This article reinterprets John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Milton offers a novel free-will defence, similar to Alvin Plantinga’s, grounded in original philosophical accounts of God, creation, freedom, and meta-ethics. Milton’s monist God creates worlds and creatures ex deo out of God-self. God – and everything else – is animated matter: one substance both material and spiritual. Milton rejects materialism, dualism, and idealism. Only animist monism delivers the libertarian freedom that Milton’s free-will defence demands. God has agent-causal libertarian freedom. God’s reasons don’t necessitate God’s choices. God freely chooses which worlds to create, which commands to issue, which hierarchies to institute. God radically transcends creatures – especially in relation to God’s meta-ethical power. Milton’s implicit meta-ethic, rejecting both voluntarism and intellectualism, resembles Robert Adams’s theist meta-ethic, where God’s nature determines excellence and God’s actual commands determine obligation. God also plays another meta-ethical role – instituting hierarchies where some creatures command others. Satan’s fall is epistemic and meta-ethical. He refuses to recognise God’s meta-ethical transcendence – to believe that God is God. Belief in God always requires a leap of faith beyond evidence and argument – because even perfect creatures cannot comprehend God’s transcendence. Creaturely epistemic freedom means there is no explanation why some angels fall while others stand.

Few songs of the British nineteenth century have had the staying power of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. With music by Henry Bishop and words by John Howard Payne, it first appeared in Clari; or, the Maid of Milan (1823) at London’s Covent Garden. The song remained in the repertory well into the twentieth century and is still a point of reference in the twenty-first. In the initial dramatic context, it was a solo vehicle for the titular heroine, a means of expressing Clari’s longing to return to her ‘humble’ home. Once the number became a breakout hit, the opera’s narrative details ceded significance to a vaguer international vogue for nostalgic sentiment. Like the much-discussed Swiss maladie du pays or the contemporary craze for the ranz des vaches, Bishop and Payne’s creation piqued the public interest in imagining a home out of reach. As the decades wore on, however, the song’s invocation of home acquired a distinctive national accent. By the mid-Victorian period ‘Home, Sweet Home’ had come to anchor an ideology of English exceptionalism. To perform or attend to this song in 1871 was to partake in a quasi-ritualistic affirmation of the doctrine of the hearth. This was partly bound up with the specious claim that other languages lacked an adequate word for home, but it was also connected to a shift in the geography of belonging. In lieu of the Romantic yearning for a distant homeland, this new Victorian nostalgia fixated on the heteronormative family home with its promise of shelter from the trials of urban modernity and the vices of foreign politics. Drawing on a range of musical, visual, and literary sources this article explores a key passage in the history of British ambivalence to city living via a song that emerged as a powerful amplifier of anti-urban desire.

Glacier ice melt, a key driver of sea level rise, depends on how the ocean currents interact with ice. The roughness and shape of the ice on scales smaller than 10 m are important and remain poorly understood due to a lack of observations. We investigate submarine ice roughness using fine-resolution multibeam sonar measurements from 13 grounded icebergs and a drone survey of a recently capsized floating iceberg in the temperate tidewater glacial fjord Xeitl Geeyi’ (LeConte Bay), Alaska. From these 14 icebergs, 55 gridded iceberg surfaces (20–40 cm resolution) were derived. We apply a spectral, scale-resolved approach to quantify iceberg roughness. Spectral analysis shows that 40 of these surfaces were dominated by vertically oriented channels with wavelengths ranging from 0.9 m to 3.7 m, likely shaped by buoyancy-driven meltwater plumes. Statistical analyses reveal a mean peak wavelength of 1.9 m, RMS height of 0.3 m, skewness of -0.3 and kurtosis of 4.3. Roughness at medium- to small-scales $\mathcal{O}$(0.5-5 m) can nearly double the ice–ocean boundary surface area and, when combined with iceberg-scale morphology $\mathcal{O}$(10 m), underscores the need to integrate realistic roughness and morphology parameters into melt models, which may improve melt predictions.

This article introduces the concept of the weaponisation of emotion to analyse how emotional responses are strategically cultivated during instances of international political captivity. Using the case of Swedish EU diplomat Johan Floderus’s 2022 detention in Iran, it explores how states manipulate collective emotions – such as fear, outrage, and pride – to pursue political, ideological, or diplomatic objectives. Drawing on intergroup emotions theory (IET), it is argued that emotions are not mere by-products of crisis but deliberate tools of emotional statecraft, shaping public reactions, pressuring foreign governments, and reinforcing domestic legitimacy. Political captivity thus becomes more than coercion or negotiation. It transforms into a symbolic arena where emotional narratives escalate tensions, mobilise identity politics, and generate international support or condemnation. By linking emotion research with security and IR scholarship, this study offers a novel framework for understanding the socio-psychological dimensions of state power and highlights the volatility and strategic potential of collective emotions in global politics.

Among Jewish Washingtonians, restrictive covenants that discriminated against Black and Jewish home seekers in equal measure are a recurring theme in memories about mid-twentieth-century DC, and they remain a part of that Jewish community’s collective identity. This linking of Black and Jewish experiences with discrimination is uniquely meaningful to many American Jews, and it is difficult to extricate one story from the other. This article argues that such extrication, separating Black and Jewish encounters with racial restrictive covenants, helps to reveal the specific forms and experiences of antisemitism Jewish Washingtonians encountered, as well as how and why a shared narrative about restrictive covenants does not always reflect the region’s history of racial discrimination. This article plumbs property, community, and personal records to tell a fuller story.

I ask whether hedgers who speculate should be regulated differently from other speculators in a model where information acquisition is endogenous, and information has real effects. Hedging benefits and feedback effects generate strategic complementarities between market-maker, firm manager, and trader, which causes multiple equilibria. Gains from trade are lower when hedgers acquire information, while speculators may produce less information than socially desirable. A “Volcker rule” separating hedging and speculative activities may help select the higher welfare equilibrium. When too little information is produced, contracts whereby a firm subsidizes losses of designated market-makers (DMM) to make prices more informative increase welfare.

Cet article examine la problématique de la grossophobie en discutant de ses racines comme de ses impacts sur les personnes qui en sont victimes ainsi que sa manifestation au sein du droit. Il explore plus précisément comment le droit et les politiques publiques peuvent perpétuer la stigmatisation des corps, notamment à travers les interventions en matière de saine alimentation. L’étude se concentre sur l’approche environnementale adoptée au Québec pour promouvoir une alimentation saine, en interrogeant sa capacité à éviter la stigmatisation individuelle. S’appuyant sur le cadre théorique des Fat Studies, l’article expose l’argumentation politique des Fat Studies, présente le cadre normatif québécois destiné à la création d’environnements favorables à la saine alimentation, et examine la place accordée au poids corporel dans les politiques publiques québécoises liées à la saine alimentation dans le but d’offrir une perspective critique sur les approches actuelles en santé publique ainsi que leurs impacts sur la perception sociétale de la grosseur.

Recently, Alfvénic ion temperature gradient (AITG) modes have been observed in the core plasma on the HL-2A tokamak. Only when electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) and neutral beam injection are simultaneously injected into the deuterium plasma do the AITG modes become unstable. The instability is electromagnetic and localised in the core plasma with an internal transport barrier. Dynamic evolution of AITG modes is greatly affected by the off-axis ECRH. Theoretical analysis suggests that there is a strong dependence of the AITG modes on $\eta _i\simeq \boldsymbol{\nabla }\ln T_i/\boldsymbol{\nabla }\ln n_i$, where $n_i$ is the ion density. It is also found that ECRH can enhances AITG modes by causing a drop of electron density and an increase of $\tau =T_e/T_i$; here $T_e$ and $T_i$ are the electron and ion temperatures, respectively. Besides, high-power ECRH may also change the safety factor or magnetic shear and then contribute to the mitigation of AITG modes. The new findings can not only enrich scientific knowledge for pressure gradient-driven instability, but also be beneficial to active control of core-localised electromagnetic modes in future fusion devices.

Conspiratorial thinking is an indelible part of American politics; indeed, conspiracy theories proliferated in North America even before the founding of the United States. A current headwind of trends appears to facilitate a surge in conspiratorial thinking, including the increased spread and accessibility of misinformation, steady declines in public trust in authority figures, and an increasingly polarized electorate marked by mutual partisan animosity. The annual symposium of the UC Irvine Center for Neuropolitics brought together experts in law, political science, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology to discuss why and how conspiracy thought develops and persists. This paper synthesizes the insights from that symposium, addressing the foundations of conspiracy thinking in both individuals and society as a whole, and its place in the current American political landscape. Through integrating various disciplinary perspectives, the symposium aimed to identify possible pathways to alleviating the prevalence and influence of conspiratorial thinking.

The increasing prevalence of herbicide-resistant weeds underscores the need to integrate non- chemical weed management approaches in soybean. Weed electrocution may be a viable option; however, limited research exists on the subject. A multi-state study was conducted to evaluate electrocution as a late-season weed control method in soybean across six Midwestern states, including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. The Weed Zapper™ electrocution implement was assessed across thirteen site-years during 2021 and 2022. The objectives of this study were to (i) evaluate the efficacy of weed electrocution on various weed species at travel speeds of 4.8 and 8.1 km h⁻¹, and (ii) compare the efficacy with other commercially available weed control options. Other non-chemical weed control treatments, which varied by location and were evaluated at selected site-years, included an inter-row cultivator, a tine cultivator, a row shaver, and a weed wiper. Weed species differed in their responses to electrocution, with the greatest control observed for giant ragweed (85%) at 14 d after treatment (DAT). Waterhemp control ranged from 43% to 78% across seven site-years, with ≥70% control achieved at four site-years. Averaged across weed species, control did not differ between electrocution speeds at 7 DAT, 14 DAT, or at soybean harvest. Weed electrocution generally provided similar or lesser control than other non-chemical treatments. In Illinois, waterhemp control with electrocution (78%) was comparable to single (65%) and sequential pass (88%) inter-row cultivation at 14 DAT in 2022. In Kansas, electrocution provided similar Palmer amaranth control (40%) to the row shaver in 2022, but lesser control in 2021 (50% vs. 73%). The results from this study suggest that weed electrocution could be a component of integrated weed management for late-season weed escapes in soybean.

Today, autocratization is the predominant trend of regime development. However, if we focus on autocratization as democratic erosion or decline, such a trend is not matched by an equivalent increase in the number of democratic breakdowns or autocracies. Why (and how) do some democracies survive autocratization, while others do not? Current research on autocratization has recently turned toward studies on democratic endurance. In particular, mostly large-N contributions focusing on structural factors protecting democracy from autocratization onset (democratic resilience) have lately been complemented by numerous small-N contributions exploring concrete actions that can stop ongoing autocratization processes before democratic breakdown (democratic resistance). However, due to its necessarily limited scope, such qualitative evidence on democratic resistance may be subject to internal and external validity issues. Therefore, we systematically advance the research on resistance to autocratization within a comparative framework. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we examine 69 autocratization episodes that began in democracies in the 21st century (2000–23). Our analysis reveals the combinations of institutional, political, social, and external conditions of democratic resistance that impede democratic collapse during autocratization episodes. While the success of individual actions is mainly context-specific, we demonstrate that it is the cooperation across various areas of resistance (unity makes strength) that characterizes the multiple, and cross-nationally robust, sufficient configurations of democratic survival during autocratization processes. Through alternative analytical choices, robustness tests, and integration of sources, we bolster the validity of prior studies on democratic resistance to autocratization and point to further research avenues.