Building on untapped archival documents and press reports, I explore a seeming contradiction underpinning the Israeli authorities’ War on Drugs from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. While the state authorities clamped down on local cannabis users, it was heavily invested in covert cannabis trafficking operations into Egypt, its main enemy at the time. The primary targets of the domestic clampdown were the country’s Jewish consumers of the drug, mainly first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (collectively known as Mizrahim). Provoking latent class, racial, and gendered anxieties, the state authorities used hashish to further marginalize and criminalize Mizrahim in Israel. However, while the state cracked down on Mizrahi hashish dealers and users, the Israeli military was directly involved in large-scale hashish trafficking operations to Egypt. This enterprise aimed to immerse and immobilize the Egyptian population generally—and the Egyptian armed forces specifically—with hashish.

We examine whether different information frames affect how people perceive the domestic costs of sanctions and support sanctions. Using data from an information provision experiment in Germany and Poland, we demonstrate that people overestimate the costs of sanctions (Gross Domestic Product loss due to an energy embargo) in sending countries. Yet, this perception can be corrected through the provision of actual information, which in turn enhances the support for the sanction. Contrasting sanctions’ costs with other costs – Covid-19 costs and costs imposed on target countries – has no additional effect.

Within the recent glut of philosophical work on hope, relatively little attention has been devoted to the circumstantial conditions that frustrate or accommodate hoping. In this article, I show how an individual’s spatial environment can constrain their capacity to sustain determinate hopes for the future via an extended case study: long-term refugee detention. Taking seriously refugees’ claims that a central cause of widespread hopelessness is the feeling of being in limbo, and drawing on recent work on the role of the imagination in hoping, I demonstrate how an individual’s spatial environment can limit imaginative access to the interim steps between their present circumstances and a desired future, making it difficult to see any way their hope could be realized.

This paper surveys the literature on gender differences in religiosity and on how religion shapes gender-related economic and social outcomes. Part I examines why women tend to be more religious than men, reviewing leading explanations from sociology, economics, and psychology. Part II analyzes how religion affects gender norms and attitudes, education, labor market participation, fertility, health, legal institutions, and discrimination. Across domains, we distinguish between effects driven by individual religiosity—such as beliefs and religious practice—and those driven by religious denomination. We emphasize studies that employ credible causal identification strategies, including natural experiments, instrumental variables, and policy reforms, while also reviewing correlational evidence for context. Overall, the literature suggests that religious teachings and participation often reinforce traditional gender roles, influencing women’s education, labor supply, and fertility decisions, though important heterogeneity and exceptions exist. We also highlight instances in which secular reforms or religious movements have altered these outcomes. The survey concludes by identifying gaps in the literature and outlining priorities for future empirical research.

Recent surveys have suggested that over half of UK households own a pet. One important aspect to this ownership is ensuring that access to appropriate veterinary care is available for their pets. To measure the ease of accessibility to such care, three aspects are important, the local demand for veterinary care, the supply of care, and the ease of travel to obtain the care. For the first element, in this study estimates were made of the household pet population for all neighbourhoods in England and Wales (36,672 neighbourhoods each containing approximately 700 households). Information regarding the location and number of veterinarians working in local practices was then used, with vehicle journey times, to provide a measure of accessibility to veterinary care. It was found that the more affluent and rural locations have better accessibility to veterinary care than deprived and urban locations. The detailed geography of the estimates provided by this study enabled the location of potential ‘veterinary deserts’ to be identified. With this knowledge additional provision can be prioritised to such locations with a view to improving the welfare of companion animals. Not only will this improve the accessibility of veterinary care but, through competition, this also has the potential to reduce care costs. Thus, the likelihood of pets receiving the care they need will improve. Whilst this study focuses upon England and Wales, the methodology presented would be equally valid in other settings where appropriate data exist.

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.

Research on understanding the effects of language experiences upon executive control processes has turned away from static measures of language use to using more continuous measures such as proficiency, language switching and exposure. The present work utilizes language entropy, a measure that indexes the social and linguistic diversity of daily-life contexts (e.g., a classroom, cafeteria, home) of language use, to delineate the mechanisms through which contextual and social effects influence executive control. Results from existing studies utilizing entropy primarily examine bilingual contexts; however, this study focuses on multilingual university students in Ahmedabad, India. Participants (N = 56) provided entropy data from the Language History and Background Questionnaire and executive control measures from the AX-CP Task for proactive control and the n-back Task for working memory. Entropy measures proved very predictive for participants’ current language use patterns, but did not significantly predict any aspect of AX-CPT or n-back Task performance. Implications for context-specific stimulus categorization and the adaptive control hypothesis are discussed.

Digital solutions are seen as ways to improve citizens’ access to public services and raise their trust. Yet, the specific impact of digital public services for migrants, remains understudied. Therefore, this study investigates migrants’ use of digital public services and examines the impact of such services on migrants’ satisfaction with migration agencies. We rely on original data from an online survey (N = 22,659) in Sweden consisting of migrants who received decisions from the migration agency regarding a variety of applications. Our results show that online applications are not related to higher satisfaction among migrant groups when measured as satisfaction during general contact. However, with more specific measurements, such as satisfaction when visiting the migration agency, online applications are related to higher satisfaction. We also find that satisfaction with the migration agency is stratified across different types of applications, with asylum-seekers being the least satisfied in their contact with the migration agency.

This Spotlight argues that Holocaust historiography stands at a critical impasse. Decades of groundbreaking research have produced an era of unprecedented empirical richness – but also profound fragmentation: a tension masterfully documented in The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (2025). As the field has matured – dethroning German exceptionalism, re-centring victim experiences and expanding its temporal and methodological horizons – the frameworks that once provided coherence, from Berlin-centrism to national containers, have been exhausted. In response, this article proposes a new methodological scaffolding: relational Europeanism. This approach shifts the analytical focus from where events occurred to how they unfolded, privileging interaction over location, proximity over typology and the methodological practice of entanglement. By tracing these dynamics horizontally across borders, vertically through scales and temporally through pre-war and post-war periods, relational Europeanism rethinks the Holocaust as a continental process woven from irreducibly local contexts. It offers a viable path to hold the field’s dazzling plurality together without imposing a new synthesis. In an age of nationalist memory politics and eroding historical knowledge, this method is not merely an academic exercise but also an ethical imperative – providing the connective tissue to write European histories as transnational as the experiences themselves.

In three empirical studies, we compare one syntactic and one semantic approach to agreement preferences in so-called pancake constructions (pcs) in Swedish, as in Senap är starkt ‘Mustard is strong’. pcs are either substance-denoting, naming an inherent property of the subject, or situation-denoting, naming a property of the subject that is linked to some event. These two types were found to differ in predicative agreement patterns when their subjects were modified (e.g. Skånsk senap är … ‘Scanian mustard is’). The studies also indicate that the presence of a modal verb can affect agreement patterns differently in the two types: substance-denoting pcs were affected by modification and modality to a much larger extent than situation-denoting ones. We conclude that the two approaches can explain some patterns, but leave others unexplained, and the results lend partial support to analyses that make a syntactic difference between the two types of pcs.

Creative thinking is a crucial step in the design ideation process, where analogical reasoning plays a vital role in expanding the design concept space. The emergence of Generative AI has brought a significant revolution in co-creative systems, with a growing number of studies on Design-by-Analogy support tools. However, there is a lack of studies investigating the creative performance of Large Language Model (LLM)-generated analogical content and benchmarking of language models in creative tasks such as design ideation. Through this study, we aim to (i) investigate the effect of creativity heuristics by leveraging LLMs to generate analogical stimuli for novice designers in ideation tasks and (ii) evaluate and benchmark language models across analogical creative tasks. We developed a support tool based on the proposed conceptual framework and validated it by conducting controlled ideation experiments with 24 undergraduate design students. Groups assisted with the support tool generated higher-rated ideas, thus validating the proposed framework and the effectiveness of analogical reasoning for augmenting creative output with LLMs. Benchmarking of the models revealed significant differences in the creative performance of analogies across various language models, suggesting that future studies should focus on evaluating language models across creative, subjective tasks.

Obesity and overweight in pregnant women increase pregnancy and neonatal morbidity with a risk of metabolic syndrome for children in later life. Maternal preconceptional bariatric surgery reduces maternal and paediatric outcomes but may induce fetal nutritional deficiencies and intrauterine growth restriction through placental reprogramming. The aim of this study was to describe feto-placental unit modifications induced by obesity, and the effect of bariatric surgery performed before gestation, on a diet-induced obese rat model. One month after surgery, rats of ‘control’, ‘obese’ and ‘bariatric surgery’ groups were mated and then sacrificed at D19 of gestation. Clinical description, immuno-histochemistry and molecular analyses were performed on feto-placental units. Obesity induces placental modifications including lipid accumulations, increased inflammation and oxidative stress. Some of these modifications are partially restored by maternal preconceptional bariatric surgery. On the other hand, a reduction in the expression of markers of glucose transport, insulin function and amino acid transport, after bariatric surgery was observed. This phenotype may lead to fetal caloric restriction, adoption of a ‘thrifty phenotype’ and subsequently fetal growth restriction. These preliminary findings highlight the importance of a close follow-up of women who have undergone bariatric surgery and their children.