There is a long tradition of excellence in research and clinical expertise in psychiatry across Britain. The BJPsych aims to reflect this wealth of mental science and practical experience alongside the very best of research and clinical practice from around the world using a variety of different kinds of articles.

Napoléon Bonaparte revolutionized the practice of war with his reliance on a mass national army and large-scale conscription. This system faced one major obstacle: draft evasion. This article discusses Napoléon’s response to widespread draft evasion. First, we show that draft dodging rates across France varied with geographic characteristics. Second, we provide evidence that the regime adopted a strategy of discriminatory conscription enforcement by setting a lower (higher) conscription rate for those regions where the enforcement of conscription was more (less) costly. Finally, we show that this strategy resulted in a rapid fall in draft dodging rates across France.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the San Antonio v. Rodriguez case, viewed by some as the worst decision in the US Supreme Court’s modern history. As legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky observed, the court essentially declared that “discrimination against the poor does not violate the Constitution and that education is not a fundamental right.”1 Five decades later, how does this case from the past continue to exert its influence on the present? And how might the present have looked different if the court had reached a different conclusion?

For this policy dialogue, the HEQ editors asked Bruce Baker and David Hinojosa to discuss the Rodriguez decision and its legacy, focusing particularly on how the case has shaped and constrained equity efforts in K-12 education. Bruce Baker is professor and chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami. A leading scholar on the financing of public elementary and secondary education systems, he is the author of Educational Inequality and School Finance (Harvard Education Press, 2018) and School Finance and Education Equity (Harvard Education Press, 2021). David Hinojosa is the director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where he spearheads the organization’s systemic racial justice work in guaranteeing that historically marginalized students of color receive equal and equitable educational opportunities in public schools and institutions of higher education. He is a leading litigator and advocate in civil rights, specializing in educational impact litigation and policy.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

While much is written about racialization of street criminals in the American media, racial dimensions of the media framing of white-collar crime remain underexplored. To address this issue, we analyze the coverage of bribery, electoral fraud, tax evasion, and insider trading in five national newspapers between 1950 and 2010. Drawing on John Hagan’s (2012) work, we trace the racialization of white-collar crime in the press back to Richard Nixon’s presidency and the beginnings of the War on Drugs. We also find that race is a significant predictor of offenders’ individualization, or the length of description accorded to them by writers. We argue that by individualizing black offenders significantly more than white perpetrators, reporters connote their oddity in the context of white-collar criminality and contribute to their collective framing as an exception. Finally, we find that black perpetrators receive significantly more positive coverage than white offenders, which serves to further underscore their distinctiveness from stereotypical black criminals and their similarity to nonthreatening (white) Americans. These findings support Hagan’s (2012) argument that racialization of street crime is mirrored by the collective framing of elite economic crime as white and, by extension, a nonthreatening side effect of American capitalism.

This Research Communication investigates how well U.S. dairy farmers understand the voting behaviour and willingness to pay of consumers for products with production traits relevant to animal health, welfare and biotechnology. Accurately understanding consumer behaviour is key to making sound production decisions and reducing risks. Comparing survey data with the literature shows that U.S. dairy farmers correctly assess consumer attitudes and behaviour over animal welfare practices like pain-controlled dehorning but could improve knowledge of attitudes towards antibiotic use and novel biotechnologies like gene editing.

The unprecedented suspension of cultural events across Europe in March 2020 had a profound impact on the performing arts. Alongside the proliferation of digital and hybrid modes of theatre-making, the Covid-19 pandemic has also precipitated a substantive shift in how theatres operate at both institutional and organizational levels in an attempt to respond to the volatile economic impact of the pandemic on the culture sector. This has provided a decisive moment for the reinterpretation of the theatre landscape, raising fundamental questions relating to institutional transformation that challenge precarious working models and entrenched hierarchical divides. Drawing on wider transnational research as part of the ‘Theatre after Covid’ project, this article examines the institutional effects of the pandemic on theatre and performance in the United Kingdom and the German-speaking countries. It details the findings of a wide-ranging survey conducted in 2022 with theatre workers and organizations that address how the industry is adapting and transforming in response to the crisis. Using this new data as a starting point, it analyzes how new forms of artistic innovation have emerged during Covid-19. By focusing on these institutional and aesthetic developments, the article argues that the pandemic has produced a paradigm shift that has crucially reinscribed how theatre is created, programmed, and understood.

As someone who has researched the effects on carers living with people with severe psychiatric disorders, the author describes her own recent experience of being a carer. The article serves as a companion piece to her psychiatrist husband's account of his cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease.

This research communication was designed to evaluate the effects of different levels of diet restriction on the composition and ethanol stability (MES) of raw bovine milk. This research was carried out using three electronic databases: Scopus, Pubmed and Web of Science. The main inclusion criteria were: (i) original research, (ii) use of alcohol (ethanol) test as a method to assess milk stability, (iii) measure different levels of feed restriction and (iv) allow access to the raw data of articles. Of the nine publications that addressed the subject filtered by the systematic review, seven fitted the selection criteria and were selected to perform the meta-analysis. Feed restriction (reduction of 20, 30, 40 and 50% of the dietary dry matter offered) decreased (P < 0.01) milk yield (−18%), ethanol stability (−5%), acidity (−4%), protein (−3%) and lactose (−2%) concentrations, but did not affect the values of pH, density, fat and total solids concentrations, nor somatic cell count. The correlation between milk yield and MES was low but positive and numerically higher in the control group compared with the restriction group. The milk of cows fed the control diet presented greater ethanol stability (76.5%) compared with milk of cows fed the restrictive diet (72.8%). This decrease by up to 4 percentage units due to restriction levels ranging from 20 to 50% of diet intake may cause limitations in milk processing at the dairy industry, increasing milk rejection.