Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe’s essay ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’ sheds significant light on political and economic influences, freedom within academia, and the role of these institutions within wider socio-political contexts. I want to endorse some of his proposals and make additional suggestions to comprehend the complexities and potential directions of African universities.

Current political divisions are destabilizing existing laws affecting the health field. Major changes in the field of health law have one thing in common: changes in who holds political power ‒ Congress and state legislatures, governors, presidents, judges, and agency officials. The laws that structure financial, economic, educational, and health care systems, environmental conditions, and civil society are primarily the product of elections that populate our political institutions. These structural determinants of health in turn create laws that influence how ‒ and how well ‒ we live and whether our society functions fairly under the rule of law. Thus, who gets elected matters a great deal to the health and safety of Americans. At the same time, changes in health laws resulting from elections may reveal shifts in the structures underlying our legal and economic systems and whether those shifts support or weaken principles of justice and the rule of law.

In studies of violence against women and children during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as in explanations of men’s increased vulnerability to the disease, the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ regularly surfaces. However, direct research on men’s perspectives on the pandemic’s impact on them as men remains scarce. Drawing on interview data on urban Nigerian men’s lived experiences and narratives of the epidemic in relation to their identities and roles as men, I explore whether toxic masculinity was emblematic of men’s responses to the Covid-19 socio-economic crisis. While I found little evidence of the men’s reliance on toxic masculine practices to maintain their identities as men during the pandemic, their accounts revealed something quite significant: the reconstitution of masculine success in terms of the ability to adjust to the times by discontinuing practices that, while once essential to their identity as men, now threatened their image as capable providers. These adjustments, which frequently involved resorting to practices that would be considered unmanly, were constituted as part of the routine situational pivots that ‘real’ men must make, in keeping with their role as all-weather providers. I conclude with a reflection on how so-called non-heteronormative male performances might still mask gender inequalities and perpetuate certain aspects of patriarchal power.

This paper explores the cohomological consequences of the existence of moduli spaces for flat bundles with bounded rank and irregularity at infinity and gives unconditional proofs. Namely, we prove the existence of a universal bound for the dimension of de Rham cohomology of flat bundles with bounded rank and irregularity on surfaces. In any dimension, we prove a Lefschetz recognition principle stating the existence of hyperplane sections distinguishing flat bundles with bounded rank and irregularity after restriction. We obtain in any dimension a universal bound for the degrees of the turning loci of flat bundles with bounded rank and irregularity. Along the way, we introduce a new operation on the group of $b$-divisors on a smooth surface (the partial discrepancy) and prove a closed formula for the characteristic cycles of flat bundles on surfaces in terms of the partial discrepancy of the irregularity $b$-divisor attached to any flat bundle by Kedlaya.

Sardismos is the name, in several Latin works of literary criticism, for a combination of more than one language or dialect in a sentence. Quintilian (first century c.e.) uses the term disparagingly; the Christian author Cassiodorus (sixth century c.e.) uses it positively. A similar term, sardîstôn, is found in the rabbinic work Exodus Rabbah 2, created in the sixth-century Byzantine empire. This article is a short study of this term, the history of its misinterpretation and reinterpretation, its meaning in context, and its relationship to sardismos.

Il volume di Elisabetta Bianchi (B.) e Roberto Meneghini (M.), Il Foro di Traiano nell'Antichità. I risultati degli scavi 1991–2007, esamina i risultati degli scavi condotti, tra il 1998 e il 2007, dalla Sovrintendenza ai Beni Culturali del Comune di Roma (attuale Roma Capitale) nel Foro di Traiano, focalizzando principalmente l'attenzione sulle strutture murarie dell'immenso complesso, scoperte ex novo o riesaminate alla luce dei nuovi rinvenimenti, e sulle loro originarie decorazioni. L'opera si propone, come sottolineato nella Premessa, come prosecuzione e completamento di una prima monografia, ad opera del solo M., pubblicata nel 2021 nella stessa collana, incentrata sulla storia del complesso traianeo nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento, delineata sulla base dei sopracitati scavi 1998–2007.1

In 1974, the Center for Law and Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Law provided legal background papers on informed consent to research to the newly created National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Sciences. These papers were written by George J. Annas, the Center’s Director, as well as Barbara F. Katz and I, who were staff attorneys at the time. These papers can be found in the appendices to the Commission reports1 and in our book Informed Consent to Human Experimentation: The Subject’s Dilemma,2 in which we present a refined version of those papers. This project introduced me to the world of human research ethics and the complexities of protecting the rights and welfare of research subjects.3 Over the past fifty years, I have sat on Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), been a member of the FDA’s Pediatric Research Advisory Board, and engaged in varying activities related to human subject protection. During this time, I took for granted that consent forms were the best method for ensuring that subjects were thoroughly informed about all aspects of the proposed research. Like many IRB members, I spent considerable time reviewing, editing, and debating with other IRB members about the precise wording of these forms.

In clinical trials involving experimental subjects who are also patients, what is supposed to become of the imperative to focus on the patient’s best interest? A second set of policy questions concerns patients who want to die. Are there limits to the imperative to let patients choose for themselves? Is commodification a threat to autonomy? When, if ever, do costs and benefits become decisively important? Can we know what to count as a cost-effective preparation for the next pandemic? When we put procedures in place to protect against abuse, is there any way to prevent such measures from becoming bureaucratic obstacles to accomplishing anything at all?

Who created literary texts in ancient Mesopotamia, and did the Mesopotamians have a concept of “literature” (→ 1)? A core witness is the song Innana B / nin me šara (NMS → 2). New translations and an inductive analysis of references to text, addressee, and speaker reveals NMS to be created by a priestess for a war ritual (→ 3). Instead of staking a claim to authorship, however, the song stresses a claim for priesthood (→ 4). New evidence shows why: the creators of ritual songs are gods, and En-ḫedu-ana is only allowed to create such a song when she herself acts as a priestess embodying a deity (→ 5 and 6). The last section will offer proof that NMS belongs to the category of literature, from both ancient and modern perspectives, and explain why it is also to be regarded as both a mythic and ritual text (→ 7).The analysis demonstrates the birth of literature through the goddess Nin-gal, embodied in En-ḫedu-ana.