We define an involution on the elliptic space of tempered unipotent representations of inner twists of a split simple $p$-adic group $G$ and investigate its behaviour with respect to restrictions to reductive quotients of maximal compact open subgroups. In particular, we formulate a precise conjecture about the relation with a version of Lusztig's nonabelian Fourier transform on the space of unipotent representations of the (possibly disconnected) reductive quotients of maximal compact subgroups. We give evidence for the conjecture, including proofs for ${\mathsf {SL}}_n$ and ${\mathsf {PGL}}_n$.

We live at a time when experts are increasingly viewed with distrust. Conservative Member of Parliament Michael Gove famously said that ‘The people of this country have had enough of experts.’ In this interview, philosopher Linda Zagzebski explores some key questions concerning experts, including: What is an expert? How does an expert differ from an authority? And: What can we do to foster a healthier relationship between experts and non-experts?

This article examines how the British colonial administration and the local Chinese population interacted around the issue of obscene prints in 1900s–1930s Singapore, with a particular focus on the policing of the female nude. The notion of obscenity acquired different meanings as prints crossed geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. What was deemed ‘obscene’ in Republican Shanghai or Edwardian London was not necessarily viewed the same way in colonial Singapore, and vice versa. By tracing the contradictory assumptions about the relationship between nudity and obscenity in a multiracial and multicultural colonial context, this article demonstrates that obscenity regulation in Singapore was intimately tied to what Partha Chatterjee has termed ‘the rule of colonial difference’,1 with race being the most obvious marker of difference. On an institutional level, the rule of colonial difference led to a division of regulatory labour that ultimately rendered Chinese salacious materials invisible to the British colonial government in the early twentieth century. In terms of definitions of nudity and obscenity, perceived racial–cultural differences—central to the rule of colonial difference—were used both to justify and to contest the public display of naked female bodies to non-Western audiences. This situates the Singapore case within the broader scholarship on obscenity regulation and colonialism, and offers fresh insights into the difference in imperial models of obscenity regulation. By exploring how obscenity regulation was premised on the process of racial ‘othering’, this article also highlights race as an underexplored factor in existing scholarship on obscenity regulation.

Isidore of Charax, in his description of the region known as Upper Media, mentions several cities and stations located on today's Kangavar-Asadabad plain. Subsequently, historians and geographers of the Islamic period have supplemented the information about the ancient routes and places of the region. While, in the last two centuries, some researchers have located some ancient toponyms in the region, this research, for the first time, has reconstructed all the old routes and its possible branches leading to the city of Hamadan (Ecbatana), on the Kangavar-Asadabad plain during the last two thousand years. In addition, some suggestions have been made for the location of some historical places mentioned by old geographers. To achieve this goal, three categories of historical and geographical texts have been used, including the later Islamic texts (the Safavid and Qajar texts), the early Islamic texts (mainly Arab and Iranian geographical texts of the ninth and tenth centuries), and the pre-Islamic texts (mainly Greek and Roman texts, especially the Parthian Stations of Isidore of Charax), whose connection to each other is not intuitively obvious at first glance. While it is not difficult to recognize historical places and routes of the studied area in the later texts, it is complicated in the case of the two older groups due to their significant gap with the present time. Overall, the result of this research indicates that multiple routes were used for passing the Kangavar-Asadabad plain during different periods. Although all these routes eventually led to the metropolis of Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), the choice of one route in ancient times seems to have depended on various factors, including the season of the year and weather conditions, road safety, the kind of caravan (light or heavy), and so on.

The discourse on State immunity has traditionally focused on its application in judicial proceedings. However, in recent years scholars have begun to address whether the law on State immunity also protects foreign States against measures taken against their property by the territorial State's executive and/or legislative organs. This question has been raised following unilateral sanctions regimes freezing property of foreign States. It has gained renewed attention in the context of the ‘immobilization’ of around €300 billion of the Central Bank of Russia's assets as a reaction to the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. In addition, there are recent suggestions to subject these sovereign assets to further steps, including confiscation, the generation of investment returns or taxing windfall profits accruing to the entities holding the assets. This article revisits the various conceptions of the law on State immunity to address the question of whether a principle of State immunity against non-judicial measures of constraint exists. Based on a review of existing State practice and opinio juris, it argues that customary international law does provide for State immunity in this context. However, the article further contends that the content of the norm should be construed differently than in relation to judicial proceedings, recognizing the weight of public policy concerns of the territorial State.

From the late ninth to the mid-seventh century BCE, the Urartian kings expanded their polity from the Euphrates to Lake Urmia. In this context, the question of Urartian legitimacy and how it was achieved is a key issue. Previous research has suggested that rulers primarily used visual representations to appeal to different segments of society, but this article explores how royal legitimacy was also pursued through religious rituals and festivals, starting from the so-called co-regency of Išpuini and Minua (ca 820–810 BCE). By focussing on these rituals, which possibly reached a broader audience than visual representations, this study seeks to understand the roles of performance and religion in the early formation of the Urartian state.

Given a surface $\Sigma$ equipped with a set P of marked points, we consider the triangulations of $\Sigma$ with vertex set P. The flip-graph of $\Sigma$ is the graph whose vertices are these triangulations, and whose edges correspond to flipping arcs in these triangulations. The flip-graph of a surface appears in the study of moduli spaces and mapping class groups. We consider the number of geodesics in the flip-graph of $\Sigma$ between two triangulations as a function of their distance. We show that this number grows exponentially provided the surface has enough topology, and that in the remaining cases the growth is polynomial.

Fix $\alpha >0$. Then by Fejér's theorem $(\alpha (\log n)^{A}\,\mathrm {mod}\,1)_{n\geq 1}$ is uniformly distributed if and only if $A>1$. We sharpen this by showing that all correlation functions, and hence the gap distribution, are Poissonian provided $A>1$. This is the first example of a deterministic sequence modulo $1$ whose gap distribution and all of whose correlations are proven to be Poissonian. The range of $A$ is optimal and complements a result of Marklof and Strömbergsson who found the limiting gap distribution of $(\log (n)\, \mathrm {mod}\,1)$, which is necessarily not Poissonian.

Thomas Schelling argued that “The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” To this, he added a question: “Can we make it through another half dozen decades?” Contemporary technological innovation, weapons proliferation, increased modernization efforts, and nuclear saber-rattling have made Schelling's question an urgent one. Recently, there has been an explosion in scholarship attempting to test the resilience of nonuse. These scholars have focused primarily on methodological innovations, generating an impressive body of evidence about the future of nonuse. Yet we argue that this literature is theoretically problematic: it reduces mechanisms of nuclear nonuse to a “rationalist” versus “normative” dichotomy which obscures the distinct pathways to nuclear (non)use within each theoretical framework. With rationalist theories, the current literature commits the sin of conflation, treating what should be distinct mechanisms—cost and credibility—as a single causal story. With normative theories, scholars have committed a sin of omission, treating norms as structural and overlooking mechanisms of norm contestation. We show that teasing out these different causal pathways reveals radically different expectations about the future of nonuse, especially in a world of precision nuclear weapons.

Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument is one of the most famous arguments in philosophy. It is a surprisingly tricky argument to understand. Some philosophers think it’s a good argument. Others disagree. In fact they even disagree about what the argument actually is. This short essay gives three different interpretations of the argument and explains why I believe none succeed.