The provocative work of German artist Christoph Schlingensief may seem to be not possible today. However, it developed an afterlife of its own. Against the backdrop of current discourse shifts and political developments my article historicizes this work from the early stage productions at the Berlin Volksbühne after the fall of the Wall to taking to the streets of Vienna at the turn of the millennium, when right-wing populism entered government politics in Europe. Determining the politicality of its fabrication of public tensions, the article calls for a closer consideration of concepts of affect studies in theatre and performance analysis and confronts the memory of Schlingensief's work with a more recent production and their reception in the context of current discussions on race and gender. Turning to Claudia Bosse's IDEAL PARADISE (2016), a street procession in Vienna, it suggests to locate Schlingensief's afterlife in new performative formats re-negotiating contemporary affective politics.

After its launch on 30 November 2022 ChatGPT (or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) quickly became the fastest-growing app in history, gaining one hundred million users in just two months. Developed by the US-based artificial-intelligence firm OpenAI, ChatGPT is a free, text-based AI system designed to interact with the user in a conversational way. Capable of answering complex questions with sophistication and of conversing in a breezy and impressively human style, ChatGPT can also generate outputs in a seemingly endless variety of formats, from professional memos to Bob Dylan lyrics, HTML code to screenplays and five-alarm chilli recipes to five-paragraph essays. Its remarkable capability relative to earlier chatbots gave rise to both astonishment and concern in the tech sector. On 22 March 2023 a group of more than one thousand scientists and entrepreneurs published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on further human-competitive AI development – a moratorium that was not observed.

We study algebraic subvarieties of strata of differentials in genus zero satisfying algebraic relations among periods. The main results are Ax–Schanuel and André–Oort-type theorems in genus zero. As a consequence, one obtains several equivalent characterizations of bi-algebraic varieties. It follows that bi-algebraic varieties in genus zero are foliated by affine-linear varieties. Furthermore, bi-algebraic varieties with constant residues in strata with only simple poles are affine-linear. In addition, we produce infinitely many new linear varieties in strata of genus zero, including infinitely many new examples of meromorphic Teichmüller curves.

Let $\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$ be the mapping class group of the closed orientable surface of genus $g \geq 1$, and let $\mathrm{LMod}_{p}(X)$ be the liftable mapping class group associated with a finite-sheeted branched cover $p:S \to X$, where X is a hyperbolic surface. For $k \geq 2$, let $p_k: S_{k(g-1)+1} \to S_g$ be the standard k-sheeted regular cyclic cover. In this paper, we show that $\{\mathrm{LMod}_{p_k}(S_g)\}_{k \geq 2}$ forms an infinite family of self-normalising subgroups in $\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$, which are also maximal when k is prime. Furthermore, we derive explicit finite generating sets for $\mathrm{LMod}_{p_k}(S_g)$ for $g \geq 3$ and $k \geq 2$, and $\mathrm{LMod}_{p_2}(S_2)$. For $g \geq 2$, as an application of our main result, we also derive a generating set for $\mathrm{LMod}_{p_2}(S_g) \cap C_{\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)}(\iota)$, where $C_{\mathrm{Mod}(S_g)}(\iota)$ is the centraliser of the hyperelliptic involution $\iota \in \mathrm{Mod}(S_g)$. Let $\mathcal{L}$ be the infinite ladder surface, and let $q_g : \mathcal{L} \to S_g$ be the standard infinite-sheeted cover induced by $\langle h^{g-1} \rangle$ where h is the standard handle shift on $\mathcal{L}$. As a final application, we derive a finite generating set for $\mathrm{LMod}_{q_g}(S_g)$ for $g \geq 3$.

The President of the American Association of Law Libraries, the biggest professional body in the world for the legal information sector, tells LIM about his long career as a law librarian, his “ghoulish nature” and his unique method for finding volunteers.