As “blackface” has become a catchall for a range of practices in contemporary global popular culture, use of the term has entrenched an implicit assumption that blackface is distinctive to the United States. To grasp the manifest globality of blackface, however, it is necessary to consider the many histories and forms blackface has taken across disparate geographies as well as its role in shaping racialized mappings of the world.

In response to the article So You Think You Know Who’s the “Legally Authorized Representative”: Clinical Research Hits a Snag, this invited commentary draws attention to the practical realities that are overlooked in the paper’s examination of enrolling research participants without decisional capacity to provide their own consent. In such scenarios, the participant’s Legally Authorized Representative (LAR) is co-enrolled to consent on the participant’s behalf. Implementation of a research-based LAR is a two-part process that involves identifying the LAR according to legal hierarchy and performing a capacity assessment to determine whether the prospective participant requires an LAR. The paper makes several comparisons between standard care and research approaches to these decisions, most of which the author deems inadequate for clinical research contexts, and suggests that navigating this process may pose “unexpected legal and ethical hazards” for researchers. By offering a practitioner’s perspective in this commentary, I hope to bring clarity to this argument by explaining from direct experience how LAR implementation includes much greater collaboration and thought partnership between researchers and IRBs than the author gives credit for.

Cuban-born A.M. Hernandez traveled to the United States in the late 1840s and performed in various US blackface minstrel troupes from the 1850s through the 1870s. His movements across Cuban and US borders show how his participation in blackface minstrelsy reflected global logics of race and antiblackness, pushing existing studies of blackface to consider subjects whose lives exist transnationally.

Perhaps we need a new tragic poetry, a new tragic art. Perhaps the age of bourgeois drama—the art form of posthistory—is over. Perhaps Elfriede Jelinek is the poet for this new age, asking why people follow a “master” whose only ideology is hollow triumphalism.

Four authors engage global histories to explicate contemporary genealogies of blackface and racial impersonation: Chinua Thelwell, Kellen Hoxworth, Bethany Hughes, and Danielle Roper.

Classical philosophy listed art as a virtue perfecting the intellect’s practical activity (recta ratio factibilium). As virtuous, human art or skill must follow a measure or mean of its activity. For classical thought, the natural order provided this measure. This is the origin of the dictum that ‘art imitates nature’. Yet, the claim that the work of creative artists must imitate nature has not gone unchallenged in modernity. This essay claims that a retrieval of the robust notion beauty as integrity, proportion, and clarity not only provides an anchor to tether the work of the creative artist to the natural order but also liberates the artist’s creative intuition from the isolation of mere taste and into the realm of the transcendent. For the creative artist, the integrity, proportion, and clarity of the natural world opens a window into a beauty that unites into one community all those who see it.

Jacques Maritain’s contributions to the philosophy of art and beauty are of great historical and philosophical importance. Art and Scholasticism (1920) in particular brought unprecedented attention to the place of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and provided other substantial insights on the relation of the fine arts to being. Maritain’s account of beauty, however, emphasizes the invisibility or ‘secret’ nature of ontological form, however, in a manner that shows the influence of modern European romanticism and modernism and that does not accurately reflect the thought of Aquinas or that of Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius, both of whom are the chief sources of Aquinas’s discussion of the nature of beauty. This essay argues for a Dionysian account of integrity, harmony, and clarity that suggests a closer relationship between Aquinas’s three conditions of beauty than Maritain’s discussion indicates.

Discussion of the relationship between art and liturgy is nearly as old as the Church itself. At root it is a matter of the theological seriousness of the liturgy, balanced against the distinctive aesthetic demands of art making and those individuals gifted with the ability to produce works of art. Notwithstanding a glorious heritage of sacred art and music in the Church, tensions have historically manifested, and still do. Equally, the stipulation that art must serve the liturgy can engender a sense that it is an addendum: helpful, even beautiful, but ultimately subservient. In this essay, I set aside more familiar arguments as to why the Church and art need each other. Instead I consult three important twentieth-century figures: Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), Joseph Ratzinger (1927–2022), and David Jones (1895–1974), who provide a range of complementary reasons why the two spheres should be intimately connected. For Maritain, who holds an expansive view of Christian art, liturgy is a transcendental archetype. Ratzinger insists that art and music should apprehend and portray the cosmic significance of Christ in the liturgy; and Jones gives an anthropological basis to the uniquely work-making character of the person – supremely articulated in sacramental action.

Commenting on Cargill’s article, this Commentary examines how gene therapy research is regulated in the United States and how oversight of the field has developed. It discusses recent applications of gene therapy technologies and their implications for oversight, and of the impact of ordered cuts to NIH-funded research on gene therapy developments more broadly. Ultimately, it underscores the need for adaptive oversight frameworks for research involving emerging biotechnologies that balance scientific innovation, safety, and ethical considerations, and for effective public engagement on the acceptable use of these technologies, notwithstanding the discontinuation of NIH’s advisory mechanism established for this purpose.

Political pressures and institutional constraints have shaped a reactionary regulatory system that unduly preferences industry interests over public health. Breaking the reactive cycles that have long shaped device regulation will involve more than standard technical or incremental reforms. Congress would instead need to revisit more foundational values of device regulation to better align policy with the interests of patients and public health.

The blackface photographic series Negro utópico (2001) by the Afro-Colombian artist Liliana Angulo underscores the role of racial impersonation in the enunciation of a black geography amid Colombia’s turn toward multiculturalism. Negro utópico is embroiled in an act of Black place-making as part of Viaje sin Mapa, the first art exhibit focused on blackness in Colombian art.

Commentary on “ERISA and the Failure of Emplloyers to Perform Their Fiduciary Duties: Evidence from a Survey of Health Plan Administrators.”