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.

Scholars of late have come to reevaluate and appreciate the achievements of merchant companies that fostered commercial networks and established new global trade routes. This research would seem to lend support to historians who have characterized early seventeenth-century calls for “free trade” as mere sloganeering driven by provincial merchants suspicious of the London-dominated corporations. This article challenges this view and argues that free trade ideas had deep roots in early modern political culture. It traces the origins of these ideas to protests in the sixteenth century and shows how a broad coalition of interests drew upon ideas of property rights and the ancient constitution to challenge the new companies. So compelling were free trade arguments that they became a commonplace in the economic debates of an emerging public sphere. A reconsideration of the free trade campaign that is attentive to interactions and negotiations between the Privy Council, Parliament, and the public highlights the ability of the early modern state before the 1630s to readjust the political economy of the commonwealth.

Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's mediation of genre through a multimodal discourse analysis of genre metadata as presented on the website Every Noise at Once, playlist curation, and media discourse. Analysing the genres bubblegrunge and rap français (French rap), we show that the algorithmic and human processes of Spotify and its users rearticulate genre, shaping, in turn, patterns of recommendation, curation, and consumption. These processes remediate earlier constructions of identity, temporality, and place in music culture. Simultaneously, they intensify differentiation and individuation, tying in with postulations of multiplicity and diversity in neoliberalism that conceal power imbalances.

In this article, the authors present the salient archaeological results of a diachronic, interdisciplinary research project on rural settlement and land use in a region of low mountains in southern Germany. Despite clear locational disadvantages, in particular great distances to drinking water sources, archaeological excavations and an extensive dating programme document an unexpectedly long continuity of prehistoric settlement in the area.

This essay begins with a quotation from Carl Schmitt in which he quotes Søren Kierkegaard on the significance of the exception in political theology. The essay is an extended reflection on this quotation within a quotation. Through a comparison of Kierkegaard and Schmitt, the author presents two readings of the state of exception: the first centers on the figure of the sovereign, while the second centers on the figure of the martyr. The sovereign suspends the law from above, while the martyr suspends it from below. In the political sphere, there are two ways of becoming the exception: the sovereign versus the martyr.

According to Candomblé, axé is present in every living being and is necessary to life. To develop and maintain a sense of well-being, one must maintain a balanced level of axé which is linked to a reciprocal relationship between human beings and orixás (African deities). This article will explore the link between the spiritual force axé and well-being (bem estar) within Candomblé philosophy. Starting with explaining axé within the context of Candomblé and its concept of personhood, the article will reflect in the latter part on the concept of well-being from the perspective of axé and put forward an argument for the inclusion of Candomblé in philosophy of religion.

Archaeologists in the Canary Islands have gathered substantial quantitative data from radiocarbon measurements and aDNA analyses. While undeniably helpful and necessary for apprehending past human activity, their interpretation, based on theories underpinning models developed for island chains, has lagged, leaving a gap in our understanding of processes of occupation and social network systems. The decontextualized nature of the archaeological landscape of the Canaries and a lack of consensus about proper radiocarbon methodologies are some of the factors contributing to heated scholarly debate. Here, for the Canary Islands, the author reviews the current literature on aDNA and discusses settlement theories, the chronological evidence used for occupation models, and how such perspectives align with current thinking on island colonization.