Erected in 1502, the two Tangut dhāraṇī pillars in Baoding, Hebei, are the latest datable Tangut materials known to history. Scholars have generally focused almost exclusively on their recency, however, overlooking the historical contexts of their erection. Meanwhile, historians have long sought to understand the patterns of local societies in northern China following the fall of the Northern Song, yet the histories of minor ethnic groups, like the Tanguts, remain underexplored. By contextualizing the pillars within their historical setting, this study seeks to improve understanding of the material and offer a new perspective on the local history of post-Jin northern China. The article has three main parts, concerning 1) the historical information the pillars’ inscriptions provide; 2) the religious practice of the Tangut community and its historical origin; and 3) the varied social status of the pillars’ patrons and the power dynamics they reflect.

In this article, I explore the history of Bokaro Steel City – a planned industrial settlement conceived in the 1960s in the Indian state of Jharkhand as part of India’s post-Independence modernization programme. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials, I demonstrate the unique socially inclusive approach of tackling social inequalities, focusing specifically on how planners approached social reproduction. By foregrounding the distinctiveness of Bokaro’s urban design, I argue for a re-evaluation of modernist urbanities, delinking them from the exclusively Eastern European monotowns or Western superblocks and demonstrating how Indian planners adapted modernist ideas to meet their local objectives.

During the 1920s, the newly formed American Legion used its unique placement as a nonprofit lobbying for veterans’ causes in a novel way—to enter movie distribution with the creation of its Film Service. The era was famously marked by the consolidation of Hollywood studios into conglomerates and the establishment of their powerful trade association, which moguls used to exert significant control over the emerging medium. Yet while big business was important in structuring the rise of motion pictures, small enterprises—including nonprofits like the Legion Film Service—still found ways to contribute to the sector’s growth by innovating and adapting complex operational strategies, becoming a surprising resource to their well-financed peers in the process. By taking these steps, Legionnaires’ civically minded playbills shaped the development of an industry that projected American cultural and economic influence for the rest of the century.

Recent debates in moral philosophy have placed significant emphasis on personal conscience, often elevating individual autonomy above all other considerations. This overemphasis has paradoxically led to the suppression of another’s conscience in situations where two moral agents must act together toward a shared goal, as in the physician–patient relationship. Critics of conscientious objection argue that recognizing its legitimacy fosters moral relativism or subjectivism. How, then, can conscience be properly formed and understood in a way that safeguards against relativism while upholding its rightful role in conscientious objection? This article argues that Aquinas’s integration of natural moral law, conscience, prudence, and virtue offers the most coherent and original framework for addressing these challenges. By grounding conscience in truth and sustaining it through virtue, Aquinas provides a robust basis for defending conscientious objection while safeguarding human dignity and moral integrity. While primarily theoretical, this study also draws practical implications for healthcare and institutional ethics, showing how a Thomistic understanding of virtue and conscience can inform dialogue and policy in pluralistic contexts.

Assessing systemic risk presents a significant challenge in finance and insurance, where conditional risk measures are essential for capturing contagion effects. This paper introduces two novel systemic risk measures – conditional interval value-at-risk (CoIVaR) and conditional interval expected shortfall (CoIES) – which extend traditional metrics by incorporating interval-based uncertainty. A formal theoretical framework is developed for both measures, offering a detailed characterization of their key properties and risk contributions. We then propose a comprehensive comparison methodology for systemic risk assessment, leveraging stochastic orders, dependence structures, and marginal distributions to establish conditions for ranking risk vectors. Finally, through numerical experiments and real-world stock market applications, we demonstrate the practical utility of CoIVaR and CoIES in quantifying systemic risk under uncertainty. The findings provide valuable insights into systemic risk propagation and establish a robust foundation for risk management in interconnected financial systems.

We study exponentiable functors in the context of synthetic $\infty$-categories. We do this within the framework of simplicial homotopy type theory of Riehl and Shulman. Our main result characterizes exponentiable functors. In order to achieve this, we explore Segal type completions. Moreover, we verify that our result is semantically sound.

This qualitative study was conducted through focus group discussions with members from three township communities in South Africa: Alexandra; Diepkloof; and the eThekwini Inanda, Ntuzuma and KwaMashu area. The primary objective of this study was to examine the crime of rape committed against patients and apprentice healers/initiates by traditional health practitioners. For generations, the Black population in South Africa has relied on Indigenous healers to address their healthcare needs. Many communities believe that Indigenous or traditional healers play a crucial role in providing primary healthcare and treating various ailments. However, this study found that some unscrupulous practitioners exploit their authority by engaging in non-consensual sexual intercourse with their patients or initiates under the pretext of healing or transferring healing powers to them. The findings advocate for the mandatory registration of all practitioners with the Traditional Health Practitioners Council of South Africa, as stipulated by the Traditional Health Practitioners’ Regulations 2024, as one measure to combat the atrocious behaviour of those meant to heal communities.

Antitrust is back, and neoliberalism is in flux. Led by a new movement that takes its name from Louis Brandeis, it evolved quickly from obscurity to prominence. How should we understand the New Brandeisians? This article takes an interpretive approach. I draw on Foucault, because he illuminates the vital role of monopoly in the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism and provides a conceptual framework that allows us to understand the debate between neoliberals and neoBrandeisians accurately as a dispute over the standards for making truth claims about markets. Whereas neoliberals developed a formal theory that promised to the excise the problem of monopoly from antitrust, neoBrandeisians draw on Progressive-era Legal Pragmatism to show how that project cannot stand up to jurisprudential or empirical scrutiny. NeoBrandeisians offer a meliorist alternative: although they concede the impossibility of fully ridding markets of monopoly, they show how a vigilant and adaptative antitrust regime can subdue market power sufficiently to serve prosperity, liberty, and democracy.

This article concerns a ‘craze’ for the tango that dominated Paris from 1911 to 1914. The dance floor of the amusement park Magic-City was one of the most elite venues in the city, and a significant site of the transformations to tango culture that took place. The Parisian tango, as exemplified by music composed by Magic-City affiliates René André and Camille de Rhynal, fit into specifically French notions of cosmopolitanism and aligned the dance with the idealized urban woman, referred to in advertisements, fiction, and the press as la Parisienne. At venues such as Magic-City, the tango was shaped into a form that suited middle- and upper-class French urban life and is reflective of ‘cosmopolitan modernity’, a concept borrowed from cultural theorist Mica Nava.

Planamandibulus nevadensis n. gen n. sp. is a newly discovered exceptionally preserved Laurentian phosphatocopid crustacean described from the upper Windfall Formation (Furongian, Stage 10) in Nevada. Planamandibulus nevadensis has closest affinity with the Baltic and Avalonian taxon Cyclotron. Its occurrence in sedimentary facies associated with dysoxia on the Laurentian paleocontinent fills in a gap in the global distribution of phosphatocopid crustaceans, facilitating a paleoenvironmental synthesis of this Cambrian group. We assess 75 taxa from nine paleocontinental areas spanning Cambrian stages 3 to 10 (~521–486.9 Ma). Comparison of these data with paleoclimate model simulations suggests that phosphatocopid distribution is explained partly by biogeography and ocean temperature patterns. Dabashanella species (e.g., D. hemicyclica Huo et al., 1983) are found across the low paleolatitude (<35°) paleocontinents of East Gondwanan (Australia), South China, and the central Asian terranes, spanning marine shelf carbonates to deeper marine black shale lithofacies, but are absent from mid- and high-paleolatitude sites, suggesting a warmer water preference. A similar warm-water preference is inferred for endemic taxa (e.g., Ulopsis, Parashergoldopsis) of East Gondwana, and perhaps for the newly described Laurentian Planamandibulus. By contrast, the mid- to high-paleolatitude paleocontinents Baltica and Avalonia are characterized by Veldotron, Cyclotron, Bidimorpha, Waldoria, Vestrogothia, Falites, and Trapezilites species, which occur in deep-shelf, cooler-water settings, typically below storm wave base. Hesslandona species sensu lato occur in mid-depth (likely above storm-wave base) warm tropical marine waters but are more typically found in deeper shelf and cooler waters in mid to high paleolatitudes. Phosphatocopids are also associated with sedimentary deposits characteristic of low environmental oxygen concentrations; this is emphasized by a peak in occurrences in the Guzhangian (Miaolingian) and Paibian (Furongian) stages, around the interval of the Steptoean Positive Carbon Isotope Excursion (SPICE) and its associated expansion of anoxic water masses onto shallow marine shelves. Our data compilation and data–model comparison support the environmental preference of phosphatocopids for low-oxygen, but not anoxic, water masses, and the new occurrence of Planamandibulus is consistent with this pattern.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/f136f8bf-1ccf-46b0-8980-b88be8f9603d