When the adjective “vegetarian” first appeared in a published text, in 1842, it was hardly intended as a daring neologism: derived from the Latin vegetus, it was meant to indicate a healthy state of body and mind, and was employed as an alternative to various other terms such as “abstinent,” “Pythagorean,” or “frugivorous.” The nineteenth-century “vegetarians” sought to emphasize the conceptual continuity between their choice to abstain from meat, or from animal products altogether, and the long tradition of ancient philosophers like Porphyry and Plutarch, as well as biblical imagery regarding human diet before the Fall. This article examines the intellectual milieu in which the word “vegetarianism” was coined in order to establish the connections both with current understandings of this diet and with discussions on abstaining from meat before the term itself started to be employed. The result is a case study of the intersections between the history of a concept and the entangled histories of the various words accompanying it. The methodology of controlled anachronism is presented as a productive tool that allows historians (of philosophy) to identify conceptual trajectories while safeguarding contextualization, and thus to trace the history of an idea amidst terminological change. The article is a plaidoyer for the application of anachronisms to historical research, moving beyond the view that they are incompatible with history’s alleged need for neutrality.

Scholarly interest in whether ordinary people are willing to freely express their views on political matters has been piqued in recent times, owing in part to concerns about the consequences of political polarization. For instance, new evidence suggests a massive increase over the last several decades in self-censorship by both the American and German people. This article expands existing research on reluctance to speak out, with a focus on using US survey data on the stark and changing inter-racial and generational differences in perceived political freedom, and by documenting factors not related to self-censorship (such as individual-level polarization, gender, social class, etc.). I conclude with some speculation about the consequences of the loss of perceived freedom of speech for the quality of democracy.

We consider the problem of detecting whether a power-law inhomogeneous random graph contains a geometric community, and we frame this as a hypothesis-testing problem. More precisely, we assume that we are given a sample from an unknown distribution on the space of graphs on n vertices. Under the null hypothesis, the sample originates from the inhomogeneous random graph with a heavy-tailed degree sequence. Under the alternative hypothesis, $k=o(n)$ vertices are given spatial locations and connect following the geometric inhomogeneous random graph connection rule. The remaining $n-k$ vertices follow the inhomogeneous random graph connection rule. We propose a simple and efficient test based on counting normalized triangles to differentiate between the two hypotheses. We prove that our test correctly detects the presence of the community with high probability as $n\to\infty$, and identifies large-degree vertices of the community with high probability.

Research on administrative burdens has highlighted how policy design and implementation shape citizens’ experiences of the state. Little attention has been paid to how conflicts between target populations can also generate administrative burdens. Using the case of gamete donation policies in Canada, this article argues that target populations can shape administrative burdens for one another through competition within policy arenas, with winners experiencing less costly policy implementation at the expense of other target populations. In doing so, it positions citizens as agents who both experience and produce the costs of policy implementation. To capture these dynamics, the article introduces the concept of consequent populations to identify distinct groups disadvantaged by the outcomes of target group competition, and consequent costs to specify the sub-category of administrative burden borne by this group.

This paper reevaluates the importance of John Taurek’s article “Should the Numbers Count?” putting his arguments in the context of work on the role of love in ethics. We can fruitfully read Taurek as attempting to ground a duty of beneficence in love. Taurek’s article should be read as having three distinct strands of thought. It articulates beneficence as responding to a value that is non-aggregative, criticizes the aggregation of human value as such, and assumes that beneficence has a very wide scope – from ordinary helping actions to disaster cases. What critics overlook is that even if there is some aggregative account of human value, Taurek gives powerful reasons for thinking that it is patently not the value typically taken to underlie our duty of beneficence. This leaves us, however, with difficult questions about the scope and limits of the duty of beneficence – and so of love – in ethics.

Drone strikes are a fixture of US counter-terrorism policy, often advertised as ‘surgical’ alternatives to ground operations. Drone strikes’ effects, however, are less precise than proponents suggest. Using data from over 12 billion call detail records from Yemen between 2010 and 2012, we show that the US drone campaign significantly disrupted civilian lives in previously-unmeasured ways. Strikes cause large increases in civilian mobility away from affected areas and create immediate, durable displacement: mobility among nearby individuals increases 24 percent on strike days, and average distance from the strike region increases steadily for over a month afterward, signifying prolonged displacement for thousands of individuals. Strikes are disruptive regardless of whether they kill civilians, though effects are larger after civilian casualties. Our findings suggest that even carefully targeted drone campaigns generate collateral disruption that has not been weighed in public debate or policy decisions about the costs and benefits of drone warfare.

We extend the logical categories framework to first-order modal logic. In our modal categories, modal operators are applied directly to subobjects and interact with the background factorization system. We prove a Joyal-style representation theorem into relational structures formalizing a ‘counterpart’ notion. We investigate saturation conditions related to definability questions and we enrich our framework with quotients and disjoint sums, thus leading to the notion of a modal (quasi) pretopos. We finally show a way to build syntactic categories out of first-order modal theories.

We prove a motivic integral identity relating the motivic Behrend function of a $(-1)$-shifted symplectic stack to that of its stack of graded points. This generalizes analogous identities for moduli stacks of objects in $3$-Calabi–Yau abelian categories obtained by Kontsevich and Soibelman, and Joyce and Song, which are crucial in proving wall-crossing formulae for Donaldson–Thomas invariants. We expect our identity to be useful in extending motivic Donaldson–Thomas theory to general $(-1)$-shifted symplectic stacks.

We study the Hilbert space obtained by completing the space of all smooth and compactly supported functions on the real line with respect to the Hermitian form arising from the Weil distribution under the Riemann hypothesis. It turns out that this Hilbert space is isomorphic to a de Branges space by a composition of the Fourier transform and a simple map. This result is applied to state new equivalence conditions for the Riemann hypothesis in a series of equalities.

The indivisibility of all human rights is a fundamental principle of contemporary human rights interpretation and advocacy. It is asserted most commonly by theorists who assert that both socio-economic rights (ESR) and civil-political rights (CPR) are intrinsic to human dignity and must be treated on the same footing as any other right without a priori hierarchy. One dominant strand of this argument is the contention that ESR help deepen and sustain democratic rights like free speech, free media and the vote, while democratic rights in turn reciprocate by boosting the cause of social minima like education, health, housing and food. However, the empirical reality and contemporary relevance of the mutually-supporting relationship of ESR and democratic rights are called into question by two factors. The first is the fact of democratic recession in the Global South and its seeming erosion in the West. The second is the evident success of some autocratic regimes in building extensive social housing, eradicating hunger and improving access to healthcare. These trends partially undermine arguments premised on predictable causal relationships between democracy and ESR realisation. We need a more refined understanding of how non-democratic political regimes, institutions and ideology interact to produce different levels of commitment and capacity to realize ESR. There are at least three plausible responses this reality gives rise to, namely (i) to alter nothing about the way we think about indivisibility, (ii) to abandon the concept of indivisibility, or (iii) to revise the concept for a more multivalent world.

This article examines the role of associations as protest and riot brokers during the Badeni crisis of 1897 in Habsburg Austria. Drawing on concepts from political science, it demonstrates how these collective actors acted as crucial intermediaries between political leaders and local communities. Through meetings and rallies, associations facilitated the translation of parliamentary conflicts into street politics, while at the same time enabling demonstrations to escalate into violent riots. The article shows how civil society organizations deployed narratives to legitimize street politics and provided emotional framing and organizational capacity that individual activists often lacked. In doing so, associations expanded political participation in Habsburg Austria by bringing broader strata of society into the political arena, while simultaneously destabilizing it by fostering exclusionary violence. By conceptualizing associations as both protest and riot brokers, the article reinterprets the Badeni crisis not simply as evidence of national hatred but as a manifestation of mass political mobilization in a rapidly modernizing society.

This paper examines the consequences of post-release management programs, arguing that these initiatives extend penal power beyond formal sentencing through mechanisms such as surveillance, discretionary policing, and information sharing. While prolific offender programs are framed as risk-management strategies rather than punishment, they operate in ways that mirror carceral control, restricting autonomy and increasing individuals’ susceptibility to criminalization. Drawing on qualitative interviews with crime analysts and police officers, I analyze how the prolific label structures police interactions, justifies heightened scrutiny and reinforces recidivist assumptions that shape sentencing and enforcement decisions. The findings challenge clear-cut distinctions between carceral and non-carceral interventions, highlighting how penal control functions fluidly across legal and administrative domains. By linking empirical findings to broader theoretical discussions of punishment, surveillance, and risk governance, this study contributes to ongoing debates on the expansion of state power in contemporary criminal justice.

We present new line drawings of the hieroglyphic inscriptions on Stela 4 (a.d. 796) at the ancient Maya royal capital of Ixkun, Guatemala. Lichen growth makes these texts almost illegible in person, but a photogrammetric model, rendered monochrome in Agisoft Metashape and imaged in Blender 3D, permits almost all the glyphs to be read or reconstructed. According to our interpretation, the main inscription records the journey of a prince of Ixkun to be fostered at Tikal, coordinated between the ruler of Ixkun and Yax Nuun Ahiin II, the king of Tikal. We think this arrangement cemented a new alliance between Tikal and Ixkun, in exchange for which the Ixkun king received a newly elevated royal and ritual status. Another text indicates that a prisoner from the neighboring Ho’kab’ kingdom, represented six years earlier on Stela 1, had survived in captivity for at least that long.

We introduce finite support iterations of symmetric systems, and use them to provide a strongly modernized proof of David Pincus’ classical result that the axiom of dependent choice is independent over $\operatorname {\mathrm {ZF}}$ with the ordering principle together with a failure of the axiom of choice.

Course-prerequisite networks (CPNs) are directed acyclic graphs that model complex academic curricula by representing courses as nodes and dependencies between them as directed links. These networks are indispensable tools for visualizing, studying, and understanding curricula. For example, CPNs can be used to detect important courses, improve advising, guide curriculum design, analyze graduation time distributions, and quantify the strength of knowledge flow between different university departments. However, most CPN analyses to date have focused only on micro- and meso-scale properties. To fill this gap, we define and study three new global CPN measures: breadth, depth, and flux. All three measures are invariant under transitive reduction and are based on the concept of topological stratification, which generalizes topological ordering in directed acyclic graphs. These measures can be used for macro-scale comparison of different CPNs. We illustrate the new measures numerically by applying them to three real and synthetic CPNs from three universities: the Cyprus University of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, and Johns Hopkins University. The CPN data analyzed in this paper are publicly available in a GitHub repository.