The Japanese art of Kintsugi teaches that imperfections and failures are not flaws to hide but opportunities for growth and enrichment; it says that true strength and beauty come from embracing imperfection and learning from the fractures along the way. In this article Hélène Russell draws on insights from three conference experiences to show how KM professionals can make use of Kintsugi and act as the ‘golden joiners’ within their firms when it comes to AI projects, making use of their blend of resilience, organisational cultural awareness, communication skills, and adaptive knowledge-sharing practices.

The textual criticism of various passages of Propertius.

In Plato’s Statesman , the stranger compares the statesman to a weaver. The modern reader does not know a priori how the statesman and the weaver resemble one another and therefore could be compared, but Socrates the younger reacts as if the comparison is natural. This note suggests, with reference to the gender division of labour in ancient Greece, that the male ‘weaver’ did not do much weaving but was a supervisor, which means that the fundamental similarity between a statesman and a weaver is that both managed subordinates. This cultural knowledge explains why the comparison seems natural to Socrates the younger.

The Catholic Church notably condemns all forms of artificial birth control and advocates natural family planning as the only morally licit means of spacing births. This teaching is presented as the quintessential pathway to the fullness of human sexuality, but many Catholics struggle with it, and the magisterium itself recognizes that this path is not an easy one to follow. This article uses recent developments in Catholic moral theology around the notion of structural sin to examine the structural constraints complicating ordinary Catholics’ pursuit of their tradition’s vision for marital sexuality, demonstrating that larger structural forces can considerably affect the perceived viability of Catholic teaching on contraception. As a result, the article highlights the importance of linking Catholic sexual ethics and social ethics to provide a more credible vision for a more compassionate approach to married life.

Contrary to traditional thought in linguistics and editing, recent studies using corpus-based evidence suggest that historical English usage patterns influenced prescriptive usage manuals’ guidelines more than the other way around. To explore the modern relationship between English language prescriptions and usage, this study focuses on the wide-reaching genre of written online news and the topic of gender-fair language. It compares changes regarding gender-specific titles in the Associated Press's stylebooks to actual usage trends as documented by the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. Results from NOW show -man title variants as the dominant form in the early 2010s, consistent with AP style at that time. However, many gender-neutral (including -person) variants saw rapid uptake in usage in the mid-2010s to become the most frequent forms by 2021, contrasting AP guidelines that only started listing -person and other neutral forms as ‘acceptable' around 2017 and as the prescribed forms more recently. These results indicate both an increased cultural consciousness for changing gender equity standards as well as a willingness of many news writers, editors, and publishers to defer to culturally significant language trends even if authoritative guides do not yet endorse them.

This article presents the concept of a ‘haptic aurality’ in soundscape composition, an aesthetic and perceptual model derived from visual art theory, media studies and phenomenology that extends the haptic beyond its common association to vibroacoustic phenomena in the sonic arts. Included in this framework are both the standard haptic arguments, from psychology and engineering, including notions of kinaesthesia and proprioception, and varied definitions of the haptic as a not necessarily tactile mode of knowing touch that involves synaesthesia, transmodal perception and philosophical notions of sensory dedifferentiation. In adapting this survey of sometimes contradictory accounts of the haptic as parameters for compositional analysis and application, the article simultaneously creates novel engagements between soundscape composition and acousmatic practice.

The ideological nature of public health is a problem for the profession. Ideological uniformity in the field of public health undermines scholars’ and officials’ legitimacy and compromises their ability effectively to prevent death and disease. I first provide some evidence that public health is ideological and then I argue that the ideology of public health is counterproductive. Additionally, public officials are also likely to violate people’s rights in trying to advance their ideology through public health policy. In light of these moral considerations against the ideological nature of public health, there are compelling reasons for people to resist the expanding scope of public health insofar as it consists in the further imposition of this counterproductive and harmful ideology. I therefore conclude that the profession would be more effective and just if public health officials and scholars focused more narrowly on improving health outcomes instead of promoting their broader ideological agenda through public health policy.

Recent historical studies on the origins of the postsocialist order in eastern and central Europe have adopted a “long transformation” perspective. They emphasize the importance of state socialist economic and political experts who, as early as the 1970s, began to think in ways that would prove compatible with neoliberal governance after 1989/91. Sharing this interest in longer genealogies of the postsocialist transformation, the present article shifts the focus of attention from the history of expertise to the everyday practices and “work on the self” of members of the urban and educated classes. It presents a microhistorical study of courses for students and white-collar workers that were offered by psychology coach David Gruber from the 1980s in Czechoslovakia and focused on intellectual productivity skills such as speed reading. These courses provide a unique insight into how people worked on themselves to become more effective in order to adapt to the newly emerging postsocialist world. The present article points to hitherto understudied continuities in the understandings and practices of productivity between the socialist and postsocialist periods.