AI and AR do not merely coexist with the archive and repertoire as modes of transmission but profoundly alter them and prove profoundly anti-archival. “Live” transmission from body to body is radically altered by digital technologies that simulate presence. “Feeling truly present with another person,” Mark Zuckerberg stated, “is the ultimate dream of social media.” He aspires to create an avatar that can simulate an emotion that he cannot express—and make him more human. Are we being led back into Plato’s cave? Artists and humanists must be centrally involved in the epistemic, ontological, and political changes that accompany these new and evolving forms of transmission.

Public authorities' compliance with judicial dictates is central to legality and constitutionality, may influence broader policy and political outcomes, and can have powerful feedback effects on judicial decision making, independence, and power. As such, it has crucial implications for interbranch relations and the rule of law. Effectively measuring compliance with judicial rulings and clearly explaining when and why elected leaders adhere to courts' mandates present a range of inferential challenges. Building on the groundwork laid in the burgeoning literature on the topic, this article advances two analytic frameworks (one for measuring and one for explaining compliance), offers strategies for grappling with the problems of descriptive and causal inference that arise in studying compliance, and advocates the use of multiple analytic methods to generate and test hypotheses regarding compliance.

Our co-authored article provides an introduction to the UCLA-based conference Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas (2008), a sister event to the opening of the new cultural and performance space with FOMMA – Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (Fortress of the Mayan Woman) – supported by the Hemispheric Institute and the Ford Foundation. Introducing the articles and contributions to the performance dossier arising out of the event and brought together for this special issue, we reflect critically on our conference set-up. Detailing our multi-sited project as a dialogic, hemispheric practice, we offer our reflections with the hope that this will lead to new possibilities and paradigms for international performance research and practice.

Three factors—contamination, a dietary reservoir effect, and a regional δ14C anomaly—are considered as possible contributing explanations for an almost 2-century offset between the historically documented age of 612 BCE and the calibrated ages of 9 14C determinations obtained on 3 human skeletons directly associated stratigraphically with an archaeologically—and historically—defined 612 BCE event at the ancient site of Nineveh in northern Mesopotamia (Iraq). We note that on the order of a 1% (∼80 yr) offset caused by one or a combination of these 3 factors, or other as yet unidentified additional factor(s), would be sufficient to move the average measured 14C age of these bone samples within the major “warp” in the 14C timescale during the mid-1st millennium BCE. We provide what we believe to be sufficient evidence that contamination is not a major factor in the case of these bone samples. At this time, we lack appropriate data to determine with sufficient rigor the degree to which a dietary reservoir effect may be contributing to the offset. At present, a posited regional δ14C anomaly does not appear to be supported on the basis of data from several other localities in the Near East of similar age. One purpose of presenting this data set is to solicit comparisons with 14C values obtained on samples from additional, historically well-documented, known-age archaeological contexts for this time period in this and adjacent regions.

On 27 February 2009, The Essays for this PMLA issue on war were coming in, against a background of various wars. The Iraq War had claimed over 100,000 civilian lives. The newly elected Obama administration vowed to amp up efforts in Afghanistan. The rubble in Gaza still smoldered from the recent Israeli attacks. The ongoing conflict in Darfur had already left 300,000 people dead, not to mention the 2.5 million displaced. When President George W. Bush left office, his boundless war on terror had exacted more lives, money, civil-liberty concessions, and international goodwill than one could even begin to tally. These were just the newsworthy wars that happened to be featured that month in the New York Times. Other, “low-intensity” wars—the devastating fighting in East Congo, the ongoing Zapatista uprising, Colombia's fifty-year-old armed conflict, Sri Lanka's civil war, and similar struggles—simmered on the back burner. The topic of war seemed as urgent that February morning as it had two years earlier, when the editors proposed this special issue. Ironically, that morning's Times showcased “Weekend at War” in its Escapes section (Sokol). The oversize image showed a crowded ballroom full of happy dancers in World War II outfits swinging to a big band orchestra—the uniforms, insignia, hats, hairdos all conjured up another time. The caption read, “It's winter 2009, but for hundreds of reenactors, it's December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.”

The past decade has brought an unprecedented boom in the study of courts as political actors in Latin America. We examine the extraordinary diversity of academic research on judicial politics in the region, identifying the key questions, findings, and theoretical debates in the literature, highlighting important conceptual disjunctions, and critiquing the research methods scholars of judicial politics in Latin America have employed in their work. We close by suggesting new avenues of inquiry to help advance the collective effort to understand the roles courts play in Latin American politics.

Performance as a genre allows for alternative mappings, providing a set of strategies and conventions that allow scholars to see practices that scripted genres might occlude. Like other genres, performance encompasses a broad range of rehearsed and codified behaviors, such as dance, theater, music recitals, sports events, and rituals. A performance lens allows scholars to look at acts, things, and ideas as performance. Looking at America as performance might explain why it is difficult to approach it as a disciplinary field of study. What might the shift in genres—from the scripted genres associated with the archive to the live, embodied behaviors that are the repertoire of cultural practices—enable? This essay proposes that an analysis of the performance of America might allow scholars to rethink not only their object of analysis but also their scholarly interactions.

Human Rights violations traumatize more than the immediate victims of “barbarous acts.” they wound families, communities, and entire societies sometimes for years, even generations. While the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights locates rights primarily in the individual (“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”), it is clear that “the human family” invoked in the opening sentence both sustains claims to inalienable rights and suffers from their transgression. Nonetheless, most responses to violations focus on individual victims almost to the exclusion of family and the broader community. Several countries sponsor “torture clinics” to reintegrate victims into society or find them asylum elsewhere. Survivors are diagnosed, and therapists help them work through their trauma in different ways, usually involving individual, group, and family therapy. These important programs medicalize trauma as individual pathology and attempt to reduce symptoms and empower survivors. However, even when particular programs are successful, problems and contradictions abound. Not all communities have access to mental health care. Not all governments are willing to sponsor programs that recognize the traumatic effects of their political actions. The wider impact of criminal politics on society as a whole remains unexplored. The question of whether society is the site of the so-called normal rather than a highly repressive or toxic environment is left unexamined. The individual becomes both the exclusive site of traumatic injury and the subject to be healed.

About 10% of women show elation and associated features of hypomania in the first 5 days following childbirth. These symptoms can be detected using a self-rating scale (the ‘Highs’) based on SADS-L criteria. This phenomenon has been confirmed using the observer-rated Comprehensive Psychopathological Rating Scale, which also revealed a high degree of related irritability. Significantly more women scoring ⩾ 8 on the Highs scale at 3 days postpartum went on to manifest depression at 6 weeks than did subjects with no psychopathology in the early puerperium. It is suggested that the ‘highs’ followed by depression may be a mild and common form of bipolar disorder.

This paper traces the development of Parents Anonymous in Australia. It was found that it was not possible to simply transfer the American system into the Australian context.

The major feature of the Australian PA is the highly successful telephone and home visiting service. In contrast, the groups have been successful for only short periods and in only few cases.

The reasons for these differences are described with reference to

(i) the wider social context of both government and public awareness of child abuse.

(ii) the changing nature of the interaction between professionals and members, and the need to distinguish between “deprofessionalisation” and “laissez-faire”.

(iii) the changing nature of the distinction between volunteers and members and the developing awareness of the symbiotic nature of giving and receiving help.