This article develops the concept of meritocratic nationalism to unpack the online backlash surrounding the rise to fame of a Tibetan cyberstar, Tenzing Tsondu (Ding Zhen), on Chinese social media. Meritocratic nationalism not only embeds ideals of individual achievement, education attainment, and productivity within narratives of national identity and regime legitimacy, but also sustains structural inequalities through racialized and gendered assumptions about who is capable of merit and whose success is ‘deserved’. First, critics frame state media’s endorsement of the internet celebrity as a betrayal to the meritocratic ideal the state is supposed to safeguard. However, this does not lead to a critique of meritocratic legitimacy itself but rather its reaffirmation. Secondly, the reproduction of a Han-centric and masculine-coded ideal of merit is integral to the construction of majority male victimhood, which denies and normalizes structural violence. Thirdly, we note the multifaceted representation of the international in the backlash, where users deploy the figure of ‘white American men’ as fellow victims of ‘political correctness’ to animate a racialized imagination of shared majoritarian grievance. The article contributes to nationalism studies and broader debates on meritocracy, racism, and the grievance politics of ethnic majority men.

Our academic medical center has offered a cooperative education position in infection prevention and control (IPC) to undergraduate students since 2005. We describe the position and surveyed prior participants (n = 16)—all reported a valuable experience, and 6 of 16 (38%) reported subsequent employment in full-time IPC positions during their careers.

Federal disability anti-discrimination laws expect clinical trials to render study processes and sites accessible to potential participants, including through the provision of reasonable accommodations. Nonetheless, people with disabilities, and particularly people with mental illness, are often excluded from clinical trials. Supported decision-making, a strategy that allows people to select trusted others to help them understand and communicate decisions, is an important accommodation to further inclusion. However, because mental illness can be dynamic and vary widely in nature (e.g., diagnosis, symptom severity, functional impairment) and duration (e.g., short-term, intermittent, progressive, permanent), supported decision-making is neither a one-size-fits-all strategy nor one that can serve as a reasonable accommodation in every situation. While prior work on supported decision-making has focused predominantly on adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities or dementias, people with mental illness may also benefit from supported decision-making, although the variability in decision-making capacity in mental illness presents nuanced challenges. Here, we explore supported decision-making in the case of people with intermittent or episodic mental illness that may impact decision-making capacity to varying degrees at different times.

Mastering adaptive stress coping behaviors is an important developmental task for children and has been theorized to be closely related to physiological activity. However, the relations between stress coping behaviors and physiological processes remain unclear. This study examined whether different coping behaviors were uniquely related to physiological processes in a parent–child dyadic stress-coping task. A total of 88 Chinese parent–child dyads were included in this study (total N = 176; child Mage = 8.07 years; 96.4% Han ethnicity). Child active coping, seeking social support, and disengaged coping were coded, and parents’ and children’s respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) levels were measured. We quantified child baseline-to-task RSA reactivity, child RSA inertia, and parent-to-child RSA synchrony. Results indicated that children who were more likely to seek support from their parents and less likely to exhibit behavioral disengagement had lower RSA inertia, which indicates more flexible physiological regulation. Children who exhibited more active and less disengaged coping behaviors had greater parent-to-child RSA synchrony, suggesting more efficient interpersonal co-regulation at the physiological level. These findings highlight specific associations between children’s coping behaviors and physiological regulation processes during dyadic stress interactions, offering insights into how behavioral and physiological systems may coordinate in middle childhood.

We present a dependently-typed cross-linguistic framework for analyzing the telicity and culminativity of events, accompanied by examples of using our framework to model English sentences. Our framework consists of two parts. In the nominal domain, we model the boundedness of noun phrases and its relationship to subtyping, delimited quantities, and adjectival modification. In the verbal domain, we define a dependent event calculus, modeling telic events as those whose undergoer is bounded, culminating events as telic events that achieve their inherent endpoint, and consider adverbial modification. In both domains, we pay particular attention to associated entailments. Our framework is defined as an extension of intensional Martin-Löf dependent type theory, and the rules and examples in this paper have been formalized in the Agda proof assistant.

Most literature on tawa’ifs remains confined to specific princely states or cities in colonial India. Making ‘travel’ its central framework, this article tries to bring the movement and mobilities of tawa’ifs into sharper focus. Engaging with the formidable research that has emerged since the publication of Veena Oldenburg’s essay on the Lucknow tawa’ifs in 1990, I propose we approach their travels as itinerant subjects through a nuanced framework that distinguishes between the different types of journeys they undertake. Turning our focus on the trajectories and movements of tawa’ifs, I shall argue, makes room for more embedded and rigorous histories of women performers in late colonial India. A conceptual attempt, this article explores the possibilities of locating performers as subjects within complex networks of travel and mobilities. This peripatetic aspect of tawa’ifs’ lives will hence become visible as distinct types of mobilities—journeys of migration; travel in search of sustenance and patronage; types of displacement; exploitative circuits of exhibitions and displays; and in most cases, a crucial means of identity-making. In this article, tawa’ifs’ travels will thus move between princely courts, towns, cities, and regions, and even across continents.

This article explores how pre-service music teachers in Norway reflect on their future professional identities and career trajectories during the final year of a five-year generalist teacher education programme. We analyse two group interviews with eight participants – one conducted during the writing of their master’s theses and one shortly after submission. The study is framed by the concept of spatially situated possible selves, combining Markus and Nurius’ theory of possible selves with Massey’s spatial theory to examine how imagined futures could be shaped by institutional, geographic, and social contexts. Thematic analysis reveals four key areas of reflection: career awareness, the influence of past experiences, the shaping role of music teacher education, and the participants’ hybrid positioning between student and teacher roles. Findings suggest that the master’s thesis serves as a transitional tool for professional development and identity formation. We argue that music teacher education can be understood as a contested and evolving space – a multiplicity of ‘stories-so-far’ – where future selves are imagined, negotiated, and constrained.

Around the globe, democracies have come under pressure. At the same time, one of the most prominent research areas in political science is the question of which democratic designs generate the most stability. However, so far, one inherent part of democracies has not received much attention in this literature: the opposition. Although research has shown that there is a wide range of power granted to oppositions, little research exists investigating the consequences of these institutional differences. In this research note, I focus on the importance of mutual toleration for democratic stability and argue that this might manifest in institutionalized legislative opposition power, which, in turn, might affect democratic stability. Preliminary results indicate that instances of democratic decline are more likely to occur in countries with weak institutionalization of opposition power. These results have important implications and open up avenues for future research on questions relating to determinants of democratic stability.

Confirming a conjecture of Erdős on the chromatic number of Kneser hypergraphs, Alon, Frankl and Lovász proved that in any $q$-colouring of the edges of the complete $r$-uniform hypergraph, there exists a monochromatic matching of size $\lfloor \frac {n+q-1}{r+q-1}\rfloor$. In this paper, we prove a transference version of this theorem. More precisely, for fixed $q$ and $r$, we show that with high probability, a monochromatic matching of approximately the same size exists in any $q$-colouring of a random hypergraph, already when the average degree is a sufficiently large constant. In fact, our main new result is a defect version of the Alon–Frankl–Lovász theorem for almost complete hypergraphs. From this, the transference version is obtained via a variant of the weak hypergraph regularity lemma. The proof of the defect version uses tools from extremal set theory developed in the study of the Erdős matching conjecture.

We compared plasma microbial cell-free DNA sequencing (mcfDNAseq) with an amplicon-based blood next-generation sequencing (NGS) assay for 10 patients with suspected bloodstream or endovascular infection. Plasma testing detected pathogens in eight (seven clinically meaningful), whereas amplicon testing was negative in all. Plasma mcfDNAseq provided higher test yield and overall sensitivity.

How do U.S. Supreme Court justices use legal scholarship? In recent landmark decisions like Trump v. CASA (2025) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the justices cited several pieces of legal scholarship in their opinions. Yet little is known of how and how often the members of the Court engage in this practice. In this article, I provide new data on the Court’s citation to legal scholarship under the Roberts Court from 2005 to 2023. I find that there is a strong upward trend in the number of citations to legal scholarship, with large increases in more recent years. Further, there is an increase in the percentage of opinions by the Court that cite legal scholarship. Also, the justices are using the most legal scholarship in some of the Court’s most recent salient decisions. Additionally, the justices overwhelmingly cite legal scholarship published in the most elite law review journals, with Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal emerging as the preferred outlets. Lastly, the data shows that the distribution of law professors cited by the justices is highly skewed, with a small number of individuals accounting for a disproportionately large share of citations, to which most share an association with the Federalist Society. The data is clear that the justices have altered the way in which they use legal scholarship in their opinions. This article sets the foundation for future theoretical work on the Court’s use of legal scholarship in its opinions.

Starting in 2025, China is gradually increasing the statutory retirement age for male and female employees. However, little is known about how parental retirement delay affects the fertility intentions of adult children. This study investigates this issue using a 2 × 4 factorial survey experimental design (N = 773) and a difference-in-differences method to identify causal relationships. It further examines the mediating roles of grandparental economic support and childcare. The results show that the Delayed Retirement Policy significantly reduces both grandparental childcare and the fertility intentions of their adult children. The mediating pathway through reduced grandparental care is supported, whereas grandparental economic support plays no significant role. The magnitude of these effects varies by the duration of parental retirement delay, the gender of the parent affected, and whether both parents are impacted. Policy recommendations include promoting flexible retirement age options, expanding parental leave, and increasing the provision of childcare services to supplement intergenerational support.

Consumer enthusiasm in plant-based eating has resulted in the rapid expansion of plant-based meat (PBM) products. The extensive processing required to simulate meat warrants further investigation regarding PBMs nutritional quality and healthiness, particularly considering the health halo that has surrounded these products. An online audit of dominant UK supermarkets evaluated PBM (n = 209) against ‘standard’ (n = 2143) and ‘reduced’ (e.g. low fat) meat equivalents (n = 100), across eight product categories. This evaluation included NOVA categorisation, Nutritional Profiling Model (NPM) classification, on-pack claims, micronutrient content and product affordability. PBM products were typically more favourable than ‘standard’ meat equivalents for energy density, dietary fibre, total and saturated fat content. However, they contained significantly higher salt in most product categories. Differences between PBM and ‘reduced’ meat comparators were more nuanced. PBM products were significantly more expensive than ‘standard’ meat equivalents in four of the eight product categories (p < .05). Few PBM and zero meat-based products reported micronutrient information. While all PBM and most meat-based products were characterised as ultra-processed, PBM products demonstrated a lower (‘healthier’) NPM score compared to ‘standard’ meat equivalents across all product categories (p ≤ .001). Although no significant differences were detected between PBM and ‘reduced’ meat-based products, a greater proportion of PBM products were classified as ‘healthier’ according to NPM compared to ‘standard’ and ‘reduced’ meat equivalents. Thus PBM products may offer healthier alternatives with the potential to synergistically support public and planetary health. Future manufacturing practices should consider cost-effective fortification and reformulation strategies to improve nutritional quality and affordability of PBMs.