Carol Sue Snowden worked for thirty years as a librarian at the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Columbus, Ohio. She led a quiet, frugal life, spending money mostly on books, which were her passion. When she died, she donated the money she had saved—over $1 million—to the Columbus library and seven local schools. Most of us would look upon this generosity with admiration, but according to a new movement called Effective Altruism (EA), Snowden got it wrong. While she was right to donate her money, she should have instead directed it to an organization that does the most good overall.

Most people believe that the rights of others sometimes require us to act in ways that have even substantially sub-optimal outcomes, as viewed from an axiological perspective that ranks outcomes objectively. Bringing about the optimal outcome, contrary to such a requirement, is an ‘optimific wronging’. It is less clear, however, that we are required to prevent optimific wrongings. Perhaps the value of the outcome, combined with the relative weakness of prohibitions on allowing harm as compared to those against doing harm, justifies non-intervention. In this article, I consider arguments to that effect, focusing on a recent paper in this journal by Andreas Mogensen. I argue that while we do not, in general, do wrong by failing to prevent optimific wrongings, we are nevertheless not permitted, in key cases, to refrain from intervening on the grounds that not intervening will secure the optimal outcome.

This article illustrates the ‘moving parts’ involved in the stylization of the voice of the Black preacher in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor with the ultimate goal of uncovering what these linguistic features help the performer to accomplish in interaction. Overall, while Pryor often utilizes hyperbolic and exaggerated features of Black preaching traditions and potentially Southern-inflected speaking styles in his performances, I argue that he engages in a type of linguistic subterfuge, blending elements of his own voice into a more favorable depiction of a witty, street-wise preacher. In fact, stretches of working-class speech, whose features overlap considerably with Pryor's ‘stage voice’, may blur the line between Pryor's ‘own’ personal stance and that of the preacher that he is constructing. (Black preachers, performance, stylization, comedy, African American English)*

This article systematically explores the sequential contexts for making multiple requests during shop encounters. Based on video recordings in convenience stores in France and Finland, it describes the multimodal practices that buyers and sellers use to treat multiple requests as progressively building a global buying project. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how multiple requests can be packed together, as relatively simple actions achieved simultaneously or successively in embodied and verbal ways either as subsequent contiguous sequences of actions, or as sequences of actions separated by inserted actions. This article also examines how requests are tied together, and how ‘late’ requests are fitted to the last sequential opportunities in the unfolding encounter. This analysis contributes to the study of commercial encounters and the buying process, as well as to the understanding of sequence organization. It likewise contributes to comparative analyses by discussing the similarities and specificities of this activity across cultural contexts and in different time periods. (Requests, shop encounters, social interaction, multimodality, French, Finnish)