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Paul de Faget de Casteljau (19.11.1930 - 24.3.2022) has left us an extensive autobiography, written in 1997. In 19 sections, he takes us through his eventful life which he describes with wit and humor. We read about his youth in occupied France and his education at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He describes in detail various episodes from his time at Citroën, the situation during and after the discovery of his now famous algorithm, the takeover by Peugeot, his ban from working on CAD and his corporate rehabilitation thanks to his advances in polar forms and quaternions. His memoirs end with his departure from Citroën and his first invited talks at academic conferences. The paper contains the transcribed French original, its English translation and numerous notes and annotations. The handwritten text is available as a digital supplement. • Education and Mindset of de Casteljau. • History of his initial algorithm. • Episodes about the organisational culture at Citroën from the 1960s to the 1990s. • Background of his further findings in trigonometric smoothing, polar forms, quaternions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theatre can be a powerful tool for exploring social justice issues, but it can also reproduce whiteness, ableism, and other systemic oppressions. As theatre educators--constrained by many competing demands on our time, resources, and energy--we want to know: how can we leverage our teaching artistry to authentically explore social justice issues with the young people and adults in our communities? Speaking from our experiences at a nonprofit theatre in a majoritywhite, upper-middle-class community, we offer creative drama as a model for integrating this kind of social justice education into youth musical theatre production camps. We explore the tools that creative drama offers for supporting youth and teaching artists in exploring issues related to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility; understanding our relationships with oppressive systems; and taking action to transform them. Then, we demonstrate how this can look in practice. We outline a process through which we developed two creative drama adventures and share stories of how these dramas unfolded. Finally, we surface some lingering tensions about our and our students' identities and how they inform our ongoing work. In sharing these stories and tensions, we invite you to consider how creative drama might support you and your communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite paying concerted attention to evolutionary mechanisms, literary scholars have rarely focused on forms of "directed evolution" like orthogenesis (evolution along a linear track) and phylogeronty—the parallel between the lifespan of an animal group and the lifespan of an aging individual—analogical concepts reflecting a paleontological manifestation of a wider interest in human decadence. This essay analyzes how these concepts are explored in three areas: popular adventure fiction, social reform novels by Marie Stopes and H. G. Wells, and writings by paleontologists. Across these texts, the essay argues that directed evolution offered a recognizable trajectory with which to render the complexity and strangeness of prehistoric and modern life alike into a familiar linear shape by reading certain extinct animals as moral exemplars of evolutionary failure. While reformers hoped that humans could escape the orthogenetic grooves confining nonhuman animals to extinction, this optimism was shadowed both with fears that humans might inevitably face decadence and with a sense that survival meant mediocrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]