I present a proposal for the identification of the deities that appear in Glyph C of the Maya Lunar Series as the patrons of the Moon’s phases, based in two arguments. First, there are two cosmological narratives associated with the phases of the Moon. In the first, the Moon dies and is reborn at each new Moon. The waxing phase would be ruled by the Lunar Maize God whom is born just before the first visible crescent, and the Lunar Death God would rule over the waning Moon dying during the last crescent, remaining dead during the Moon’s invisibility period. Second the Moon transforms into a night Sun during the full Moon, which would be represented by the Lunar Jaguar God of the Underworld. This deity would govern over the days around the full Moon, as the nocturnal Sun. The second argument is that, as the calendar controlled by Glyph C was used, at least loosely, to predict eclipses, that occur during the new and the full Moon, and because these syzygies are governed by the proposed deities, the control realm of these gods was extended over the Glyph C semesters, to differentiate them, and reinforce their relationship to eclipses.

This article overturns the assumption that early modern ballads include too much godly, moralizing content to be considered part of news culture. It uses a wide range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English ballads in print and manuscript to demonstrate that one of the news ballad’s most significant features was the inclusion of providence – the ongoing supernatural workings of God in the material world. Placing these songs in the context of other cheap print genres and drawing on research into the role of religion in everyday life, the article shows that rather than undermining the ballad’s role in news culture, providence defined it. Moreover, the early modern distinction between God’s overall plan and specific examples of his intervention in earthly affairs helps to subdivide the genre into those where providence forms an editorial line and those where providence itself provides the story. This second type has traditionally been seen as godly rather than ‘newsy’. Understanding providence shows that those ballads which have been dismissed as more moralistic than topical in fact shared the most important news people could hear.

We generalize Hopf’s theorem to thermostats: the total thermostat curvature of a thermostat without conjugate points is non-positive and vanishes only if the thermostat curvature is identically zero. We further show that, if the thermostat curvature is zero, then the flow has no conjugate points and the Green bundles collapse almost everywhere. Given a thermostat without conjugate points, we prove that the Green bundles are transverse everywhere if and only if it is projectively Anosov. Finally, we provide an example showing that Hopf’s rigidity theorem on the $2$-torus cannot be extended to thermostats. It is also the first example of a projectively Anosov thermostat which is not Anosov.

Waste management is one of the major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. This Perspective examines how vegetation dynamics at composting facilities and landfills both reflect and influence anthropogenic environmental change. We define our use of the Anthropocene as a human-dominated epoch that is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene, and we argue that waste-derived ecosystems constitute model systems for detecting its signals through technogenic substrates and synanthropic succession. Although composting reduces pressure on landfills, incomplete processing of biowaste can disseminate propagules of invasive plant species. Landfills, shaped by disturbance and altered edaphic regimes, support synanthropic plant assemblages dominated by neophytes that act as bioindicators of leachate stress and other pressures. At the same time, spontaneous vegetation provides functional benefits, including slope stabilization, organic matter accumulation and habitat provision during early successional stages. We bring together information on risks and functions, link ecological criteria to permitting, monitoring and post-closure management pathways, and outline practical considerations for integrating plant-based indicators with geochemical screening. These steps enable ecologically sensitive strategies to be implemented that mitigate biodiversity risks while leveraging succession to improve the resilience of waste-derived landscapes.

The No Labels Party emerged with claims that it could interrupt the traditional two-party system in the United States. The political science literature on third parties would seem to challenge this assertion, highlighting the difficulty of altering the party ecosystem. In this article we use behavioral and attitudinal data to better understand the life cycle of the No Labels Party in North Carolina. We find that, although it became the second-largest third party (after the Libertarian Party), it struggled to gain and maintain party membership. The plurality of party switchers to the No Labels Party come from the ranks of Unaffiliated, not from the two major parties. Further, attitudinal data reveal that North Carolinians were largely uninformed and agnostic about No Labels. In the end, the No Labels Party’s demise was easily predicted. Despite a rise in independent/unaffiliated party registrants and identifiers, the two-party system is here to stay.

Despite years of efforts to combat disinformation, we remain far from a satisfactory set of solutions. The rise of generative AI, which enables the creation of highly credible fake content at scale, suggests that the problem is likely to grow even more severe. Lessons from the recent pandemic also call for a reconsideration of how disinformation should be addressed. This paper proposes a new approach that focuses not only on regulating everyone who spreads false information, but also on those who hold epistemic power – individuals with the capacity to shape what others know or believe. Such a strategy has the potential to move the debate forward, as it avoids the most common objection to disinformation regulation: the fear of widespread censorship. The paper argues that an individual’s epistemic position can justifiably differentiate their legal duties, and that those who possess epistemic power should bear corresponding legal – specifically, criminal – responsibility for the abuse of that power in spreading disinformation.

In 1940, Serge Koussevitzky officially founded the Berkshire Music Center (later known as Tanglewood) and appointed Aaron Copland as head of the faculty. Copland actively participated in the US cultural diplomatic initiative of the Good Neighbor Policy by setting up the conditions for modern Latin American composers to attend the Center. By examining the contribution of modern Latin American art music, especially at Tanglewood, this article reflects on the relationship between music and politics, and shows that musical modernism encompasses a much broader artistic spectrum than previously thought.

This article discusses the grammatical role played by the interpretation of an action as either intentional or accidental. It focuses on two grammatical restrictions that exhibit sensitivity to such interpretation. The first concerns so-called subject obviation, whereby, in many European languages, the subject of the subjunctive clause cannot refer to the same individual as the subject of the matrix clause. For the purpose of this article, an important property of subject obviation is that it is weakened in the case of accidental actions. The second restriction pertains to an aspectual restriction in negative imperatives and desire statements in Slavic, which disallows the perfective aspect in these constructions. As is the case with subject obviation, the aspectual restriction in Slavic is lifted when the action is interpreted as accidental. This article argues for a unified semantic-pragmatic account of the weakening of subject obviation and aspectual restriction. It also shows that this weakening of obviation and of aspectual restriction is part of a larger picture where the interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental plays a central role.

Previous research has shown that childhood disability incurs higher costs. Welfare state cash support is crucial to guarantee adequate social participation for families of children with disabilities. To properly assess the adequacy of cash support, the needs-based costs of childhood disability must be accounted for. This article investigates the adequacy of a cash support system that is designed to increase with the severity of the child’s care needs for four hypothetical children with different types of care needs. Therefore, we build on recently developed reference budgets for adequate social participation for families with disabled children in Belgium. The results show that Belgian cash support is generally insufficient to enable equal social participation for these families, particularly for children with less-visible disabilities. This forces families to make choices about which costs are met by the support measures and which costs are borne by themselves.

The political participation of Black women has important consequences for electoral outcomes in the US, yet little is known about whether and how affect (both negative and positive) influences this group’s engagement in American politics. Despite the prevalent stereotype that Black women are “angry,” scholarly exploration of the effects of the emotions of these women is rare. In this paper, we highlight a gap in theories that center on Black women and argue that survey question wording about affect may impact how Black women express positive or negative emotions in relation to their political behavior. Using 2016 and 2020 CMPS data, we find support for our expectations. This project highlights the importance of group-specific, intersectional theories and the potential limitations to our understanding of how affect influences political participation.

This paper responds to the target article by Law et al. (2025), who explore whether sign languages undergo regular phonological change similar to regular sound change observed in spoken languages. While they argue that iconicity and transmission patterns may inhibit such change, I propose that sign languages evolve systematically in a way that allows for regular change but in modality-specific ways that obscure it. Evidence of grammaticalization, lexicalization, and phonetic variation in sign languages indicates that both signed and spoken languages undergo the same processes, challenging the notion that regular change is absent. Additionally, I propose an approach that examines regular change through bundles of phonological features in signs that act as phonological environments shaping such change. Future research must integrate historical and online data, computer vision, and concerted studies to uncover whether regular phonological change is specific to modality or to language.

Drawing on Umberto Eco’s epistemological metaphor of the open work, this paper explores the intersection of two open forms of notation, inherent scores and text scores, with generative AI. Building on the notion of inherent scores, in which the interface merges with the notation, we introduce embodied sketching, a notational approach that streamlines composition and performance with real-time neural audio synthesis (NAS). We then examine text scores in text-to-audio NAS, presenting Mouja+, a work combining real-time NAS with embodied sketches and AI-generated audio from Fluxus scores. Based on the experience of composing and performing Mouja+, we show how AI’s statistical processing of language introduces interpretative gaps between the human understanding of the scores and the model’s output and propose prompting strategies to streamline the use of text scores with text-to-audio generative AI. We continue by discussing how NAS adds to the open work through algorithmic processes that coalesce into an elusive and deferring sense of presence. Through Derrida’s notion of hauntology, we thus extend the open work into what we term the ‘haunted work’, an epistemological metaphor encompassing a growing corpus of works engaging with the tension between presence and absence as a source of openness.

While it is known that speakers tend to use more reduced forms for more predictable words or phrases, it is unclear whether the same happens at the referential level: the influence of referent predictability on pronoun production remains a contentious issue, with divergent findings reported in the literature. To address this inconsistency, we carried out a Bayesian meta-analysis of the current literature on the relationship between referent predictability and pronoun production. Our meta-analysis covers twenty primary peer-reviewed studies, encompassing twenty-six experiments across eight languages. We find stronger evidence for a small positive effect of referent predictability on pronoun usage, as opposed to the alternative hypothesis of no effect or a negative effect. As the first comprehensive synthesis of available evidence on this topic, our study offers insights into pronoun production and identifies promising avenues for future research: focus on typologically diverse languages, on conditions where a variety of referring expressions are expected or where the effect of predictability is more likely to appear, and others. Finally, we also advocate for the use of meta-analysis as a tool for theoretical linguistics.