In this paper, I explore how two recent politically charged deaths—those of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt—illuminate the broader dynamics inherent in the concept of political martyrdom and its relationship to American democracy. Political martyrdom (as distinct from that associated with religious communities) offers martyrs a life beyond the grave, not by promising eternal life or paradise, but by ensuring them a role in a community’s collective memory. It involves three components: death, in what we might call “unnatural” circumstances, generally connected to an individual’s identity (or identities) or political commitments; consecration of that death, embedding it in a community’s collective memory and ascribing to it transcendent meaning; and transmission, the passing down of martyrdom narratives over time through media, ritual, and commemorative practices. The paper uses the examples of Floyd and Babbitt to illustrate the value of this conceptual category, one that focuses less on the personal qualities of individuals and more on communities’ narrations of their lives and deaths; highlights such narratives’ capacity to build collective identities over time, often in contexts far removed from the martyrs’ own lives and deaths; and offers new interpretive lenses for considering twenty-first-century issues of systemic violence and structural injustice.

We present the Sydney Radio Star Catalogue, a new catalogue of stars detected at megahertz to gigahertz radio frequencies. It consists of 839 unique stars with 3 405 radio detections, more than doubling the previously known number of radio stars. We have included stars from large area searches for radio stars found using circular polarisation searches, cross-matching, variability searches, and proper motion searches as well as presenting hundreds of newly detected stars from our search of Australian SKA Pathfinder observations. The focus of this first version of the catalogue is on objects detected in surveys using SKA precursor and pathfinder instruments; however, we will expand this scope in future versions. The 839 objects in the Sydney Radio Star Catalogue are distributed across the whole sky and range from ultracool dwarfs to Wolf-Rayet stars. We demonstrate that the radio luminosities of cool dwarfs are lower than the radio luminosities of more evolved sub-giant and giant stars. We use X-ray detections of 530 radio stars by the eROSITA soft X-ray instrument onboard the Spectrum Roentgen Gamma spacecraft to show that almost all of the radio stars in the catalogue are over-luminous in the radio, indicating that the majority of stars at these radio frequencies are coherent radio emitters. The Sydney Radio Star Catalogue can be found in Vizier or at https://radiostars.org.

Donald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, racial equality). As such, his rhetoric legitimized the defense of white male privilege as a vital component of this restoration. While this use of civil religious themes emboldened those who harbor prejudicial views, it alienated others who interpret such rhetoric as an assault on the soul of the nation. Relying on a unique module within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that adherence to the tenets of American civil religion significantly exacerbated the effects of symbolic racism and modern sexism on support for Trump.

The Variables and Slow Transients Survey (VAST) on the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is designed to detect highly variable and transient radio sources on timescales from 5 s to $\sim\!5$ yr. In this paper, we present the survey description, observation strategy and initial results from the VAST Phase I Pilot Survey. This pilot survey consists of $\sim\!162$ h of observations conducted at a central frequency of 888 MHz between 2019 August and 2020 August, with a typical rms sensitivity of $0.24\ \mathrm{mJy\ beam}^{-1}$ and angular resolution of $12-20$ arcseconds. There are 113 fields, each of which was observed for 12 min integration time, with between 5 and 13 repeats, with cadences between 1 day and 8 months. The total area of the pilot survey footprint is 5 131 square degrees, covering six distinct regions of the sky. An initial search of two of these regions, totalling 1 646 square degrees, revealed 28 highly variable and/or transient sources. Seven of these are known pulsars, including the millisecond pulsar J2039–5617. Another seven are stars, four of which have no previously reported radio detection (SCR J0533–4257, LEHPM 2-783, UCAC3 89–412162 and 2MASS J22414436–6119311). Of the remaining 14 sources, two are active galactic nuclei, six are associated with galaxies and the other six have no multi-wavelength counterparts and are yet to be identified.