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When the verdict was announced in the case of "State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin," the university at which the author is employed made an announcement, probably much like those emitted at other colleges and universities around the country. The campus was informed that the verdict was an indication not of the sound state of justice in the country, "not of how far we have come as a society, but of how far we have to go." People were told that America is a terrifying place for its black citizens, and that the Floyd case demonstrated "the fear and anger that Black Americans experience as part of each day." The campus was called to "model inclusivity" and to "tak[e] action" by, for example, "let[ting] a family member know that it's never OK to stereotype people" and by "seek[ing] ways to align with others in everyday life." The work to address "systemic racial inequity" on campus and in the country would require "continuous and permanent work . . . to become an antiracist and equitable community." "We, like the rest of our country, have a long way to go," people were solemnly reminded. The message concluded by calling readers to attend "a community gathering to reflect on the Chauvin trial and its implications for the future." In this article, the author examines the idea of community in the college setting in the wake of George Floyd.

I AM IN a 1982 Volvo, headed north on I-5 toward Oceanside, at a pace I could easily beat on a bicycle. A universe of cars spreads to the north [...]

Dyadic interviews were conducted with 32 youth ages 13–21 and their self‐identified key adult supports to illuminate how adult supports help protect youth in communities impacted by high levels of violence. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis. Youth described choosing social interactions carefully, avoiding high‐violence areas, and keeping busy with activities. Many youths discussed the necessity of minimizing contact with peers to avoid violence, resulting in isolation from friends and increased engagement with family at home. Adult supports reflected upon an intergenerational transfer of violence avoidance, safety planning, and coping strategies through sharing their own lived experiences. Dyads highlighted the need for intergenerational programming to address social isolation and build supportive social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the new ARTEMIS emulator suite of high-resolution (baryon mass of 2.23 × 104 h −1 M⊙) zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-mass systems. Here, three haloes from the original ARTEMIS sample have been rerun multiple times, systematically varying parameters for the stellar feedback model, the density threshold for star formation, the reionization redshift, and the assumed warm dark matter (WDM) particle mass (assuming a thermal relic). From these simulations, emulators are trained for a wide range of statistics that allow for fast predictions at combinations of parameters not originally sampled, running in ∼1 ms (a factor of ∼1011 faster than the simulations). In this paper, we explore the dependence of the central haloes' stellar mass on the varied parameters, finding the stellar feedback parameters to be the most important. When constraining the parameters to match the present-day stellar mass halo mass relation inferred from abundance matching we find that there is a strong degeneracy in the stellar feedback parameters, corresponding to a freedom in formation time of the stellar component for a fixed halo assembly history. We additionally explore the dependence of the satellite stellar mass function, where it is found that variations in stellar feedback, the reionization redshift, and the WDM mass all have a significant effect. The presented emulators are a powerful tool which allows for fundamentally new ways of analysing and interpreting cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. Crucially, allowing their free (subgrid) parameters to be varied and marginalized, leading to more robust constraints and predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memento mori is a profoundly important aspect of religious reflection on the fleeting nature of life and the need to prepare spiritually for the inevitability of death. This essay considers two recent examples--the deaths of a world-renowned athletic celebrity and an obscure academic philosopher--and explores the contrasting images of death and its meaning found in religious and secular philosophical understandings., Author(s): Alexander Riley [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.253363.2, 0000 0001 2297 9828, Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Bucknell University, , 1 Dent Drive, 17837, Lewisburg, PA, USA The memento mori is a [...]

Imagine that you recently discovered a book titled How Cancer Works, written by a respected professor from a prominent university. He promises to explain the disease and tell you how [...]

IN THE WAKE of the Derek Chauvin verdict, Bucknell University, the liberal arts school where I work, lost no time in issuing a statement. We were told that America remained [...]

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Milky Way Survey (DESI MWS) will explore the assembly history of the Milky Way by characterizing remnants of ancient dwarf galaxy accretion events and improving constraints on the distribution of dark matter in the outer halo. We present mock catalogues that reproduce the selection criteria of MWS and the format of the final MWS data set. These catalogues can be used to test methods for quantifying the properties of stellar halo substructure and reconstructing the Milky Way's accretion history with the MWS data, including the effects of halo-to-halo variance. The mock catalogues are based on a phase-space kernel expansion technique applied to star particles in the Auriga suite of six high-resolution lambda-cold dark matter magnetohydrodynamic zoom-in simulations. They include photometric properties (and associated errors) used in DESI target selection and the outputs of the MWS spectral analysis pipeline (radial velocity, metallicity, surface gravity, and temperature). They also include information from the underlying simulation, such as the total gravitational potential and information on the progenitors of accreted halo stars. We discuss how the subset of halo stars observable by MWS in these simulations corresponds to their true content and properties. These mock Milky Ways have rich accretion histories, resulting in a large number of substructures that span the whole stellar halo out to large distances and have substantial overlap in the space of orbital energy and angular momentum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the conventional approach to decomposing a rotation curve into a set of contributions from mass model components, the measurements of the rotation curve at different radii are taken to be independent. It is clear, however, that radial correlations are present in such data, for instance (but not only) because the orbital speed depends on the mass distribution at all (or, minimally, inner) radii. We adopt a very simple parametric form for a covariance matrix and constrain its parameters using Gaussian process regression. Applied to the rotation curve of the Milky Way, this suggests the presence of correlations between neighbouring rotation curve points with amplitudes of |$\lt 10\, \mathrm{km}\, \mathrm{s}^{-1}$| over length scales of 1.5– |$2.5\, \mathrm{kpc}$| regardless of the assumed dark halo component. We show that accounting for such covariance can result in a ∼50 per cent lower total mass estimate for the Milky Way than when it is neglected, and that the uncertainty in model parameters increases such that it seems more representative of the uncertainty in the rotation curve measurement. The statistical uncertainty associated with the covariance is comparable to or exceeds the total systematic uncertainty budget. Our findings motivate including more detailed treatment of rotation curve covariance in future analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author(s): Alexander Riley [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) grid.253363.2, 0000 0001 2297 9828, Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Bucknell University, , 1 Dent Drive, 17837, Lewisburg, PA, USA Stéphane Courtois, Lénine, l'inventeur du [...]

A year ago in April, a student group at the university where I teach invited Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to speak on the topic [...]

Darel E. Paul's review essay 'Against Racialism' (October) is among the most succinct and incisive statements of the problem of the left in America today. Nietzsche wrote in the late [...]

Mythological thinking about events of mass violence is common in modern societies and this thinking frequently focuses on dynamics of 'us' and 'them.' Myths about the 9/11 terrorist attacks can be found on political right and left. On the right, the United Flight 93 memorial is described as an Islamist plot designed to denigrate the victims and venerate Islamist terrorism. On the left, the 9/11 attacks are viewed as orchestrations of an imperialist American government interested in vilifying and subjugating Muslims. Both myths are easily debunked with empirical data, but the power of mythological thinking about such events is such that data-based criticism has limited power to change the minds of adherents to myth., Author(s): Alexander Riley [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0001 2297 9828, grid.253363.2, Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Bucknell University, , 1 Dent Drive, 17837, Lewisburg, PA, USA American society, like every other [...]

In 2002, in these pages, Peter Berger, the late American sociologist, offered a succinct summary of the health and status of sociology. In Invitation to Sociology (1963), he had praised [...]

Author(s): Alexander Riley [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Bucknell University, 0000 0001 2297 9828, grid.253363.2, , 1 Dent Drive, 17837, Lewisburg, PA, USA One of a Dwindling Breed [...]

Peter Tonguette's superb decryption of Revolutionary Road ('At Home on Revolutionary Road,' April) and Ephraim Radner's poignant reflection on the vast amount of 'Music That is Never Heard' touch on [...]

Theodore Dalrymple ('Identity as Ideology,' February) is certainly correct to point to the yearning for transcendence that was not--and likely cannot be--obliterated in people like Andre Hebert when they lose [...]

Some four miles as the crow flies from the site at which United 93, which was the fourth plane involved in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on the United States, struck ground, there sits a small chapel dedicated to the passengers and crew. The Thunder on the Mountain Chapel is considerably less well known than the Parks Department memorial a few hundred yards from the crash site, but it is, arguably at least, equally important in the cultural production of the Flight 93 myth. This article draws from Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life as well as other theoretical sources to look closely at the chapel. I argue that what is going on at the Chapel contributes to a totemic myth that turns the American flag into a representation of the dead national hero and then places the totem object into the beliefs and rituals of an American civil religion. Keywords: Durkheim, culture, civil religion, cultural sociology Quelque six kilometres du site oU le quatrieme avion implique dans l'attaque de l'onze septembre, United 93, s'est ecrase, il existe une petite chapelle consacre aux passagers. La Chapelle "Tonnerre sur la Montagne" est beaucoup moins connu que le memorial official situe quelques centaines de metres du lieu de l'accident, mais il est sans doute au moins aussi important dans la production de la mythologie culturelle de l'United 93. Cet article s'inspire du celebre livre de Durkheim sur la religion ainsi que d'autres sources theoriques pour tenter une analyse du symbolisme de la chapelle. Il est soutenu que ce qui se passe a la chapelle contribue a un mythe totemique qui transforme le drapeau americain en representation du corps de l'heros national en situant cet objet totemique au milieu des croyances et rituels d'une "civil religion" americaine Mots cles: Durkheim, la culture, la religion civile, sociologie culturelle, Introduction A century after its publication, Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (hereafter EFRL), along with the powerful contributions of some of his collaborators who were deeply informed by [...]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2451.2009.01694.x Byline: Alexander Riley (1) Abstract: The classical Durkheimian understanding of violence has been significantly augmented in recent decades by a neo-Durkheimian analysis of the dual nature of the sacred and mass-mediated ritual. A good deal of the post-1970s thought of Jean Baudrillard, including his controversial writings on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, was centrally concerned with the ways in which the media shape the social experience of violence. In this chapter I argue that his theoretical reconceptualisation of the meaning of suicide, which can reasonably be described as Durkheimian in its essentials, offers a useful tool for making sense of the fascination exerted on viewers by some mediated acts of self-destructive violence. Author Affiliation: (1)Bucknell University