Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, affecting people of all ages. This chapter focusses on what has been learnt about the microRNA system in this important disease. Starting with an overview of epilepsy, it addresses what causes seizures to occur and some of the underlying mechanisms, including gene mutations and brain injuries. It explores how and which microRNAs drive complex gene changes that underpin but also oppose the enduring hyperexcitability of the epileptic brain. This includes by regulating amounts of neurotransmitter receptors, structural components of synapses, metabolic processes and inflammation. It also covers some of the earliest studies linking microRNAs to epilepsy as well as recent large-scale efforts to map every microRNA and its target in the epileptic brain. Finally, it highlights ways to model epilepsies and use of experimental tools such as antisense oligonucleotides to understand the contributions of individual microRNAs. Collectively, these studies reveal how microRNAs contribute to the molecular landscape that underlies this disease and offer the exciting possibility of targeting microRNAs to treat genetic and acquired epilepsies.

This chapter presents contemporary African American theater and drama as a democratic art form that addresses social injustice and racial inequalities in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Obama presidency. The plays The White Card by Claudia Rankine and Fairview: A Play by Jackie Sibblies Drury are discussed in light of recent developments in Black performance theory and with regard to Jacques Rancière’s argument on the democratic and egalitarian potential of theatrical performance. Both plays work toward a revision of how racial identities are configured in what Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The White Card reflects on the theatrical representation of police brutality and its mediation through photography and art. Fairview provides an example of how contemporary playwrights elaborate on a tradition of actor–spectator interaction in African American theater as a means for destabilizing the social allocation of racial and spatial positions in society. In this sense, Rankine and Drury transform African American theater into an oppositional site that challenges the configuration of racial discourses in a variety of contexts and instances.

In the two loci classici about Roman satire, Quintilian and Diomedes famously draw a bifurcation of the history of the genre into two strands, which often comes in handy for modern scholars. This chapter argues that this bifurcation is the result of a stratification of, and compromise between, at least two different views: a communis opinio held by most authors of satire of the Republican period and their readers, and the single but ‘authoritative’ view of Horace, who established meter as a formal criterion to define satire. This chapter traces the origins of both views by discussing the relevant sources, and shows how Horace’s Satires appropriated pre-existing ideas about the nature and history of the genre, innovated on key aspects of them, and became a source of original ideas in turn. A similar scheme applies to Quintilian and Diomedes too: their perspective combines previous stances, but this combination itself represents an innovation which influences our own view of Roman satire in turn. Thus, while focusing on Roman satire, this chapter discusses a more general dynamic in the creation of literary histories.

A portrait of Shivaji Bhonsle, crowned Chhatrapati Maharaj of the Maratha territories in western India in 1674, is currently being modelled by the sculptor Ram Sutar for a statue over 200 metres (circa 695 feet) high, projected to rise off the shore of Mumbai. Though the work has stalled due to legal suits—including a plea on the part of local fishermen to retain the use of the waters for their livelihood—the massive bronze cast of Shivaji rearing a horse is emblematic of the symbolic power of this seventeenth-century king today. Yet the likeness that Sutar sculpts has a history; it is rooted in a chromolithograph made by the artist Raja Ravi Varma in the late nineteenth century to centre a growing nationalist movement in western India.

This essay traces Shivaji’s portrait from a range of images made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to those that Ravi Varma and other artists developed in the late nineteenth century. In this period, western Indian nationalists sought a hero-icon for their movement, and the absence of a definitive portrait of Shivaji from his own court became the subject of a fraught debate. The multiple portraits collected at this time reveal their negotiation with a range of deeply rooted traditions of representation in western India—including those of men and of gods—and with those of colonial portraiture and the classification of people.

This aesthetic flexibility was a decisive factor in the transformation of Shivaji’s portrait into a medium of anticolonial resistance. Yet, the multivalence of the image not only stood as a beacon for independence but also as a potent icon for a Hindu polity, which continues to this day. This is a charged image and I treat it with respect as I do Shivaji Maharaj, though the essay is not engaged with him as a historical figure. My purpose here is rather to trace a genealogy of Shivaji’s portrait to historicize and complicate a picture that has become infused with communal politics, and to question the framework of the secular for an image that refuses to be defined as either hero or icon.

Continuing from the account of Iran–South Africa relations in Chapter 3, this chapter looks in particular at the increasing importance of Iranian oil to South Africa in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, as a result of which, by 1978, Iran supplied over 90 per cent of South Africa’s crude oil imports. Because of its importance as a supplier of oil, not just to South Africa but also its neighbouring countries, Iran attained an influential position in Southern Africa during this period. Its influence was such that in 1977 and 1978, the United States and Britain asked the shah to help negotiate a settlement with the Ian Smith government to end the crisis in Rhodesia. The chapter explores Iran’s role in the crisis, not only its support of US-British initiatives, but also its outreach to Rhodesia’s revolutionary politicians, like Joshua Nkomo, who travelled to Iran and met with the shah several times during this period. As the chapter will show, Iran’s involvement was driven by concerns over the possibility of civil war spreading into neighbouring countries, and the implications of this for Iran’s Indian Ocean aspirations.

The US legal system is notoriously complex. Navigating this labyrinthine structure requires knowledge of legal precedents, procedures, and rules, along with the ability to anticipate and adapt to shifts in the legal landscape. Businesses, therefore, require the guidance of seasoned lawyers. Over the past few decades, US corporations have increasingly turned to in-house lawyers for legal services, leading to their rising prominence in the corporate hierarchy and profound changes in the US legal profession and corporate governance. This could also be true for Chinese companies operating in the United States. Hence, this chapter investigates the Chinese companies’ utilization of full-time internal legal managers within the dual institutional context. For those employing such managers, this chapter scrutinizes two key aspects: (1) whether these legal managers are locally hired or are expatriates and (2) whether they hold licenses to practice law in the United States, which approximates their ability to handle US legal risks and opportunities. Analysis under the dual institutional framework reveals not only effects of both home- and host-state institutions but also substantial intercompany variations associated with other institutional and firm-specific variables of theoretical and policy importance.

This chapter provides an overview of the global history of oil and explains how Russia, as a key storehouse of raw materials, producer, consumer and fossil energy exporter, fits into it.

Chapter 3 addresses the question of how TD takes place. Two driving forces emerge as individuals move from early spontaneous actions and reactions to environmental opportunities and challenges to more purposive real and projected actions. One driving force emerging in a personal context of surviving-thriving adaptation is individual niche-picking, which influences the direction and strengths of personal strivings, and the other driving force is cultural selection based on cultural norms and distinction, which determines what is culturally worth supporting given its priorities. These two “invisible hands” jointly regulate one’s characteristic adaptation (CA) in the exploratory stage of talent development, and maximal adaptation (MA) in the systematic developmental stage. Both CA and MA are seen by ECT as self-organizing motivational forces for long-term development. CA allows the person to explore their horizon of possibilities and identify a pathway to success that is most rewarding as well as most achievable, and MA allows the person to seek inner and outer resources to maximize their chance of success. Consequently, a developing person has to show patterns of CA and MA conducive to reaching the highest level of self-organization: building a personal enterprise.

It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.