To understand the early modern Caribbean, we must understand the societies that inhabited it. The parameters through which historians approach these societies have changed drastically in the last decade. While recent interventions have proven useful for framing our attitude to how populations in the Caribbean formed, they are less effective when applied to societies whose longevity was uncertain that, in some cases, fractured or collapsed. It is in this context that some historians have identified what they term “sinew populations”: communities whose “off-grid” nature necessitates different ways of thinking about how they functioned. Recent works have discussed how sinew populations ensured the long-term viability of their communities, but this approach also requires attention to the factors that could render a sinew population’s existence unviable.

This article uses an eighteenth-century Caribbean population of pirates as a case study to illustrate the issue of viability within sinew populations. In particular, the article emphasizes the weak social foundations on which this sinew population was built and the lack of interest among the pirates themselves, after 1718, in maintaining a large pirate population. In thinking about how pirates related to one another and what this meant for the long-term survival of the pirate sinew population, this article demonstrates the importance of social maintenance for understanding how Caribbean societies operated.

This study uncovers a previously overlooked chapter in the historiography of civil disobedience: Menachem Begin’s resistance to Israeli emergency legislation between 1948 and 1954, which he argued undermined foundational democratic principles. It presents the first scholarly analysis of Begin’s resistance, contending that it constitutes a clear instance of civil disobedience, embodying its core tenets. At the heart of this historical case study lies a paradigmatic question: how can laws that erode foundational—yet abstract—democratic principles, such as the separation of powers, be effectively resisted, and can such resistance be accommodated within traditional frameworks of civil disobedience? Begin’s struggle brings these questions into sharp relief, illuminating longstanding critiques of the framework’s overly restrictive boundaries and underscoring the tension between theoretical frameworks and political reality. More broadly, the article engages central debates at the intersection of law, politics, and democratic thought. By examining the democratic convictions of a prominent right-wing leader, it contributes to historical scholarship on the role of conservative and right-wing movements in shaping democratic ideologies, while also providing a historical reference point for subsequent ideological transformations and radicalization processes within these movements. Finally, by illuminating the complexities inherent in opposing laws that erode core-yet abstract-democratic principles, this study resonates with contemporary debates on democratic backsliding, offering a historical lens through which civil disobedience has served as a principled response to such challenges.

Our collective futures depend on ecological stewardship rooted in both understanding of and care for the complex relationships of forest ecosystems. In particular, nuanced insight into forests’ entwined link with climate change is integral to policies and practices that can mitigate the worst climate impacts and sustain resilient multispecies communities. To this end, we foreground a creative approach to critical data literacies in the context of the biodiversity and climate crises. As part of the project Forest Carbon Futures, we present three explorations into different creative avenues for representing data, which share common aims of exploring the value of storytelling and situatedness in supporting more palpable connections between people, forests, stewardship responsibility, collective agency and more resilient futures. We position this inquiry as a valuable facet within an emerging field of Critical Forest Studies that holds promise in fostering ecologically-attuned understanding and care in relation to forest landscapes. Through interdisciplinary co-inquiry grounded in design and creation methodologies, we offer a constellation of interlinked themes, strategies and insights to inform transformative approaches to environmental education in our current era of ecological disconnect and rampant mis/disinformation.

The Chignecto Isthmus is the sole land connection between Nova Scotia and mainland Canada, supporting national trade, agriculture and transportation. Much of this low-lying corridor is protected by aging dikes that are increasingly vulnerable to compound flooding from tides, storm surges and sea-level rise. This study combines static flood modeling and GIS-based land use classification to evaluate the elevation-based flood exposure of infrastructure and agricultural land. A planar water surface modeling approach validated with differential GPS measurements was applied to a 1-m-resolution digital elevation model. Results indicate that water levels in the adjacent basin can reach within 1 m of the mean dike crest elevation during spring tides. Planar surface modeling scenarios demonstrate that relatively modest increases in water level beyond this threshold could result in inundation, affecting thousands of hectares of cropland and hundreds of hectares of developed land, along with critical transportation infrastructure. This exposure has the potential to disrupt agricultural productivity, rural livelihoods, groundwater quality and interprovincial supply chains across the isthmus. While simplified, this analysis highlights the diminishing safety margin afforded by existing dikes, underscores the need for more detailed scenario-based modeling and reinforces the importance of proactive adaptation planning to safeguard this nationally significant corridor.

This article examines the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) as a transformative political movement that has emerged from Pakistan’s historically marginalized borderland region. Immediately following the aftermath of Naqibullah Mehsud’s extrajudicial killing on January 13, 2018, the PTM exceeded its initial demand for justice to articulate a broader critique of state violence, militarization, and structural inequalities faced by Pashtuns in Pakistan. Drawing on postcolonial theory, this article attempts to situate PTM within the genealogy of colonial indirect rule and Pakistan’s continuation of exceptional governance in its frontier region through mechanisms such as the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), and to examine how such practices produced a space of exclusion in which Pashtuns were simultaneously securitized and silenced. The article’s main argument is that PTM represents a rupture in this historical pattern by generating a “neo-Pashtun consciousness” forged in urban centers through student politics; digital networks; and the lived realities of profiling, displacement, and everyday state surveillance. Through ethnographic accounts, the analysis highlights how PTM disrupted hegemonic binaries of citizen/terrorist and periphery/center by examining the internal contestations and ideological resistance the movement faced within the Pashtun community, which were shaped by state propaganda, class interests, and suspicion of authenticity. Mainly focused on both support and opposition to PTM within the Pashtun population, this article also argues that PTM sheds light on the dialectics of political agency in Pakistan, where hegemony and resistance continually redefine the boundaries of citizenship, justice, and collective memory.

We show that the set of locally finite Borel graphs with finite Borel asymptotic dimension is $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }^1_2$-complete. The result is based on a combinatorial characterization of finite Borel asymptotic dimension for graphs generated by a single Borel function. As an application of this characterization, we classify the complexities of digraph homomorphism problems for this class of graphs.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Latin American artists turned low-cost, open platforms such as Mozilla Hubs, Twitch, Jitsi, YouTube and OBS into ephemeral infrastructures for collaborative VR concerts, 3D live-coding sessions, collective streaming events and networked Algoraves. Drawing on participant observation, event documentation and informal interviews, this article examines these cases with a focus on La Fábrica VR (TOPLAP México) and related experiences in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica. We argue that these practices materialise a situated, collaborative and tactically informal technological production that reconfigures agency, embodiment and listening in immersive environments.

Suicide is among the most pressing public health problems of the 21st century. Fictional depictions of suicide have long been known to influence the public’s understanding of suicide and, in some cases, can impact suicide rates. Unrecognised to date is that J.K. Rowling is, arguably, the most prolific popular author on the topic of suicide. Dozens of Rowling’s characters and, indeed, each of her books, have a connection to suicide. This review summarises Rowling’s coverage of suicide and discusses the implications. In particular, it explores how her books/series generally include a protagonist who survives a crisis and a foil who succumbs to despair and trauma, and how these narratives relate to what Rowling has said publicly about her own story of survival. Although her treatment of suicide does not always align with recommendations for responsible media portrayals, overall, Rowling’s works have exposed numerous people worldwide to messages of hope and survival, and this deserves scientific attention.

Does Benatar’s anti-natalism – the view that it is better never to have been – imply that death is better than continued living? This is known as the pro-mortalist question, a compelling, unresolved question surrounding anti-natalist discourse. In order to answer this question, I analyse two theories about the badness of death that Benatar uses to argue against the idea that anti-natalism implies pro-mortalism. The first is that death deprives one of the good things in life. The second is that death annihilates the person. However, I argue that these theories fail to block pro-mortalism. As such, I conclude that Benatar’s anti-natalism implies pro-mortalism, suggesting that if it is better never to have been, then it is better to cease to be.

In 1958, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority established a fifteen-minute daily Persian-language program targeting Iranian listeners, restarting segments that had begun almost a decade earlier. These broadcasts were written and produced by recent Iranian Jewish immigrants to the country, who brought press and activism experience and expertise from their country of origin. The purpose of these broadcasts was to highlight Israel’s economic and technological achievements, convey its foreign policy perspectives, and strengthen elite connections with Iran. In the process, such broadcasts also became the focal point for an increasingly internationalizing Iranian population, a fact that remained true up to and beyond the country’s 1978–79 revolution. Studies of radio in Israel have noted the medium’s function in both domestic constructions of the new state’s identity and culture as well as public diplomacy facing its enemies and allies. This article shows that Persian-language radio broadcasts served both these purposes, as well as positing a further function in their use as a point of transnational connectivity, beyond relations with Israel alone. In so doing, this article points to the power of listeners in structuring their own communities, even in response to state-centric media campaigns.

The connection between working memory (WM) and the breadth of vocabulary knowledge (BVK) in foreign language young learners remains underexplored, particularly with respect to how these constructs co-develop across the primary school years. Although growth in WM has been linked to early gains in BVK, the directionality and temporal dynamics of their association are not well understood. Utilizing a cross-lagged panel design, this study tracked the development of WM and BVK in 158 young learners from grade 1 to grade 5. Results unveiled lagged associations between WM and BVK, suggesting that working memory serves as a valuable indicator for future BVK acquisition, while also indicating that accumulated BVK may, in turn, exert an influence on WM. These findings highlight a complex, bi-directional relationship between WM and BVK throughout primary school students’ formative years, in line with the transactional model.