This essay explores the Danish concept of hygge, commonly glossed as “coziness,” as a structure of feeling attuned to particular qualities of light. It draws from an ethnographic study of Copenhagen Municipality’s Climate Plan to build the world’s first carbon-neutral capital. Homing in on one of the Climate Plan’s inaugural initiatives—the LED (light-emitting diode) conversion of street lighting—it tracks how ambient intensities of hygge are swept up with both changing lightscapes and changing national demographics. Via a semiotics of social difference, I examine how changing qualities of artificial light are experienced as eroding culturally configured sensory comforts, and how this erosion is grafted onto a fear of the city’s potentially diminishing “Danishness.” This semiotic process is evidenced in the lamination of racialized anxieties about “non-Western immigrants” onto discomforts derived from energy-efficient lighting technologies, and the apparent intrusion of both into habit worlds of hygge. In Copenhagen, I show how a semiotic account of atmosphere illuminates the fault lines of the Danish racial imagination.

This paper examines clothing depicted in the portraits painted on the walls of the tombs of elites at various settlements in Campania and Lucania in southwest Italy in the fourth century BC, as it provides important information on sartorial appearances and self-perception, especially in view of the dearth of textiles and lack of textual sources. It investigates the interconnected relationship between dress behaviour, ethnic identity and social status among independent Italic groups in the region in this century, a time of political and cultural tensions triggered by Rome’s aggressive expansion of its territorial control. The images, as well as the material culture from grave assemblages, indicate that people expressed who they thought they were through clothing and dress accessories and that this happened on a local basis rather than on a large scale or ‘national’ level. It was predominantly women who were expressing group belonging through specific garments and styles, headdresses, colours and patterns. These images painted for perpetuity offer us a precious window on dress behaviour and they suggest that women were the primary bearers of small-scale community identities in funerary representation and in life in this period of political and social change.

From 1967 onward, the ANC in exile recruited young non-South Africans classified as “white” to carry out clandestine solidarity missions because of their ability to travel freely around the country. Drawing on the recollections of these recruits, as documented in two books and presented in a series of webinars, this article examines how they exploited their white privilege to support the liberation struggle. By foregrounding female perspectives and focusing on the tensions caused by concealing political convictions, the article provides new insights into daily life in the underground movement and sheds light on this lesser-known dimension of international solidarity.

Rhizoliths, cylindrical concretions formed primarily by CaCO3 accumulation around plant roots, serve as valuable indicators of past environmental conditions, including hydrology, redox dynamics, and carbon cycling. Despite growing interest in paleo-reconstructions, the lack of quantitative studies on formation mechanisms complicates interpretation. We present “RhizoCalc”, the first mechanistic model (deployed in HYDRUS-1D) computing rhizolith formation in CaCO3-containing loess soils, integrating water fluxes, root water uptake, and (Ca)-carbonate chemistry to simulate conditions under which rhizoliths develop. Hydraulic fluxes drive Ca2+ transport (0.13–1 mmol/L) toward the rhizosphere, governed by root water uptake under low (ETo = 0.03 cm/d) and high (ETo = 1 cm/d) flow rates at optimal (ho = –100 cm) and intermediate (ho = –1000 cm) moisture conditions. The simulations show that hydraulic constraints and calcite-induced jamming of the porous medium are key inhibitors of rhizolith growth, distinguishing physical limitations from biogeochemical feedbacks in the rhizosphere. On top of this, our work reveals root encasement and reliquary varieties, linking their physical and biogeochemical mechanisms to rhizolith transformations and offering insights into paleosol hydrology and redox dynamics. Under intermediate soil-water conditions with 1 mmol/L Ca2+, concentric rhizoliths with 0.2–3 cm radii form chrono-sequentially over 1.5–150 years. Each layer preserves CaCO3 constituents (δ18O, δ13C, 44Ca, 46Ca, 48Ca), root-derived biomarkers (e.g., lignin), and clumped isotopes (Δ47), preserving environmental signatures across time into the future. Therefore, this framework conceptualizes each rhizolith as a ‘time-capsule’ with each successive CaCO3 layer encapsulating a snapshot of vital environmental proxies, providing a window into otherwise inaccessible historic ecosystem dynamics. Refining reconstructions of Earth’s paleoclimatic history requires cross-sectional isolation of concentric layers in well-preserved rhizoliths, capturing distinct isotopic bands and their stratigraphy.

Severe dilated cardiomyopathy in children may uncommonly be caused by abnormal loading conditions such as mid-aortic pathology and renal artery stenosis. Refractory hypertension and left ventricular dilatation with hypertrophy are important clues to reversible causes. We present a case of dilated cardiomyopathy in a child secondary to mid-aortic syndrome with renal artery stenosis.

We build on a 1990 paper of Bukovský and Copláková-Hartová. First, we remove the hypothesis of ${\mathsf {CH}}$ from one of their minimality results. Then, using a measurable cardinal, we show that there is a $|\aleph _2^V|=\aleph _1$-minimal extension that is not a $|\aleph _3^V|=\aleph _1$-extension, answering the first of their questions.

The goal of this chapter is to explain the normative force of personal projects and the project-dependent reasons they generate. Scheffler argues that it is not wrong to ignore project-dependent reasons. I point to three considerations that aim to show, pace Scheffler, that it is wrong to simply ignore the project-dependent reasons we once acknowledged. First, it is a condition for valuing a particular project that we have reasons to continue to respond to project-dependent reasons, even in cases where the project has been completed, where circumstances have forced us to abandon it, or where we have become less prone to value the project positively. Second, it is the fact of having once attained meaning in our lives by valuing a particular project that explains why we face additional reasons to sustain the project and to continue to respond to the project-dependent reasons we once acknowledged. Third, to the extent that a particular project accounts, in part at least, for our normative identity, and provided that it is valuable to thereby have conditions for having reasons at all, we have a further explanation of why project-dependent reasons carry a particular normative force for us to continue to value that project.

This article examines the politics of restitution within the Black Atlantic through the case of the Restitution Study Group’s legal challenge to the Smithsonian Institution’s return of Benin bronzes to Nigeria. While most scholarship frames restitution as a struggle between Western museums and postcolonial states, this article shifts the lens to intra-Black debates that complicate inherited frameworks of return, foregrounding the unresolved legacies of slavery and the claims of Black American and broader diasporic communities. At the same time, it situates these debates within the larger global landscape in which Western institutions and nation-states continue to define the terms and tempo of restitution. By challenging the assumption that restitution is solely a matter between source nations and former colonial powers, the Restitution Study Group brings attention to how African elites’ historical participation in the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing marginalization of diaspora communities shape contemporary claims. The article also places these interventions alongside disputes within Nigeria over custodianship between the federal government, Edo State, and the Benin royal court. By tracing these overlapping histories, ethical claims, and political stakes, the article argues that returns of looted artifacts are not simply acts of restitution, but processes of decolonial repair that reconfigure authority, belonging, and historical responsibility across diasporic and national contexts.

Vertically symmetric alternating sign matrices (VSASMs) of order $2n+1$ are known to be equinumerous with lozenge tilings of a hexagon with side lengths $2n+2,2n,2n+2,2n,2n+2,2n$ and a central triangular hole of size $2$ that exhibit a cyclical as well as a vertical symmetry, but finding an explicit bijection proving this belongs to the most difficult problems in bijective combinatorics. Towards constructing such a bijection, we generalize the result by introducing certain natural extensions for both objects along with $n+3$ parameters and show that the multivariate generating functions with respect to these parameters coincide. This is a significant step from a constant number of equidistributed statistics to a linear number of statistics in n. The equinumeracy of VSASMs and the lozenge tilings is then an easy consequence of this result, which is obtained by specializing the generating functions to signed enumerations for both types of objects and then applying certain sign-reversing involutions. Another main result concerns the expansion of the multivariate generating function into symplectic characters as a sum over totally symmetric self-complementary plane partitions, which is in perfect analogy to the situation for ordinary ASMs where the Schur expansion can be written as a sum over totally symmetric plane partitions. This is exciting as it is reminiscent of the well-known Cauchy identity, and the Cauchy identity does have a bijective proof using the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth correspondence, and thus the result raises the question of whether there is a variation of the Robinson–Schensted–Knuth correspondence that does eventually lead to a bijective proof.