Anarchist, Black Liberation Army member, and “Gender Rebel” Kuwasi Balagoon spent a lifetime performing a practice of resistance and autonomy—“freedom as a habit”—given kinetic, embodied form in his Exercise Book. Kuwasi Balagoon’s writings, as well as recollections from friends and comrades, are placed in dialog with James Boggs’s writings on automation to explore the tensions and frictions in the encounter between automation as a social formation and the insistent enactment of freedom as habit.

The notion of strong 1-boundedness for finite von Neumann algebras was introduced in [Jun07b]. This framework provided a free probabilistic approach to study rigidity properties and classification of finite von Neumann algebras. In this paper, we prove that tracial von Neumann algebras with a finite Kazhdan set are strongly 1-bounded. This includes all property (T) von Neumann algebras with finite-dimensional center and group von Neumann algebras of property (T) groups. This result generalizes all the previous results in this direction due to Voiculescu, Ge, Ge-Shen, Connes-Shlyakhtenko, Jung-Shlyakhtenko, Jung and Shlyakhtenko. Our proofs are based on analysis of covering estimates of microstate spaces using an iteration technique in the spirit of Jung.

Environmental governance, often characterized as a tug-of-war between central ambitions and local reluctance, provides a valuable lens for examining the dynamics of China’s central–local relations and their impact on policy processes, enhancing our understanding of both the changes and continuities of the Xi Jinping era. By analysing the eco-transformation of waste management through the framework of political steering theory, this article presents a nuanced avoidance strategy used by local governments, which we term minimum compliance. This strategy allows local authorities to cope with and sidestep centrally mandated policies while avoiding the consequences of policy failure. This study enriches the discourse on China’s central–local relations by exploring why top-level design has not reduced policy implementation deviations. It also highlights how local governments in the Xi era evade policy responsibilities in their daily operations and hedge against political pressure.

We provide upper bounds for the Assouad spectrum $\dim_A^\theta(\mathrm{Gr}({\kern2pt}f))$ of the graph of a real-valued Hölder or Sobolev function f defined on an interval $I \subset \mathbb{R}$. We demonstrate via examples that all of our bounds are sharp. In the setting of Hölder graphs, we further provide a geometric algorithm which takes as input the graph of an $\alpha$-Hölder continuous function satisfying a matching lower oscillation condition with exponent $\alpha$ and returns the graph of a new $\alpha$-Hölder continuous function for which the Assouad $\theta$-spectrum realizes the stated upper bound for all $\theta\in (0,1)$. Examples of functions to which this algorithm applies include the continuous nowhere differentiable functions of Weierstrass and Takagi.