Power Plus Persuasion: The Anatomy of Kennedy’s Housing Order

We examine the influence of various political actors on the substance and timing of presidential orders. Specifically, we analyze President John F. Kennedy’s decision to issue E. O. 11063, which directed the federal bureaucracy to eliminate discrimination in the sale or lease of residential property overseen by the federal government. We show that this order did not result solely from Kennedy’s policy preferences; rather, it was a product of persuasion by several political actors who coaxed Kennedy to act. This reinforces previous findings that the president’s power of the pen is often conditioned by the informal political costs of unilateral executive action.     

Environment and collapse: Eastern Anatolian obsidians at Urkesh (Tell Mozan,Syria) and the third-millennium Mesopotamian urban crisis

The Early to Middle Bronze Age transition in Northern Mesopotamia has received great attention for the apparent concurrence of aridification, deurbanisation, and the end of the Akkadian empire around 2200 BCE. Our understanding of the “crisis” has been almost exclusively shaped by ceramics, demography, and subsistence. Exchange and the associated social networks have been largely neglected. Here we report our sourcing results for 97 obsidian artefacts from Urkesh, a large urban settlement inhabited throughout the crisis. Before the crisis, six obsidian sources located in Eastern Anatolia are represented among the artefacts. Such a diversity of Eastern Anatolian obsidians at one site is hitherto unknown in Mesopotamia. It implies Urkesh was a cosmopolitan city with diverse visitors or visitors with diverse itineraries. During this crisis, however, obsidians came from only two of the closest sources. Two to three centuries passed before varied obsidians reappeared. Even when an obsidian source reappears, the raw material seems to have come from a different collection spot. We discuss the likely exchange mechanisms and related social networks responsible for the arrival of obsidians at Urkesh and how they might have changed in response to climatic perturbations and regional government collapse.     

From flow to quarry: magnetic properties of obsidian and changing the scale of archaeological sourcing

Previous studies have endeavored to use petrophysical traits of obsidian, particularly its magnetic properties, as an alternative to conventional geochemical sourcing, one of the greatest successes in archaeological science. Magnetic approaches, however, have not seen widespread application due to their mixed successes. In a time when geochemical analyses can be conducted non-destructively, in the field, and in a minute or two, magnetic measurements of obsidian must offer novel archaeological insights to be worthwhile, not merely act as a less successful version of geochemistry. To this end, we report the findings of our large-scale study of obsidian magnetism, which includes 734 geological obsidian specimens and 97 artifacts measured for six simple magnetic parameters. Based on our results, we propose, rather than using magnetic properties to source artifacts to a particular obsidian flow (inter-flow sourcing), these properties are best used to differentiate quarrying sites within an individual flow (intra-flow sourcing). Our results also demonstrate that certain magnetic properties are highly affected by ancient knappers' material selection criteria. Furthermore, depending on the spatial scales of variation, which likely vary from flow to flow, we envision several potential applications of this approach, including integration into minimum analytical nodule analysis (MANA). Magnetic data appear to shift the scale of obsidian sourcing from flows to quarries and, in turn, enable new insights into raw-material procurement strategies, group mobility, lithic technology, and the organization of space and production.     

Miralinidae (Marsupialia: Phalangeroidea) from northern Australia,including the youngest occurrence of the family

Five isolated molars from two localities in the Northern Territory, the middle Miocene Bullock Creek and late Oligocene Kangaroo Well sites, are assigned to the new miralinid genus Barguru, which includes the three new species: Barguru kayir, Barguru maru and Barguru kula. The Miralinidae was previously thought to be restricted to the late Oligocene and early Miocene, but the occurrence at Bullock Creek extends the time range of this family into the middle Miocene. Analysis of metaloph development in the Miralinidae suggests that loph formation in this family followed a different trajectory to that of phalangerids.     

Strauss on Maimonides’ Secretive Political Science

Abstract

In this article, the authors review Joseph Cropsey's last collection of essays, Humanity's Intensive Introspection. They argue that Cropsey's essays draw on resources in the Western tradition, both from within liberal thought and from ancient sources, to elevate human life and to fortify modern society, especially against contemporary critiques of liberalism. Philosophy's discovery of the inscrutability of the whole opens it to revelation and also provides a basis for philosophy's active contribution to an open or liberal society.     

Josiah Wedgwood and the seventh dominion scheme

The founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, believed that Zionism would create a new type of Jew. The youth organization that he headed, Betar Youth, used a variety of means to train its members to realize the vision of the “new Jew,” from physical and paramilitary exercises to learning and using the Hebrew language, from a certain code of behavior to making every effort to immigrate to Eretz Yisrael. Jabotinsky presented three figures as models of the new Jewish character: Herzl, who had brought the nation back into history; Trumpeldor, who personified the pure idea of pioneering and serving the nation; and Shlomo Ben Yosef, who, when sentenced to death by the British Mandate authorities, demonstrated strength and honor while in prison and went to the gallows with the Betar Song on his lips. These three men symbolized in their lives the idea of the “new Jew” – the antithesis to the figure of the ghetto Jew.     

Widespread Policy Disruption: Terrorism, Public Risks, and Homeland Security

We address theoretical and empirical aspects of policy disruptions that affect multiple areas of policymaking. Our theorizing leads us to consider the effects of widespread disruptions in gaining the attention of elected officials, in affecting policymaking, and in reshaping the involvement of federal agencies. Our empirical analyses concern the threat of terrorism in the United States and its implications for public risk subsystems over the past 25 years. Our analyses of the attention of policymakers and resultant policymaking volatility show selective patterns of subsystem disruption related to the threat of terrorism. We show that capturing the attention of policymakers in multiple subsystems is insufficient to motivate heightened levels of policymaking across the board. In addition, we find more muted impacts for federal agency involvement than might have been expected from the massive reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security. More generally, the disjunctions we observe show the powerful influence of policy subsystems in buffering against widespread policy disruptions.