True to his pathbreaking and imaginative scholarship, David Armitage has discovered a rich fabric of connections between opera and international law — links that have been largely overlooked by previous scholars. By reading Beaumarchais and Mozart alongside Abraham Wicquefort and other contemporary sources on ambassadorial practice, he brings out some of the implications of his historical and sociological argument that opera was born not only with the modern state, as has long been argued, but also with modern interstate relations and the law of nations. He makes a powerful case for the affinities between opera and international law, recapturing not just the broad interest both held at the time among political elites, but also their disruptive and even revolutionary possibilities.

We construct pathological examples of MMP singularities in every positive characteristic using quotients by $\alpha _p$-actions. In particular, we obtain non-$S_3$ terminal singularities, as well as locally stable (respectively stable) families whose general fibers are smooth (respectively klt, Cohen–Macaulay, and F-injective) and whose special fibers are non-$S_2$. The dimensions of these examples are bounded below by a linear function of the characteristic.

The anomalous origin of the right pulmonary artery from the ascending aorta is a rare congenital anomaly usually diagnosed in infancy. When diagnosed later during adolescence, it presents diagnostic and treatment challenges, especially in determining whether pulmonary vascular disease can be reversed. We report the case of an 11-year-old girl who experienced increasing fatigue and was diagnosed with anomalous origin of the right pulmonary artery from the ascending aorta through echocardiography, CT angiography, and cardiac catheterisation. Segmental pulmonary hypertension was noted, but the operability was uncertain. A new non-invasive test combining 2D phase-contrast cardiac MRI with inhaled iloprost was performed. Flow measurements revealed a 42% rise in right pulmonary artery flow, indicating preserved vasoreactivity. Lung biopsy confirmed pulmonary vascular changes consistent with Heath–Edwards Stage II–III. Based on these findings, surgical reimplantation of the anomalous artery into the main pulmonary artery was performed. The postoperative recovery after surgery was uneventful, and follow-up catheterisation demonstrated normalised haemodynamics without residual stenosis. This case highlights the potential value of cardiac MRI–based vasoreactivity testing with inhaled iloprost as an additional tool alongside standard diagnostics for evaluating operability in late-presenting anomalous origin of the right pulmonary artery from the ascending aorta. Combining imaging, histopathology, and haemodynamic data allowed a personalised and safe surgical approach.

This article considers John Owen’s introduction of the word ‘atonement’ as a term of art for Christ’s satisfaction in response to Socinian attacks on that doctrine. Owen’s innovation complicates the use of atonement theories in the dogmatic history of atonement by F. C. Baur and his successors, because Owen’s account of Christ’s work extends beyond satisfaction, and he uses ‘atonement’ to emphasise not the mechanism of that work but its relational necessity. Even as the framework of atonement theories obscures these aspects of Owen’s work, his novel use of ‘atonement’ lays the foundation for satisfaction to become an atonement theory in Baur’s sense.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) among adolescents severely jeopardizes their well-being and has emerged as a significant global public health challenge. However, research on the trends in NSSI among adolescents remains scarce. This study sought to uncover the evolving patterns in the severity of NSSI among adolescents and the factors that influence these patterns. The Deliberate Self-Harm Inventory was employed to measure the severity of NSSI among adolescents. Relevant studies were retrieved from both Chinese databases (CNKI, Wanfang, and VIP) and English databases (Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, ProQuest, and Wiley). A total of 70 articles (71 studies; N = 96,382) were included in this review. The data spanned from 2007 to 2023. The analysis revealed the following: (1) Although the severity of NSSI showed a small to moderate upward trend from 2007 to 2023, this increase did not reach statistical significance. (2) No significant differences in trends were observed among Asia, Europe, and the America. (3) Adolescents with clinical samples exhibited a more pronounced upward trajectory in NSSI severity compared to those with non-clinical samples. (4) Social development indicators (GDP per capita, Human Development Index, and Internet penetration rate) and social well-being (happiness index) exhibited significant positive correlations with NSSI among adolescents. Conversely, lower social equity (higher Gini coefficient) was associated with reduced NSSI among adolescents. This study elucidated the changing trends in NSSI among adolescents and offered novel insights for the early prevention and individualized intervention of NSSI among adolescents.

The Syrian government’s violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in March 2011 sparked a civil war that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions. This study focuses on the emotional achievement of 357 Syrian primary and secondary school students who have moved to Türkiye and are under temporary protection. The researchers used the achievement emotion scale to collect data. They conducted a t-test, analysis of variance, correlation analysis and multiple linear regression to examine the sociodemographic factors affecting students’ achievement emotions. The results revealed that boy students experienced more negative achievement emotions than girl students, and that the longer the students have been in temporary protection, the more their positive achievement emotions have decreased. The ongoing war in Syria has dire consequences for school-age children who have been forced to flee their homes.

In his second lecture about opera’s relationship with international law, David Armitage recalls Wagner’s quasi-origin story for Der fliegende Holländer (1843): the composer’s own stormy sea voyage from East Prussia to Paris via London and Norway in the summer of 1939. Although Wagner had already planned to transform the legend of the eternally doomed ghost ship into an opera, he insisted that his journey gave his ideas a characteristic musical-poetic coloring. For Armitage, this coloring had less to do with the Schauer (dark)-romanticism of the craggy Norwegian fjords than with Wagner’s experience of the sea as a space of legal exceptionalism and the ship as a vector of law in an ocean of lawlessness. On the run from his Baltic creditors, Wagner had crossed the East Prussian border illegally. According to Armitage, the journey lent both documentary and autobiographical significance to the action, redirecting emphasis from romantic and gothic visions of the sea towards its legal significance.

Sebell’s book provides an intense and insightful commentary on Memorabilia 4, built around the thesis that Xenophon’s central goal is to point good readers toward the theological solution to the problem of politics. That thesis is not overt in the Memorabilia itself, so the bulk of Sebell’s book is devoted to showing how better sorts of readers benefit from thinking through arguments originally addressed to a decidedly limited Socratic interlocutor, Euthydemos. But Sebell’s book is not easy. His sentences are sometimes labyrinthine in their complexity. And as someone Sebell would call, reasonably enough, a conventional classicist, my difficulties in following his argument are larger.

In 2023, a constitutional amendment that would remove male-only pronouns and replace them with gender-neutral nouns in the state constitution was proposed in South Dakota. Policy changes related to gender pronouns are a sensitive and politically charged issue, particularly in more conservative states such as South Dakota. In April 2024, several months before the vote, we conducted a survey experiment with 727 registered voters in South Dakota to investigate whether providing an additional explanation about the proposed changes in the amendment affected South Dakotans’ support for the proposal. We found that Republicans were less supportive of the proposal across all conditions. The results also showed that participants who were given an explanation of the proposed changes were more supportive of the proposal than those to whom it was described as only introducing gender-neutral language, particularly among women, Independents, and Republicans. Overall, we found that the attitudes toward the proposal were structured along partisan lines and that providing additional information about the proposed changes increased popular support.

Concepts are the building blocks of social science. Yet, like all aspects of the discipline, they are subject to biases and unexamined assumptions. Rethinking how we use concepts is important for creating useful concepts and theories, as well as for broadening the perspectives that are recognized in the discipline. Nonetheless, today, there is insufficient guidance for scholars looking to challenge existing concepts. Despite this, numerous social science scholars, particularly qualitative scholars, have long used different solutions for reconstructing existing concepts to make sense of their immediate observations. In this article, we bring together these similar strategies under the banner of a single approach, which we call theory reconstruction. Distinct from both theory building and theory testing, theory reconstruction is an abductive, or “puzzle-based,” approach to research that uses discrepancies between one’s empirical observations and the literature to challenge key concepts. Using examples of existing scholarship, we propose four strategies of theory reconstruction (revising, narrowing, extending, and disrupting), each of which serves as an accessible way to unsettle entrenched assumptions in the discipline, invite new perspectives, and encourage more theory-based research.

Improving social and emotional well-being (SEWB) for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is central to achieving health equity in Australia. Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHS) deliver SEWB programmes that are culturally grounded and community-led. While service design and delivery have been explored, less is known about how Aboriginal peoples’ perceptions of self-efficacy influence their SEWB help-seeking behaviours and self-management. This study re-analysed 22 one-on-one interviews with Aboriginal community members from the Kimberley region of Western Australia. In this context, self-efficacy is understood as an individual’s belief in their ability to support their own SEWB, shaping their motivation, persistence and responses to challenges. The findings highlight the importance of family, culture and connection to Country as critical enablers of self-efficacy. The concept of ‘strength’, grounded in cultural identity, relationships, and personal growth, emerged as an important foundation for SEWB self-management. The study affirms that self-efficacy can be developed over time through mastery experiences, vicarious learning, verbal encouragement, and emotional regulation. It concludes that culturally safe services and environments that nurture self-efficacy are essential to improving SEWB outcomes.

The impact of galaxy cluster mergers on the properties of the resident galaxies remains poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the effects of merging environments on star formation (SF) activity in nearby clusters ($0.04\lt z\lt0.06$) from the SAMI Galaxy Survey – A168, A2399, A3880, and EDCC 0442 – which exhibit different dynamical activity. Using single-fibre spectroscopy from the SAMI Cluster Redshift Survey and Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we trace SF activity across the cluster sample by identifying the star-forming galaxy (SFG) population based on spectral features. We find a mild enhancement in the star-forming galaxy fraction ($f_{SFG}$) in merging clusters, although not statistically significant. The spatial and projected phase-space distributions show that SFGs in merging clusters are well-mixed with the passive population, while galaxy populations exhibit a clear segregation in the relaxed clusters. Analysis of the equivalent width of the H$\alpha$ line, as a tracer of recent SF activity, does not reveal strong evidence of triggered SF activity as a function of dynamical state for both the global cluster environment and subsamples of galaxies selected near possible merger features. This suggests that the increase in $f_{SFG}$ is due to the mixing of galaxies in dynamically complex, young merging systems that are still forming, unlike their older, relaxed counterparts that have had longer to quench.

A successful energy transition requires the reallocation of private capital away from fossil fuel assets to greener alternatives. This transition is typically hindered by investors’ focus on today’s returns. In times of crisis, however, credible and unambiguous political signals about the future profitability of green industries can steer investments toward low-carbon assets. Drawing on European Union interventions during the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we present an event study of daily stock market returns following the most salient policy announcements by the European Commission in 2022. Our analysis shows that markets for shares of EU-based energy firms were initially prepared to move capital to cleaner companies, suggesting support for the clean energy transition. However, the short-lived distributional effects materialized only for announcements that could unmistakably be understood as unwavering commitments to the EU’s green renewal, while more ambiguous announcements did not have the same distributional implications. Our findings emphasize that repeated and unambiguous political signals during crisis episodes can create favorable market conditions, at least in the short term, to support capital reallocation toward greener stocks.

In areas where waste management is inadequate, the welfare of free-roaming animals can be significantly affected by the ingestion of plastic waste, potentially impacting human livelihoods and health. However, the effect of plastic pollution on terrestrial animals is poorly understood. Using a combination of methodologies from animal behaviour, environmental and social sciences, this study assesses the effects of plastic pollution on donkeys, cattle and their owners in Kenya. Behavioural observations suggested that donkeys and cattle preferentially fed at waste sites, where 1 in every 10–20 items ingested were plastic. Faecal sampling also showed much higher concentrations of microplastics than those reported in previous studies of farmed cattle and significantly higher concentrations in the faeces of donkeys and cattle grazing at waste sites compared to rural areas. Survey data showed that the majority of livestock owners believed that plastic pollution was a problem, and nearly a third of local residents had witnessed an animal becoming ill following plastic ingestion, reporting mortality rates of 78%. Triangulating data from multiple methods highlights the risks terrestrial plastic pollution poses to domestic animals, demonstrating the need for interdisciplinary projects that tackle this important issue by addressing the interconnectedness of human behaviour, animal welfare and environmental health.

This article examines wool cooperatives in the American West between 1880 and 1930, demonstrating how institutional requirements systematically transformed democratic marketing organizations through capacity-based selection pressures. Analysis of government reports and trade publications reveals that individual associations experienced extreme volatility despite aggregate growth statistics, with survival rates correlating strongly with organizational capacity. The sophisticated marketing tools that emerged – binding multiyear contracts and deferred payment structures – imposed fixed costs and liquidity demands that operated as effective membership filters, systematically excluding smaller producers. While cooperative market share peaked in the early 1920s before declining substantially by 1930, western geographic concentration increased, revealing selection by producer characteristics rather than reduced crisis motivation. This research extends the Hoffman and Libecap framework by demonstrating how internal producer heterogeneity reshaped institutional objectives despite commodity characteristics favouring broad-based cooperation.

This Article examines the evolving concept of the material constitution and its application to the EU. The first part focuses on the theory of Italian jurist Costantino Mortati, exploring both its foundations and its contemporary relevance. Mortati’s understanding of the material constitution—deeply rooted in the framework of the modern nation-state—faces significant challenges when extended to supranational entities such as the EU. The second part turns to the work of Riccardo Monaco, who reimagined constitutional normativity in light of European integration. His analysis highlights the dynamic, institutional character of the European Communities’ legal order. The Article traces how the concept of the material constitution has been adapted—and ultimately transformed—within transnational contexts. This transformation reveals both the concept’s interpretive value and the theoretical tensions involved in applying it beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. In particular, it underscores the normative significance of the ECs’ underlying political economy.