Bad Place Research Articles

(Dis)utopian Landscapes in Don DeLillo’s Fiction

The concepts of utopia (a good place) and dystopia (a bad place) might be arrived at and developed by one’s contact with the (constructed) reality and comprehension, yet frustration and discontent with it, and one’s pessimism and optimism over a better present and future contingent upon the place and time in which one exists. The former has a long history, whereas the latter is a work in progress. That is, one cannot simply distinguish between the two by asking whether the latter is primarily precautionary and reactive, cautioning us what not to do, whilst the former is proactive, pointing us towards the right direction. Both the former and latter may have similar motives, namely, to demonstrate the dark characteristics of one society by comparing it with another, fictitious culture. Someone’s utopia might alternate dystopia, or many traditional utopias from the past include aspects that modern readers would identify as dystopian. On the other hand, one could argue that dystopia serves as the worst-case scenario, presenting a degraded, collapsing, and/or collapsed society, be it socio-culturally, economically, or technologically, worse than another, yet still hopeful for a drastic change for the better. Utopia could be received as the best-case scenario for people in a society considering its socio-political demise. Shortly, both utopian and dystopian scenarios would fit into an extended framework of contemplations on a catastrophe that would either signal a tremendous shift for the better or result in an apocalyptic nightmare. Drawing on the standpoints of Giles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard and tracing Don DeLillo’s fiction, this paper seeks to explore the notion of dystopia, the future assumptions that dystopian fiction puts forward, and the challenges and issues it highlights, such as digital surveillance, technological control, the disappearance of individualism, uncertainty, and dread.

Аccuracy of different methods of assessing competitive results in air gun shooting in olympic disciplines

The article deals with the problem of improving shooting evaluating system of air gun results in Olympic disciplines. A total of 45 competition finals were analysed, in which 164 shooters from 35 countries took part. The shooting results in Olympic air guns disciplines at international competitions such as World, European and Asian Championships, World Cups and ISSF Grand Prix among men and women in individual, mixed pairs and team events were analysed. Based on the results of 45 competitions, it was established that in many cases the shooters took worse places with a larger score results. According to the results of our research, it was found that the scales for evaluating the results in air gun shooting competitions in Olympic disciplines could have different accuracy and quality. The rating scale for whole points, drawn up according to the linear regression equation with the characteristics D = 99.03% and Ā = 7.25%, does not meet the requirements of high accuracy and gives errors in the selection of the best shooters to participate in competition finals. The scale evaluating the results by points received the worst quality indicators (D = 76.36% and Ā = 41.64%), which is beyond the minimum acceptable values (D ˂ 80% and Ā > 15%). The use of the highest accuracy scales can improve the objectivity of determining the medallists in air gun competitions in Olympic disciplines.

The Representation of Ritual (Im)Purity Through Meteorological Metaphors in Folkloric Language

"The Representation of Ritual (Im)Purity through Meteorological Metaphors in Folkloric Language. For the mythical-magical thinking of archaic and traditional communities, ritualistic purity represents a fundamental dimension of the entire universe, most often linguistically expressed through a reference to its antinomian pair, with the help of the clean-unclean opposition. According to the degree of contamination with various impure things, such as the multitude of good and evil spirits that populated the world, both space and time were qualitatively differentiated in good places and bad places, good hours and evil hours. People themselves had, in turn, to fulfil this condition of ritual purity, before beginning an important activity. If they were not pure from this point of view, they would be unsuccessful whether it was about working in the fields, going to church, or travelling somewhere. However, these metaphors from folkloric language, long discussed in Romanian ethnological literature, will be invoked only as points of reference in our study, since we intend to closely analyse here some of the least investigated meteorological metaphors, such as morning dew, mist, clouds and rainbow. We consider that they too deserve close attention, considering that a person, as a passing being, is represented in many folkloric creations as a forever wanderer, who begins their path With morning dew on your feet/With mist on your back. Starting from the image of the bathed person and, thus, purified by the morning dew, but burdened by the thick, impure mist that they symbolically carry on their back, we will attempt to remake the imaginary scheme that connects the pure and the impure in the archaic mentality, a scheme organised not after the principle of antithesis, but of the ambivalence specific to symbolic logic. Keywords: pure, impure, morning dew, mist, cloud, hail, dragon, silver, rain, rainbow "

The Future of Dystopia

Dystopia, just as utopia, has always been immersed in political visions: utopia ‎as an ideal society and dystopia as its opposite: ‘bad place’ – a futuristic, usually ‎very near future, an imagined universe in which oppressive social control ‎rules. However, utopia and dystopia cannot be absolutely separated, there is‎ a constant threat of replacing good place by bad place, very often leading to‎ the conclusion that every utopia either leads to dystopia or already is dystopia.‎ Today, it often seems that the dystopian future has already arrived, the reality ‎itself evokes dystopian imagination: the global warming and the catastrophes, ‎the monstrous underside of various technologies that would ultimately over-power‎ us – humans. Furthermore, both utopia and dystopia are narratives about ‎how to govern the commons. Whereas in the past the commons appeared in ‎different utopian visions of good governing, today most often the commons ‎fleshes out in disfigured forms of dystopian narratives. In this essay I analyze ‎dystopian imagination as a traumatic symptom of the commons, expressed in‎different narratives of the crisis of capitalism (the Anthropocene, the global‎ monsters, the uncanny weather, metaverse, neo- or techno-feudalism).‎

“I Think It’s a Shame They are Calling Us a Ghetto, I Don’t Think This a Ghetto.” – Ambivalent Enactments of Living in Underprivileged Neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT People and places are entangled through material, social, discursive and emotional relations, which makes it complex to understand the daily living in a certain place. In this article, we explore such entanglements, with an outset in two underprivileged neighbourhoods in Denmark, by drawing on two sets of theoretical thinking: The framework of multiplicity, and the concept of place. We argue that the neighbourhoods cannot be defined as either good or bad places of living. Rather they exist in complex ways, where what makes some people feel at home, is what makes others feel insecure, and where such ambivalent feelings can co-exist inherently for individual residents. Furthermore, our analysis shows that manifold enactments of residents and places enable multiple trajectories of how to live and identify oneself in relation to the neighbourhood.

Between existential mobility and intimacy 5.0: translocal care in pandemic times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured every social, political, economic and cultural aspect of modern society. Millions of people have been stuck in lockdown within and across borders, national and regional terrains, in their homes and worse places. At this time of unprecedented change and 'stuckedness', digital communication technologies have served as a lifeline to forge and nurture communication, intimate ties and a sense of continuity and belongingness. But being stuck and simultaneously virtually mobile has brought many difficulties, tensions and paradoxes. In this paper we discuss first insights from a study with 15 members of the older Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) population in Victoria, Australia to explore experiences of being physically stuck and virtually mobile. We find practices of translocal care - ways of caring for distant others through digital technologies, has been made more complex by the pandemic and shaped by two dynamics: networked collective 'existential mobility', and a quantification of feeling that we call 'intimacy 5.0'.

Bad places for the approximation property for finite groups

Given a number field $k$ and a finite $k$-group $G$, the Tame Approximation Problem for $G$ asks whether the restriction map $H^1(k,G)\to\prod_{v\in\Sigma}H^1(k_v,G)$ is surjective for every finite set of places $\Sigma\subseteq\Omega_k$ disjoint from $\text{Bad}_G$, where $\text{Bad}_G$ is the finite set of places that either divides the order of $G$ or ramifies in the minimal extension splitting $G$. In this paper we prove that the set $\text{Bad}_G$ is sharp. To achieve this we prove that there are finite abelian $k$-groups $A$ where the map $H^1(k,A)\to\prod_{v\in\Sigma_0}H^1(k_v,A)$ is not surjective in a set $\Sigma_0\subseteq\text{Bad}_A$ with particular properties, namely $\Sigma_0$ is the set of places that do not divide the order of $A$ and ramify in the minimal extension splitting $A$.

Explicit estimates in inter-universal Teichmüller theory

In the final paper of a series of papers concerning inter-universal Teichmüller theory, Mochizuki verified various numerically non-effective versions of the Vojta, ABC, and Szpiro Conjectures over number fields. In the present paper, we obtain various numerically effective versions of Mochizuki's results. In order to obtain these results, we first establish a version of the theory of étale theta functions that functions properly at arbitrary bad places, i.e., even bad places that divide the prime "2". We then proceed to discuss how such a modified version of the theory of étale theta functions affects inter-universal Teichmüller theory. Finally, by applying our slightly modified version of inter-universal Teichmüller theory, together with various explicit estimates concerning heights, the j-invariants of "arithmetic" elliptic curves, and the prime number theorem, we verify the numerically effective versions of Mochizuki's results referred to above. These numerically effective versions imply effective diophantine results such as an effective version of the ABC inequality over mono-complex number fields [i.e., the rational number field or an imaginary quadratic field] and effective versions of conjectures of Szpiro. We also obtain an explicit estimate concerning "Fermat's Last Theorem" (FLT)—i.e., to the effect that FLT holds for prime exponents $> 1.615 \cdot 10^{14}$—which is sufficient, in light of a numerical result of Coppersmith, to give an alternative proof of the first case of FLT. In the second case of FLT, if one combines the techniques of the present paper with a recent estimate due to Mihăilescu and Rassias, then the lower bound "$1.615 \cdot 10^{14}$" can be improved to "257". This estimate, combined with a classical result of Vandiver, yields an alternative proof of the second case of FLT. In particular, the results of the present paper, combined with the results of Vandiver, Coppersmith, and Mihăilescu-Rassias, yield an unconditional new alternative proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

Reviewed by: A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson Kathleen Logothetis Thompson A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation. John Matteson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-393-24707-7. 528 pp., cloth, $35.00. When first reading the title of this work, I expected a new critical analysis and military history of the Battle of Fredericksburg and its effects on the war's military and political trajectory. What awaited me within the pages of John Matteson's book was an example of deft storytelling that draws readers into the very complex and human story of the Civil War. In A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation, Matteson weaves together the lives of five people to tell the story of Fredericksburg and the Civil War as a whole. First was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., born to a prominent family, who served as a captain in the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, was wounded several times and survived the war. He later served on the US Supreme Court, forever changed by his wartime experiences. Second was John Pelham, on the verge of graduating from West Point when called home to fight for the Confederacy. Pelham rose to fame skillfully commanding J. E. B. Stuart's Horse Artillery and died a Southern martyr at Kelly's Ford in March 1863. Third was Reverend Arthur B. Fuller, [End Page 215] who had faced constant tragedy in the years before the Civil War and longed to do something significant for his nation. Fuller went to war as a chaplain in the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and struggled with the physical toll campaigning took on his health. He poured his enthusiasm into the spiritual health of his soldiers, until he picked up a gun at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Fourth was Louisa May Alcott, known for her literary work before and after the war but decidedly affected physically and emotionally by her work in a Union hospital in the months surrounding Fredericksburg in the winter of 1862–63. Finally was Walt Whitman, a poet who struggled with his reputation prior to the war and whose rise to fame was built off his experiences in the Civil War. Using the stories of these five individuals and the people immediately connected to them, Matteson leads the reader through Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the aftermath of the two campaigns of late 1862. The military history of both battles, as well as others, such as Ball's Bluff and Kelly's Ford, is present, and the reader will certainly understand the broad synopsis of each engagement. However, by focusing on the story of five military and civilian figures, Matteson brings the reader from the battlefield to the aftermath. In viewing family members' efforts to find their wounded or captured soldiers, he illuminates how the events on the field of battle rippled out into the civilian communities of the North. As he introduces each of the five subjects, he analyzes the individual motivations for entering service or the world of the war. Using Whitman and Alcott's nursing work in various Union hospitals, the reader views not only the action of the field but the aftermath and its toll on the bodies and minds of both soldiers and nurses. Matteson's continuation of the story into the postwar years allows the reader to see how war experiences affected Whitman, Alcott, and Holmes and directed their very public work in their later lives. At first, the title of this work seemed misleading; it was not the targeted analysis of Fredericksburg and its consequences that I had expected. However, as the book reached its conclusion it was clear that Matteson had demonstrated how the campaigns of 1862 had changed the nation. By weaving the lives of five main subjects together, all meeting in some way at Fredericksburg, and demonstrating how the experiences affected these individual people, Matteson illustrates how the Civil War shaped the very people of the United States, deeply and profoundly. The war altered not just the path of the military campaigns...

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

Colección Creativa: Divagaciones de la imaginación

This collection features three short creative writings. The first entry, “Sapos planos” (“Flat Toads”) explores the anxious memories of an adolescent that are inexorably linked to a song. On a dark night, in a subdivision that was never built, an older brother and his friend plan to teach a younger sibling how to drive by way of a gruesome game. The song “So What” by Ministry becomes the soundtrack to the youth’s foray into delinquency. The second work, “El huésped” (“The Houseguest”), is a creative continuation of the short story “El banquete” (“The Banquet”) written by Peruvian author Julio Ramón Ribeyro and published in 1958. The original story is centered on a man named Fernando who spends his fortune throwing a sumptuous party during which he asks the president of Peru to grant him several “small” favors such as naming him the ambassador to Rome. Surprisingly the president is prepared to fulfill all of Fernando’s wishes. However, during the party, some of the guests conspire to overthrow the president. The next morning, when Fernando reads the headlines about the coup d’état, he faints. This creative piece ponders what may have happened in the moments and days that followed. The final work is entitled “Mal lugar para los descalzos” (“A Bad Place for Bare Feet”) and follows a young girl’s experience at a boarding school during an unforgettable moment.

Parents think—incorrectly—that teaching their children that the world is a bad place is likely best for them

ABSTRACT Primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are beliefs about the world’s basic character, such as the world is dangerous. This article investigates probabilistic assumptions about the value of negative primals (e.g., seeing the world as dangerous keeps me safe). We first show such assumptions are common. For example, among 185 parents, 53% preferred dangerous world beliefs for their children. We then searched for evidence consistent with these intuitions in 3 national samples and 3 local samples of undergraduates, immigrants (African and Korean), and professionals (car salespeople, lawyers, and cops;), examining correlations between primals and eight life outcomes within 48 occupations (total N=4,535) . As predicted, regardless of occupation, more negative primals were almost never associated with better outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less job and life satisfaction, worse health, dramatically less flourishing, more negative emotion, more depression, and increased suicide attempts. We discuss why assumptions about the value of negative primals are nevertheless widespread and implications for future research.

Trust, Consistency, Engagement: Meeting the Complex Needs of Younger Residents and Staff Who Care for Them

Trust, Consistency, Engagement: Meeting the Complex Needs of Younger Residents and Staff Who Care for Them

My Dysfunctional Narrative

My Dysfunctional Narrative Suzanne Rivecca (bio) When my debut book, a story collection, was nearing its publication date, my publicist—a woman I'd met once—sent me a list of questions. My answers to these questions would be included in the press kit submitted to bookstore buyers and potential reviewers. If I'd had the foresight and savviness to actually anticipate the mechanics of this scenario—a succession of word-fatigued strangers, half-hidden behind a stack of brand-new books wobbly as a Jenga pile, wearily scanning my kit for some angle to seize—I probably would've treated the questions less as an invasive series of direct challenges and more as a tool for controlling the discourse: an opportunity to preemptively neutralize antagonists, in the smiling and slippery way of a politician who repurposes each debate question into a launching pad for her talking points. But I had no foresight or savviness. My initial reaction to these questions was to instinctively recoil, as if backed into a corner by someone I didn't want to talk to at a party, someone who was half in the bag and and flush with faux-confidential insistence, beer on her breath, asking me a bunch of shit, needlingly, for the hell of it. Shit like: You're dealing with some very provocative themes. Were you conflicted about publishing such a sexually explicit collection? And: Do you feel exposed by publication? Do you see yourself in any of the characters in these stories? When I'd met the publicist, months before, one of the first things she said to me was "You're so sweet and sunny! I expected, like, a really dark girl." And I was glad I seemed sweet to her, I guess. I wanted to make a good impression. I'd bought, for the occasion, a green dress and bright-yellow flats with a shaggy leather flower on each toe. The shoes quickly got ruined in a spring downpour as the publicist and I dashed around to lunch meetings filled with people whose names blurred together, people to whom we were supposed to explain what my book was about and why they should care, people who sported the Sphinx-like, leisurely, watchful smiles of Shark Tank panelists, kicking back, waiting for a reason to invest. I was very conscious of not wanting to seem odd: defective, vulnerable, dark. And so I was sweet to these people, too, even though I didn't know how to describe what my book was about. I felt that anything I could say along those lines would [End Page 49] be damning, would give me away as … what? I didn't know; I just knew this wasn't about the book, not really. It was about proving something paradoxical: that I was from a place—a bad place, a place where bad things happened—but not of it. But I felt like I was of it; I carried it with me all the time. During one meeting, I announced to the table, "I think the book's about self-delusion." Did I really believe this? Maybe. Once I'd actually written the stories, once I transcended that first heady flush of acute identification and empathy with my protagonists, once I'd stopped seeing the main characters as extensions of myself and started cultivating a chilly pseudo-sociological distance between us, a distance intended to convey not only my capacity for artistic invention—See, I can make stuff up!—but my comparative functionality as a human being and, by extension, my reliability as a witness—I fell into the habit of using certain terms to describe the girls and young women in my book. Deluded. Self-mythologizing. Self-deceiving. Manipulative. Victim complex. I talked about them as if they were histrionic little sisters: the petulant, performative Amys to my nobly stoic Jo. It was my solemn and rigorous duty, post-publication, to point out how bad they were at defining themselves, how they claimed the wrong labels, believed the wrong things, donned the wrong guises. Bad things may have happened to them, sure, but they capitalized on those bad things; they flailed around in...

МИФОПОЭТИКА ПРОСТРАНСТВА КЛАДБИЩА В ХОРРОРЕ (на материале современной русской литературы)

This article deals with the locus of the cemetery in modern Russian horror. We examine approaches to the depiction of scary spaces in literature, describe the cemetery as a locus of horror, study the motives associated with the cemetery in horror, detect intermedial connections, provide interpretation of folklore and literary references. The cemetery is one of the key loci of folk culture, presented in folklore as a space of contact with the otherworldly (with the world of the dead), which explains the interest of horror authors in these ‘scary’ places. The modern literature of horror offers modifications of the image of the cemetery, their main characteristics, intertextual interaction with Russian and foreign traditions, which allow us to speak of this image as a unit of the genre canon of horror. The paper examines how exactly the image of the cemetery is presented by modern Russian authors: A. Ivanov, A. Ateev, M. Romanova, K. Alekseev, I. Lesev. We have established that various clichés of folklore and horror literature are used in connection with the locus of the cemetery. These include the motive of a ‘bad place’, the motive of reviving the dead, the motive of crossing the borders, violation of a ban/taboo. The cemetery can be viewed in a literary work as a source of supernatural horror (and even, as in Alekseev’s work, may turn into a thinking creature) or, as in Ivanov’s novels, represent a false source of danger. We conclude that the cemetery in horror becomes a place where not only worlds but also eras are connected, which reveals the important function of horror – the comprehension of the past of an individual and society. The portrayal of the cemetery in horror draws on a rich literary and folkloric tradition.

Prolife hypocrisy: why inconsistency arguments do not matter

Opponents of abortion are often described as ‘inconsistent’ (hypocrites) in terms of their beliefs, actions and/or priorities. They are alleged to do too little to combat spontaneous abortion, they should...

Is Beckett’s Island Dystopia(n) or not?

The literary genre of dystopia remains popular in the English-speaking world, particularly in young adult fi ction. The word “dystopia” is a nineteenth century English neologism formed upon the logic of Thomas More’s utopia. Dystopia denotes a physical “bad place”, and a metaphysical “negative space”. In Malone Dies the novel’s fi nal scene is happening on an island or “islet”, as Beckett wrote. What unfolds is a scene of horror, a slaughter committed by guardian Lemuel. The islet thus becomes Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” (bad place), and Lemuel the boatman Charon who ferried souls to the underworld in Greek mythology. Endgame is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and everything is happening in a kind of bunker-shelter. Outside there is, probably, nothing. Or, maybe, only Death, as Hamm says. Are they situated on an island or not? Are Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell the last survivors of an atomic war? A kind of Robinsons, lost on an island in the middle of a desert planet, like the lost boys in Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Beckett wrote some other works that can be considered dystopian, but in my paper I will focus on the two mentioned above, and try to analyze characters in those hostile landscapes, and their useless efforts to avoid the inevitable – the end.

Gabors in Bad Places: Early Visuocortical Population Responses to Aversive Spatial Conditioning

Gabors in Bad Places: Early Visuocortical Population Responses to Aversive Spatial Conditioning

Five William Shakespeares Versus One Santa Claus; Self-Sacrifice and The Trolley Problem in the Series “The Good Place”

The television series The Good Place (2016–2020), created by Michael Schur revolves around four humans who—after their deaths—end up in what they believe to be heaven: the “Good Place”. In reality, however, they are in a very sophisticated torture place, built and directed by demons from the “Bad Place”. During the four seasons of the series, the four humans discover the true nature of their predicament and try to reach to “real” Good Place, through—among other means—improving their moral attitude, e.g., becoming a better person by taking ethical lessons provided by one of the four, who is an actual professor of moral philosophy. During these lessons, the four discuss many ethical and philosophical notions, ideas and problems, among which is Philippa Foot’s famous 1967 thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem. The series as a whole, the author of this article argues, revolves around this impossible moral dilemma, suggesting self-sacrifice as an ultimate solution to the Trolley Problem.

Urban Spaces, Non-Places and Bad Places: Intersections Between Theory and Fiction in the Writings of Aldous Huxley and Michel Houellebecq

Urban Spaces, Non-Places and Bad Places: Intersections Between Theory and Fiction in the Writings of Aldous Huxley and Michel Houellebecq