bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Some Plays
Authors: Orgel Stephen
Published: November 2022

Drama begins with a script, something written by hand, the work of a writer, not of a printer and publisher. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the text of a play in the theater was “the book of the play.” The actors did not receive the whole play, but only their parts with the cue lines. But the play was more than its book or a collection of parts: scripts are realized in performances; the performance is the play, and unlike its text, every iteration is different. Moreover, published quartos of plays are not simply reproductions of the script: to make a script publishable required an editor to standardize the presentation and adapt the play to an audience of readers rather than spectators. That editor would not necessarily, or usually, have been the author. The book is not the play.
Some Works
Authors: Orgel Stephen
Published: November 2022

How does a text become a “work”? When Ben Jonson placed his plays first in his volume of Workes, the response was surprise and some disapproval: plays were entertainments in the popular theater, not works, and those few that were published normally had no author’s name. Jonson’s Workes was a landmark volume, declaring that modern theater had the status of classics; and it served as the essential enabling precedent for grand volumes throughout the century: the two Beaumont and Fletcher folios, those of Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, as well as for the most famous book in English, the Shakespeare folio in its four iterations.
Poetry and Drama
Authors: Orgel Stephen
Published: November 2022

Why is classic drama in verse? The chapter considers the intersection of poetry and drama, focussing specifically on three major dramatists who were also poets, and how their two modes interact. How would Shakespeare’s career appear to us if his poems had been, from the beginning, thought of as an essential part of his works, if the first folio had been works instead of plays? The two contrasting examples are Marlowe and Jonson, two of the three greatest dramatists of Elizabethan/Jacobean England, who were also two of the greatest poets, and whose poetry has been, for subsequent ages, significantly related to their drama.
What Is a Book?
Authors: Orgel Stephen
Published: November 2022

When poems for circulation among private friends are reconceived as books they are transformed. The texts go from something private and personal to something public and processed, and the poems’ audience is extended both socially and temporally. When the scripts of plays become books their texts are no longer addressed solely to the actors engaged in preparing a performance but have become works for the study, and to return them to the stage involves a good deal of reprocessing. Before the nineteenth century, the text was not fixed by publication in the way it is for us. We consider the book the end of the creative process; but that is a very modern notion, and even now largely inaccurate. Throughout literary history—and for the most part even today—works have changed from edition to edition; and it has always been true that publication removes the text from the control of the author. The book’s transformations are obviously not limited to the early modern era, but are part of a continuous process as the nature of literacy itself changes: from tablet to scroll to codex, papyrus to parchment to paper, manuscript to printed book to electronic text.
Minority Governments in Spain
Authors: Field Bonnie N.
Published: November 2022

Minority governments are predominant in Spain. Spain had either single-party majority or minority governments between its transition to democracy in the mid-1970s until a minority coalition formed in 2020. This chapter examines why minority governments form, how they govern, and how well they perform in Spain. Regarding formation, contextual factors during the transition to democracy and historical legacies from the 1930s encouraged single-party minority governments in the early years of the new regime. Political actors also established institutions and practices to make single-party minority governments a viable governing formula. The formation, functioning, and performance of minority governments also intertwine with the relevance and nature of regional parties and the decentralized state. Regional parties have little interest in governing Spain, yet want to receive policy concessions, further state decentralization and political support to govern their regions. In addition to multilevel exchanges, the study examines the government’s majority-building strategies in parliament and the use of office-based concessions to allies. Finally, the chapter seeks to explain why Spain’s minority governments have often performed as well as their majority counterparts, and why recent minority governments have governed with greater difficulty. It highlights three factors: political institutions, the government’s partisan bargaining position, and the reconcilability of party goals.
Minority Governments in Italy
Authors: Giannetti Daniela
Published: November 2022

The aim of this chapter is to revisit Strøm’s pathbreaking analysis of minority governments thirty years after the radical changes in the electoral rules and the party system that have occurred in Italy since 1992. The chapter argues that the high frequency of minority governments in Italy in the period 1948–92 can be explained by a stable structure centered on the presence of a core party, while their subsequent sharp decrease—despite no change in the basic constitutional framework—is due to the disappearance of this stable structure. An implication of the analysis is that institutional variables—e.g. the presence of formal investiture rules or a strong committee system— per se do not explain the occurrence or lack of minority governments. The occasional formation of inter-electoral minority governments in post-1992 Italy is mainly due to intra-party politics effects, fostered by different electoral rules for electing the Chamber and the Senate. Analysis of the Italian case provides evidence for the hypothesis that minority cabinets do not differ substantially from their majoritarian counterparts in terms of duration and legislative effectiveness.
Comparative Conclusions on Minority Governments
Authors: Field Bonnie N. , Martin Shane
Published: November 2022

This concluding chapter summarizes key findings from the thirteen cases that have formed the backbone of this volume, focusing on what we believe contribute to previously unresolved debates, unexplored or underexplored topics, and fruitful directions for further research in the study of minority governments. We revisit our three questions in light of the case studies: First, we explore why minority governments form, not least given the understanding that minimum—or minimal—winning governing coalitions are the expected outcome of legislative elections where no party wins a majority of seats. Second, reflecting a growing shift away from studying government formation in isolation from the governance stage of the parliamentary lifecycle (Bergman, Bäck, and Hellström 2021), we explore how minority governments operate once in office. Finally, and relatedly, we explore how minority governments perform, especially as they compare to periods of majority government in the respective country setting. While many aspects of our conventional understanding of minority governments are confirmed in the preceding chapters, this chapter also discusses how the country cases also challenge many established perspectives and bring forward heretofore neglected or discounted aspects of minority government formation, operation, and performance.
Economy
Authors: Watroba Karolina
Published: November 2022

This chapter covers themes of money, class, ideology, tourism, and marketing as they relate to The Magic Mountain and its reception history. Diverse reading records are discussed, including two novels from the 1930s: Sanatorium Arktur by Konstantin Fedin, one of the founding fathers of socialist realism in Soviet Russia, and Der Zauberlehrling by Erich Kästner, who received a commission from the tourist board of Davos for an upbeat novel set in the town to counter the morbid association with tuberculosis supposedly propagated by The Magic Mountain. Fedin’s propagandistic text and Kästner’s commission are placed alongside other traces of engagement with the novel, ranging from records of a Davos summer school in the 1920s, where a discussion between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer encapsulated the divergence of continental and analytical philosophical traditions, to the inception of World Economic Forum meetings, and Gore Verbinski’s recent Hollywood horror film, A Cure for Wellness.
Emotions
Authors: Watroba Karolina
Published: November 2022

This chapter considers themes of illness, suffering, heartbreak, marginalization, and entrapment in The Magic Mountain and its reception history. Three texts that showcase the productive ambiguities surrounding the culturally contested issue of emotional expression and melodramatic sensibility in Mann’s novel are analysed: A. E. Ellis’s The Rack (1958), a half-forgotten English novel, which once was included in the Penguin Modern Classics series; Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (1987), a global bestseller from Japan, which sold more than ten million copies worldwide; and Alice Munro’s short story ‘Amundsen’ (2012), published just a few months before the Canadian author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. These three texts are contextualized through references to other reading records, from fan mail which Thomas Mann received from tubercular readers of The Magic Mountain to recent online accounts of reading the novel by people convalescing from complicated surgeries or suffering from terminal diseases.
Erudition
Authors: Watroba Karolina
Published: November 2022

This chapter discusses themes of erudition, intellectualism, levity, reflection, and critique in The Magic Mountain and its reception history. It shows how scholars, writers, and readers have tried to delineate the boundaries of immersion in a literary work and argues that this issue is at the very heart of The Magic Mountain itself. Among other sources, a Goodreads forum where readers formed an online book club to read The Magic Mountain together is analysed to show that the novel was designed to make its reader feel like an intellectual imposter, but in the process the reader gets an exciting opportunity to dissect the cultural politics of erudition. This argument is developed with reference to three recent afterlives of The Magic Mountain that are sensitive to this issue: Paweł Huelle’s Polish novel Castorp (2004), Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animated film The Wind Rises (2013), and Paolo Sorrentino’s British/Italian film Youth (2015).
Robert Michels, Socialism, and Modernity
Authors: Bonnell Andrew G.
Published: November 2022

Robert Michels (1876−1936) is best known for his 1911 book Political Parties, which is still a standard reference in political science as a work that propounds an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ that governs the organizational evolution of democratic political parties. The work was closely informed by Michels’ engagement with the German Social Democratic Party in the early 1900s, but also by his involvement in radical politics in France and Italy in this period, and by his interest in a range of intellectual and social movements—including feminism, nationalism, racial theory, and the emerging disciplines of sociology and political science. This new study, using archival and printed sources hitherto overlooked in earlier works on Michels, presents a new interpretation of Michels’ intellectual evolution which contests previous arguments which have sought to explain Michels as a disillusioned adherent of ideas of direct democracy or as an extremist moving from revolutionary syndicalism to fascism. The biographical and intellectual influences on Michels are shown to be more complex, and more transnational, than such schematic explanations have allowed.
Introduction
Authors: Bonnell Andrew G.
Published: November 2022

The Introduction sets the scene for this study of Michels by pointing to the continuing interest in him, and the perception of the continued relevance of his 1911 magnum opus on Political Parties and Michels’ argument for the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. The Introduction briefly surveys the main lines of the existing literature on Michels, and points to the need for a broader understanding of the range of intellectual influences to which Michels was exposed between 1900 and 1910. The Introduction also briefly sketches some of the complex and diverse intellectual networks to which Michels was connected in this period, across a number of countries. Finally, the Introduction sets out the chapter structure of the present volume.
Robert Michels, a Career
Authors: Bonnell Andrew G.
Published: November 2022

This chapter provides a brief biographical overview of Robert Michels’ career, which provides a perspective to enable the reader to find their way more easily through the more thematic chapters. The chapter traces Michels’ education and early academic career plans, his love of Italy and sense of affinity with the Italian people, and his transition from socialist activist in Germany, with connections with socialists and left syndicalists in Italy and France, to someone seeking to establish a career in the emerging discipline of social science. In this context, Michels’ relations with Max Weber and Werner Sombart, and his involvement in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, were of particular importance. Once Michels succeeded in getting an academic post at the University of Turin, he was also increasingly influenced by Italian elite theory, as espoused by Mosca and Pareto. The chapter finally turns to Michels’ conversion to fascism, while arguing that this evolution was not as simple or pre-determined as earlier scholarship has sometimes suggested.
Michels and the Modern
Authors: Bonnell Andrew G.
Published: November 2022

Robert Michels did not engage in a systematic, theoretical way with processes of modernization or the phenomenon of modernity, in the way that Weber did with his concepts of rationalization and the disenchantment of the world. However, underlying Michels’ writings is a strong sense that he is taking part in dynamic changes associated with modernity. What strikes a reader of Michels is, firstly, the frequency with which he uses the word ‘modern’ and its derivatives, and secondly, the overwhelmingly positive valuation with which he invests the term. A core element of Michels’ critique of the imperial German state was its retention of anachronistic and feudal elements into the twentieth century. Here, Michels’ formulations prefigure the terms of the later debate over the German Sonderweg (special path of development and flawed modernization). His revolt against the conservative order of imperial Germany also reflected elements of the generational youth revolt of the period around 1900.
The Institution of Nature
Authors: Mantovani Mattia
Published: November 2022

This chapter considers Descartes’s theory that brain states are ‘instituted by nature’ to bring about certain mental states. By this means Descartes intended to account for the mismatch between what bodies are—nothing but ‘extended things’—and how we perceive them to be. The chapter spells out this theory by studying its evolution through Descartes’s writings and its relation to the Scholastic background. It suggests that Descartes’s theory of an ‘institution of nature’ should be understood as a response to Antonio Rubio’s claim that species are ‘naturally designed’ to cause perceivers to assimilate the object’s form. With his theory of an ‘institution of nature’, the chapter argues, Descartes intended to shift the explanation of why perceivers have certain sense perceptions from external objects to the perceivers themselves, thereby making a case for the peculiar human character of our sense experience and paving the way for a species-dependent account of perception.
What Is It Like to Be a Material Thing?
Authors: Chamberlain Colin
Published: November 2022

Henry More argues that materialism cannot explain how a single subject or perceiver can have multiple perceptions simultaneously, as, for example, when we see, hear, and smell at once. In response, Margaret Cavendish appeals to the mind or rational matter—terms she often uses interchangeably—to explain the integration of sensory input from multiple senses in her materialist framework. When rational matter integrates perceptions across modalities, different parts share their knowledge so that they all come to perceive alike. When rational parts successfully communicate their knowledge, each part knows what all the others know. They pool their knowledge; they perceive alike. When someone hears, sees, and tastes, each part of her mind hears, sees, and tastes alike, in parallel and in unison. The Cavendishian mind, in short, approximates simplicity by achieving uniformity or homogeneity of perceptions across its parts.
Spinoza on the Fear of Solitude
Authors: Sharp Hasana
Published: November 2022

Spinoza is widely understood to criticize the role that fear plays in political life. Yet, in the Political Treatise, he maintains that everyone desires civil order due to a basic and universal fear of solitude. This chapter argues that Spinoza represents the fear of solitude as both a civilizing passion and as an affect that needs to be amplified and encouraged. The turbulence of social and political life makes solitude attractive, but isolation undermines the conditions of human power. Although it may seem uncontroversial to understand isolation as something to avoid in political life, this chapter argues that Spinoza deflates the appeal of la vita solitaria even for philosophers and those seeking ethical perfection.
Cudworthian Consciousness
Authors: Leisinger Matthew A.
Published: November 2022

Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) is credited with introducing the English word ‘consciousness’ into the philosophical lexicon. This chapter argues, however, that Cudworth distinguishes two kinds of consciousness in his (largely published) freewill manuscripts, which I term ‘bare consciousness’ and ‘reflective consciousness’. The difference is that, while each involves the soul’s reflection upon itself, Cudworth thinks that bare consciousness is always directed toward individual cogitations; reflective consciousness, by contrast, is the kind of consciousness that the soul achieves through reflection upon itself as a whole. Cudworth thus takes reflective consciousness to introduce a unity into our experience that is not present at the level of bare consciousness.
Get Her Out of the South
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter focuses on Margaret Walker’s years at New Orleans University. For Walker, writing poetry was something she did, but the idea of writing poetry as a career evolved slowly. By the time Margaret turned sixteen, her parents had come to understand three things: their daughter was exceptionally bright; she was determined to have her way; and, finally, whatever career path she chose, it would have something to do with her writing. Walker had begun her college studies just as NOU launched a successful campaign to bring in the best Negro students from throughout Louisiana. NOU was an important experiment in interracial cooperation. The chapter then looks at the meeting between Walker and Langston Hughes, who advised her to “get out of the South.” This turning point in her life reveals much about the importance she placed on literary influence as she began to define her place in the world of art and imagination. Later, Walker was asked to write something for the Colored Juvenile Delinquent Rescue Association of New Orleans. Entitled “What Is to Become of Us?,” the essay was aimed at the students who were graduating. Walker seems to be saying that too much of the wrong kind of education is a bad thing for the race; she then makes the connection to Black business and economic growth, and secondarily to individual achievement.
Marriage Is a Green Apple
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter recounts how, even though most of her time was spent going to meetings, working, reading, writing, and studying with Richard Wright, Margaret Walker had begun to respond to the advances of a young minister James Russell Brown sometime during 1936. She struggled with her feelings from the beginning: a strong sexual attraction demanding fulfillment and the need for restraint required by custom. She had to weigh these impulses against everything else that was occupying her time. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) job was going well, and she was writing constantly, experiencing success and support. But she saw herself falling hopelessly in love with Brown. She confided the private, inner story of the relationship with Brown in a thirty-two-page journal entry, in which she speaks honestly about her own sexual urges and the corresponding impact of sexual repression. The chapter then looks at Walker’s refusal of Brown’s marriage proposal because of her growing awareness of the limitations and expectations for women of her generation. The knowledge that marriage would go hand in hand with suppression of her creativity trumped all other knowledge and all feeling.
The Author of “For My People”
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter narrates how Margaret Walker’s growing radicalism motivated an intense work ethic that allowed her to divide her time efficiently between the Writers’ Project and her own writing. She was learning to focus her creative energies and work on the “northside novel.” Knowing poetry to be her strongest artistic form, the most likely to bring recognition, she was committed to improving her skills in fiction writing as much as she could. Walker was then introduced to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Reading Hurston undoubtedly precipitated an interest in the works of Black women writers. Given the pressure Walker was under, one might expect slow progress on her own projects, but she remained highly productive. However, the transformation that her folk sketches needed did not occur until she went to Iowa in 1939: they became folk ballads that form the second part of For My People.
On Being Female, Black, and Free
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter explains that when art and resistance came together for Margaret Walker, it pushed her beyond the normal boundaries. She operated through language, words were her choice of weapons, and the Wheatley Festival had been the opening that could lead to a new intellectual understanding of where she was in mid-life and what remaining work she needed to do. She had spent a week facing a new generation of women head-on, but any thoughts about what it might signify beyond its immediate impact had yet to materialize. While she recognized the generational differences, especially in the attitudes of the younger women toward their sexual freedom, it became a matter of fact, not something she could change. What made it more difficult for this period to be a real new awakening after the festival was an established pattern of behaviors and practices: pushing through a long period of intense activity would disguise the tell-tale bodily signs of a health crisis; following the activity, she would be forced to go to the hospital. She had no one to blame but herself, which made these hospital stays important moments for contemplation.
Making Peace with My Soul
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines how Margaret Walker had so many sleepless nights and panic attacks over the two years that the Roots controversy dragged on. She had already come to the conclusion that Jubilee was indeed her most important book and that it was more than an historical novel. By that time, her novel had become a moral symbol for her. At some point in her reflections, Walker concluded that her part in the Roots matter was driven by a cardinal sin: excessive pride. Beyond her acknowledgment of corporate greed and the support that Alex Haley had, Walker did not, and never would entertain a more thorough discussion of the Roots affair in relationship to larger questions of gender and the prevailing sexist, racist attitudes toward Black women, despite the immensity of these public conversations at the time. She acknowledged that there were differences between Haley and herself, but her analysis remained rooted in corporate class dynamics. Just as her conscience had been the driving force behind her actions in the first place, it was her conscience—her sense of personal responsibility—that drove her to reexamine her actions at the end of the process. Another factor may have accounted for the lack of broad-based support among other women, especially Black feminists.
Reaping the Whirlwind
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter assesses how Margaret Walker remained optimistic about the Margaret Walker Alexander Center and Mississippi’s future, even as the nation seemed to be headed toward a reckoning. While a civil rights agenda sustained a powerful presence, its impact became more decentralized and dispersed. The move from civil rights to equal rights was reflected in the passage of the American Disabilities Act in 1990, one year before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which solidified provisions of the 1964 legislation. The election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 brought renewed interest in the South, the result of which was a perceived blending of and unity between the Black and white South. Meanwhile, Walker planned two writing projects as she identified four theme essays: “How I Wrote Jubilee,” “On Being, Female, Black and Free,” “Mississippi and the Nation,” and “Revolution and the University.” While these themes did not define all she had talked and written about, they provided the scaffolding for the collections that were published during her lifetime.
Institutional Change and the Profession of Journalism
Authors: Kosterich Allie
Published: November 2022

This chapter details and explicates an analytical framework for understanding who news nerds are, how they emerged and evolved within the broader field of the journalism profession, and why it matters that they did. Building on the rich scholarship in journalism studies, this chapter discusses the boundaries and central tenets of professional journalists and reviews recent changes throughout the news industry, including an explication of the development of news nerds. The chapter then outlines the theoretical argument for analyzing institutional change in a profession and argues its relevance for the case of professional journalists. The chapter closes with an abridged discussion of the research context and methods.
Experimentation and Evaluation in the Profession of Journalism
Authors: Kosterich Allie
Published: November 2022

This chapter charts the beginning of extant news organizations’ experimentation with and evaluation of news nerds. Drawing again on analysis of both interviews and industry documents, this chapter focuses primarily on changes from within the industry. Here again, the chapter turns to the case study of journalist employment networks, which helps shed light on several of these patterns through a quantified statistical perspective. The case study specifically allows for comparisons between legacy news organizations and new entrants (e.g., at the time, digital-native news organizations) and capitalizes on the differences between their hiring practices of news nerds to better understand the role of factors such as extant organizational experimentation in institutional change over time.
Legitimization of News Nerds
Authors: Kosterich Allie
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines the role of legitimacy in the institutional augmentation of journalists for news nerds. Analysis of interviews and industry documents suggests that news nerd legitimacy is manifested in three ways: as moral legitimacy through, for example, the increasing emphasis on news nerd skills at journalism schools; as pragmatic legitimacy through the increasing connection between news nerd output and audience engagement and business returns; and as cognitive legitimacy, through the increase in media coverage of news nerds and the awards won by their work. Regression analyses of journalist employment data provide systematic assessments of the relationship between legitimacy and news nerds at both the professional and organizational levels.
Planning for the “Expected Unexpected”
Authors: Freeman Richard B.
Published: November 2022

Abstract: This chapter analyzes the implications of the unexpected 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic for work and retirement in the United states. The pandemic induced the greatest loss of jobs in the shortest period of time in U.S. history. A slow economic recovery would surely have endangered work longer/retire later policies that seek to adjust the finances of Social Security retirement to an aging population. Boosted by the huge CARES (March 2020) and ARPA (April 2021) rescue packages, the early recovery from the COVID-19 recession was faster and stronger than the recovery from the 2007-2009 Great Recession. Even so, the pandemic greatly altered the job market, with workers suffering from long COVID having difficulty returning to work and more workers working from home. In its immediate effect and potential long-run impact, the pandemic recession/recovery is a wake-up call to the danger that shocks from the natural world pose to work and retirement. Realistic planning for the future of work and retirement should go beyond analyzing socioeconomic trends to analyzing expected unexpected changes from the natural world as well.
The Psychology of Working Longer
Authors: Beier Margaret E. , Davenport Meghan K.
Published: November 2022

Abstract: Why do some people continue working, while others choose to retire? The economy and job availability shape these decisions, but psychology also plays a role. We describe decisions to work longer as a function of individuals’ skills, their perceptions of their ability to keep working, and their motivation to work. These psychological processes are a function of individual abilities, environmental attributes, and their interaction. We explore what organizations can do to influence workers’ skills, perceptions, and motivations in order to retain older workers. We identify five areas for future research: a focus on working longer as well as retirement; heterogeneity among older workers; how to engage older workers in 21st century jobs; future time perspective as a lever for extending work lives; and how major disruptive events like the COVID-19 pandemic influence the experience of work and decisions to work longer among older workers.
Campus Misinformation
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: November 2022

Campus Misinformation shows how misinformation about colleges and universities has proliferated in recent years. Currently popular but misleading claims about so-called free speech crises and a lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses emerged in the mid-2010s and continue to shape public discourse about higher education. Such claims, which this book defines as “campus misinformation,” impede constructive deliberation about higher learning while helping to normalize suspect ideas about First Amendment freedoms and democratic participation. Campus Misinformation is a study, above all, of misleading language and its detrimental effects. The chapters in this book detail how campus misinformation popularizes flawed arguments about such specific key terms or concepts as viewpoint diversity, trigger warnings, safe spaces, free speech, and orthodoxy. The sum of that terminology reflects elitist and politically reactionary metadiscourse rather than consistently informed and responsible arguments about colleges and universities. More disturbing still, portions of campus misinformation resemble both past and present forms of organized resistance to creating multicultural institutions of higher learning. Campus Misinformation helps readers identify examples of misinformation while encouraging them to advocate for better-quality public debates about academic freedom in higher education and democratic participation beyond. This book should matter to anyone concerned about the state of higher education and the state of US democracy.
Why Public Space Matters
Authors: Low Setha
Published: November 2022

Why Public Space Matters examines how public space contributes to individual and societal flourishing. Based on thirty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork on plazas, walkways, parks, markets, and beaches in the United States, Costa Rica, Argentina, India, Kenya, and France, it presents a new understanding of the role of social contact, public culture, and affective atmosphere in the creation of places essential to everyday urban life. This multimethod inquiry emphasizes the importance of public space to social justice and democratic practices sustained through people’s experience of representation, recognition of difference, inclusion, and care, as well as opportunities for contestation and resistance. Cases studies demonstrate how public space provides a context for socialization of children and improves physical and mental well-being by encouraging walking and sports as well as access to natural landscapes. Sidewalks, parks, and plazas offer business opportunities through public markets and informal selling, and locations for festivals and celebrations that promote a sense of belonging and place attachment as well as transmit cultural practices. Parks, urban gardens, and waterways construct sustainable greenways for water retention and wildlife and improve ecosystem services. During disasters, public spaces become locations of social solidarity and support. In New York City, public spaces expanded to accommodate almost all needs and services during the COVID-19 pandemic. This book aims to realign urban priorities by highlighting the importance of public space for socially just cities and encouraging local activism with an ethnographic methods toolkit (TESS) for undertaking community research to address public space problems.
Green Guerillas, Seed Bombs, and Granite Gardens
Authors: Low Setha
Published: November 2022

Chapter 7. Green Guerillas, Seed Bombs, and Granite Gardens: Environmental Sustainability in Paris and New York City considers the role of environmental sustainability and the greening of public space by tracing the history and impact of these interventions. Community gardens, urban agriculture, and sustainable parks contribute to ecological sustainability by building stronger communities, supporting social reproduction, and promoting environmental justice. Human ecological planning and ecosystem services assessments offer strategies for enhancing sustainability through scientific methods that identify the best ecological practices and indicators for public space design. Strongly held environmental values support a public culture of defending community gardens, advocating for trees and green space, recycling trash, composting organic waste, and protesting environmental injustice when deleterious land uses threaten neighborhood open spaces.
Whiteness as Pleasure
Authors: Myers Ella
Published: November 2022

This chapter investigates how whiteness is related to affective investment in Black pain. Du Bois wrestles repeatedly with what he calls the “irrationality” of racism and white supremacist violence in particular. In his discussions of lynching and race riots, he suggests that Black suffering is a source of “sadistic” enjoyment and “vindictive joy” for whites. His commentary, especially on the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, emphasizes the gratuitous nature of this violence and the apparent pleasure it generates, thereby challenging strictly political-economic explanations of such acts. The chapter shows that Du Bois simultaneously argues that race hatred helps to maintain capitalism and also that white supremacy, particularly in its most brutal manifestations, is not merely a side effect of the economic order, but a potent source of pleasure in its own right. He thus challenges the current tendency to oppose political economy to libidinal economy when interpreting the American racial order.
Epicureanism, the Original Cast
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter briefly introduces Epicurus and the most prominent Ancient Greek and Roman Epicureans, as well as Epicureanism’s most vocal critics. Epicurus was an Athenian citizen by birth, though he grew up on the island of Samos. After serving in the Athenian military, he spent his early adulthood in Lampsacus, eventually returning to Athens to start a philosophical community, the Garden. While Epicurus wrote voluminously, we now only have three philosophical letters he wrote to friends, two collections of Epicurean doctrines, and some fragments from longer works. Later Epicureans, especially Lucretius, Philodemus, and Diogenes of Oenanda, help flesh out our understanding of key parts of the Epicurean project. Prominent critics like Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch help draw our attention to the most common objections to Epicureanism, though some critics prove far more charitable than others.
Imposter Syndrome
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores our anxiety that others will discover our intellectual or cultural shortcomings, a fear some call “imposter syndrome.” Epicurus opposes over-valuing cultural refinement and intellectual talents that are inessential to living well, and he recommends that Epicureans “free themselves” from arbitrary standards of intellect and taste. Such standards not only invite individual anxiety; they also risk undermining social trust and stability. A society that values intellectual and cultural sophistication independent of ethics and virtue risks celebrating smart people who lack a moral compass, while disregarding virtuous people with fewer intellectual talents or opportunities. In other words, elitism about intellect can crowd out the personal and social values necessary for tranquility. Many critics in Epicurus’ own time considered him culturally and intellectually unrefined. He was by no means anti-intellectual (Epicureans love science!), but he was decidedly anti-snob.
Ambition, Work, and Success
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the Epicurean opposition to familiar forms of ambition. Epicurus discourages pursuing things that involve “struggle” and considers many forms of competition corrosive. Critics object that a human life without ambition, risk, and competition is undesirable, perhaps even contrary to nature. In his own way, Epicurus remains ambitious—he thinks we can pursue non-necessary, though legitimate, interests despite the risk of failure, at least if we adopt the right attitude. Epicurus also retains an account of “success” as satisfaction with having what one needs, and he values cooperative work that secures our needs more highly than competitive work that supplies extravagances. He entirely rejects a conception of success or ambition that feeds unlimited and corrosive desires. Epicurus, then, makes room for ambition, work, and success, albeit on his own terms.
Misfortune and Resilience
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the Epicurean approach to misfortune. Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, suggests strategies for coping with and counteracting grief rather than encouraging its elimination. The Stoics seek to eliminate grief because they think it arises from a false judgment that something bad has happened. Epicureans, by contrast, recognize the loss of a child as a genuine misfortune. Nevertheless, they think some ways of managing grief are healthier than others. Specifically, they recommend accepting that the past cannot be changed, distracting ourselves by replaying pleasant memories, expressing gratitude for past and present pleasures, and engaging with close and caring friends. These strategies, while controversial then and now, have some contemporary empirical support, especially the cultivation of gratitude and the ability to reflect on pleasant memories during times of crisis.
Science and Anxiety
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explains why Epicurus thinks studying the physical nature of the universe is necessary for tranquility. We generally focus on science’s products rather than how it affects our psychology. Yet uncertainty about how the world works causes anxiety, and proper scientific understanding makes the world more predictable and easier to navigate. Superstition, on the other hand, makes the world less predictable and more difficult to navigate. This chapter introduces the basics of Epicurus’ remarkably modern natural science and raises two worries for the view that scientific understanding diminishes anxiety. First, it might seem that scientific truth could make people more anxious rather than less. Perhaps recognizing the truth of climate science is more terrifying than denying it. As a related concern, one might wonder whether Epicurus thinks a scientific explanation even needs to be true if it successfully diminishes anxiety.
The Fourfold Remedy
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces and explores the popular distillation of Epicurean practical philosophy into a “Fourfold Remedy.” The Remedy was introduced by later Epicureans who sought to capture Epicureanism’s central commitments in a brief and memorable set of claims: “God presents no fears, death no evils; the good is easy to obtain, the bad easy to endure.” Despite the convenience of having something chantable as a reminder of core beliefs, Epicurus would never have wanted the Fourfold Remedy to stand on its own. The Remedy is toothless and ineffective without at least a rough understanding of the reasons that undergird each claim. This chapter marshals the arguments of earlier chapters to offer a synoptic view of the Epicurean project that the Fourfold Remedy artfully distils.
The Dominance of Public Funding for Private Provision in the US Healthcare System
Authors: Grogan Colleen M.
Published: November 2022

The US healthcare system is a complex public/private sector system with significant implications for health equity, quality of care and excessive health service and non–health service costs. It encompasses four major entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid, employer-based health insurance, and the subsidized marketplace under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Two policy designs characterize the system. These involve contracting with private actors to provide and administer publicly funded benefits and providing “private benefits.” Under this system, private actors have the right to make claims on the state that shape US entitlements through tax policy. Under this system, cost limits on private actors is difficult to achieve. This system also presents challenges affecting health equity and the quality of healthcare.
Not Even a Physiologist
Authors: Brown Andrew
Published: November 2022

Hill was raised by a single mother, Ada, in southwest England. His education depended on winning scholarships first to Blundell’s School and then to Trinity College Cambridge. At school, he was an outstanding athlete and rifleman. He read mathematics at Cambridge, placing third in the competitive Wrangler exams before switching to physiology on the advice of his tutor, Walter Fletcher. His first two research papers on cell membrane receptors and on hemoglobin function, both overlooked for decades, are among the most significant of his entire career. The head of the Cambridge physiology department, J.N. Langley, ignites his muscle research by suggesting he consider frogs’ muscle as a thermodynamic machine. First travel abroad to study German physiology laboratories.
Heat and Lactic Acid
Authors: Brown Andrew
Published: November 2022

Fletcher and Hopkins published the first accurate account of the generation of lactic acid during muscle contraction and its disappearance when oxygen is available during recovery. Langley set his new research student, Hill, to measure the heat produced during muscle activity to extend the earlier experiments. The tiny temperature changes that Hill recorded both during contraction and relaxation reflected the underlying chemical reactions. Meyerhof’s colleague, Weizsäcker, came to work in Hill’s laboratory and proved that oxygen is not necessary for the conversion of chemical energy into mechanical activity in muscle. Oxygen is necessary, however, for the removal of lactic acid. Hill predicted that about 20 percent of lactic acid is oxidized, while the majority is reconstituted into a precursor molecule. Another visitor, Jakob Parnas, disagreed and believed lactic acid was all burnt up. Meyerhof, in Kiel, described the unity of biochemical reactions between simple organisms such as yeast and animal cells.
Revolutions in Physiology and Power
Authors: Brown Andrew
Published: November 2022

In 1930, Lundsgaard from Copenhagen showed poisoned muscle fibers could still contract but generate no lactic acid. He explained to Hill, “the lactic acid formation only plays quite a secondary role for the liberation of energy during the contraction.” Meyerhof invited Lundsgaard to his new lab in Heidelberg and their subsequent work prompted Hill to proclaim “a revolution in muscle physiology.” Lohmann continued to study the high-energy phosphate molecule, ATP. Meyerhof came to the realization that hydrolysis of ATP, with the release of a burst of energy, is the primary event leading to contraction. Meyerhof’s group also continued to unravel the multiple steps of glycolysis and identified a large proportion of the coenzymes that facilitate the process. Hitler’s ascent early in 1933 cast a pall over German universities. Meyerhof was acutely aware but thought it would be short-lived. Hill helped to create the Academic Assistance Council in the United Kingdom.
Deliverance
Authors: Brown Andrew
Published: November 2022

Hill became an MP for Cambridge University in 1940, giving him a backbench view of the dramatic events in the House of Commons with Churchill as prime minister. With the threat of invasion, many foreign academics supported by the AAC were interned and Hill led efforts to have them released. He saw his main role to be a nuisance and as such could be a fearless critic of the persecution of the war, and afraid to attack Churchill openly at times. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Meyerhof became active in the lab again, but his priority was to secure Walter’s escape from France. He wrote regularly to Hill as a distant but diligent observer of the war and expressed uncompromising views on the restructuring of postwar Germany, as well as the fate of the Jews.
Restoration
Authors: Brown Andrew
Published: November 2022

Although events tilted against the Axis in 1942, both Hill and Meyerhof recognized that notions of victory were premature. Hill, while tireless in his humanitarian efforts, made a forceful case in the House of Commons that the greatest benefit would come from the relentless prosecution of the war. By 1943, he allowed himself to consider postwar life. He visited India to review the status of the universities, research and development, and health services there. After an arduous five-month tour, his comprehensive report suggested many improvements later adopted. Returning to London, he spearheaded a Royal Society review of Post War Needs. Meyerhof believed the traditional power groups in Germany needed to be destroyed economically and politically before any attempts at re-education. After the defeat of Germany, he was appalled at the self-pity of some of his former colleagues, who did not seem to accept the unprecedented catastrophe that Germany had visited on the world.