Increasing evidence shows that genuine collaboration between scientists and Indigenous Peoples and local communities can deepen global understanding of species’ ecological distribution ranges, baselines and trends. In this study, we explore trends in bird body mass as reflected in the collective biocultural memory of 10 place-based communities on three continents. To do so, we conducted a globally coordinated survey, asking 1,434 adult participants about the most common bird species around their territories both at present and during their childhood. The survey resulted in 6,914 unique bird reports, corresponding to 283 bird species and covering an 80-year period (1940–2020). By combining our ethno-ornithological dataset with scientific data on species’ body mass, we assessed whether the composition of locally abundant bird assemblages has shifted towards smaller-bodied species over time. Our results show a general shift in the bird species observed over the participants’ lifetimes, with recent species assemblages being composed of species with smaller body sizes than those in the past. Despite variation among sites, we find an overall statistically significant body mass reduction of 72% across all sites over 80 years. This work illustrates that the depth of the current avian extinction crisis, which has been well documented by scientists, is also widely acknowledged by Indigenous Peoples and local communities through their deep ecological knowledge and place-based observations. It highlights the substantial benefits of establishing meaningful collaborations across different knowledge systems to increase the evidence basis that underpins biodiversity policy and practice.

Adam Neumann surely ranks among the most disgraced corporate leaders of our time. The former WeWork founder and CEO, who was ousted from the company in 2019, became emblematic of the corporate excesses and hollow boosterism of post-dotcom Silicon Valley. In the public imagination his name is synonymous with failure and fraud. But to the outrage of many he is back on the scene, securing unprecedented backing from venture capital titan Andreessen Horowitz for his new real estate venture Flow. This essay unpacks the non-death of Adam Neumann, interrogating why someone seemingly so untouchable is being funded at the highest level by one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous VCs. I argue that, through his atypical ‘exiting’ of WeWork, whereby he extracted billions from the company without initial public offering or acquisition, Neumann attained a level of wealth and power that made him ripe for reinvestment. The case challenges the liberal ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it’ myth of Silicon Valley meritocracy. US tech today increasingly takes the form of billionaire VCs funding already-powerful, deceptive and ruthless repeat founders. It is this increasingly consolidated and cynical system that enables Adam Neumann to ‘fail up’; rewarded rather than punished for his extreme misdemeanors.

This study addressed the prevalence of resilience within specific domains (domain-specific resilience) and across multiple domains (multidomain resilience), as well as the predictive value of resilience for long-term outcomes. Using data from 244 parentally bereaved youth ages 8 – 16 who completed multiple assessments over 15 years in a randomized preventive intervention trial, we examined resilience trajectories across 10 outcomes in five domains on which bereaved youth are at risk, assessed over 14 months. Resilience was defined as low, stable problems or high, stable competencies across assessments; and multidomain resilience as the number of outcomes on which there were resilient trajectories. Results showed that resilience was generally common within specific domains, though its prevalence varied across multiple domains. Multidomain resilience followed a near-normal distribution, with few people having no domain on which they are resilient or being resilient across all domains. Several domain-specific resilience trajectories and multidomain resilience predicted multiple outcomes 15 years after baseline.

In this study, we engage in a deep dive into Black Americans views of the Congressional Black Caucus. We argue that given the goals of the organization, Black people should be the CBC’s strongest supporters. We also anticipate that age will be a major cleavage in support for the CBC among Black people. We test our hypotheses using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). We find that Black people, and older Black people in particular, are the most supportive of the CBC. Moreover, we find that disparities in support among the youngest and oldest Black respondents are greater than the differences between Black and White people in our analysis. We empirically explore the causes of this intergenerational rift and show that younger Black Americans’ lower levels of support for the organization are in part tied to their lower levels of linked fate and their perception that elected officials do not work to advance their interest in government.

This paper traces enslaved people’s attempts at staking out liberty in Hamburg and attendant reactions by Hamburg inhabitants and authorities. It argues that in the decades before Hamburg’s anti-slavery laws were passed in 1837, treatment of people of African and Asian descent intersected strongly with ever-stricter alien laws. Based on extensive research in archival sources as well as newspapers and other printed material, the article contains two parts: First, it examines Hamburg’s few existent traces of attempted flights from slavery, pointing to conditions of escape and recapture. Second, the paper links these findings to Hamburg’s legal history leading up to its 1837 anti-slave-trade law, examining alien legislation, poor relief regulations, and domestic workers’ legislation. It also highlights how these policies affected individual lives. In combining legal historical and micro-historical/prosopographical approaches, the paper contributes to studies of Black German history, free soil policies, and questions around the policing of aliens.

Scholars trained in disciplines like anthropology, history, law, political science, and sociology helped to give rise to the field of law and society over the past two generations. What theories does law and society offer those disciplines in return, and are scholars in those fields looking back to law and society? To answer these questions, this article, which introduces a symposium celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Law & Society Review, brings together scholarship across disciplines to share the possible future influence of law and society on the disciplines. This theoretical and forward-looking inquiry invites us all to reflect upon law and society’s contributions over the past two generations and to consider what law and society will contribute to the next generation of interdisciplinary – and disciplinary – scholarship.

Bribery by the pharmaceutical industry is one common manifestation of corruption that can be found in a pharmaceutical system. This study analyzes patterns of bribery in the global pharmaceutical industry through a systematic review of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Working Group on Bribery Phase Reports published between 1999 and February 2025. These reports document investigations and enforcement actions related to bribery across jurisdictions. An inductive thematic analysis was used to identify key patterns in cases implicating pharmaceutical firms. We found patterns across many of the cases we studied. For example, bribery was often approved by high-ranking managers. Also, the use of intermediaries and complicated corporate structures to obscure bribes. Multiple cases revealed the involvement of subsidiaries, third-party vendors, or shell companies that processed payments disguised as legitimate transaction. Reported bribes amounted to about US$12.6 million, with sanctions exceeding US$1.1 billion. Government officials, regulatory authorities, and healthcare providers were bribed through cash, gifts, luxury travel, and fraudulent research to gain market access, increase sales, or influence prescribing. These findings underscore the systemic nature of bribery in the pharmaceutical sector and call for stronger oversight and accountability to protect public trust and equitable medicine access.

New challenges and opportunities are emerging to support young people to learn about socio-ecological risk. While experiences with risk are a daily occurrence, a new phase of history defined by global environmental change will transform lives in complex ways. All young people need to be provided with the knowledge and skills to critique the failings of modernity and learn to manage risk. For that reason, environmental pedagogies need to be balanced with critical understandings of risk across different societies. Forest research in Australia, Nepal and Switzerland highlights that understanding local perceptions of value and risk generates vital knowledge to inform conceptions of sustainable forest management, while providing critical knowledge and processes to support active learning. There are opportunities to guide education systems to help people develop understandings of how beautiful, biodiverse, forested landscapes can be managed sustainably within local socio-cultural contexts. Educators can utilise constructivist pedagogies to identify the values and risks of forests with walks, rides, explorations, monitoring, and analysis of different conceptions of sustainable management. In such a manner, learning about socio-ecological risk develops knowledge and skills, but also supports young people to become advocates and actors for positive change in the forest and beyond.

Sexual-identity disparities in substance use among U.S. veterans, and whether mental-health treatment mitigates risk for those with depression, remain under-examined. Using data on veterans from the 2021–2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH; N = 7,212), disparities were estimated in past-30-day nicotine, marijuana, binge drinking, and polysubstance use, as well as severe psychological distress (K6≥13) and past-year suicidal ideation. Guided by a biosocial/minority-stress framework, multiple imputation was applied (m = 20) and survey-weighted logistic regression adjusting for age, year, race/ethnicity, sex, education, metro status, insurance, marital status, employment, and income; among veterans with a past-year major depressive episode (MDE), interactions were tested between sexual identity and (a) depression-related clinical contact (DRC) and (b) prescription medication for depressive feelings. Bisexual veterans showed the highest prevalence of marijuana (33.5%) and polysubstance use (30.6%), exceeding that of heterosexual (11.8%, 14.9%) and gay/lesbian veterans (24.0%, 18.8%). Models restricted to veterans with MDE, past-year DRC (DRC defined as any visit or conversation with a health professional about depressive feelings) moderated risk for gay/lesbian veterans, with DRC associated with lower odds of binge drinking and polysubstance use; prescription medication showed a similar moderating pattern for nicotine and polysubstance outcomes. Findings for severe psychological distress and suicidal ideation were mixed and consistent with confounding by indication. Results should be interpreted cautiously given the cross-sectional data, self-report, small sexual-minority subgroups, and non-aligned recall windows (past-year mental health/treatment vs past-30-day substance use). Overall, sexual-identity disparities in substance use are evident, with bisexual veterans bearing the greatest burden, and engagement in DRC and medication among veterans with MDE, particularly gay/lesbian veterans, showing associations consistent with a buffering effect of affirming care. Longitudinal and qualitative studies are needed to test causal pathways and to illuminate lived experiences, and policy/clinical efforts should expand culturally competent, integrated services and routine SOGI data collection to monitor and reduce inequities.

This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.

The decline of native plant species associated with alien plant invasion is often assumed to be driven by competitive exclusion. However, invasive alien plant species could also directly or indirectly impact native plants by limiting reproductive success. Here, we tested whether invasive alien plants influence seed production, viability and germination using the Benjoin, Terminalia bentzoe (L.) L.f. subsp. bentzoe, a critically endangered tree endemic to the Mascarene Islands (South-West Indian Ocean), as a model species. Seed production was estimated from seed densities under the canopy of adult individuals from one of the largest remaining subpopulations of the species (in Cirque de Mafate, Reunion Island). Seed viability was determined using a tetrazolium test on the different sets of seeds collected in the field. Densities of seeds and viable seeds were then tested for correlation with the percentage cover of invasive alien plant species in the liana, tree, shrub and herbaceous forest layers. Seed germination was studied by sowing seeds in soils where three alien invasive plants, three endemics and T. bentzoe subsp. bentzoe had previously been grown. Seed production and viability decreased with increasing abundance in invasive alien plants in the liana and tree strata but not in the lower vegetation strata. Mechanisms specific to tall-statured invasive alien plants could include competition for resources, interference with pollinator behavior and mechanical constraints. Seed germination was inhibited by the invasive alien succulent Mauritius hemp, Furcraea foetida (L.) Haw. and T. bentzoe subsp. bentzoe itself but enhanced by the endemic tree species Poupartia borbonica J.F.Gmel. These species may differ in their resource use intensity, associated microbial communities and allelopathic effects. Our findings therefore suggest that plant invasions can significantly contribute to the decline of native plants through reduced reproductive ability and induce an extinction debt due to a lack of regeneration.