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The recent expansion in Black suburbanization is the most substantial shift in Black American residential patterns since the Great Migration. It has left Blacks more sorted between urban and suburban neighborhoods across metropolitan areas. This study explores whether this increasing residential stratification is associated with differentiation in Blacks' political views on racialized issues. I first lay out a theory of Black political sorting by place, specifying processes inherent in suburbanization that could lead to opinion stratification between suburban and urban Blacks. This is followed by a descriptive analysis of American Voices Project interviews with suburban and urban Black respondents. The data show Black suburbanization is neither as economically transformative nor politically differentiating as might be expected. Despite subtle opinion differences between suburban and urban respondents, they mostly converge in their bleak assessments of racialized issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I document and analyze all municipal, state, and county-level efforts for Black reparations in the United States. Most efforts resemble H.R. 40's exploratory commission model, possibly due to policy path dependency. Few geographies have allocated funding for committee recommendations, but some have allocated funds for committee activities. Only Evanston, Illinois, has allocated and distributed funds to qualifying residents. On average, cities with reparations efforts demonstrated mixed performance on metrics related to Black wealth, with insufficient evidence to suggest local Black-White disparities are more severe than the nation as a whole. Several proposals emphasize the Black-White racial wealth gap as emblematic of slavery-derived disparity, but no municipal or state proposal can rival the scale or potential of a federal program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of smart homes globally has increased to 300 million, and the smart home market is expected to reach approximately $181.4 billion by 2025. These new developments, however, are accompanied by related security risks. The attack surface for smart home devices poses latent dangers because of inadequate security that enables cybercriminals to gain access to such devices. This Article proposes extending product liability to address security vulnerabilities in smart home devices. Part I examines the ubiquity of smart home devices. Part II sets forth the breadth of security vulnerabilities in connected devices, confirming the need to clarify that product liability applies to software and to create a global standard that reduces compliance costs for smart home device makers. Part III develops a detailed global standard for smart home device product liability, aligning U.S. product liability law with the proposed revision of the European Union's Product Liability Directive 85/374/EEC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does homeland origin impact the welfare of emigrants (and their US-born descendants) in the US diaspora? Hostilities between governments in places of origin and settlement may trigger xenophobic reactions of the native-born and discriminatory treatments against immigrant-origin Americans tied to antagonistic foreign homelands due to the latter being presumed "guilty by ethnic association." Rising US-China tensions and negative perceptions of China may endanger the lives and livelihoods of Chinese and other Asian Americans. However, the relationship between public perceptions of China and the fate of Americans perceived as being Chinese has been largely anecdotal. Viewed through the prism of US public opinion toward China and US-China relations, this research provides a systematic review of the rise and contours of the perceived "China threat" in American public opinion and how it may impact the welfare of Chinese Americans in specific and Asian Americans in general iii the present day. This research benefits from the availability of several large-scale national public opinion surveys conducted between 2020 and 2023, especially the STAATUS 2023 and SOCA of 2022. We find little relationship between perceived threats from China and people of Chinese descent residing in the US. Our findings refute the idea that there is a necessary relationship between perceived threats by China and assessments of Asian American loyalty and high-tech employment. However, we also show evidence that this does not mean Chinese and other Asian Americans themselves do not feel discriminated against on a daily basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arts Magazine is the property of Thamar University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The proliferation of digital goods has led to an increased interest in how the digitization of products and services affects consumer behavior. In this article, the authors show that although consumers are willing to pay more for physical than digital goods, this difference attenuates—and even reverses—when consumers are asked to make a choice between the two product formats. This effect is explained by a contingent weighting principle: In willingness to pay, a quantitative task, consumers anchor on quantitative information (e.g., market beliefs). However, in choice, a qualitative task, consumers anchor on qualitative information (e.g., which good dominates on the most important attribute). These differences in contingent weighting result in physical goods being preferred in willingness to pay, but their digital equivalent being preferred relatively more in choice. The authors draw conclusions from ten preregistered experiments and six supplemental studies using a variety of goods in hypothetical and incentive-compatible contexts, as well as within- and between-subjects designs. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for the marketing of digital goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two and a half years ago COVID-19 spread to the United States. Following the federalism model (New State Ice Co. vs Liebmann; Cheng and Lee 2019), the 50 states and their governors and legislators made many of their own pandemic policy choices to mitigate the damage from the virus. States learned from one another over time about what policies worked most and least effectively in terms of containing the virus while minimizing the negative effects of lockdown strategies on businesses and children. This study is an expanded and updated version of an October 2020 report card of how pandemic health, economy, and policy varied across the 50 states and the District of Columbia (Committee to Unleash Prosperity 2020). It examines three variables: health outcomes, economic performance throughout the pandemic, and impact on education. We find no relationship between reduced economic activity during the pandemic and mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study asks if Black mayors' individual and collective responses to George Floyd's killing were qualitatively different than mayoral reactions to the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Specifically, I examine whether Black mayors rejected the "timeworn" tradition of respectability politics in favor of a new paradigm in 2020. I also consider the characteristics of mayors, cities, and media that may explain this change. My original dataset includes 232 public statements issued by 31 Black mayors during either the Obama administration (2014–2015) or Trump administration (2020). I find that the cohort of Black mayors leading large cities during Era 2 were demonstrably less likely to activate respectability politics when talking about Floyd's murder than their predecessors. I discuss the implications of these observations considering the political climate mayors are confronting at the time of writing, around the 2-year anniversary of Floyd's death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first distinguishes three governance scenarios that have been enacted in the COVID-19 pandemic, including identification and control; herd immunity without policy adjustments; and periodic lockdowns and hasty opening. In suggesting how different governments' strategies were taxonomized into these categories, the paper examines major socio-legal challenges, including variations in social structures and government responsibilities; differences in public health cultures and legal policy options available to governments; unequal distribution of health and social welfare benefits; and public concerns of government overreach in relation to privacy of the infected and the preservation of individual liberty and freedom. Finally, the paper offers critical recommendations in the interest of ensuring a robust social-legal framework for providing adequate medical care to the infected; improving public health for vulnerable groups; ensuring that less privileged countries have access to vaccines; and designing post-disaster reconstruction by seeking global health objectives, rather than state-centric national justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Australian Journal of Political Science is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

COVID-19 scams promise to alleviate the physical and financial risks associated with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic but in fact expose consumers to additional risk. The present research examines how one prominent and unequally distributed socioeconomic factor—resource availability during childhood—influences susceptibility to COVID-19 scams among US adults. One pilot and five preregistered studies (total N = 1595) provide evidence that childhood adversity may often confer a protective advantage; when environmental threat is low, adults raised in scarcity are less susceptible to scams than those raised in abundance. However, heightened environmental threat—such as evidence of a worsening global pandemic—holds different consequences for those with different socioeconomic backgrounds: whereas adults raised in abundance become less susceptible to scams when the world seems more threatening, adults raised in scarcity become more susceptible to scams under these conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary democracy in multiple countries has been under assault from what has been variously called right-wing populism, authoritarian populism, cultural majoritarianism, new nativism, new nationalism, quasi-fascism, and neo-fascism. While the authoritarian behaviors of several electorally legitimated leaders in these countries have been in focus, their misogyny is seen as merely an incidental part of their personality. This article highlights the centrality of misogyny in legitimating the political goals and regimes of a set of leaders in contemporary democracies—Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, and Erdogan (all but Trump are still in power)—in countries from across Global North/South, non-West/West, with mixed populations and different majority religions. The argument proceeds as follows. First, I clarify the conceptualization of misogyny and explain why it matters. Second, I demonstrate the substantive misogyny of political leaders who are/have been heads of hegemonic right-wing political projects in five contemporary democracies (Trumpism, Modification, Bolsonarismo, Dutertismo, and Erdoganism). Third, I put forward three systematic ways in which misogyny works as an effective political strategy for these projects, by enabling a certain politics of identity to demonize opponents as feminine/inferior/anti-national, scavenging upon progressive ideas (rather than rejecting them) and distorting them, and sustaining and defending a militarized masculinist approach to policy and delegitimizing challenges to it. This article, thus, contributes to the literature on how masculinity, misogyny, and gender norms more broadly intersect with political legitimacy, by arguing for understanding the analytic centrality of misogyny to the exercise of political power in multiple global projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dossier on #MeToo and Transnational Gender Justice builds on rich feminist scholarship that critically foregrounds the transnational over the global ([15]; [9]; [2]; [7]). However, collectively their primary focus is on how the heterogeneous and diffuse feminist politics of #MeToo as a transnational social movement transforms the very concepts that are so at risk of being universalized within a US-based genealogy of #MeToo and gender-based violence. #MeToo and Genealogies of Transnational Feminist Thought This dossier on #MeToo engages with two primary genealogies of transnational feminisms that have emerged over the last thirty years, during which feminists have engaged the limitations and possibilities that contemporary globalization presents for feminist thought and praxis. What emerges through this dossier on the transnational feminist politics of #MeToo, then, is a politics of transformation, one that very much challenges a politics of assimilation that might otherwise be the way that the story of MeToo's globality is told. [Extracted from the article]

What can narratives of suicide tell us about diasporic and Indigenous relationships to the white settler state? This article engages relational critique to examine trans/femme/bisexual South Asian Canadian filmmaker Vivek Shraya's short film I want to kill myself (2017) and queer Cree/Métis filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones's feature film Fire Song (2015). Both films challenge the spectacularity of suicide, effectively situating suicide on a continuum of "slow death." However, the films also stage distinct relationships between suicide, community, and the state that emerge from diasporic and Native positionalities within a white settler society. Whereas Shraya's diasporic struggle with suicide is alleviated by forging community within settler spaces, Fire Song counters pathologizing depictions of reserve communities by emphasizing resurgent Indigenous practices and their refusal of settler logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do racially concentrated policy changes translate to political action? Using official election returns, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and original data on the unprecedented mass closure of schools in segregated, predominantly Black neighborhoods across Chicago, we demonstrate that those living in the communities affected (1) increase their attendance at political meetings; (2) mobilize in support of ballot measures to avert future closings; and (3) increase their participation in the subsequent local election, while decreasing their support for the political official responsible for the policy on the ballot—at a higher rate than every other group. These findings shed light on how groups that previously participated at the lowest rates go on to participate at the highest rates on community issues that matter to them. We develop a theory of place-based mobilization to explain the role of "the community" in acting as a site of coidentification and political action for marginalized groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics charge President Donald Trump with racism, but he insists he opposes bigotry and is an American nationalist, not a white nationalist. We use analysis of Trump's campaign rhetoric, his administration's policies, and their reception to assess these rival claims. In his campaign, Trump narrated American identity as a tale of lost greatness in which a once-unblemished America gave way to globalist elites who have victimized many Americans, particularly traditionalist, predominantly white Christian Americans. His policies have systematically expanded protections for such Americans and sought to increase their share of the American electorate and citizenry, while reducing or eliminating initiatives designed to assist and increase the numbers of non-white, non-Christian American voters and citizens. The evidence thus shows that although Trump does not explicitly endorse white nationalism, his rhetoric and policies articulate not a consistent race-blind nationalism, but a vision of white protectionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long recognized the role that older Black American women play in providing care for their own grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and even non‐kin, arguing that kinship and caregiving relationships have been shaped by historical and structural factors. In this article, I consider intensive grandchild caregiving among Black American grandparents, primarily grandmothers, living in Detroit, Michigan. I highlight how the decision and process of providing care involves a "care calculation" where grandmothers evaluate their decision to caregive against existing financial, emotional, and bodily resources. In doing so, I argue that grandparent caregiving should be understood as a responsive and intentional process, where the decision to care for grandchildren and the performance of care work is more than simply responding to a set of certain circumstances and/or obligations based on biological kinship relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I read Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (2002) and its legal historical intertexts in order to nuance "fiction" as a literary category of antebellum African American writing. Specifically, I develop connections between The Bondwoman's Narrative and US laws of slavery by thinking about the novel's form in relation to legal citational practices. I argue that the novel encrypts and encodes legal narratives within its fictionalized accounts of verifiable "historical" events. By close reading Crafts's alterations of such events, I compare her use of encryption to the citational practices inherent in legal precedent. This comparison yields a stronger understanding of antebellum African American authorial practices as deploying legal rhetorical strategies that resisted dominant legal narratives and generated new literary forms. I problematize the tendency to redeem law as a possible or ideal site of black belonging and to underscore the ways that authors such as Crafts encrypted their writing with rejections of law and the nation-state. Her work does so even as it rehearses a facility and engagement with legal culture that might suggest an effort to inscribe African Americans into legal frameworks and the ongoing nineteenth-century project of US nation-building. Instead of reading this complex engagement with US law as evincing an attachment to it, I argue for reading it as the rejection and radical reimagining of existing logics of authority and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social distancing is an effective means of containing the spread of COVID‐19, but only if we all participate. Who are the individuals who are least likely to adhere to social distancing recommendations, presently and in the long term? Such knowledge is important for policy makers looking to sustain the public's buy‐in to social distancing. Using survey data from a sample of U.S. residents (n = 1,449), the authors show that some demographic factors (gender, age, race, political party) help predict intent to adhere to social distancing. Yet demographic factors are relatively poor predictors compared with individual attitudes and media diets. Public officials should make efforts to inform and persuade the public of the importance of social distancing, targeting media such as television and radio, where audiences are less likely to currently engage in social distancing or are less likely to envision themselves sustaining strict social distancing for several weeks or months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comprehensively examines international migration trends and policies in light of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It begins by reviewing migration developments throughout the past 60 years. It then examines pandemic-related migration trends and policies. It concludes with a series of general observations and insights that should guide local, national, regional, and international policymakers, moving forward. In particular, it proposes the following: National measures to combat COVID-19 should include international migrants, irrespective of their legal status, and should complement regional and international responses. Localities, nations, and the international community should prioritize the safe return and reintegration of migrants. States and international agencies should plan for the gradual re-emergence of large-scale migration based on traditional push and pull forces once a COVID-19 vaccine is widely available. States should redouble their efforts to reconcile national border security concerns and the basic human rights of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. States and the international community should accelerate their efforts to address climate-related migration. States of origin, transit, and destination should directly address the challenges of international migration and not minimize them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines basic functions of crisis decision‐making—cognition, communication, coordination, and control—in response to COVID‐19. This crisis decision‐making framework is applied to cases from South Korea, Italy, and the United States as public officials grapple with how to recognize, respond, and recover from this deadly, invisible threat. The authors acknowledge the harsh trade‐off between the compelling need to limit transmission of the virus to protect public health and the consequent economic losses of halting social interaction. They draw implications from this crisis for better decision‐making and investment in a global information infrastructure system to manage large‐scale, multidisciplinary threats to the health, economy, and sustainability of the world's community of nations. The essay concludes that collective cognition, amplified by timely, valid communication and supported by sound planning, trained personnel, appropriate technology, and bold leadership, enables coordinated action needed to bring a large‐scale global crisis under control. Evidence for Practice: Invest in information technology to manage systematic data collection, analysis, and modeling.Provide timely, informed updates on community status to constituents.Maintain a knowledge base of resources, vulnerabilities, and plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In article the author talks about military depiction in the media. Topics include Chris Kyle's American Sniper and many military books; and that books focus on the personal lives of the protagonists along with historical, political, and cultural context; and the depiction of consumed military memoirs in political speeches, films and television dramas.

This essay presents an ecocritical analysis of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, the 1850s manuscript novel by a formerly-enslaved African American woman that was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in 2001. Examining Crafts's extensive engagement with Charles Dickens's Bleak House, it argues that Crafts's fictionalized narrative of enslavement and self-emancipation re-imagines a Victorian politics of environmental health as a critique of environmental racism. Showing how Crafts presents the material ecology of the plantation South as a site and vector of violence, it reads The Bondwoman's Narrative as resisting nineteenth-century scientific discourses of racialized immunity that sought to legitimize the systemic neglect of enslaved people in the antebellum United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how Spike Lee's 2015 Lysistrata adaptation, Chi-Raq , reaches beyond the screen—'in excess' of its medium—by using the techniques of immersive theatre to revive Aristophanes' classical plot as well as his urgent call to citizenly collective action (McGowan, Todd. Spike Lee. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014). Lee's seductive activist fairytale in rhyming verse imagines a worldwide sex strike led by Chicago's women of colour. Like its Classical predecessor, the film both critiques and reinforces the spectacular objectification of female bodies; that tension is always in play, even as it successfully brings about a peace treaty between two warring Englewood gangs. To explore this and other socio-political tensions, Lee's film employs many of the 'physical, sensual and participatory' elements that Josephine Machon understands as central to immersive performance (Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xv). Crucial to this immersive adaptation is Lee's transgressive coordination of sight, touch, and sound to aptly update Lysistrata 's acts of refusal as deeply gendered and racialized calls for intimate justice. In effect, audiences learn, move, chant, yearn, and envision a better world alongside the characters in the film. As a result, the goals of Chi-Raq are achieved in ways that are both more compellingly relevant and more radical than any other contemporary Lysistrata adaptation in recent memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers, acting independently of marketers and advertisers, have started creating and disseminating documents that strongly resemble, in form and intent, ads for the brands that they love. Employing a netnographic method, this paper investigates consumer-generated, commercially relevant artifacts by examining the brand community centered on the Apple Newton, a brand that was (along with its supporting advertising) discontinued in 1998. The members of the Newton community create commercially relevant content to fill the void created by the lack of advertising for the brand. These artifacts reflect tensions with the marketer, the market, and the community itself, and imbue the brand with powerful meaning. These data reveal that consumers can be quite skilled in the creation of brand-relevant communications, applying the styles, logics, and grammar of advertising. The ascendancy of consumer-generated content prefigures revolutionary changes in how advertising is defined and practiced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School reform policies, such as the closure of "low-performing" schools and the competitive introduction of school choice and charters, were presented to communities of color as the fix to educational inequities and the lifeline needed for urban Black students to have a chance at a quality education and social mobility. The ways in which reforms have under-delivered on this promise, and in some cases exacerbated negative academic outcomes, particularly for Black boys, are documented. Yet, research on the experience of Black adolescent girls is sparse. We explore ways that policies aimed at delivering a school choice environment have affected daily life for Black adolescent girls. We examine this issue in the context of the Detroit metropolitan area with Black adolescent girls, reflecting on their high school education experiences that spanned a time-period of rapid transitions in the schooling environment (2014–2016) prompted by a series of school reforms in Michigan. Through in-depth interviews we found that girls sought to invest in their high school education as a path to college; yet the very reforms advanced as ways to clear this path hindered their ability to spend time on the human and social capital activities believed to be important to their academic success and social mobility. Our findings suggest advantages for those students with proximal access to high quality neighborhood schools cannot be replicated in a choice environment. There may also be health consequences of the coping strategies girls are compelled to employ to carry on under adverse educational circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal fiscal condition is typically assessed using objective financial indicators, but little is understood about how local officials subjectively evaluate their own fiscal health. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze survey data from Michigan, we explore how local officials conceptualize fiscal health and compare self‐assessments with conventional financial indicators. The results reveal that local officials emphasize long‐run issues and external stressors, but the relative importance of different factors varies depending on whether they report high or low fiscal stress. We suggest that self‐assessments may be a useful supplement to conventional objective measures in capturing "true" fiscal health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While library models already exist for sharing physical materials and joint licensing, this paper envisions an aspect of future collections involving a national digital collection owned, not licensed, by libraries. Collaborative collection development, digitization, and digital object management of owned collections can benefit societies in multiple ways, from expanding access to users otherwise unable to reach these materials, to preserving content even when disaster strikes, to reducing duplication of effort and expense in collection or digitization. This article will explore both the benefits of and the challenges to this type of collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the feminist approach to the moral psychology of hope, and understanding the why, how and what one can hope. Topics discussed include things that influence one's hope include interpersonal relationship, imagination and limitations, oppression as a threat to rational thinking and hope, especially in the feminist context, and example of indigenous people of North America who live on reserves and are plagued with unemployment, poverty and health issues.

The article criticises the violence and mourning in the sovereignty and containment of the American government with respect to the racism and targetted killing of African Americans in the U.S. Topics discussed include unapologetic violence in New York, Baltimore, Maryland and Charlottesville, Virginia, victims of violence includes Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, and ideologies of French philosopher Michel Foucault.

The article explores the origination of the pharmaceutical manufacturer preemption defense from the U.S. Supreme Court's application of the Hatch-Waxman Act's provisions. It examines the unintended consequence of the law of absolving generic manufacturers from tort liability. It also assesses clear evidence of impossibility originally required for preemption defense based on several cases, including Wyeth v. Levine.

This particular study provides a brief history of the death penalty in the United States and evaluates in more detail the death penalty in Nebraska. Information regarding Nebraska's legal position on the issue is provided, but this study goes beyond that to spatially examine recent vote patterns regarding the death penalty. The geographical breakdown demonstrates how Nebraskans vote compared to their elected officials in the legislature's single chamber known as the unicameral, which was implemented in 1937. In 2015, with support from liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans, unicameral members voted for life imprisonment to replace the death penalty, a measure which also withstood the governor's veto in an override vote (LB268). In 2016, Nebraska's citizens by a wide margin (60.6 percent of Nebraskans voted in support of the death penalty) retained the death penalty with Referendum 426. Four unicameral members were also voted out of office in 2016; history demonstrates that outside of term limits sitting senators are rarely replaced. All four had voted against the death penalty but resided in districts that supported the measure, and three of the four were Republicans replaced by Republicans. Ultimately, Nebraska's citizens decided the state's stance on the death penalty, which supports long-time Nebraska politician George Norris' contention that elected officials would be held accountable by the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project explores attitudes of males of different ages toward black and white celebrity endorsers. Using advertisements for a men’s fragrance, the authors determine that although males of various age cohorts have similar perceptions of a celebrity’s credibility, likability and attractiveness, once paired with a product in an advertisement, attitude measures diverge. Older white male consumers have significantly more positive attitudes toward products endorsed by white celebrities versus black celebrities while young males make no such distinction. A key explanation for this difference lies in the self-focused value orientation of younger males. Multiple study iterations replicate results and reinforce findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research has indicated that giving users the opportunity to customize a persuasive source led to increased liking for the product that the source was selling. In this study, users were either assigned a two-dimensional avatar representing a persuasive source, allowed to select an avatar, or were asked to create an avatar to represent a source's appearance. Results indicate that increasing the number of customization options increases perceptions of identity with the source and control over the source, which reduces psychological reactance to the persuasive message and ultimately increases product liking. These findings suggest that persuasive message creators using interactive media would do well to give users the opportunity to customize a source object when presenting them with a persuasive message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the theory of 'ontological insecurity,' people who worry that society is in a state of decline or upheaval will also support punitive social control of deviants. I test the relationship between several measures of people's anxiety about the state of society, their perception of racial tension, and their confidence in the police (as enforcers of social control) during the period of social unrest following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I use ordinary least squares regression to analyze data from a nationally representative public opinion poll gathered for the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press during August, 2014. I find that pessimism about the state of the economy, pessimism about race relations, and the experience of personal hardship are related to decreased confidence in the police, while pessimism about the state of morals in society is related to increased confidence. I conclude that public confidence in the police is intertwined with public confidence in the stability of the country, more generally. This study supports a 'neo-Durkheimian' model of policing. The opposite findings of economic versus moral insecurity also call for refinement of the ontological insecurity theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues against water poisoning in Flint, Michigan which have ruined many lives in the city and was used an example in both racial capitalism and environmental racism. Topics include the cause of poisoning was troubled by the municipal Emergency Fiscal Manager (EFM), the solutions for the problem and the abandonment of shrinking services and democratic practices.

At least twice, Georges Bataille commented briefly but memorably on photographs he owned of a Chinese prisoner being executed by dismemberment. The history of this punishment in China, known as lingchi, or “the death by a thousand cuts,” ended around the same time the photographs were taken, but Bataille’s comments evinced a modern sensibility of punishment that is aesthetic rather than pedagogical, and which Bataille often theorized with reference to the Marquis de Sade. In the contemporary US, this regime is intimately connected with the visual stigmatics of racism, and has resulted in two contrasting phenomena: capital executions giving way to solitary confinement, and the extrajudicial public killings of unarmed black people by police. In this paper, the purposes of hidden and visible torture by the state are compared through examples taken from premodern China, early modern Europe, and the contemporary United States, and interpreted with reference to psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores what may justify the appeal of the novel "Gone with the Wind" by American author Margaret Mitchell and its continued presence on the literary scene. Topics include the endurance of the novel as one of the most-beloved motifs of Southern culture, the double discourses that have surrounded the afterlife of the novel, and the end to which retelling is used by treating the unauthorized parody, "The Wind Gone Done," by Alice Randall.