John McGreevy has written a book of such breadth and erudition as to daunt a would-be reviewer. How to evaluate so formidable an achievement? One could, of course, devote one's allotted paragraphs exclusively to praise, all of which would be merited. (McGreevy's engaging prose would come in for prominent mention.) But what then of the critical eye that every reviewer hopes to train on even the most accomplished work of scholarship? McGreevy himself suggests a way out: “Specialists will regret what is missing,” he notes in the book's introduction, “and rightly so.” Given the remarkable range of subjects the book actually covers, however, quibbling over its inevitable omissions seems neither charitable nor fruitful. Best, perhaps, to “think out loud” about the impact of McGreevy's global perspective on my own assumptions as a historian of American Catholicism. Needless to say, his is a book from which I learned a great deal.

Plato's Republic VII suggests that if we ask someone to philosophize when they are too young, they can become corrupted (537e–539d). Republic VII also suggests that to avoid this corruption, we must not expose youth to argument (539a–b). This is not a reasonable option outside of Kallipolis, so a question arises: does Plato describe how to correct corruption if we do not manage to prevent it? This paper shows that a parallel between this passage from Republic VII and a passage from Laws X suggests that he does. Laws X describes an impious man who is corrupted in the same way as the youth exposed to philosophy prematurely in Republic VII. While we leave the youth to his corruption in Republic, the impious man is helped to overcome his corruption in Laws with a refutation followed by a myth (also called a charm). This paper analyses these steps in terms of Plato's psychology, showing that both corruption and correction require a destabilization of the soul, which in these passages is brought about through refutation. This destabilization allows for a reconfiguration, which, with something that can restabilize the soul (for example with myth), can be a reconfiguration for the better.

In this contribution, I present a selected overview of optical interferometry imaging results that brought insights on stellar activity and mass loss in evolved stars. I briefly introduce the STELLIM project that aims to characterize stellar surfaces and circumstellar environments by producing fast and reliable interferometric images.

Short-duration archeological sites situated entirely within plateaus in the radiocarbon calibration curve pose unique challenges for our understanding of past processes at regional and global scales. This paper aims to overcome these limitations by leveraging the specific characteristics of two depositional contexts, the Early Neolithic Swifterbant Culture sites S3 and S4, located in the Dutch wetlands. These sites are of exceptional significance as they provide the earliest conclusive evidence of crop cultivation and animal husbandry outside the expansion of Linearbandkeramik (LBK) farmers in north-western Europe. Here, we present a customized approach that combines radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modeling, predicated on vertical sequences of short-lived plant remains. Our innovative approach enables us to determine, at a fine scale, the temporal position and duration of the prominent archeological contexts at S3 and S4, and explore the chronological relationship between the two sites. Through our analysis, we propose a new chronology for the onset of Neolithization in the Dutch wetlands.

This study analyzed the Doppler shift in the solar spectrum using the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). Two types of oscillations were investigated: long period damp and short period damp. The researchers observed periodic perturbations in the Doppler velocity oscillations of bright points (BPs) in the chromosphere and transition region (TR). Deep learning techniques were used to examine the statistical properties of damping in different solar regions. The results showed variations in damping rates, with higher damping in coronal hole areas. The study provided insights into the damping behavior of BPs and contributed to our understanding of energy dissipation processes in the solar chromosphere and TR.

We developed a new approach to identify vulnerabilities to water insecurity across entire archaeological culture areas by combining a paleohydrological model of the sensitivites of hydrological systems to droughts with least-cost analyses of the costs to acquire domestic water. Using a custom Python script integrated into ArcGIS Pro software, we calculated the pairwise one-way cost in time for walking between 225 water sources and 5,446 Ancestral Pueblo cultural sites across the Jemez and Pajarito Plateaus of the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico. This allowed us to identify whether periodic hydrological droughts occurring between AD 1100 and 1700 increased water acquisition costs across these regions. We found that hydrological droughts increased travel times in both regions to durations exceeding modern standards for water insecurity. Beginning in the fourteenth century, greater underlying hydrogeological sensitivities to droughts and the decline of a dual-residence pattern caused by population losses made the remaining aggregated communities of the Pajarito Plateau much more vulnerable to water insecurity than those on the Jemez Plateau. This would have upended long-standing relationships between communities and water on the Pajarito Plateau during a time when socioeconomic integration across the northern Rio Grande Valley pulled people toward valley bottoms.