Burials of eminent Quanzhen masters, particularly in the form of extravagant assembly-funerals, served as the initial step in the development of a Quanzhen-style ancestor worship. This ancestor worship functioned as the bedrock of a thriving Quanzhen lineage-building movement in thirteenth-century north China. Quanzhen Daoists attributed great significance to the physical remains of a lineage's founding master and commonly conducted multiple burials of the master. Each instance of reburial presented an opportunity for specific lineage members to assert their lineage identity, as well as ownership over the founding master's spiritual and material legacy. Lineage members commonly materialized their ancestor worship through a series of memorial objects established within a hosting monastery, including tombs, statues, portraits, memorial shrines, and commemorative steles. These lineage-building efforts strengthened dynamic networks of people, monasteries, and material culture, shaping regional interactions and transformations in north China under Mongol rule.

This article examines the idea of mind-reading technology by focusing on an interesting case of applying a large language model (LLM) to brain data. On the face of it, experimental results appear to show that it is possible to reconstruct mental contents directly from brain data by processing via a chatGPT-like LLM. However, the author argues that this apparent conclusion is not warranted. Through examining how LLMs work, it is shown that they are importantly different from natural language. The former operates on the basis of nonrational data transformations based on a large textual corpus. The latter has a rational dimension, being based on reasons. Using this as a basis, it is argued that brain data does not directly reveal mental content, but can be processed to ground predictions indirectly about mental content. The author concludes that this is impressive but different in principle from technology-mediated mind reading. The applications of LLM-based brain data processing are nevertheless promising for speech rehabilitation or novel communication methods.

In the summer of 1719, woolen and silk weavers took to the streets in cities and towns across England to protest the East India Company's importation of cotton calicoes from South Asia. English weavers viewed these popular imports as hurting their economic livelihoods. During the protests, they violently turned their anger against women wearing calico, tearing off their clothes and even throwing acid on some victims. Their actions spurred widespread condemnation, but the weavers got what they wanted in the end. In March 1721, an act banning the importation and use of all calico cloth in Britain received royal assent. On that same day, an act arranging the first in a series of financial rescues of the South Sea Company in the wake of the South Sea Bubble became law. Drawing from a range of archival and printed sources, the author explores the political and cultural connections between the calico crisis and the South Sea Bubble and investigates how reactions to both episodes intersected ideologically with fears of Jacobitism and foreign invasion and with broader anxieties about gender, the social order, and the political influence of financial corporations.

The objective of the article is to establish why a financial bonus for Slovenian–Italian bilingualism was introduced in the District of Koper (comprising today’s Slovenian municipalities of Ankaran, Koper, Izola and Piran), which came under Yugoslav rule after 1954. Using Brubaker’s triadic nexus concept and analysis of newly discovered archival sources, the authors found that (a) on the federal level, Yugoslavia only focused on minority protection as much as it was required to by international agreements and treaties, (b) the Italian minority itself was not a relevant actor in the Yugoslav system of minority protection, (c) Italy had a marginal role in the process of protecting the Italian minority in Yugoslavia, and (d) the political elite in Yugoslavia introduced the bilingualism bonus to encourage the integration of the Italian minority when building a new (socialist) sociopolitical order. The Slovenian-Italian bilingualism bonus was therefore not an altruist measure directed at minority protection, but rather a self-serving measure by the authorities to reinforce their power.

Print created the urge to innovate new modalities of musical knowledge production and dissemination in nineteenth-century Bengal. Publication of music books made the bifurcation between music theory and practice clearer, but only as a textual category. As the literature suggests, these were two categories for organizing musical knowledge, intimately entwined, where one produces the other and also doesn't exist without each other. The technology of ‘swaralipi’ (musical notation) used in the modern printed books materialized the project of disseminating music to the reader who could now ‘read’ the music from the book. For some book writers, music books were meant to be a replacement for the oral tutelage, published as ‘self-instructors’. But, on the contrary, the most prolific book-writers of the time used their books as the basis of oral tutelage in the music school. In the modern setting of the music school, the person of the ‘guru’ or ‘ustad’ was replaced by the formalized, systematic teaching of the ‘professors’ of music. Music books, as the medium of modern music pedagogy, thus changed not only the way students learned – making it possible to learn from the book with no instructor – but also the role of teachers, whose teaching was validated by the book. The music books came to function as the ‘modern shastras’ – to exercise regulatory authority over music practice, and how music is learned and taught. The ‘orality’ of music emerges as a liminal space in the gap between the writings on music and the writing of music. What emerges is an unlikely milieu where a new form of musical education is devised, the possibility of an education without a guru is conceived, and the schema of musical notation brings the entire process to life.

In July 1979, the Sunday Mirror published an article with the headline: “HOSPITALS AT CRISIS POINT: Jobs and beds to go in cash curbs.” In this article we explore the role of hospital beds in such public discussions of “crisis” within the British National Health Service (NHS). In the 1970s, the media and politicians paid increasing attention to bed numbers as an indicator of resource scarcity within the NHS. While this in part reflected a genuine trend, it was also a powerful narrative device. The hospital bed has become a cipher for NHS resourcing and resilience, but throughout the twentieth century, there has been a tension between stories of declining bed numbers as a sign of “crisis,” and declining bed numbers as a marker of more efficient, high-quality healthcare. This article will show that the hospital bed was an extremely important political device because it was imbued with rich social and cultural symbolism, and that stories of declining bed numbers were not as straightforward as they first appear. While discussions in the public sphere tended to focus on bed numbers and waiting times, discussions in the healthcare sector and among policymakers attended to what beds could—and should—do for both patients and staff. Public rhetoric about decline was less about the object itself, and more about the role of the hospital bed as a symbol of care and as a politically pertinent shorthand for the health of the NHS as an institution.