We start this survey in Italy during the early first millennium bce; a context on which Seth Bernard's new monograph offers an exciting, and in several respects transformative, contribution.1 Its general claim is that, while Rome did not develop a historiographical tradition until Fabius Pictor, there was a keen and pervasive interest in history across ancient Italy, since the early Iron Age, which played out across a wide range of venues and media. The brief of the historian must be to jettison any hierarchical approach to the interplay between textual and archaeological evidence, and to take as broad a view on what history amounts to as possible.

Black Power and existentialism were mutually reinforcing movements in the late 1960s. Stokely Carmichael used French existentialism to shape some Black Power principles, which demonstrated existentialism’s continued relevance to racial equality. Existentialism reinforced values, such as moral purpose and self-definition, which supported positive appraisals of Black Power revolt on campuses. Carmichael’s adoption of French existentialism illuminates transnational influences on Black Power dating to the 1940s, as well as how important French existentialist texts amplified Black perspectives. The meeting of French existentialism and Black Power assisted increased representation of Black perspectives on campuses, and popular awareness that representation was as important as desegregation to equality.

Understanding why people choose to adapt or emigrate when facing slow-onset climate events is central to the design and implementation of policy addressing displacement spurred by climate change, especially climate-refugee programs. In this article, we leverage extensive field interviews and a novel survey in the Federated States of Micronesia, a country at high risk of environmental degradation but whose citizens have carte blanche access to the United States. We find that despite a general awareness of environmental risks, these play a minor role in migration decision making. Instead, other factors like work, health, and family obligations take precedence.

In order to better characterise carbonaceous components in atmospheric aerosols and to assess the contributions of fossil carbon (FC) and non-fossil carbon (NFC) sources and their seasonality in the Eastern Mediterranean, we collected fine (PM1.3) aerosols at a remote marine background site, the Finokalia Research Station, Crete, Greece, over a period of one-year. PM1.3 samples were analysed for elemental carbon (EC), organic carbon (OC), water-soluble OC (WSOC), and stable carbon isotope ratio (δ13CTC) and radiocarbon content (14CTC) (pMC) of total carbon (TC). All the parameters, i.e., PM1.3, δ13CTC and 14CTC showed a clear temporal pattern with higher values in summer and lower values in autumn. The 14CTC ranged from 54.7 to 99.1 pMC with an average of 74.5 pMC during the entire year. The FC content in TC (FCTC) was found to be slightly lower in winter and almost stable in other seasons, whereas the NFC contents (NFCTC) showed a clear seasonality with the highest level in summer followed by spring and the lowest level in winter. Based on these results together with the seasonal distributions of organic tracers, we found that biomass burning (BB) and soil dust are two major sources of the fine aerosols in winter. Although biogenic emissions of VOCs followed by subsequent secondary oxidation processes are significant in summer followed by spring and autumn, pollen is a significant contributor to TC in spring. This study showed that emissions from fossil fuel combustion are significant (25.5%) but minor compared to NFC sources in the eastern Mediterranean.

Globally, there is seasonal variation in tuberculosis (TB) incidence, yet the biological and behavioural or social factors driving TB seasonality differ across countries. Understanding season-specific risk factors that may be specific to the UK could help shape future decision-making for TB control. We conducted a time-series analysis using data from 152,424 UK TB notifications between 2000 and 2018. Notifications were aggregated by year, month, and socio-demographic covariates, and negative binomial regression models fitted to the aggregate data. For each covariate, we calculated the size of the seasonal effect as the incidence risk ratio (IRR) for the peak versus the trough months within the year and the timing of the peak, whilst accounting for the overall trend. There was strong evidence for seasonality (p < 0.0001) with an IRR of 1.27 (95% CI 1.23–1.30). The peak was estimated to occur at the beginning of May. Significant differences in seasonal amplitude were identified across age groups, ethnicity, site of disease, latitude and, for those born abroad, time since entry to the UK. The smaller amplitude in older adults, and greater amplitude among South Asians and people who recently entered the UK may indicate the role of latent TB reactivation and vitamin D deficiency in driving seasonality.

We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frieman (2024: 1421) notes, ideas and practices persist because they are “valued, recreated, manipulated, instrumentalised and enacted generation after generation”; and as Ingold (2024: 1417) puts it, traditional tasks “are not subject to the free will of the individual but fall upon practitioners as part of their responsibilities” to their communities. Drawing on the practice of Bronze Age metallurgy, Pollard (2024) asks the million-dollar questions: how does innovation occur, and what causes it? As both Prentiss (2024) and Pollard note, for example, the pace of technological change is often punctuated, an observation common across the natural and social sciences, but one that defies easy explanation (e.g. Duran-Nebreda et al. 2024; O'Brien et al. 2024).

Eusebius’ much-discussed catalogue of ‘acknowledged’, ‘disputed’ and ‘spurious’ works (Historia Ecclesiastica 3.25) is a key passage in the history of New Testament canon formation, but it is often extracted from its literary context and consequently misunderstood. This passage is in fact a summary of conclusions that Eusebius has already reached in the contributions to apostolic biography with which he supplements the Book of Acts in HE 2.1–3.24. Biographical passages relating the conclusion of the apostolic lives of James, Peter, Paul and John are accompanied by statements about the texts they authored or authorised, or that have been falsely attributed to them. This biographical context for differentiating genuine works of prestigious figures from their pseudepigraphal counterparts has its roots in Greco-Roman literary culture, as exemplified in the Lives of the Philosophers of Diogenes Laertius. Eusebius’ crucial contribution to the formation of the New Testament canon is thus rooted not in exclusively Christian concerns but in the wider literary culture of Late Antiquity.

The WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) does not legally define what entities should be covered by the Agreement. However, its member Parties list their ‘covered entities’ in a series of schedules. The list approach has complicated accession negotiations and discourages Parties from providing a ‘wider’ range of entity coverage. Moreover, the list approach raises some tensions and a lack of legal certainty, especially concerning those that are not strictly ‘government entities’, such as State-owned enterprises (SOEs). This problem is exacerbated in the case of modern SOEs in developing countries, many of which can bear both public and private features. Given these conditions, the author proposes a definition of ‘covered entities’ to facilitate accession negotiations and the future expansion of the GPA. The proposal is based on a comparative study of the GPA and the EU public procurement regulations. It develops a framework by which all publicly controlled entities are presumably covered by the GPA. Nevertheless, Parties can rebut GPA obligations by proving that an entity competes with other commercial entities under normal market conditions.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace … Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves … Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs …

As more people are displaced by climate change, public acceptance of migrants is an increasingly relevant geographical and political issue. How willing are Americans to accept climate migrants and how does this support compare to others who are fleeing conflict? We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment (N=1,027) with prompts that varied the context of refugee resettlement, including a control condition without context, those displaced by global warming, refugees from Ukraine, and refugees from Afghanistan. Respondents expressed marginally lower willingness to admit climate migrants and significantly higher willingness to admit Ukrainian refugees. These differences were amplified by partisanship, religion, and race. These results suggest that some migrants experience a more welcoming public than others and highlight a challenge for those who are made vulnerable by climate change.

Statistics, ableism and domestic colonialism were inextricably intertwined in Britain over the long nineteenth century, based on both engineering people deemed to be “backward” and improving “waste” land, which together were used to justify farm colonies for the disabled, bookended by two key moments. The first is Sir John Sinclair's introduction of descriptive statistics into the English language in order to provide a foundation for domestic colonization which, as the founding president of the British Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, he promoted. He also enlisted Jeremy Bentham, who published his own domestic colonization plan (massive pauper panopticons on waste land) rooted in the statistics of his pauper population table. The second key moment occurs at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Sir Francis Galton develops key statistical arithmetic methods as the foundation for eugenics and his defense of compulsory segregation of the mentally disabled into domestic farm colonies.

The rise of populism concerns many political scientists and practitioners, yet the detection of its underlying language remains fragmentary. This paper aims to provide a reliable, valid, and scalable approach to measure populist rhetoric. For that purpose, we created an annotated dataset based on parliamentary speeches of the German Bundestag (2013–2021). Following the ideational definition of populism, we label moralizing references to “the virtuous people” or “the corrupt elite” as core dimensions of populist language. To identify, in addition, how the thin ideology of populism is “thickened,” we annotate how populist statements are attached to left-wing or right-wing host ideologies. We then train a transformer-based model (PopBERT) as a multilabel classifier to detect and quantify each dimension. A battery of validation checks reveals that the model has a strong predictive accuracy, provides high qualitative face validity, matches party rankings of expert surveys, and detects out-of-sample text snippets correctly. PopBERT enables dynamic analyses of how German-speaking politicians and parties use populist language as a strategic device. Furthermore, the annotator-level data may also be applied in cross-domain applications or to develop related classifiers.

Research has shown that as the size of government assistance programs grow, and the recipients of such programs are increasingly non-white and/or non-citizen, public support for them declines. Our study examines this phenomenon on the question of deservingness in federal disaster assistance. Using a 2018 survey experiment that leverages two devastating hurricanes—Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Harvey—that hit different parts of the United States in 2017, we explore how the social identities of race/ethnicity and partisanship affect attitudes about disaster deservingness. Our results demonstrate that although federal disaster assistance has broad support, it is contingent on perceptions about the disaster victim and the type of assistance. Respondents were less likely to support disaster assistance to Hurricane Maria–affected people than those affected by Hurricane Harvey. Moreover, white and Republican respondents were more likely to favor market-based assistance whereas race-/ethnic-minority and Democratic respondents were more likely to support more generous forms of disaster assistance. These findings have important implications for the allocation of disaster funds as climate change intensifies and the frequency of billion-dollar disaster events increases. This is exacerbated by political polarization and heightened social vulnerability due to changing population demographics.

In the vein of important observations made by several scholars, in this article I discuss a variegated corpus of early sefirotic passages attesting to the prevalence and conventionality of spherical perceptions of the sefirot, already at the earliest stages of the sefirotic literature known to us. First, I show that for at least a substantial number of the earliest authors, seeing the sefirot as a set of concentric, hierarchical spherical divine entities was a self-evident premise. Second, I offer a tripartite division of the material, based on the different types of inner hierarchies characterizing the spherical descriptions. For each of these types I offer a relevant ideational context, related to contemporary cosmological conventions as well as to various theological notions.

This article summarises the BJPsych Bulletin 2024 special edition on mental health in criminal justice and correctional settings. The edition considers issues across a range of settings, including police custody, the courts and prisons, as well as considering wider international questions and systems within the field. In this edition, we assert the right of the individual to healthcare services that should be available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality. Psychiatry must play a significant role in shaping this debate as it moves forward.

Historically, trans people have been excluded from politics. Despite political under representation, trans interests increasingly appear on the political agenda in the Netherlands and Germany. In 2021, trans women were elected to the Dutch and German parliaments for the first time. However, increased trans visibility is accompanied by backlash and transphobia. The political representation of trans people does not follow a familiar pattern from elected descriptive representatives to increased substantive representation of interests. What mechanisms shape the political representation of trans people? We argue that symbolic representation shapes possibilities for descriptive and substantive representation of trans people. The analysis of symbolic representation of transpeople draws on a combination of 1) qualitative text analysis of Dutch and German parliamentary documents, research reports, and trans activists’ publications and 2) in-depth interviews with trans andcisgender representatives, candidates, and activists. The findings demonstrate how political spaces are not only gendered, but also cisgendered and heteronormative.