Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

Let $\omega (n)$ denote the number of distinct prime factors of a natural number n. In 1940, Erdős and Kac established that $\omega (n)$ obeys the Gaussian distribution over natural numbers, and in 2004, the third author generalized their theorem to all abelian monoids. In this article, we extend her theorem to any subsets of an abelian monoid satisfying some additional conditions, and apply this result to the subsets of h-free and h-full elements. We study generalizations of several arithmetic functions, such as the prime counting omega functions and the divisor function in a unified framework. Finally, we apply our results to number fields, global function fields, and geometrically irreducible projective varieties, demonstrating the broad relevance of our approach.

The chatbot psychosis phenomenon is no longer just a hypothesis. We call for interdisciplinary frameworks to systematically investigate individual characteristics and artificial intelligence related factors which (on their own or in combination) cause or contribute to this phenomenon, underlying mechanisms and the psychoeducation, ethics, policy and practices needed to reduce harm.

In 2024, the Women and Equalities Select Committee in the UK Parliament published a report entitled Misogyny in Music. It included the recommendations that ‘music colleges, conservatoires and other educational settings need to do more to address the gendering of instruments, roles and genres and improve the visibility of and support for female role models’. While there is a dearth of policy levers available to implement this recommendation, this article critically analyses three existing policy/regulatory frameworks that could be used for its implementation in England. The article also highlights a significant limitation of the report – its exclusion of trans and non-binary musicians.

Between 2012 and 2014, a crew from the Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP) excavated a small mound located on the western periphery of the Pacbitun site, a medium-sized ancient Maya center located in west-central Belize. That mound consisted of a thick deposit of granite sand and debitage, revealing a record of the production of several thousand granite tools dating to the Late Classic period. Since those excavations, a total of 22 similar mounds have been recorded, with 11 tested. All tested mounds reveal a similar material record representing periodically used working platforms where granite tools were shaped and finished during the Late Classic period. The recorded granite debris mounds are distributed over an area of 1 km2 some 500 m from Pacbitun’s core, an area that we suggest represents a community of attached, part-time specialists making granite tools on a seasonal basis. Given the scale of granite tool production, we suspect this community made tools not just for local consumption, but also for consumption outside of Pacbitun as part of a strategy to navigate the dynamic political Late Classic landscape of the Belize River Valley.

This study revisits the long-standing consensus that the number and nature of basic-level administrative units in imperial China remained static over two millennia. It argues that this view underestimates the size and sophistication of field administration during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). During this period, towns (zhen) emerged as administrative centers, undertaking roles akin to the predominantly rural counties but within urban settings. Through a systematic analysis of the administrative functions of towns, this article reveals that approximately 30 percent of the 1,891 towns documented in 1085 were staffed by imperial officials and played a crucial role in delivering urban public goods such as fire prevention and law enforcement. In doing so, they supported the Song state’s extraordinary reliance on commercial taxation. These findings prompt a reassessment of the prevailing view in Chinese urban history that a disconnect between administration and commerce began during the Tang-Song transition.

Institutional investors conduct more governance research and are less likely to follow proxy advisor vote recommendations when a company’s bonds comprise a larger share of their assets. These findings are driven by bond holdings, shareholder proposals, and companies where fixed-income managers are more likely to be attentive and share an interest with equity investors in improving governance. The findings do not concentrate on companies or shareholder proposals where creditor–shareholder conflicts are likely. Overall, the findings suggest that corporate bond holdings influence how actively institutions monitor their equity positions and contribute to institutions’ overall incentive to be engaged stewards.

Regional survey of the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Cayo, Belize by the Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project has revealed an expansive, ancient Maya granitic-rock extraction and ground stone tool crafting industry distributed across an 11 km2 region. To date, 16 extraction-workshop sites of varying size and compositional complexity totaling 100 ha or 1 km2 have been identified through a combination of ground-based reconnaissance and aerial LiDAR survey. This article introduces the two largest recorded to date, Buffalo Hill Quarries and Moshy’s Hill. Discussing them, we present an overview of the common attributes of the Mountain Pine Ridge quarry workshops including types of extraction sites (quarry pits, strip mines, and cut faces), structural components (bedrock pits and erected blocks), cached tools (hammerstones and pics), and discarded products (half-loaf and full-loaf forms and metates) found at them. As the type of sites presented here are new to archaeology, the article concludes with a series of questions to guide future work.