The consumption of food is simultaneously one of humanity’s most basic necessities and one of its greatest luxuries. It has, appropriately, both inspired and reflected cultural activities, from agricultural rituals and ascetic practices to epicurean banquets and poetry. At the present moment, we seem to be living in an era of peak food obsession, fueled by extremely popular food culture, the rapid rise of “foodie” life on social media, and heated debates over the authenticity and identity of cuisine in a multicultural context. Chinese societies have been equally obsessed, with food being a central theme of ancient bronzes, Confucian classics, religious practices, and literary works. For this reason, the study of Chinese food culture naturally brings one through a wide array of disciplines, including cultural studies, history, religion, medicine, and aesthetics. However, with a few notable exceptions, major research in humanistic food studies has tended to emphasize recent time periods, European and American cultures, or both (the “modern west”). The result has been a strong emphasis on “cultural studies” approaches, usually adopting structuralist, culturalist, or Gramscian critiques of power brokers in the past century.1 This special issue shows how attention to Chinese food history may bring to light many new questions and methods in the study of food culture.

This article develops an intellectual history of neoliberal climate change denial, bringing together scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas with critical research on climate denialism. Focusing on the writings of Deepak Lal (1940–2020), a prominent late neoliberal thinker, the article reconstructs the key arguments Lal developed to throw climate science into question. After situating Lal in relation to neoliberal thought and think tanks, the article explores his views on four key themes: the scientific legitimacy of climatology, the intellectual corruption of climate researchers, the politics of the environmentalist movement, and the concept of imperialism. The article argues that Lal threaded familiar neoliberal concepts and tropes into climate denial, thus articulating a distinctly neoliberal theory of climate change. This theory quickly became influential within the neoliberal movement, segments of which came to echo Lal’s arguments. The article concludes with a broader reflection on neoliberalism’s relation to climate catastrophe.

Handheld firearms have been little studied in the military history of the Portuguese in Asia. Historians have centered on naval and siege warfare, in which cannons feature extensively. The way artillery was used in ships and sieges has been depicted as an important innovation of European origin, which gave the Portuguese a decisive advantage over their Asian opponents. Yet, this approach has confined harquebuses and muskets to a secondary role. We reconsider this historiographical imbalance using Jeremy Black’s idea that fitness-for-purpose is the best standard to measure military effectiveness. We argue that even if handheld firearms were not used by the Portuguese in a particularly “innovative” way, they were important and effective at the time.

This paper describes and reflects on the imaginaries, knowledge, processes and methods of a new four-year research project called Performing AI (PAI): Governance, Agency and Action – An Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s “collaborative and interdisciplinary research” program, the project assembles researchers from three Swiss universities (the Universities of Fribourg and Lausanne and the Zurich University of the Arts) and Japan (University of Tokyo’s General Systems Science department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences). PAI’s goal is to investigate “AI” from epistemic, ontological, aesthetic and ethical angles, neither taking for granted its “uncontroversial ‘thingness’”, nor assuming received disciplinary frames to fit the purpose. Instead, we address how AI is “performed” – that is, enacted and produced – across different discursive and material sites and contexts. PAI asks multiple questions: How is AI enacted in governmental policy? What does artistic practice do to AI, and what does AI do to artistic practice? How is AI reconfigured in interdisciplinary scientific domains such as artificial life (as opposed to computer science)? How is AI taken up, or reconfigured in the public sphere, including schools, museums and festivals focused on the intersections of art, technology and society?

High-frequency mortality data have attracted growing attention, but their use has largely been confined to specific applications rather than general modeling and forecasting. Such data pose new challenges to traditional mortality models due to pronounced seasonal patterns and short-term fluctuations. To address these challenges and produce more accurate forecasts with the high-frequency mortality data, this paper introduces a novel integration of gradient boosting techniques into traditional stochastic mortality models under a multi-population setting. Our key innovation lies in using the Li and Lee model as the weak learner within the gradient boosting framework, replacing conventional decision trees. Empirical studies are conducted using weekly mortality data from 30 countries (Human Mortality Database, 2015–2019). Empirical evidence highlights that the proposed methodology not only enhances model fit by accurately capturing underlying mortality trends and seasonal patterns but also achieves superior forecast accuracy, compared to the benchmark models. We also investigate a key challenge in multi-population mortality modeling: how to select appropriate subpopulations with sufficiently similar mortality experiences. A comprehensive clustering exercise is conducted based on mortality improvement rates and seasonal strength. The empirical results demonstrate that our proposed model maintains strong forecast accuracy across different clustering configurations, thereby reducing the need for extensive data preprocessing.

The prevalence of Palmer amaranth weeds that are resistant to inhibitors of glyphosate and acetolactate synthase has been affecting sugar beet yield in Colorado and Nebraska since 2020. While metamitron applied preemergence has previously been reported to effectively control glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth, the rates evaluated in the literature are likely higher than what is practical for growers to use on their crops. Consequently, identifying an optimal rate will reduce potential herbicide use while still effectively controlling Palmer amaranth. Lower rates of metamitron may be sufficient to allow control of Palmer amaranth through the two true-leaf (2 TL) stage of growth, when herbicides that inhibit very-long-chain fatty acids can be used to layer additional residual herbicides and prevent Palmer amaranth emergence. Multiple dose–response analysis studies were established in Nebraska in 2020 and 2023, and in Colorado in 2023, to determine the necessary rate of metamitron, with and without a tank-mix partner of ethofumesate, to control Palmer amaranth through the 2 TL stage of sugar beet. Metamitron rates ranged from 0 to 6.40 kg ai ha−1, while ethofumesate was included at a fixed rate of 1.68 and 1.86 kg ai ha−1 in 2020 and 2023, respectively. At all locations, maximum Palmer amaranth control was obtained when metamitron (4 kg ai ha−1) was applied alone. Adding ethofumesate as a tank-mix partner reduced the metamitron use rate to about 2.9 kg ai ha−1. Results of these trials provided supporting evidence for the U.S. Environmental Potection Agency to issue an emergency exemption under Section 18 of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act to use metamitron at a rate of 3.27 kg ai ha−1 in Colorado and Nebraska in 2024, and the subsequent extension to include Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming in 2025.

We investigate how galaxy evolution varies with environment in the nearby Universe by comparing an ‘average’ reference volume in the Southern Galactic Pole (SGP) dataset to the Nexus region, a dynamically assembling superstructure centred on the Abell 4038 galaxy cluster. Environmental effects are quantified using the quenched fraction (fQ) and the mean and scatter of the specific star formation rate (sSFR) for star-forming galaxies, measured as functions of stellar mass and improved group-scale halo mass estimates. Trends are characterised using logistic fits for fQand power-law fits for mean log sSFR. After decoupling stellar and halo mass dependencies, we find that fQ increases with stellar mass in both field and group environments, while group galaxies show an additional dependence on halo mass. Relative to the SGP baseline, the Nexus exhibits systematic differences consistent with enhanced heterogeneity in accretion histories and pre-processing within a forming superstructure. For star-forming galaxies, mean log sSFR declines strongly with stellar mass and is further suppressed in group-scale haloes, whereas the scatter in log sSFR depends primarily on stellar mass and only weakly on halo mass. Most differences remain within current uncertainties. Within the Nexus, splitting the sample by projected distance from Abell 4038 reveals systematic variations in both quenching and star-forming properties, largely driven by changes in the sampled halo mass function. A projected phase-space analysis shows higher fQ in regions associated with earlier infall, linking quenching to orbital history; however, this trend is strongly stellar-mass dependent and is absent for low-mass galaxies ($\log M_{stellar} \lt 10$). These results demonstrate that galaxy evolution depends jointly on stellar mass, halo mass, and location within the surrounding large-scale structure.

We investigate the aggregate effects of household debt on a monetary policy easing shock using a smooth transition vector autoregression model. Using generalized impulse response functions, we measure whether the effect of a reduction in interest rate on output is conditioned by different levels of household debt in Australia, Sweden and Norway, three developed economies with high levels of household indebtedness, and in the world’s seven largest economies. Our findings show that the short-term effects of a reduction in interest rates are generally stronger during periods of high household debt. On average, the monetary stimulus (on impact) is 0.06% (percent of GDP) larger in Norway and the United States during periods of high household debt. Our findings also suggest high levels of household debt may diminish the persistence of monetary policy shocks in the medium term (4–8 quarters).

This article examines whether formal and informal workers in Argentina and Chile hold different attitudes toward labor unions. Engaging debates on labor-market dualism and union revitalization, we assess the representation gap hypothesis—which expects weaker union support among outsiders—against the class solidarity hypothesis, which anticipates broadly similar orientations across labor-market positions. Using original 2025 survey data from both countries, we find limited evidence of a systematic insider–outsider divide. Although informal self-employed workers sometimes express more skeptical views, most attitudes among informal workers are statistically indistinguishable from—and in some cases more favorable than—those of formal workers. Cross-nationally, Argentine workers tend to assign greater importance to unions, while Chilean workers report higher willingness to unionize. Taken together, these findings suggest that the representation gap thesis may not fully capture workers’ orientations and point to the potential relevance of solidaristic dynamics shaped by national institutional and political contexts.

Essays appearing in this issue, authored by scholars who gathered at the University of Coimbra in 2021-22, display a range of approaches to historicizing the emergence of the global Portuguese empire in the passage from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The present introduction contextualizes their contributions by tracing a shift in the Portuguese and international historiography over the last half century. By and large, scholars have moved away from narratives of exceptionalism concentrated on elite figures such as King Manuel I of Portugal, and gravitated instead to grappling with how the early modern Portuguese empire was co-created with the wider world through vectors of violence, exchange, and reciprocity. These new scholarly imperatives prompt an adoption of novel spatial and disciplinary frameworks for tracing critical transformations in early modern global history.