Rebels regularly provide public services, especially legal services, but the consequences of such programs are unclear. We argue that rebel courts can boost civilian support for insurgency and augment attack capacity by increasing the legitimacy of the rebellion, creating a vested interest in rebel rule, or enabling rebel coercion of the civilian population. We study the impact of the Taliban's judiciary by leveraging cross-district and over-time variation in exposure to Taliban courts using a trajectory-balancing design. We find that rebel courts reduced civilian support for the government and increased it for the Taliban, and were associated with more attacks and more coalition casualties. Exploring mechanisms, we find that courts resolved major interpersonal disputes between civilians but also facilitated more insurgent intimidation of civilians, and that changes in public opinion are unlikely to have been driven solely by social desirability bias. Our findings help explain the logic of rebel courts and highlight the complex interactions between warfare and institutional development in weak states.

Iron absorption and daily loss of Fe were measured in riboflavin-deficient (B2-) Norwegian hooded rats and controls (B2+). Animals were fed on a test meal extrinsically labelled with 59Fe and whole-body radioactivity measured for 15 d. Riboflavin deficiency led to a reduction in the percentage of the 59Fe dose absorbed and an increased rate of 59Fe loss. All post-absorption 59Fe loss could be accounted for by faecal 59Fe, confirming that the loss was gastrointestinal. Fe concentrations and 59Fe as a percentage of retained whole-body 59Fe were higher in the small intestine of riboflavin-deficient animals than their controls, 14 d after the test meal. A separate experiment demonstrated that riboflavin deficiency was associated with a significant proliferative response of the duodenal crypts of the small intestine. These observations may explain the enhanced Fe loss in riboflavin deficiency.

William Lisle Bowles said of the anecdotist Joseph Spence, “He seems to have opened his mouth and his ears to every thing Pope told him.” This sneer implied that Pope was a liar and Spence a gull, but the splenetic Bowles inadvertently implied something else that, if true, is of significance to English literary history: that Spence was an omnivorous snapper-up of trifles who did not judge or discriminate but merely recorded. For if Spence, gull or no gull, was an accurate and veracious recorder, his notes on the conversation of Pope and other literary figures possess great value; if he was not, they are nearly worthless. Without Spence's records our knowledge of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers would be considerably less than it is, and the biographers of Pope in particular would cut a sorry figure. Only if Spence's manuscripts had lain unknown for a century and a half, if neither Warburton nor Johnson nor anyone else had been granted a look at them, if not one of the anecdotes had ever found its way to the light, and then if a modern discoverer had published his find—then only would the ensuing sensation have brought a realization of the importance of Spence's labors and the magnitude of the debt which the world has been none too ready to pay him.

AT THE death of Joseph Spence, the companion and intended biographer of Pope, Spence's executors discovered certain manuscripts relating to a burlesque poem, The Charliad. Although the work was apparently ready for the press, the author had taken no steps toward publication, and for sundry reasons the executors decided upon suppression of the poem as the proper course to follow—at least for a time. After more than a century and a half, The Charliad still remains undisturbed in manuscript form, known only to scholars and to them chiefly by name. Because of its intimate connection with The Dunciad, however, as well as because of lesser considerations, Spence's peculiar production deserves some belated attention.