Sebell’s book offers a modest surface concealing a profound interior. Promising to examine a small portion of one work of Xenophon (Memorabilia 4.1–7), a portion that presents a seemingly dumbed-down education of Euthydemos, a less-than-promising youth, Sebell opens up that education to an altogether more comprehensive, genuinely Socratic one. As his title indicates, Sebell, through his remarkable and thorough analysis of this apparently half-baked education, reveals the education that Xenophon himself received, albeit indirectly (as all we readers perforce must do), from Socrates. As he suggests, insofar as the Memorabilia is Xenophon’s “most defensive or apologetic” Socratic work, it would “make sense for it also, in places, to be his most daring” (p. 16). Moreover, as his subtitle indicates, Sebell’s study promises a consideration of the fundamental question or questions of political philosophy: To what extent can politics be guided by reason? To what extent by religion? Do their respective modes of guidance somehow “limit” politics? Can they align or does the quarrel between the two itself somehow limit politics? And why does Sebell speak (in his subtitle) of the limits only of politics? As we discover in the course of his study, there might appear to be limits to both reason and religion as well, not least in their apparent inability to refute one another (Sebell insists Socrates acknowledges “the very real possibility of superhuman wisdom”; p. 203, n. 29).

True to his pathbreaking and imaginative scholarship, David Armitage has discovered a rich fabric of connections between opera and international law — links that have been largely overlooked by previous scholars. By reading Beaumarchais and Mozart alongside Abraham Wicquefort and other contemporary sources on ambassadorial practice, he brings out some of the implications of his historical and sociological argument that opera was born not only with the modern state, as has long been argued, but also with modern interstate relations and the law of nations. He makes a powerful case for the affinities between opera and international law, recapturing not just the broad interest both held at the time among political elites, but also their disruptive and even revolutionary possibilities.

Double aortic arch is a congenital vascular ring with tracheal and oesophageal compression, potentially causing stridor and dysphagia. While some recommend early surgery, others favour observation. We present a 7-week-old female with mild symptoms and prenatally diagnosed double aortic arch who suffered cardiac arrest, highlighting the need for early surgery in patients with vascular rings and airway or oesophageal compression.

The goal of this study was to assess starch degradability, protein fractionation, and fermentation profile of wet brewers grain (WBG) ensiled with maize or sorghum grains. Two treatments were prepared: maize + WBG, maize rehydrated with WBG; and sorghum + WBG, sorghum rehydrated with WBG, with 10 replications per treatment, adjusted to 55% dry matter (DM). Data were analysed in a completely randomized design using the MIXED procedure of SAS. Losses and pH were lower in maize + WBG, however, it also presented higher lactic acid bacteria, yeasts, moulds, and lactic acid (P < 0.001). Acetic acid did not differ; but propionic acid was lower in maize + WBG. The DM and EE were higher in maize + WBG, whereas ash, neutral detergent fibre, acid detergent fibre, and crude protein were lower in this treatment. Starch concentration was similar, however with higher degradability in maize + WBG. The A1, A2, and C protein fractions were higher for maize + WBG; while B1 and B2 were lower. Overall, WBG ensiled with maize showed higher A1 (ammonia) and A2 (soluble protein) protein fractions, and higher starch degradability compared with sorghum silages rehydrated with WBG.

The anomalous origin of the right pulmonary artery from the ascending aorta is a rare congenital anomaly usually diagnosed in infancy. When diagnosed later during adolescence, it presents diagnostic and treatment challenges, especially in determining whether pulmonary vascular disease can be reversed. We report the case of an 11-year-old girl who experienced increasing fatigue and was diagnosed with anomalous origin of the right pulmonary artery from the ascending aorta through echocardiography, CT angiography, and cardiac catheterisation. Segmental pulmonary hypertension was noted, but the operability was uncertain. A new non-invasive test combining 2D phase-contrast cardiac MRI with inhaled iloprost was performed. Flow measurements revealed a 42% rise in right pulmonary artery flow, indicating preserved vasoreactivity. Lung biopsy confirmed pulmonary vascular changes consistent with Heath–Edwards Stage II–III. Based on these findings, surgical reimplantation of the anomalous artery into the main pulmonary artery was performed. The postoperative recovery after surgery was uneventful, and follow-up catheterisation demonstrated normalised haemodynamics without residual stenosis. This case highlights the potential value of cardiac MRI–based vasoreactivity testing with inhaled iloprost as an additional tool alongside standard diagnostics for evaluating operability in late-presenting anomalous origin of the right pulmonary artery from the ascending aorta. Combining imaging, histopathology, and haemodynamic data allowed a personalised and safe surgical approach.

A meta-conjecture of Coulson, Keevash, Perarnau, and Yepremyan [12] states that above the extremal threshold for a given spanning structure in a (hyper-)graph, one can find a rainbow version of that spanning structure in any suitably bounded colouring of the host (hyper-)graph. We solve one of the most pertinent outstanding cases of this conjecture by showing that for any $1\leq j\leq k-1$, if $G$ is a $k$-uniform hypergraph above the $j$-degree threshold for a loose Hamilton cycle, then any globally bounded colouring of $G$ contains a rainbow loose Hamilton cycle.

Despite the widespread and creative use of heritage politics by a range of international actors, such as multilateral institutions and states, the field of International Relations (IR) has paid insufficient attention to the topic. To the extent that these politics have entered the field’s attention, it has been primarily through instances of highly publicized cultural heritage destruction during armed conflict. This special issue brings together eight research articles, as well as a framing introduction and a conclusion, with the aim of launching international heritage politics as an important IR research agenda. Moving beyond destruction to the productive politics of heritage, these contributions show the range of these politics from the construction of international cultural status to forging contemporary international alliances along themes of cultural and historical familiarity. Further, they show heritage politics at work in international institutions, from UNESCO to the ICC, in bilateral and multilateral relations, and as moving between international and domestic politics. In these broad deployments, heritage politics are attached to museum collections, travelling exhibits, archaeological digs, DNA tests, restitution demands, and debates on international land swaps.

This article considers John Owen’s introduction of the word ‘atonement’ as a term of art for Christ’s satisfaction in response to Socinian attacks on that doctrine. Owen’s innovation complicates the use of atonement theories in the dogmatic history of atonement by F. C. Baur and his successors, because Owen’s account of Christ’s work extends beyond satisfaction, and he uses ‘atonement’ to emphasise not the mechanism of that work but its relational necessity. Even as the framework of atonement theories obscures these aspects of Owen’s work, his novel use of ‘atonement’ lays the foundation for satisfaction to become an atonement theory in Baur’s sense.

In his second lecture about opera’s relationship with international law, David Armitage recalls Wagner’s quasi-origin story for Der fliegende Holländer (1843): the composer’s own stormy sea voyage from East Prussia to Paris via London and Norway in the summer of 1939. Although Wagner had already planned to transform the legend of the eternally doomed ghost ship into an opera, he insisted that his journey gave his ideas a characteristic musical-poetic coloring. For Armitage, this coloring had less to do with the Schauer (dark)-romanticism of the craggy Norwegian fjords than with Wagner’s experience of the sea as a space of legal exceptionalism and the ship as a vector of law in an ocean of lawlessness. On the run from his Baltic creditors, Wagner had crossed the East Prussian border illegally. According to Armitage, the journey lent both documentary and autobiographical significance to the action, redirecting emphasis from romantic and gothic visions of the sea towards its legal significance.

Sebell’s book provides an intense and insightful commentary on Memorabilia 4, built around the thesis that Xenophon’s central goal is to point good readers toward the theological solution to the problem of politics. That thesis is not overt in the Memorabilia itself, so the bulk of Sebell’s book is devoted to showing how better sorts of readers benefit from thinking through arguments originally addressed to a decidedly limited Socratic interlocutor, Euthydemos. But Sebell’s book is not easy. His sentences are sometimes labyrinthine in their complexity. And as someone Sebell would call, reasonably enough, a conventional classicist, my difficulties in following his argument are larger.

In 2023, a constitutional amendment that would remove male-only pronouns and replace them with gender-neutral nouns in the state constitution was proposed in South Dakota. Policy changes related to gender pronouns are a sensitive and politically charged issue, particularly in more conservative states such as South Dakota. In April 2024, several months before the vote, we conducted a survey experiment with 727 registered voters in South Dakota to investigate whether providing an additional explanation about the proposed changes in the amendment affected South Dakotans’ support for the proposal. We found that Republicans were less supportive of the proposal across all conditions. The results also showed that participants who were given an explanation of the proposed changes were more supportive of the proposal than those to whom it was described as only introducing gender-neutral language, particularly among women, Independents, and Republicans. Overall, we found that the attitudes toward the proposal were structured along partisan lines and that providing additional information about the proposed changes increased popular support.

This paper presents an analysis of the decapitated head found in 2020 under the collapsed wall of the Cantabrian oppidum of La Loma. This settlement was besieged and destroyed by the Roman Army during the Cantabrian Wars (29–16 BCE), either towards the end of the military campaign directed by Octavius   Augustus (26 BC) himself, or during the subsequent campaign, commanded by Gaius Antistius Vetus (26–24 BCE). Radiocarbon dating, taphonomical and anthropological analysis, and DNA analysis assign the skull to one of the defenders of the hillfort. This man’s head would have been exposed on the walls as a symbol of victory before they were razed to prevent reoccupation of the settlement.

Recently, Barros et al. [‘On the shortest distance between orbits and the longest common substring problem’, Adv. Math. 344 (2019), 311–339] adopted a dynamical system perspective to study the decay of the shortest distance between orbits. We calculate the Hausdorff dimensions of the exceptional sets arising from the shortest distance between orbits in conformal iterated function systems.

Concepts are the building blocks of social science. Yet, like all aspects of the discipline, they are subject to biases and unexamined assumptions. Rethinking how we use concepts is important for creating useful concepts and theories, as well as for broadening the perspectives that are recognized in the discipline. Nonetheless, today, there is insufficient guidance for scholars looking to challenge existing concepts. Despite this, numerous social science scholars, particularly qualitative scholars, have long used different solutions for reconstructing existing concepts to make sense of their immediate observations. In this article, we bring together these similar strategies under the banner of a single approach, which we call theory reconstruction. Distinct from both theory building and theory testing, theory reconstruction is an abductive, or “puzzle-based,” approach to research that uses discrepancies between one’s empirical observations and the literature to challenge key concepts. Using examples of existing scholarship, we propose four strategies of theory reconstruction (revising, narrowing, extending, and disrupting), each of which serves as an accessible way to unsettle entrenched assumptions in the discipline, invite new perspectives, and encourage more theory-based research.