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Over the past few decades, there has been a significant uptick in the number of people relocating to Berlin. This influx is most of-ten viewed as a response to rebranding the reunified German capi-tal as a creative city – a tactic that foregrounded Berlin’s longstand-ing reputation for cheap rent, liberal attitudes, artistic culture, and vibrant nightlife. The housing market responded as vacancies plummeted while rent prices skyrocketed. Alongside the widely lamented changing face of the reunified capital, the spike in rent prices is one tangible outcome of Berlin’s rapid gentrification. This essay examines the aesthetics of gentrifying Berlin through an ex-amination of a genre commonly associated with the imperatives of gentrification: the romantic comedy. Unlike other cinema tradi-tions associated with urban space, the romcom is commonly un-derstood as a genre that frames the city as a site of aspirational af-fluence and consumerism. This framing has, to date, overwhelm-ingly referred to romcoms produced in the American context. Through analyses of three romcoms set in Berlin – Germany’s highest grossing romcom to date KEINOHRHASEN (‘Rabbit With-out Ears’, Schweiger, 2007); the 2019 installment in Emmanuel Benbihy’s ‘City of Love’ anthology film series, BERLIN, I LOVE YOU and Doris Dörrie’s GLÜCK (‘Bliss’, 2012) this essay interro-gates whether romcoms set in Berlin can be, as has been claimed of their US counterparts, understood as a genre of gentrification.

The trope of forced sex in romance fiction has found itself under scrutiny and pressure since the feminist movement, and even more so now as women's media, especially e-media and social media, grow increasingly concerned with what is called "rape culture". A thriving subgenre of romance fiction is the Viking-themed romance, a paranormal-inflected subgenre that invariably features non-consensual sex (“ravishment”). My contention is that the Viking in these romance novels is a symbol of the pre-modern, allowed to be a brutal dominator precisely because he is freed from the restrictions of rational modernity. Moreover, the persistence of the paranormal in these stories marks them as clearly existing outside the general consensus of reality. Socially unacceptable behaviour becomes reframed as part of a fantasy, pre-emptively defusing any criticism that the acts of rape within are meaningful in a contemporary real-world context. The genre of Viking romance fiction, then, creates a more comfortable space for these stories by projecting rape into the past, and obscuring it with the veil of the numinous. Ravishment is accepted more readily when it is represented within a context that is neither "modern" nor "normal": rather, it is pre-modern and paranormal. The genre uses a number of observable moves, related to the pre-modern and the paranormal, to manage the transformation of a potentially guilty reading pleasure into a less-encumbered reading pleasure.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is increasing in prevalence with the aging population. Deposition of amyloid-β (Aβ) in the brain of AD patients is a hallmark of the disease and is associated with increased microglial numbers and activation state. The interaction of microglia with Aβ appears to play a dichotomous role in AD pathogenesis. On one hand, microglia can phagocytose and clear Aβ, but binding of microglia to Aβ also increases their ability to produce inflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and neurotoxic reactive oxygen species (ROS). Scavenger receptors, a group of evolutionally conserved proteins expressed on the surface of microglia act as receptors for Aβ. Of particular interest are SCARA-1 (scavenger receptor A-1), CD36, and RAGE (receptor for advanced glycation end products). SCARA-1 appears to be involved in the clearance of Aβ, while CD36 and RAGE are involved in activation of microglia by Aβ. In this review, we discuss the roles of various scavenger receptors in the interaction of microglia with Aβ and propose that these receptors play complementary, nonredundant functions in the development of AD pathology. We also discuss potential therapeutic applications for these receptors in AD.