“From this it arises that all the armed prophets conquered,” wrote Niccolò Machiavelli, “and the unarmed ones were ruined.”1 Moses was his preeminent example of a prophet-prince, since Moses relied not only on the revelation of Yahweh, but also on the arms used to maintain the way of life that revelation prescribed. For Machiavelli, the firebrand Dominican Girolamo Savonarola served as a timely Florentine example of a ruined prophet without arms, for mere popular support was not enough to sustain the serious changes the friar sought for Florence’s church and society.2 To be sure, in Machiavelli’s day, there was a widespread belief that the Western church had fallen very far from its apostolic origins; recent popes such as Alexander VI, who had excommunicated Savonarola and fathered Cesare Borgia, could well serve as an archetype of ecclesiastical corruption. But while many agreed with Savonarola’s denunciations of wayward popes and clerics, his attempt at reform turned only into a prelude to the return of the Medici to Florence, and their influence over the papacy.

The October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel entailed a disproportional military counterattack by Israel on Gaza, and on Iranian strongholds in the Middle East. Iran’s evident failure to fully protect its allies and military assets pointed to a receding regional influence. The US-Israel Twelve-Day War against Iran’s military, industrial, nuclear, and civilian targets in June 2025 exposed the scale of Iranian defense vulnerability. On the diplomatic front, Iran failed to work with Saudi Arabia to prevent bloodshed in Gaza or the Twelve-Day War, despite joint appeals to reduce violence and condemn the Israeli aggression. Saudi Arabia encouraged a ceasefire in Gaza, but it discouraged Tehran and its ally Hamas from regrouping against Israel.1 The Saudi response to the Twelve-Day War arrived belatedly, after other Muslim countries first condemned the attacks. Both conflicts revealed Iran’s frequent resort to niche diplomacy: seeking limited diplomatic goals without garnering momentum to resolve conflicts.2 Its triangular diplomacy to mobilize resources with Saudi Arabia to preempt Israeli aggression only served to sustain Tel Aviv’s hostility and cautious ties with Riyadh.3

Americans rely on the media to learn about the US Supreme Court. Historically, coverage was concentrated among a small set of major newspapers that regularly reported on high-profile decisions. The expansion of digital platforms and the Court’s decision to livestream oral arguments at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic created new opportunities for coverage, but it is unclear whether these changes increased overall media attention on the Court. Using new data to track how often Supreme Court decisions and oral arguments appear in print and broadcast-affiliated outlets, this article shows that the volume of coverage has declined in traditional newspapers but expanded (unevenly) across other outlets. These patterns challenge assumptions about stable and centralized Supreme Court coverage and highlight the need for scholars to account for changing levels of media attention when studying public responses to the Court.

Herbicide-resistant Palmer amaranth has been problematic within the United States for the past 30 years. The recent introduction of Palmer amaranth into the Pacific Northwest (PNW) prompted extensive surveys in 2023 and 2024 to collect seed samples for herbicide-resistance screening and leaf tissue for resistance-mechanism genotyping. Greenhouse dose-response bioassays were conducted in Kimberly, ID, during the summer of 2024 to assess the response of Palmer amaranth populations to selected postemergence herbicides. Resistance to glyphosate predominated across populations, and reduced sensitivity to 2,4-D, dicamba, and mesotrione was also observed. In contrast, glufosinate and saflufenacil provided effective control of PNW Palmer amaranth populations. Based on the dose-response bioassays, the effective dose required to provide 90% control (ED90) of the suspected glyphosate-resistant populations was 20 to 63-fold compared to the susceptible population. Subsequent 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS) gene duplication analysis was conducted to confirm glyphosate resistance in the Palmer amaranth populations. About 74% (17 of 23) of the Palmer amaranth tissue samples showed gene duplication, with up to 150 copies of the EPSPS gene. The EPSPS gene amplification analysis of plants that survived 2X rate of glyphosate (2,520 g ae ha-1) showed up to 150 EPSPS genes in glyphosate-resistant populations. The widespread glyphosate resistance in the collected samples suggests that Palmer amaranth populations are being introduced into the PNW from locations where resistance to herbicide sites of action has previously evolved.

Within the space of monotheistic options, trinitarian monotheism holds a puzzling place. It asserts that God is a single being who is, somehow, also three distinct persons. This form of monotheism has regularly been charged with being either inconsistent, unintelligible, or undermotivated – and possibly all three. While recent explorations of trinitarian monotheism have tended to rely on work in metaphysics, this paper turns to the philosophy of mind, showing that functionalist theories of mind prove to be surprisingly hospitable to trinitarian monotheism. This paper will address only the inconsistency and unintelligibility objections, showing that if role-functionalism (or something near enough) is both consistent and conceivable, then it is both consistent and conceivable that: God is a single being who is exactly three distinct persons because there is one primary divine person who interacts with exactly one system-sharing re-realisation of his own person-type.

Many of Yi In-sŏng’s works, including On an Autumn Day and Room in Summer, depict tropical plants and exotic vegetation. Although the specific types of foliage he portrayed remain unclear, Yi’s use of foreign foliage clearly conveys the allure of exotic scenery. Beginning in the 1930s, coinciding with Japan’s expansion into the South Sea region, images of palm trees and exotic plants found their way into colonial Korean homes. This article investigates the emergence of the practice of portraying ‘others’ in colonial Korea, with a particular focus on the artworks of Yi In-sŏng. Yi was a renowned Western-style painter during the colonial period in Korea, celebrated for his depictions of exotic landscapes and vibrant foreign flora. While Yi’s work is often characterized as an expression of Korean ‘local colour’, this article, instead, explores Yi as an urban bourgeois and delves into his appreciation for exotic elements in his work. By contextualizing the depiction of diverse rural flora and exotic interior decorations in Yi’s urban intellectual cosmopolitanism, this article discusses how the practice of imagining ‘others’ emerged in colonial Korea during the 1930s.

Critical thinking is supported by a rich and diverse literature, with particularly close ties to argumentation theory and informal logic. It has often been presented in terms of a set of skills and dispositions, with the latter exemplified through the figure of an ideal critical thinker. These accounts of the relevant dispositions are intuitive and tend to emphasize openness, clarity, and a concern for truth. Seemingly running against this impression, it is argued here that an ideal critical thinker can willfully engage in fallacious argumentation. This surprising possibility is grounded in the distinction between thinking and arguing, with the literature on critical thinking being implicitly and rightly limited to the former. The argument draws on an established account of critical thinking dispositions, a simple supporting view of the nature of dispositions, and analogies to familiar phenomena like lying. The result complements existing work on the subject in terms of what a critical thinker should do, contributing to our understanding of the conceptual boundaries of critical thinking and argumentation proper.

Academia, though not immediately associated with preserving humanity in war, has been instrumental in advancing international humanitarian law (IHL). Since the 1864 Geneva Convention, scholars have supported the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) by promoting IHL, researching it, and helping the law develop. In a world facing 130 armed conflicts, rising polarization and dehumanization, and a paradoxical mix of interest in and disillusionment with IHL, academia’s role is more vital than ever. Despite its contributions, however, limited scholarship exists on how academia has supported the ICRC in preserving humanity in war by contributing to IHL. How has academia promoted this body of law? How has research strengthened IHL as the cornerstone legal framework that it is today? What role have academics played in its normative development? This article explores these questions, examining academia’s endeavours to promote IHL through education, advocacy and public engagement; its research efforts to consolidate IHL, clarifying it and supporting its implementation; and its contributions to IHL’s development, from involvement in treaty-making to proposing new norms. The piece also calls for reforms in IHL education to enhance its impact, advocates for multidisciplinary and ethical research focused on compliance and other pressing issues, and urges greater inclusion of academia in structures and processes aimed at developing the law. Finally, the article concludes by issuing a call to action for States, universities and academics, and outlining pathways to collectively strengthen IHL and uphold humanity in war.

This article is a comparative study of Fedor Dostoevskii and Martin Heidegger’s messianic nationalism as understood in terms of their conceptualization of primordialism and racial purity. It offers, and further invites, a critical lens especially on Dostoevskii’s prejudices, viewing them as systematic rather than isolated. This article endeavors to offer a comprehensive exploration of the novelist’s essentialist premises through Heidegger’s philosophical framework of similar views on the “other.” Both authors claim that certain “truths” could only spring from the people, whether narod or das Volk. I argue that Dostoevskii and Heidegger arrive at similar warped visions of national destiny due to their formulation of the so-called primordial “call of conscience” and its attachment to their preferred poets. The point of my interdisciplinary effort here is to demonstrate that their racial bias is not limited to incidental remarks but that these biases are deeply embedded in the authors’ broader intellectual projects.