Legal institutions rely on monitoring and prediction technologies to enforce the law. Drawing on three recent books—Predict and Surveil by Sarah Brayne (2021), Data Driven by Karen Levy (2023), and Policing Patients by Elizabeth Chiarello (2024)—this review essay examines how the incorporation of these technologies brings about three shifts in the work of frontline enforcement. First, it broadens the categories of actors with the capacity to facilitate the formal enforcement of law. Second, it reorients enforcement to increasingly center on generating information for future use by institutional actors beyond the original information gatherer. Third, it increases the variety and frequency of agents’ decisions about how much to engage with new tools. These shifts are likely to exacerbate a persistent challenge faced by frontline agents: navigating conflicting goals and flawed laws with inadequate resources and guidance.

Sub-clinical ketosis (SCK) significantly affects post-partum dairy cow performance and welfare. A total of 11,327,959 test-day (TD) records over two years on 1.76 million Holstein cow lactations and 2840 farms were processed to ascertain thresholds for milk acetone (mACE) and β-hydroxybutyrate (mBHB) as indicators of SCK on the basis of a significant milk yield loss at the TD. The set thresholds for mACE and mBHB were 0.10 mmol/L and 0.14 mmol/L, respectively. The prevalence of SCK in the population during the first 60 days in milk (DIM) was estimated based on herd size and milk yields, utilizing one or both of these metabolites surpassing their respective thresholds. Analyzing both mACE and mBHB together revealed a higher occurrence of SCK in small herds (fewer than 100 cows) and a lower occurrence in the two most productive milk categories. The prevalence had an inverse relationship with the daily milk yield at 60 DIM, indicating a surprisingly high frequency of low-productivity herds in the risk classes exceeding 30%. These results suggest that assessing SCK prevalence through the combined evaluation of mACE and mBHB is a more effective approach than using the milk fat to protein ratio, especially when considering different herd sizes and daily milk yield at 60 DIM.

The essays in this roundtable emerged from a panel we organized at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association that took place in Montreal in 2023. With a focus on “ecocritical terrains,” the panel sought to rethink environments in the Middle East and Tamazgha (the broader North Africa) by paying attention to more-than-human ecologies. We use “Tamazgha” to acknowledge the reimagination by the Imazighen, the Indigenous people of North Africa, of the geography of their ancestral homeland, which encompasses the expansive space extending between the Canary Islands and west Egypt, from the Mediterranean Sea to sub-Saharan Africa.1 This remapping of the territory offers tremendous environmental and ecocritical opportunities that current methods of knowledge production about the region have not permitted to emerge or become part of academic conversations.

We prove that if a compact, simply connected Riemannian G-manifold M has orbit space $M/G$ isometric to some other quotient $N/H$ with N having zero topological entropy, then M is rationally elliptic. This result, which generalizes most conditions on rational ellipticity, is a particular case of a more general result involving manifold submetries.

A Yoruba ritual – the Oodua ritual festival in Ile-Ife – has been sustained over a long period, but has been adjusted under the pressure of modernity. Its relevance as a cultural practice is being asserted in multiple ways in today’s Nigeria. Ethno-nationalism is a key factor in the ritual in contemporary Ile-Ife in the sense that the Olokun Festival Foundation (OFF) is the agency through which the ethno-nationalism of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) is inscribed on the ritual. Although it professes to be a culture-promoting affiliate of the OPC, the OFF’s involvement in the ritual facilitates the presence of the OPC – a popular Yoruba ethno-nationalist movement – and thereby results in significant modifications to the ritual. Hence, the ritual has become an embodiment of new significations through which understandings of the contemporary face of Yoruba ethno-nationalism in Nigeria can be expanded. In sum, a combination of symbolic anthropological and sociological approaches reveal that the ritual in its modified form is culturally restrictive and socially integrative.

After publishing a new Qatabanic inscription that mentions the term kʿbt for the first time, this paper provides a South Arabian etymology for the pre-Islamic Meccan sanctuary of the Kaʿbah, which is derived traditionally from the Arabic word kaʿb “cube”. The paper suggests that the name of the Meccan Kaʿbah, and the Kaʿbah of Najrān, both derived from the ancient South Arabian term kʿbt, supposedly as a variant of the term kʾbt, which designates a high structure, probably with a protective function against water, a term which was later assigned to a sanctuary name for the deity dhu-Samāwī in Najrān; and not derived from Arabic kaʿb “cube”. The paper argues that the Arabic word “kaʿb” meaning “cube” was borrowed from Greek κύβος at a later time after the Meccan Kaʿbah had already established the cubic form that we know today.

The increasing economic value of Majang forest land that accompanied the establishment of large, state-run coffee plantations and timber production has led to growing tensions between Majang people and ‘incoming’, resettled ‘highlanders’ or ‘migrants’ from the Ethiopian highlands (known in the local vernacular as Gaaleer), which often circulate around dynamic land transactions. In the early 2010s, the Ethiopian government introduced a new policy of land registration to settle these tensions by regulating uncontrolled land sales. This article explores how past land deals generated contests and grievances and how the formalization of land titling resulted in aggravating these tensions, even triggering violent conflict in 2014–15, rather than resolving them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Gambella’s Majang zone, this article examines how contests and grievances attached to different interpretations of past land transactions between Majang people and ‘highlanders’, and their political implications, heightened when the government attempted to formalize land tenure in the early 2010s. The article makes an important contribution to our understandings of African land tenure and land-related conflict.

I have defined “Saharanism” as a racializing and extractive imaginary that operates across deserts.1 Saharanism “entails a universalizing idea of deserts as empty and lifeless spaces, providing the conceptual justification for brutal, conscienceless, and life-threatening actions in desert environments.”2 Saharanism is informed by an ideology that creates, sustains, and weaponizes the ubiquitous perception of deserts as abnormal environments that are there to accommodate actions and undertakings that would not otherwise be undertaken in places that are considered ordinary. Given its extensive history and trans-desertic nature, Saharanism encompasses a wide array of disciplinary and policy thinking about deserts, which has had dire effects on deserts and arid lands globally.3