But malice aforethought: cities and the natural history of hatred

I take as my starting point the fact that Western cities are often depicted as on the brink of catastrophe. Indeed some contemporary authors would argue that they have never been closer to that brink. The first part of this paper argues against this tendency by focusing on the preponderance of activities of repair and maintenance. Having looked at the state of this forgotten infrastructure, in the second part of the paper I turn to an examination of why this Cassandra interpretation is so prevalent. I argue that, in particular, it draws on wellsprings of misanthropy which are rarely voiced in writings on cities because sociality is too often confused with liking. Yet it seems vital to me to tackle misanthropy head on. Then, in the third part of the paper, I argue that currently there is a coming together in cities of all kinds of affective politics of concern which can act, through all manner of small achievements, as a counter to misanthropy but which do not mistake the practice of this politics for a search after perfection.     

No Race in Any Direction: State Welfare and Income Regimes

This paper has two objectives. First, we examine state adoption and implementation of income support policies under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. We develop a composite measure of income support that includes welfare programs that scholars traditionally investigate and adds optional policies that encourage independence through work. Second, we engage a substantive focus on the administrative ability and willingness of states to adopt and implement sophisticated income support policies. We investigate the extent to which state government professionalism, ideology, economic resources, and racially based policies have shaped state policy. We find that the percentage of the state population is liberal; state racial demographics and governmental professionalism are critical determinants of state welfare and income support regimes. Significantly, we find no evidence that states are converging toward high‐quality, effectively financed welfare policies or income regime policies to help the poor move into and economically survive in the job market.     

QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR INVESTIGATING THE VARIABLES THAT UNDERLIE PREFERENCE FOR LANDSCAPE SCENES

A series of quantitative methods for investigating the basis for preference for landscape scenes was applied to photographs of alpine and subalpine landscapes in Alberta. The procedure incorporates a multidimensional scaling analysis with the repertory grid technique and also employs a property vector-fitting algorithm as an aid in interpreting the dimensional solution. The preferences of a sample group were based on three criteria. In order of importance, these are character of vegetation cover, depth of field, and elevation of terrain. Additional validation of the results was obtained through a principal components analysis of the repertory grid data.     

Archaeogenetic study of prehistoric rice remains from Thailand and India: evidence of early <Emphasis Type="Italic">japonica</Emphasis> in South and Southeast Asia

We report a successful extraction and sequencing of ancient DNA from carbonized rice grains (Oryza sativa) from six archaeological sites, including two from India and four from Thailand, ranging in age from ca. 2500 to 1500 BP. In total, 221 archaeological grains were processed by PCR amplification and primary-targeted fragments were sequenced for comparison with modern sequences generated from 112 modern rice populations, including crop and wild varieties. Our results include the genetic sequences from both the chloroplast and the nuclear genomes, based on four markers from the chloroplast and six from the nuclear genome. These markers allow differentiation of indica rice from japonica rice, the two major subspecies of Asian rice (O. sativa) considered to have separate geographical origins. One nuclear marker differentiates tropical and temperate forms of subspecies japonica. Other markers relate to phenotypic variation selected for under domestication, such as non-shattering, grain stickiness (waxy starch) and pericarp colour. Recovery and identification of sequences from nuclear markers was generally poor, whereas recovery of chloroplast sequences was successful, with at least one of four markers recovered in 61 % of archaeological grains. This allowed for successful differentiation of indica or japonica subspecies variety, with japonica identified in all the Thai material and a mixture of indica and japonica chloroplasts in the two Indian assemblages. Rice subspecies was also assessed through conventional archaeobotanical methods relying on grain metrics, based on measurements from 13 modern populations and 499 archaeological grains. Grain metrics also suggest a predominance of japonica-type grains in the Southeast Asian sites and a mixture of japonica and indica in the Indian sites with indica in the minority. The similar results of grain metrics and ancient DNA (aDNA) affirm that grain measurements have some degree of reliability in rice subspecies identification. The study also highlights the great potential of ancient DNA recovery from archaeological rice. The data generated in the present study adds support to the model of rice evolution that includes hybridization between japonica and proto-indica.     

Écrire la mort, écrire l’amour dans La Part secrète de Carol Bernstein

La Part secrète (1999) is the second text by Carol Bernstein, an American writer living in Paris, the first having been Le Rival invincible. This latest text exemplifies several contemporary discourses, addressing issues of disease, trauma, biography and autobiography, parentage, and testimony. Although at the crossroads of so many current debates, to date it has not attracted any critical studies. Faced with this lack, due perhaps to the brevity and apparent, but misleading, simplicity of this story, I first consider the text as a narrative about illness, relying primarily on Susan Sontag’s study Illness as Metaphor as well as Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. I then show that via writing the narrator manages to work through his feelings of loneliness, to overcome the lies that surround him and to inscribe himself within his family history. This second part of the article, which analyses the redemptive power of writing to rise above the ravages caused by an unnamed disease, is however only a fragment of the exposition because this act of writing is probably not in fact that of the narrator. It could be that of his daughter, usurping her father’s identity in an act of ventriloquism. Finally, I consider the daughter’s motivations in order better to understand how the writing of La Part secrète illuminates in a disturbing way the father-daughter relationship.