Focusing on seventeenth-century Madrid, this article explores the interplay between urban public space and a specific type of written defamatory statements, the carteles de desafío or letters of challenge, with the aim of examining the implications of this interaction. Letters of challenge were primarily conceived as a communication tool between the participants in duels and challenges. Displayed in public spaces, they could take on new meanings and even replace the combat itself, while at the same time perpetuating the values of a male honour culture that encouraged the use of violence among large sectors of society to settle disputes.

Plastic pollution in the Arctic marine system is sparsely quantified, and few enforceable policies are in place to ameliorate the issue. With an inflow-outflow budget for the Arctic Ocean, we identify gateways through which plastic enters and exits the Arctic marine system. While estimating the flux of plastic through rivers, sea ice, and ocean, we also quantify marine plastic pollution from Arctic shipping and fishing. Plastic fluxes are calculated using horizontal volume fluxes of water and ice and combining them with plastic waste concentration data; flux from fishing and shipping is generated through combining waste estimates with estimated ship traffic. We estimate that fishing and shipping contribute 105 tonnes of plastic flux per annum, compared to 10−1 tonnes per annum from river inflow. The ocean has a far smaller net outflow, dwarfed by that of ice, at 10−8 to 10−7 and 10−5 to 10−3 tonnes per annum, respectively. We examine how a suite of proposed policy interventions would quantitatively change those concentrations, and how the current governance environment makes each feasible; we find interventions targeting vessel traffic most effective. These interventions include a prohibition on the use of certain plastics in fishing as well as a Polar Code permitting scheme.

In an attempt to counteract the silence of Exeter’s late sixteenth-century cartographic representation and to explore further the idea of urban social relations expressed in auditory terms, this article investigates the issues involved in the ringing of Exeter’s civic bells, some of which may reflect a fractious relationship between two sources of authority within the city walls. It sets out some of the challenges to recreating this city’s broader sonic identity and outlines the results of initial attempts to do so.

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified substantive views about justice in outcome distributions.

The Dobbs decision has precipitated renewed medical, political, and professional interest in the issue of abortion. Because this decision handed responsibility for regulation of abortion back to the states, and because the states are enacting or have enacted policies that tend to be very permissive or very restrictive, the result has been legal and professional confusion for physicians and their patients. Medical education cannot resolve either the legal or ethical issues regarding abortion. However, medical education must prepare future physicians for caring for patients seeking abortion-related services. Physicians must be prepared to interact appropriately (sensitively and with integrity) with patients or colleagues whose views on abortion differ significantly from their own. This essay describes our educational effort to achieve that objective. The motto that governed this exercise was “No Easy Answers.”