In the early 2000s, a video of Nina Simone's 1960 performance of “Love Me Or Leave Me” on The Ed Sullivan Show resurfaced online. The song's original piano solo, rife with references to the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach, clearly displays Simone's training as a classical pianist. Several inaccurate claims on the solo circulate in scholarship, magazines, and social media—some describe the solo as a fugue; others incorrectly attribute it to Bach himself. This article unpacks the racial and gendered implications of the Ed Sullivan clip's reception. The misreadings of Simone's performance, I argue, are rooted in a possessive investment in whiteness and classical music. By exaggerating Bach's influence on Simone, various media erase her musical agency to advance a romanticized view of classical music as a universal art form. These narratives obscure the way her stylistic heterogeneity emerged as a response to the racial and gendered structures that shaped her performing career. Through an analysis of Simone's four renditions of “Love Me Or Leave Me,” I demonstrate how she strategically inserts textural, melodic, and harmonic allusions to Bachian counterpoint within the structure of the song. Her performances therefore showcase a form of stylistic hybridity in which she draws on her classical piano training to synthesize the conventions of fugue and popular song. By challenging narratives that incorrectly label Simone's solos as quotations or imitations rather than original compositions, I draw attention to the inner workings of her stylistic heterogeneity at the piano.

This article discusses the activities of the Sino-Japanese Society of the Study of Esoteric Buddhism, which was active in North China from the early 1930s until the end of the Second World War. The organization was founded by Yoshii Hōjun, a young priest of the Japanese Shingon sect. It attracted the support of a wide range of actors, including a range of former Beiyang government politicians, Japanese diplomats, as well as prominent members of the Japanese community in North China. It had contacts in the Japanese military that have garnered the Society the reputation of having been a front for Japanese intelligence operations. This article critically investigates these claims and seeks to understand the relationship between religion and politics manifested in the Study Society for Esoteric Buddhism. Its history reflects the fraught relations between the two nations as well as between the various interest groups on both sides and thus provides a window into the complexities of pre-war North China in the 1930s.

This article examines Irish nationalist girl scouts in the period 1911‒23 with a particular focus on the organisation Clan na Gael (or Clann na nGaedheal). It illuminates the involvement of girls in Irish nationalist youth organisations in the early twentieth century and situates them in the wider contexts of uniformed youth groups and the Irish nationalist movement during this period. Like their male counterparts in Na Fianna Éireann, Irish nationalist girl scouts received forms of military training and provided military support services to their adult colleagues in the Irish independence movement. Thus, these Irish girls challenged the gender conventions of the time more overtly than members of the international Girl Guide movement. Participation in these groups could also serve as a conduit to future membership and activism in Cumann na mBan or the Irish Citizen Army. The contributions of Clan na Gael and other girl scouts to the Irish nationalist movement demonstrate that girls, as well as boys, sought to further the struggle for Irish independence. Yet, these adolescent female activists have received far less recognition for their efforts. This may be due to their relatively small numbers, dismissive preconceptions of their contribution, and the sparsity of primary source material.

Famars (ancient Fanum Martis) is situated in northern Gaul, in the south of the Nervian territory. Large-scale investigations undertaken over the last ten years have enabled in-depth analyses of archaeobotanical, archaeozoological and ceramic data, alongside other artefacts. These analyses have demonstrated the town's management of raw materials yielded by its territory, as well as the processing and redistribution of the finished products on a local and regional scale, and across the whole of northern Gaul. Such settlements were part of the Empire's system for supplying troops and inhabitants with food and materials of all kinds. Although data from perishable or otherwise ephemeral materials are limited, ceramics can act as proxy evidence of the production and distribution of other products. This paper provides an overview of these recent discoveries and places them in the broader context of Roman-period supply networks.

How do the tools of musical composition shape the cognitive processes of composition in absentia? In exploring the role of these absent tools, can progress be made towards an extended understanding of imagination and memory? This article posits the conceptual framework of ‘Integrated Tool Competency’ as a way of reconciling the powerful insights of externalist accounts of cognition with the fact that so much of the process of musical composition can take place without directly interacting with compositional tools. Effectively, this concept extends the integration of tools into a composer’s cognition beyond the moment of their use, including both unconscious competencies such as audiation and conscious actions such as imagining using a certain tool. This article proposes the concept of Integrated Tool Competency and discusses its potential ramifications for understanding the tools of composition.

To my mother, Penelope.

This paper offers an overview of the published material of the Epirotic sanctuaries. The presentation will be limited to the geographical area of modern Epirus (prefectures of Arta, Ioannina, Preveza, and Thesprotia) and it will cover the period from the Early Iron Age (eighth century BC) to the beginning of the Roman conquest (second to early first century BC). Areas of ritual character in Epirus range from shrines to organized sanctuaries. It is not always easy to identify the deity/deities worshipped at the ritual places presented.

If you were a candidate in an election, would you prefer more support from voters or less? Put another way: would you prefer that your campaign staff persuade more voters to vote for you, or fewer? These questions seem silly, because of course you would want more support from voters. Surprisingly, when using certain voting methods it is actually possible for more voter support to produce a worse result for a candidate; such an outcome is a type of monotonicity paradox. In [1], we searched for various types of monotonicity paradoxes in 1079 single-transferable vote (STV) elections from a database of Scottish local government elections. The purpose of this article is to present in detail two of the most interesting elections revealed by our search. These two elections are arguably the most paradox-riddled real-world political ranked choice elections ever documented, perhaps rivalled only by four single-winner examples from the United States: the 2009 mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont ([2, 3]); a 2021 city council race in Minneapolis, Minnesota [4]; the 2022 Special Election for US House in Alaska [5]; and the 2022 District 4 School Director election in Oakland, California [6]. The first election we present is the 2017 council election in the Buckie Ward of the Moray Council Area, which demonstrated the most extreme instance of a committee size monotonicity paradox ever observed in an actual election. The second election is the 2012 council election in the Steòrnabhagh a Tuath Ward of the Nah-Eileanan Siar Council Area, which demonstrated upward and downward monotonicity paradoxes, as well as a no-show paradox. To contextualise these elections, as part of our discussion we indicate how often these kinds of paradoxes occur in Scottish local government elections.

Laween is among several Palestinian theatre cooperatives established over the last decade, which have not received sufficient attention from theatre scholars. Born out of the struggle of living under Israeli apartheid, the repression of the Palestinian Authority, and alienation from NGO theatres, whose work has been depoliticized by reliance on foreign funding, the emergence of these theatre cooperatives represents a significant change in the Palestinian cultural landscape. Working with a renewed cultural and political consciousness, Laween seeks to reflect collectively on, and resist the various forms of oppression experienced by, the Palestinian community. The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, together with Israeli military and settler violence in the West Bank, make it more pertinent than ever to rethink what ‘cultural resistance’ means in the Palestinian context and to give attention to the community initiatives grappling with the brutal realities of ethnic cleansing through art. The interview here with two of the founding members of Laween, Mousa Nazzal and Hamza Al-Bakri, discusses the development, challenges, and envisaged future of this Palestinian theatre cooperative.

Meeting the buffer requirements of concentrate-fed dairy cows is a challenging task. We evaluated the effect of supplementing different feed additives to diets containing K2CO3 on feed intake, nutrient digestion and milk production of dairy cows. Eight peak lactation high yielding Holstein cows were used in a replicated 4 × 4 Latin square design with 4 periods of 21 d (14 d for diet adaptation and 7 d for sampling and data collection). Treatments comprised control (a diet containing a rumen buffer with the active component of K2CO3 at 6% of dietary dry matter (DDM) and containing 10% K); yeast, the control diet supplemented with live Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast (0.06% of DDM); essential oils (EO), the control diet supplemented with essential oils (0.02% of DDM) and; peptides, the control diet supplemented with biogenic peptides (0.16% of DDM). Feed intake was greater (P < 0.001) in the yeast treatment (33.2 kg/d) compared to the others (30.9 to 32.1 kg/d). Dry matter and starch digestibilities were similar across the treatments. Cows that were supplemented with EO had a greater energy-corrected milk yield than control, and those supplemented with yeast and peptides were intermediate. Milk protein production was greater (P < 0.01) in EO and peptide treatments than in the control, with yeast treatment intermediate. In high-concentrate diets containing K2CO3, supplementing with yeast increased feed intake while supplementing wth essential oils increased energy-corrected milk yield, with small effects on milk protein yield.