During comedians’ performances, most of the usual norms around what we should and shouldn't say are, rightly, suspended. Yet there are still some offensive jokes that ought not be told. To mark such jokes out, some comedy nights and venues have adopted an ethic of ‘don't punch down’, ruling out jokes that target the disadvantaged, vulnerable, and oppressed. This article argues that such an ethic threatens to misdirect our attention. I begin by getting clear about the distinctive sense in which some offensive jokes can punch. Rather than focusing on what discriminatory attitudes the joke reports, or conjectures about the true beliefs of the comedians who make the joke and the audiences who laugh, I draw our attention instead to what a joke does. In particular, the crucial question is whether, and how, an offensive joke contributes towards undermining anti-discriminatory norms, or towards reinforcing unjust hierarchies and damaging stereotypes. In order to track the offensive jokes that punch in this sense, I propose two revisions to the ethic of don't punch down. First, that ethic overemphasises the relative position of the comedian as compared to the joked-about party and the direct target of a joke. Instead, our focus should be on what a joke of this kind does, in the context in which it is told. Second, I argue that the joke's audience is a crucial, and often determining, factor in our ethical assessments.

Integrating library instruction into studio art classes can be challenging for art librarians. While some courses have a research component, and thus a clear need for library instruction, many do not, requiring art librarians to creatively engage art students and faculty to demonstrate the value of the library in studio education. One way art librarians can do this is by encouraging students to see the library as a place for artistic inspiration through serendipitous discovery. But how can art librarians foster the idea of the library as a creative place through instruction? From the 1970s to the present day, studies have shown that artists and art students have a marked preference for browsing the stacks as an information seeking strategy. By aligning browsing with chance as an artistic practice and collaborating with studio art professors, art librarians can create dynamic and impactful learning experiences that lead to exciting outcomes in students’ studio courses. One possibility where serendipitous browsing's potential as a learning outcome can be explored is through the creation of book spine poetry, a found poetry technique where books are arranged so their titles create a poem.

Graduation is supposed to be a time to be happy and celebrate. So why does it often feel so terrifying, so empty? The work of existentialist philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre can shed some light on why graduation is a rupture that is so disruptive.

Anthony Comstock is synonymous with the Gilded Age crusade against vice. The 1873 “Act of the Suppression of the Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” – better known, then and now, as the “Comstock Act” – secured its namesake’s enduring notoriety. Most federal laws with an appellation honor a congressional sponsor, or, in more recent years, a victim of the issue that the law aims to address. Only the Comstock Act memorializes a man who was both the chief civilian proponent of its passage and the government bureaucrat tasked with its enforcement.1

The four books suggested for review in this article are very disparate; so what shall be attempted here is to bring them into conversation with each other, but also to explore what they reflect about recent scholarship and how they contribute to current debate.

Philosophers have attempted to explain humour in various ways over the years. Drawing on the main philosophical theories of humour – the superiority theory, the relief theory, and the incongruity theory – along with the psychological theory of benign violation, I elucidate what makes swearing (sometimes) funny. I argue that each of these theories has something to contribute to understanding swearing's funniness and that, in addition, its funniness also likely derives from two other factors. One of these factors is the glee that many of us came to attach to uttering naughty words when we were children. The other factor is the emotion-intensifying unpredictability (‘Whatever will happen next?’) introduced by the breaking of norms that occurs when someone swears inappropriately, which – provided that the norm-breaking does not introduce a threat – provokes amusement.

The radical right has become a central political force in most Western democracies. This process has been the result of the normalization and mainstreaming of its political leaders, discourses, and visions of society, notably involving the scapegoating of immigration and the use of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. However, the normalization and mainstreaming of radical right actors competing for the leadership of their overall political family remain an under-researched topic. The scope of the current article is to explore this phenomenon by considering the case of France, which after the United States, is the largest Western state that could potentially be ruled by a radical right president with extensive executive powers. The analysis shows that actors competing for the leadership of the radical right in a given country can generate diverging strategies of normalization and mainstreaming to secure their political distinction. Immigration and the Great Replacement constitute, respectively, a topic and a conspiracy theory that are emphasized and/or downplayed by opportunistic stakeholders weaving a web of interactions to define their comparative legitimacy and supremacy in the public sphere.

I thank Bentley and O'Brien (2024) for their cogent review of issues associated with inheritance and intention in cultural evolution. Intent is, of course, present in cultural process and that begs the question as to when and how we concern ourselves with it as a factor in cultural evolution (Rosenberg 2022). Intent underlies our understanding of both micro- and macro-scale processes of cultural evolution. Lamarckian microevolutionary process depends on decision-makers choosing whether or not to accept and sometimes alter cultural traits (Boyd & Richerson 1985). Zeder (2009, 2018) points out that even long-term change may be affected by conscious infrastructural investments that alter capacity for socioeconomic production and, subsequently, canalise later developments.