bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Late-Onset Rejection in Liver Allograft Biopsies: An Analysis of Process, Pattern, and Clinical Implications
Authors: Bateman Justin , Anugwom Chimaobi , Zhou Yan , Lim Nicholas , Adeyi Oyedele 
Published: February 2023

AbstractObjectivesBoth alloimmune and nonalloimmune factors affect the long-term survival of liver allograft recipients. Various patterns of late-onset rejection are recognized, including typical acute cellular rejection (tACR), ductopenic rejection (DuR), nonspecific hepatitis (NSH), isolated central perivenulitis (ICP), and plasma cell–rich rejection (PCRR). This study compares the clinicopathologic features of late-onset rejection (LOR) in a large-cohort context.MethodsFor-cause liver biopsies more than 6 months after transplant were included from the University of Minnesota between 2014 and 2019. Histopathologic, clinical, laboratory, treatment, and other data were analyzed in nonalloimmune and LOR cases.ResultsThe study consisted of 160 patients (122 adults, 38 pediatric patients), with 233 (53%) biopsies showing LOR: 51 (22%) tACR; 24 (10%) DuR; 23 (10%) NSH; 19 (8%) PCRR; and 3 (1%) ICP. Mean onset of 80 vs 61 months was longer for nonalloimmune injury (P = .04), a difference lost without tACR (mean, 26 months). Graft failure was highest with DuR. Response to treatment, as measured by changes in liver function tests, was similar between tACR and other LORs, and NSH occurred more often in pediatric patients (P = .001); tACR and other LOR incidence was similar.ConclusionsLORs occur in pediatric and adult patients. Except for tACR, patterns overlap in many ways, with DuR having the greatest risk of graft loss, but other LORs respond well to antirejection treatments.
“It’s People in the Swamp”: Du Bois against the Democracy of Things
Authors: Wolff Nathan 
Published: February 2023

AbstractW. E. B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), which has been called a “spiritual epic of cotton,” was inspired by Frank Norris’s “epic of wheat” The Octopus (1901), though the connection is rarely explored. This essay argues that Du Bois offers a crucial critique of Norris’s novel, specifically in contesting the ways Norris naturalizes capitalist exploitation by depicting the nonhuman power of the wheat and the railroad as the plot’s prime movers. Du Bois’s exposure of the forces allied against Black political power in the rural South and in the nation’s capital, and his utopian vision of collective world-building, offers an insistently human-centered rebuttal to Norris’s vitalist fantasy of salvific wheat. In so doing, Du Bois helps expose the limitations of, and model alternatives to recent calls by critics (aligned with New Materialism, Actor-Network Theory, and Object-Oriented Ontology) for a “parliament of things” or a “democracy of objects”—related claims for the supposed political radicalism of according nonhuman and human agents equal weight.“For Du Bois, the nonhuman world . . . may well have a kind of animacy, but its power is too tightly entwined with racial capitalism for it to serve as a democratizing check on human power run amok.”
Antifascist Narrative and the Politics of Optimism
Authors: Vials Christopher 
Published: February 2023

AbstractThis essay identifies the structure of US antifascist literary narrative, and in so doing, outlines its history and theorizes its democratic intervention. It argues that since the 1930s, antifascist narratives have been fueled by an optimism they maintain in the face of an existential threat to democracy. Spawned at moments of danger, antifascist narratives do not fight fascism simply to restore the status quo of liberalism, but strive to expand democracy through the defeat of fascism, forging a new reality in the fight against monsters. The essay focuses on two largely forgotten works published in the late 1930s, perhaps the darkest era for antifascists: James T. Farrell’s novella, Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade (1939), and William Thomas Smith’s serial novel, The Black Stockings (1937), which appeared in the Baltimore Afro-American. These two works are part of a subgenre of antifascist literature that I call “the blackshirt narrative,” a subgenre particularly worth revisiting for those interested in preserving and expanding democracy in the twenty-first century.Spawned at a moment of danger, [antifascist] optimism does not just fight fascism in order to restore the status quo of liberalism, but . . . strives to expand democracy through the defeat of fascism, forging a new reality in the fight against monsters.
The Novel, theDemos, and Genres of the Human
Authors: Bentley Nancy 
Published: February 2023

AbstractThe post-Civil War novels discussed in this essay allow us to see not just the failure of liberal recognition to enfranchise freedpeople but also the legible misrecognition of how humanness is known and lived by Black subjects. By tracing uncanny or syncopated humanness that is manifest most clearly in Black kinship, these novels demonstrate the genre’s ability to represent incommensurate orders of the human. But this very affordance––the novel’s capacity to represent and reflect on contending “genres of the human” coexisting agonistically in the Atlantic world––also demands new theorizing, an account of the genre that does not obviate the multiplicity of the human by presuming a uniform demos. If the novel is to enlarge its potential for democratic thought, it will need to revise the cosmologies and geographies that have heretofore oriented our theories of the Atlantic novel.What are the implications of this discontinuous humanness for the possibilities of democracy? If multiple “genres of the human” coexist agonistically in the Atlantic world, can any novel project a demos that does not obviate that multiplicity?
The Multispecies We: Democracy and Pronouns in the Environmental Novel
Authors: Irr Caren 
Published: February 2023

AbstractAnthropocentric preoccupations with human collectivity have obscured the underlying and arguably more fundamental relations of human and nonhuman life. In a period characterized by escalating environmental crisis, learning how to articulate a collective subject—a “we”—that encompasses both human and nonhuman beings is an urgent task. It is also a task well suited to the literary imagination. This essay examines three contemporary fictions that use we-narration to expand notions of collectivity across national, gendered, sexualized, and species lines. Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011), Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2018), and Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021) all elaborate versions of the we narrator that open it up to perspectives that suggest a new grounding for the democratic subject so influentially designated as “we the people.”[L]earning to mark the we pronoun in English with some of the nuance that it has in other languages is a necessary project when considering principles of democracy.
What’s Going on with Whiteness?
Authors: Travis Trysh 
Published: February 2023

AbstractCalls to “de-center whiteness” in contemporary literature and cultural scholarship raise questions about the meaning of whiteness studies, a field that flourished in the 1990s. This article surveys four recent books that focus on white identity and asks what they tell us about the state of the field today.[A]re there still things going on that we don’t know, but need to know, about the great white whale?
Contours of Dread
Authors: Brenkman John 
Published: February 2023

AbstractHannah Arendt’s and Isaiah Berlin’s incomprehension of one another resulted in one of the great missed dialogues in political theory. Arendt’s civic-democratic values find freedom in participation on a par with others in the political realm. Berlin’s liberal-democratic commitments define freedom as the space where individuals are unconstrained by the state or others. Modern democracy introduces the social-democratic commitment to the state’s ability to reduce inequality and provide for the public good. The strife, varyingly creative or destructive, among the liberal-, civic-, and social-democratic dimensions animates modern democracies. Kai Hiruta provides a comprehensive account of the Arendt–Berlin relation. Adriana Cavarero draws on Arendt’s conception of political participation to illuminate contemporary protests against injustice and racism in Western countries. Dilip Gaonkar examines, with emphasis on India’s democracy, the role of direct action, including riots, as forms of political participation by the demos. Charles Taylor and Craig Calhoun, in their account of democratic “degeneration” in the US and Europe in light of globalization and populist and autocratic trends, postulate the social-democratic as the telos of democracy itself, diminishing the liberal- and civic-democratic and overlooking democracy’s ineluctable strife. By contrast, there is no telos in Arendt’s thought, which values beginnings and innovations.
Niche evolution in a northern temperate tree lineage: biogeographical legacies in cork oaks (Quercus section Cerris)
Authors: Denk Thomas , Grimm Guido W , Hipp Andrew L , Bouchal Johannes M , Schulze Ernst-Detlef , Simeone Marco C 
Published: February 2023

Abstract

Background and Aims
Cork oaks (Quercus section Cerris) comprise 15 extant species in Eurasia. Despite being a small clade, they display a range of leaf morphologies comparable to the largest sections (&gt;100 spp.) in Quercus. Their fossil record extends back to the Eocene. Here, we explore how cork oaks achieved their modern ranges and how legacy effects might explain niche evolution in modern species of section Cerris and its sister section Ilex, the holly oaks.

Methods
We inferred a dated phylogeny for cork and holly oaks using a reduced-representation next-generation sequencing method, restriction site-associated DNA sequencing (RAD-seq), and used D-statistics to investigate gene flow hypotheses. We estimated divergence times using a fossilized birth–death model calibrated with 47 fossils. We used Köppen profiles, selected bioclimatic parameters and forest biomes occupied by modern species to infer ancestral climatic and biotic niches.

Key Results
East Asian and Western Eurasian cork oaks diverged initially in the Eocene. Subsequently, four Western Eurasian lineages (subsections) differentiated during the Oligocene and Miocene. Evolution of leaf size, form and texture was correlated, in part, with multiple transitions from ancestral humid temperate climates to mediterranean, arid and continental climates. Distantly related but ecologically similar species converged on similar leaf traits in the process.

Conclusions
Originating in temperate (frost-free) biomes, Eocene to Oligocene ranges of the primarily deciduous cork oaks were restricted to higher latitudes (Siberia to north of Paratethys). Members of the evergreen holly oaks (section Ilex) also originated in temperate biomes but migrated southwards and south-westwards into then-(sub)tropical southern China and south-eastern Tibet during the Eocene, then westwards along existing pre-Himalayan mountain ranges. Divergent biogeographical histories and deep-time phylogenetic legacies (in cold and drought tolerance, nutrient storage and fire resistance) thus account for the modern species mosaic of Western Eurasian oak communities, which are composed of oaks belonging to four sections.
Why do firms pay dividends? 180 years of evidence
Authors: Moortgat Leentje , Annaert Jan , Deloof Marc 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
We investigate the determinants of dividend payments in Belgium between 1838 and 2020. As the institutional environment changes drastically over time, we explore whether the determinants of dividend payments depend on the environment in which firms operate. Large firms, firms that are not informationally opaque, firms with a high share denomination and firms with liquid shares are more likely to pay. However, the importance of these characteristics changed over time. Surprisingly, firms seemingly do not use dividends for signaling. Our results indicate that the omnipresence of universal banks in pre-war Belgium might have lowered the need for a signal.
Economic Actors as Human Rights Watchers: The Effects of Government Sexual Violence on Foreign Direct Investment
Authors: Adelaiye Samaila Oluwatope , Roy Chhandosi , Sarwari Mehwish 
Published: February 2023

AbstractDo reports of sexual violence by state forces influence foreign direct investment? While studies have examined the impact of government human rights performance on FDI, how investors react to civilian victimization during wartime remains understudied. We investigate this with a focus on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). We argue that sexual violence by state governments results in the loss of FDI during conflict due to reputational and economic costs faced by foreign investors. With increasing international developments on CRSV, ties to governments that perpetrate sexual violence can be harmful to how the global community perceives foreign corporations. Moreover, government sexual violence signals that the government is relatively weaker than its opponent, creating uncertainties for foreign corporations regarding future investment opportunities in the host state. Analyzing sexual violence by government forces for all civil conflicts from 1989 to 2008, our findings show a decline in FDI as government sexual violence increases.
Using enclave groups to discuss workplace cultural diversity and community inclusion
Authors: Kuehl Rebecca A , Enz Molly Krueger , Mehltretter Drury Sara A 
Published: February 2023

AbstractWorkplace cultural diversity and community inclusion are two facets of a complex public issue that require a deliberative community-based problem-solving approach. This article reports findings from a qualitative analysis of fourteen focus groups (N = 83 participants) held in a rural Midwestern community that centered on community members’ experiences with workplace cultural diversity and community inclusion. Three themes emerged: (a) racism and micro-aggressions; (b) discomfort talking about and across cultural differences; and (c) lack of belonging. Of the 14 focus groups, five represented enclave groups with culturally diverse employees. By engaging with historically excluded groups, researchers communicated with affected stakeholders when framing the public issue and convening public meetings to discuss that issue. This use of enclave groups to make the initial stages of the deliberative cycle more inclusive has implications for practitioners of public deliberation, scholars of human communication, and citizens and their communities.
Las agencias reguladoras independientes y sus desafíos de legitimidad democrática: revisión de literatura y agenda para el derecho constitucional en Latinoamérica
Authors: Latorre Indira 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
The Anglo-Saxon and European literature usually presents independent regulatory agencies as institutions capable of solving some of the problems of constitutional democracies and of satisfying the objectives of the so-called regulatory state. It also shows the presence of some problems, which I call constitutional ruptures, caused by the actions of independent regulatory agencies both at the domestic and global level, and presents various responses to the legitimacy challenges that these ruptures generate. In contrast, although the literature in Ibero-America shows growing progress in understanding these institutions, it has not sufficiently explored these constitutional problems. Based on the literature review, this article seeks to set out some lines of argument around such constitutional problems, so as to contribute to shaping a future agenda for constitutional discussion, especially in the Latin American region.
The Impact of Aging and Toll-like Receptor 2 Deficiency on the Clinical Outcomes of Staphylococcus aureus Bacteremia
Authors: Hu Zhicheng , Kopparapu Pradeep Kumar , Deshmukh Meghshree , Jarneborn Anders , Gupta Priti , Ali Abukar , Fei Ying , Engdahl Cecilia , Pullerits Rille , Mohammad Majd , Jin Tao 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) causes a broad range of infections. Toll-like receptor (TLR) 2 senses the S. aureus lipoproteins in S. aureus infections. Aging raises the risk of infection. Our aim was to understand how aging and TLR2 affect the clinical outcomes of S. aureus bacteremia. Four groups of mice (wild type/young, wild type/old, TLR2−/−/young, and TLR2−/−/old) were intravenously infected with S. aureus, and the infection course was followed. Both TLR2 deficiency and aging enhanced the susceptibility to disease. Increased age was the main contributing factor for increased mortality rates and changes in spleen weight, whereas other clinical parameters, such as weight loss and kidney abscess formation, were more TLR2 dependent. Importantly, aging increased mortality rates without relying on TLR2. In vitro, both aging and TLR2 deficiency down-regulated cytokine/chemokine production of immune cells with distinct patterns. In summary, we demonstrate that aging and TLR2 deficiency impair the immune response to S. aureus bacteremia in distinct ways.
U.S. Agency Experts in Shackles: The Quest for Information
Authors: McGarity Thomas , Wagner Wendy 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
In taking stock of environmental and administrative scholarship for the future, one area in need of investigation is whether expert agencies are actually given the authority and tools they need to carry out their delegated assignments. We know that the political branches and courts often impose constraints on agency experts in ways that are likely to compromise the agencies’ ability to fulfill their statutory assignments. But we have little understanding of how many constraints there are, how they operate, or how to think of them more generally. In our contribution to this Special Issue, we spotlight the importance of this topic for regulatory studies in the USA and abroad by mapping out the multi-faceted ways that agencies in the USA are constrained from carrying out their delegated assignments. We discover numerous and consequential constraints that are both invisible and undermine the agencies’ ability to carry out their statutory mandates.
Epigenetic potential: Promoter CpG content positively covaries with lifespan and is dependent on gene function among vertebrates
Authors: Sheldon Elizabeth L , Schrey Aaron W , Lauer M Ellesse , Martin Lynn B 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Variation in DNA methylation is associated with many ecological and life history traits, including niche breadth and lifespan. In vertebrates, DNA methylation occurs almost exclusively at “CpG” dinucleotides. Yet, how variation in the CpG content of the genome impacts organismal ecology has been largely overlooked. Here, we explore associations between promoter CpG content, lifespan and niche breadth among 60, amniote vertebrate species. The CpG content of 16 functionally relevant gene promoters was strongly, positively associated with lifespan in mammals and reptiles, but was not related to niche breadth. Possibly, by providing more substrate for CpG methylation to occur, high promoter CpG content extends the time taken for deleterious, age-related errors in CpG methylation patterns to accumulate, thereby extending lifespan. The association between CpG content and lifespan was driven by gene promoters with intermediate CpG enrichment—those known to be predisposed to regulation by methylation. Our findings provide novel support for the idea that high CpG content has been selected for in long-lived species to preserve the capacity for gene expression regulation by CpG methylation. Intriguingly, promoter CpG content was also dependent on gene function in our study; immune genes had on average 20% less CpG sites than metabolic- and stress-related genes.
Core root-associated prokaryotic community and its relationship to host traits across wheat varieties
Authors: Zheng Yuyin , Wang Jialong , Zhang Xue , Lei Li , Yu Rui , Yao Minjie , Han Dejun , Zeng Qingdong , Li Xiangzhen 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
The root-associated microbiomes play important roles in plant growth. However, it is largely unknown how wheat variety evolutionary relatedness shapes each subcommunity in the root microbiome and, in turn, how these microbes affect wheat yield and quality. Here we studied the prokaryotic communities associated with the rhizosphere and root endosphere in 95 wheat varieties at regreening and heading stages. The results indicated that the less diverse but abundant core prokaryotic taxa occurred among all varieties. Among these core taxa, we identified 49 and 108 heritable amplicon sequence variants, whose variations in relative abundances across the root endosphere and rhizosphere samples were significantly affected by wheat variety. The significant correlations between phylogenetic distance of wheat varieties and prokaryotic community dissimilarity were only observed in non-core and abundant subcommunities in the endosphere samples. Again, wheat yield was only significantly associated with root endosphere microbiota at the heading stage. Additionally, wheat yield could be predicted using the total abundance of 94 prokaryotic taxa as an indicator. Our results demonstrated that the prokaryotic communities in the root endosphere had higher correlations with wheat yield and quality than those in the rhizosphere; thus, managing root endosphere microbiota, especially core taxa, through agronomic practices and crop breeding, is important for promoting wheat yield and quality.