Why was New Jersey able to construct a more robust air pollution control regime after World War II while Ohio lagged far behind? Moreover, why did Ohio — a pioneer in early air pollution control efforts — fall behind New Jersey during this period? Both of these states were heavily-industrialized, densely populated, and concerned about maintaining a competitive economy. This paper explores the role played by institutional legacies in shaping bureaucratic politics as well as the development of effective government agencies. It demonstrates that statewide action on air pollution was primarily shaped by the states’ institutional legacies (or lack thereof) from the Progressive Era. In Ohio, extant urban pollution agencies remained the center of pollution control during the 1960s even as policymakers recognized their limited capacity to address air pollution. In contrast, policymakers in New Jersey could design a statewide agency virtually from scratch without disrupting existing institutions and their relationships with affected industries. While it took some time for New Jersey to develop an effective state agency, policymakers and pollution control advocates could focus on improving one statewide agency rather than several urban agencies, thus easing their path to developing an agency capable of regulating corporate activity.

This article offers a Baradian–Butlerian reading of Arendse & 42 Others v Meta, a landmark Kenyan case on outsourced content moderation. Moving beyond structural and subjection-centred framings, it theorises law as a site of ontological reconfiguration – where labour, harm and personhood are co-constituted through intra-action. Drawing on diffraction as an onto-epistemological method, the paper examines how the Kenyan courts reclassified digital labour, pierced jurisdictional separability and temporarily unsettled transnational corporate insulation. Yet, this legal aperture also generated recursive violence: moderators lost employment, residency and psychiatric care, even as their trauma became juridically legible. The paper challenges linear emancipatory or subjection-based accounts of such cases, arguing instead that law functions as a diffractive apparatus – producing patterns of recognition and exclusion without closure. It contributes to the governance of content-moderation scholarship by showing how Kenya’s legal system intra-acts with global capital to generate contradictory but generative juridical formations.

Citizen participation and empowerment are high on the political agenda of Western European welfare states. They are often pursued through processes of decentralisation with an appeal to ‘place-based’ working. Existing research focuses on citizen experiences or policymaker motivations, neglecting the perspectives of (municipal) public servants as mediators. Using an ethics of care framework, we examine the concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ within the context of local decision-making processes to help us understand how public servants negotiate local initiative within the spaces of local decision-making. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty-three municipal public servants and managers, we show that they frequently experience an absence of care and eschew joint responsibility for concerns voiced by citizens. We show how ‘privileged irresponsibility’ depends on invisibility and normativity and is the outcome of local political relations and institutional pressures. ‘Tokenist’ forms of participation make it difficult for municipal public servants to take up ‘caring’ responsibilities towards citizens, with effects on their job satisfaction.

We report new interpretation of >19,500 beach strandlines from waterbodies in the western St. Lawrence and Champlain Lowlands in northern New York and adjacent areas of Vermont, Quebec, and Ontario from ≤2-m-resolution digital elevation models. Strandline evidence supports a deglaciation model in which proglacial lake and marine shoreline deposits adjusted continuously in response to steady shoreline regression linked to outlet incision, differential isostatic adjustments, and postglacial relative sea-level rise. Gaps in strandline preservation reflect times of rapid water-level decline associated with breakout floods and abrupt shifts in drainage to new outlets. Water levels returned to slower, steady decline and renewed beach sedimentation during the later stages of a breakout as water levels in the source and receiving waterbodies equilibrated. Our conclusions contrast with previous models that infer discrete lake stages were controlled by stable outlets then fell abruptly as lower outlets were exhumed from beneath the Laurentide Ice Sheet during deglaciation. We present a new deglacial chronology and lake nomenclature that reflects this paradigm and redefines the spatial and temporal distributions of proglacial lake and marine water in the region.

Italian ryegrass is a troublesome weed species commonly found across the United States. In North Carolina, biotypes resistant to herbicides from Groups 1, 2, and 9 have been confirmed. In fall 2020, multiple growers reported unsatisfactory control of Italian ryegrass after sequential burndown applications of paraquat in the Southern Piedmont region of the state. The objectives of this study were to confirm the presence of a paraquat-resistant Italian ryegrass biotype in the state through a whole-plant dose–response bioassay and to characterize the response of Italian ryegrass accessions from the same region to commonly used burndown herbicides. Greenhouse studies were conducted at the North Carolina State University weed science laboratories to evaluate the response of three putative paraquat-resistant Italian ryegrass biotypes (B, H, SB) and four putative susceptible biotypes (S1, S2, S3, and S4) to paraquat rates ranging from 52.5 to 26,880 g ai ha−1 and the response of 38 accessions to clethodim (271 g ai ha−1), glyphosate (1,260 g ae ha−1), glufosinate (880 g ai ha−1), nicosulfuron (34 g ai ha−1), and paraquat (840 g ai ha−1). The effective paraquat dose required to reduce biomass by 50% (GR50) for the putative paraquat-resistant biotypes ranged from 570 to 1,729 g ai ha−1, equivalent to 19- to 58-fold more resistant to paraquat compared to the average GR50 of susceptible biotypes. This study confirms the presence of paraquat-resistant Italian ryegrass in North Carolina. Results from the accessions study reveal that 29% of biotypes tested were resistant to paraquat, all of which also exhibited resistance to glyphosate and nicosulfuron. Additionally, a wide distribution of multiple herbicide–resistant biotypes was observed in the Southern Piedmont region, with 97% and 74% of accessions tested resistant to ≥1 and ≥2 sites of action, respectively.

The Guanajuato Mining District of central Mexico is one of the main silver and gold deposits in the world. It is in the State of Guanajuato in the southern part of the Sierra Madre Occidental (SMO) volcanic province. The mining district developed within a mid-Tertiary volcano-sedimentary sequence that includes thick alluvial-fan deposits accumulated in a tectonic basin during the Eocene-Oligocene named the Guanajuato Red Conglomerate and an overlying volcanic sequence mostly pyroclastic of Oligocene age. The mid-Tertiary stratigraphy of Guanajuato is revised and reinterpreted in the light of new fieldwork and U-Pb ages, which document a close timing between all units of the volcanic succession at the top of the Guanajuato Red Conglomerate. This sequence is made of pyroclastic density current deposits formed during episodic events from the Guanajuato caldera. A new nomenclature of the caldera’s units is proposed; the Guanajuato Caldera Volcanic Group, which includes the Guanajuato Pyroclastic Formation represented by the Loseros PDC deposits and the Bufa-Calderones ignimbrites emplaced around 32.8 ± 0.2 Ma, and the post-collapse lava domes of El Rodeo and Chichíndaro formations emplaced at 31–30 Ma. Apparently, a resurgent pulse of the caldera uplifted the collapsed intra-caldera blocks, so that the caldera floor is now exposed. The caldera collapse was controlled by the pre-existing normal faults inherited from the previous tectonic basin; thus, it is classified as a graben-type caldera, with a square shape and a size of 15 × 16 km. By comparison with other similar calderas of Mexico, the Guanajuato caldera is another case study of graben-type calderas of the SMO coinciding with mineral districts, such as Bolaños (Jalisco).

Integrating nature and green space into urban areas is a growing social challenge. The dollar value that renters place on public amenities when choosing where to live is essential for policymakers and urban planners looking to provide equitable access to environmental amenities and other public goods. This study estimates renter willingness to pay (WTP) for urban green space in the greater Boston area, utilizing a sorting model framework with data on census, transit, and neighborhood quality measures. My results suggest that renter household WTP is between $1.17 and $1.64 for an additional percentage point of urban green space in their location decisions. I examine differences in WTP for green space between white and minority renters, uncovering both shared and divergent sorting behaviors, as well as disparities in the distribution of environmental benefits across groups.

Rituals are sites of personal and social transformations. However, we still do not have a sophisticated theory for how these rituals were embedded and generated within specific political economies, nor how communities used ritual activities to conceptualize the cosmos. This paper develops a theoretical framework exploring pragmatism and materialism to articulate the relationship between imperial political economies and ritual activities, situating the latter in the former. This framework will then be applied to ritual activities in southern Roman Britain, exploring how ritual activities emerged within the imperial political economy. The emergence of Roman imperialism in Roman Britain materially impacted upon not only the nature and range of ritual activities, but also the cosmologies of local communities. Ritual activities are materializations of cosmological beliefs, and both were determined by the imperial political economy. It is this process by which cosmologies emerged to naturalize socially constructed relations and activities that I call ontogenesis.

This study investigated the effects of audience design and goal bias in Chinese speakers’ message generation of source-goal motion events (e.g., A bird flies from the tree to the house), using picture description and memory tasks. The status of the source (e.g., the tree) or the goal (e.g., the house) was manipulated as known or unknown to the confederate addressees. The findings revealed that the participants were more likely to omit the sources when they were mutually known to the addressee than when they were not. However, participants showed similar accuracy in detecting source changes, regardless of whether the sources were known to the addressee. Moreover, they consistently mentioned goals and showed similar accuracy in detecting goal changes, regardless of whether the goals were known or unknown to the addressee. The results suggest that audience design influenced the speakers’ mention of sources, but not their memory of them. It did not affect either the mention or the memory of goals. Goal bias was not consistently observed across the two experiments, both linguistically and in memory. This suggests a fragile goal bias in Chinese. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that audience design and goal bias influence the message generation of motion events in Chinese speakers.