revealed so artfully by Hume’s Dialogues).

Chapter 6 reconstructs the technology-specific legal contours of freedom of expression in the Internet age, presenting empirical evidence of the growing importance of technology for legal practice and regulation. Since data-processing technology is a prerequisite for free speech, the starting point is privacy law. An important distinction is made between data integrity and network integrity and the discussion on net neutrality and the open Internet is revisited. The case law of the ECtHR on Article 10 ECHR is also examined to see if there is a tendency to recognise an independent ‘right to transmit’. Moreover, the activities of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can be seen to produce technology-related standards relevant to the freedom of expression. ICANN, which is responsible for routing data packets to their destination, controls the ‘master key’ to the entire global Internet and can thus influence the conditions under which freedom of communication is possible. Finally, the chapter addresses the technical standards for the Internet developed by the independent Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, which are also crucial for the freedom of expression.

Around the turn of the twentieth century the mélodie claimed a new place in French musical life, recognised increasingly as a genre that could exploit the accomplished musicianship of professional and specialist performers, and compel serious critical attention. Evident even in the changing priorities of the quintessential salon mélodiste Reynaldo Hahn, the new status of song would be confirmed in the riotous reception of Ravel’s Histoires naturelles (1907). Ravel’s mélodies are at the core of this chapter, the composer’s preoccupation with the interplay of poetic and musical form, and with the rhythms and assonances of text, offering guiding threads across an immensely varied body of work. Setting Ravel’s mélodies alongside key works by Hahn, Charles Koechlin and Albert Roussel, together with Lili Boulanger’s transcendent 1914 cycle Clairières dans le ciel, the chapter traces some of the continuities of style, practice and influence that sustained French art song across forty years of seismic musical and cultural change.

This chapter describes the successful application of advances in practical truthful mechanisms design to a large-scale computationally hard problem: The FCC’s 2016–2017 incentive auction, which reallocated tens of billions of dollars of radio spectrum resources from use in television broadcasting to higher-value uses in mobile broadband. The mechanism used was an impressive combination of advances in efficiently solving NP-hard resource allocation problems (in most cases) and in new mechanism design that is simple to implement and that adapts well to limited computation capacity. The auction resulted in repurposing 84 megahertz of spectrum and yielded $19.8 billion in revenue.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

The recent proliferation of Indigenous-made gothic has revitalised debates regarding how these stories fit within larger conversations and conventions of the genre/mode. Arguing for a kind of pre-colonial gothic aesthetic, this chapter engages two manifestations: traditional stories of the Windigo in contemporary, often colonial contexts and Indigenous experiences in worlds overrun by zombies. A kind of pre-colonial gothic functions as part of what Rebecca Duncan and Rebekah Cumpsty theorise as ‘world-gothic: that is gothic as a cultural index for local experiences of relations that constitute the modern world.’ In the case of Richard Van Camp’s Wheetago, the creature awakened within the Alberta tar sands embodies the modern world signified by the oil industry, which has reached a critical crisis point in how it damages the environment and threatens the local Indigenous peoples. The local experience manifests as gothic, but also, it points to a gothic that has always been.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.