Familiar Question Research Articles

Profits Before Patients? Rethinking the Shareholder Primacy Model of Corporate Governance for Health Care

Concerns about the ballooning cost of health care and medicine are at the heart of perpetual debate about the corporate accountability of health care corporations. This essay critiques the shareholder primacy model of corporate governance for health care enterprise using the American pharmaceutical company Merck as a small sample case study that might be indicative of broader corporate governance issues generally, that deserve further research. In 2009 an Australian Federal Court class action was led by Merck product patient users against Merck’s Australian subsidiary, for allegedly failing to withdraw the drug Vioxx from the market. The patient group claimed that Merck insiders knew Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks, yet persisted to manufacture and market the drug to secure profits for shareholders. At first instance, the trial judge awarded damages in favor of the original plaintiff claimant, finding that the drug had caused the claimant's alleged heart risk injury. However that decision was overturned on appeal, with further leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia being refused on 11 May 2012. Simultaneously, settlements between the company and other groups of claimants involving the same drug, have been and are continuing to be reached in other jurisdictions around the world in 2013.The case more generally evokes a familiar normative question of to whom a duty of care is and should be owed by health care corporate decision makers: shareholders, patients, or both? This paper briefly answers that question by critically analysing the market impact of the shareholder primacy model of corporate governance, on end user health care patients by transforming them from patients into consumers. The paper then constructs a potential solution in the form of an evolved shareholder primacy model of corporate governance which encompasses a value duty of virtue to shareholders that potentially meets the interests of both shareholders and patients.

Is Religious Belief a Kind of Belief?

Abstract This paper discusses the familiar question of whether expressions of faith or conviction offered by religious believers really express their beliefs, in the standard sense of ‘belief’ used in philosophy and psychology. Some hold that these expressions do not express genuine beliefs because they do not meet the standards of rationality, coherence and integration which govern beliefs. So they must serve some other function. But this picture of ‘genuine belief’ is inadequate, for reasons independent of the phenomenon of religion. Once we get a better picture of belief, we can see that religious beliefs conform to this picture, and that typical expressions of faith really are expressions of belief in the proper sense.

Revisiting the Metaphorical Concept of "No Strokes First - All Strokes First": Part One - Beginning Strokes

The aim of this article is to address the familiar question “Which swimming stroke should be taught first?” The discussion is usually focused on breaststroke versus crawl. Provoked by these naïve discussions of which stroke should be taught first (as if stroking equals swimming, which it emphatically does NOT), the question was answered metaphorically in an earlier article “No Stroke First – All Strokes First” (Stallman, 2008a). Here in Part I we identify and describe six strokes, all of which might be a candidate for any learners ‘very first’ stroke. We describe them as beginning strokes. Having identified and learned which one that a learner finds to be their easiest, the learner should then acquire the others. This strategy not only places the learner’s easiest stroke first but adds the other “beginning strokes” and launches an all-around foundation upon which all other strokes can more easily be learned.

On deducing ethical egoism from psychological egoism

AbstractA familiar question is whether psychological egoism (suitably supplemented with plausible further premises) entails ethical egoism. This paper considers this question, treating it much more thoroughly than do any previous treatments. For instance, it discusses all the most common understandings of ethical and psychological egoism. It further discusses many strategies and arguments relevant to the question addressed. Although this procedure creates complexity, it has value. It forestalls the suspicion, aroused by so many treatments of this subject, that the results stem largely from leaving stones unturned—for instance, from ignoring many natural argumentative strategies and many familiar understandings of the views discussed. The paper's conclusion is that psychological egoism (suitably supplemented …) does not entail ethical egoism.

Review: In Pursuit of Utopia: Los Angeles in the Great Depression, by Errol Wayne Stevens

Historians of Los Angeles and Southern California have long observed that the region was an extraordinary place during the 1920s and 1930s. The region’s population and economy grew at a phenomenal rate. Evangelists called new arrivals to megachurches created by Hollywood set designers. Hundreds of thousands of Iowans flocked to annual picnics in Long Beach to celebrate their midwestern roots. Hucksters sold stocks for sham companies on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. As the Depression took hold and regional economic prospects spiraled downward, seemingly equally strange proposals and movements to solve the economic crisis and its corollary human suffering emerged and gained popularity, from the Ham and Eggs pension movement to Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign.In this carefully researched and thoughtfully written book, Errol Stevens asks the familiar question of why Los Angeles saw so many radical movements take hold in the 1930s. Over ten readable chapters, he rejects the common argument that Angelenos, many of them new migrants from the Midwest, naively fell for the impractical schemes of radicals and con artists. Instead, Stevens argues that Southern Californians, many of them desperate for feasible solutions to their abysmal economic situations, were willing to consider creative, even unusual, social and economic proposals to address personal and regional economic woes.As Stevens narrates, these programs and proposals varied widely. They included widespread agricultural self-help cooperatives that grew and distributed foodstuffs to thousands of members and those in need from Compton to El Monte. The Communist Party built a dedicated membership from its headquarters in Boyle Heights and in defiance of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad.” Members of the newly formed Utopian Society advocated for a radical rethinking of the nation’s economic structure, a transformation that they believed could come about without revolution and would restore a solid middle class. Physician Francis E. Townsend proposed a wildly popular program of universal lifetime pensions of $150 a month for those over sixty or unemployed with the one stipulation that the money be spent in its entirety by the end of each month in order to stimulate the economy and end the Depression. At the urging of some prominent California Democrats, Sinclair, a longtime socialist, changed his party affiliation and announced his campaign for governor. His campaign, known as End Poverty in California (EPIC), organized over two thousand clubs across the state and helped add 350,000 new registered Democrats to the state’s voter rolls. Sinclair enjoyed tremendous popularity but state conservatives waged “one of the dirtiest campaigns in California history” against him and his Republican opponent won (p. 168).Ultimately, In Pursuit of Utopia explores why California’s “aging, churchgoing, largely conservative, midwestern” population flocked to “movements that advocated programs that would change the very nature of the capitalist system” (p. 197). Stevens finds that the region’s older midwestern transplant population turned to long-established midwestern agricultural traditions of communalism to make ends meet. They also responded to the real threats of homelessness and starvation, a complete absence of a federal social safety net, and the refusal of local officials to provide adequate relief by supporting novel and innovative proposals. As Stevens observes, “thousands of Southern Californians rushed to support these movements because there were no alternatives…in retrospect, it is clear that they were not pursuing utopia, just trying to survive” (p. 200).A historian and an archivist, Stevens spent the final two decades of his career as the director of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University. While there, he also administered the Center for the Study of Los Angeles Research Collection. His training as an archivist is evident in this deeply researched and carefully sourced book. Sadly, the community of Los Angeles archivists and historians lost Stevens in 2020, but his contributions to the field live on in this finely researched and written book and in his stewardship of regional archival materials.

The biopic screenplay as a research output: Towards a working definition of narrative fiction filmmaking methodology

Can the writing of a screenplay or the making of a narrative fiction film be considered a form of academic research? This will be a familiar question for those professional filmmakers entering the academy. To answer this question, scholars of screenwriting and screen production face the difficulty of articulating their creative practice as research within the broader institutional research cultures of the academy. This article seeks to overcome this difficulty by reflecting on the methods employed in the process of screenwriting a biopic about British boxer Randolph Turpin. To demonstrate how screenwriting and screen production practice generates and disseminates new knowledge, I offer a working definition of narrative fiction filmmaking as methodology, where mise en scène is shown to operate as a core reflective strategy.

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Why We Serve: Native Americans in the United States Armed Forces by Alexandra N. Harris and Mark G. Hirsch

Reviewed by: Why We Serve: Native Americans in the United States Armed Forces by Alexandra N. Harris and Mark G. Hirsch Joseph G. Hiller (bio) Why We Serve: Native Americans in the United States Armed Forces by Alexandra N. Harris and Mark G. Hirsch National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2020 THIS COLLECTION-QUALITY BOOK broadly pursues a somewhat familiar question. There is no short or simple answer, however, to such an apparently simple inquiry. This rich book explains why the question is asked and relates in detail the many varied answers. Well-chosen illustrations and photographs, along with an attention-grabbing book cover, help make this book a sought-after collector's item. Since the question cannot be directly answered by our long-gone ancestors, the authors carefully describe the historical involvement of Natives in warfare. Several historical vignettes present captivating stories revealing comprehensive data and narratives that in a circumstantial way begin to answer the "why" question. When the "why" was asked of contemporary veterans and their families, however, a pattern of responses began to emerge. Why We Serve justifies the original reason for the question and continues to provide numerous authentic, thoughtful, and elegant answers laid out by testimony, stories, illustrations, and historical notes. Several themes align along a timeline that organizes this book. The first theme asks the question and establishes context. In view of both the historical and the contemporary relationship between Natives and the United States, how can Natives possibly sign up and support the federal sovereign in times of war? The question is perplexing and cumbersome to many; but the book reveals why it is not such a dichotomy to be Native and to serve in the military. The second theme explores warfare in a Native context—the reasons it occurs and how/why alliances between tribes were beneficial—albeit often temporary—for family and tribal homelands protection. Next comes the relationship with Europeans and the nuances they brought as third parties to existing alliances. In many cases members or clans of the same tribe aligned themselves with opposing European forces. Finally, major conflicts involving the U.S. dating from the early Indian Wars to the current Global War on Terrorism are one-by-one briefly addressed and accompanied by anecdotes, notable quotes, and illustrations addressing the central [End Page 145] "why" question. Stories are carefully told—by veterans, including Native Hawai'ian, Alaska Native, and American Indian—of the Native experience and singular sacrifice of service members, their families, and communities. Today with an all-volunteer military force, we find a mix of contemporary, traditional, and familial reasons to serve, ranging from the practical (the G.I. Bill, salary and benefits, job training, adventure and respect) to the more personal and tribal notions of doing greater good by serving society honorably and being from "a family that served" (157). Whatever the reason, Native military service is made known and honored in this book. Why We Serve is unique; it brings together in one place an authoritative, well-researched text that tells the collective story of Natives in military service to the United States. It presents an impressive collection of artwork and photographs and is footnoted extensively for further reference and reading. The book cover is perfectly eye-catching for this topic. Why We Serve is well worth the read and serves as an excellent reference on the topics of Natives and military service. [End Page 146] Joseph G. Hiller JOSEPH G. HILLER, Ph.D. (Oglala), LTC(R) U.S. Army Special Forces, is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona. Copyright © 2022 Regents of the University of Minnesota

All The Devils Are Here: How Shake Speare Invented The Villain by Patrick Page

Reviewed by: All The Devils Are Here: How Shake Speare Invented The Villainby Patrick Page Patrick Midgley ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE: HOW SHAKE SPEARE INVENTED THE VILLAIN. Adapted from the works of William Shakespeare. Written and performed by Patrick Page. Film direction by Alan Paul. Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. 04 9, 2021. After his first monologue in All the Devils Are Here, Patrick Page—one of America's most esteemed and experienced Shakespearean actors—dropped character, looked directly at the camera and introduced not another scene, but a thesis statement. The goal of this digitally recorded, one-man performance, he explained, was more than to perform a sequence of polished speeches from Shakespeare's most notorious evildoers: Page wanted to know if and how Shakespeare's exploration of villainy made him "a more humane writer." While initially jarring, Page's easygoing personal commentary alongside soaring performances of material from Shakespeare's plays made for a captivating performance-as-researchproject that capitalized on the constraints of pandemic performance. With an equally erudite and entertaining tone, Page cataloged the motif of "villainy" across Shakespeare's career. At the same time, with brilliant performances seemingly plucked from his previous productions, Page single-handedly provided the thrill of a fully realized, in-person production. And while Page's foundational arguments and performance style are likely familiar to many Shakespearean scholars and practitioners, All the Devils Are Herenevertheless emerged as an original, captivating, and deeply informed transformation of case studies into characters. Page progressed in chronological order through Shakespeare's career, portraying his fascination with villains in three distinct eras. In the first, from Shakespeare's earliest attempts at playwriting through the plague and the subsequent sonnets (1589–94), Page presented Shakespeare as the "upstart crow," selfconsciously mimicking and responding to his contemporaries—in particular, Christopher Marlowe, whose thundering verse inspired Shakespeare to write more natural language and nuanced antagonists. This early section was dominated by Page's muscular and magnetic portrayal of Richard III. In the second era, from Henry IV, Part 1through Hamlet(1594–1604), Page suggested that Shakespeare's understanding of evil deepened as his villains began to grapple with their consciences. Here, Page focused primarily on Shylock and, surprisingly, Falstaff. Both characters, Page argued, challenged Shakespeare's earlier, easier conceptions of villainy. After concluding a scene from The Merchant of Venice(1596) in which Page played multiple roles, he claimed that while the play was written for and, at times, pandered to an openly anti-Semitic audience, Shakespeare also invited that same audience to put themselves in Shylock's shoes. Page's argument regarding Falstaff stumbled slightly. Frequently termed a villain throughout Henry IV, Falstaff, it is true, is a symbol of human vice. But he is simultaneously an embodiment of joie de vivre, something Page neglects to mention. Falstaff always defies classification, something that Page was forced to admit following his brilliant portrayal of the fat knight in Boarshead Tavern: "Perhaps it's not Falstaff we should fear," he wryly suggested, begging the familiar question of Hal's villainy. Page argued that in the third era, including Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest(1605–11), Shakespeare crawled into the psyches of his most sociopathic and willfully evil characters: Iago and Macbeth. Here, Page's digressions lacked some of the depth of the previous sections and relied more upon contemporary comparisons than historical analyses. Before he performed a scene from Othello, for example, Page revealed that while preparing to play Iago, he read Martha Stout's 2006 book The Sociopath Next Door, which argued that 4 percent of people are unable to feel remorse. The inference that Iago classifies as such a sociopath, while edifying, still felt shallow next to what Coleridge described as Iago's "motiveless malignity." And is not a "sociopath" different from a "villain?" Nevertheless, the relative lack of new insight into Iago's psyche was not really a failure: rather, it underscored Shakespeare's perpetual elusiveness and upheld Page's talent for uncovering character through performance. It is ultimately within Page's portrayals of Iago and Macbeth, not his descriptions of them, that he finally confronted their limitless depths. Page concluded by...

Fiction and Emotion: The Puzzle of Divergent Norms

Abstract A familiar question in the literature on emotional responses to fiction, originally put forward by Colin Radford, is how such responses can be rational. How can we make sense of pitying Anna Karenina when we know there is no such person? In this paper I argue that contrary to the usual interpretation, the question of rationality has nothing to do with the Paradox of Fiction. Instead, the real problem is why there is a divergence in our normative assessments of emotions in different contexts. I argue that explaining this divergence requires a more nuanced account of the rationality of emotion than has previously been proposed. One advantage of my proposal over alternatives is that it helps to explain one way we can learn emotionally from fiction and imagination.

Generational Bargain, Transfer of Disadvantages and Extreme Poverty: A Qualitative Enquiry from Bangladesh

Why do the poor stay poor? And, crucially, why are their children likely to be poor and end up poor later in life? This is a familiar question in the fields of development, social policy and economics alike. Bangladesh has seen notable successes in reducing poverty, and yet, addressing the transfer of deprivations and disadvantages within and between generations still poses a major challenge for policy-makers. To date, literature on inter-generational poverty remains dominated by large quantitative panel data. By contrast, this study draws on a unique qualitative dataset of 72 extreme poor households across Bangladesh, examining how inter- and intra-generational bargains generate extreme poverty. It is argued that, while poverty is transferred inter-generationally, it is not transferred equally. Rather, transferred disadvantages are shaped by persistent forms of deprivation, discrimination and a household-level political economy that is highly gendered. The inter-generational transfer of poverty should be seen as a dynamic and negotiated process that is crucially shaped by intra-generational bargains.

Tort’s Indifference: Conformity, Compliance, and Civil Recourse

AbstractLeading accounts of tort law split cleanly into two seams. Some trace its foundations to a deontic form of morality; others to an instrumental, policy-oriented system of efficient loss allocation. An increasingly prominent alternative to both seams, Civil Recourse Theory (CRT) resists this binary by arguing that tort comprises a basic legal category, and that its directives constitute reasons for action with robust normative force. Using the familiar question whether tort’s directives are guidance rules or liability rules as a lens, or prism, this essay shows how considerations of practical reasoning undermine one of CRT’s core commitments. If tort directives exert robust normative force, we must account for its grounds—for where it comes from, and why it obtains. CRT tries to do so by co-opting H.L.A. Hart’s notion of the internal point of view, but this leveraging strategy cannot succeed: while the internal point of view sees legal directives as guides to action, tort law merely demands conformity. To be guided by a directive is to comply with it, not conform to it, so tort’s structure blocks the shortcut to normativity CRT attempts to navigate. Given the fine-grained distinctions the theory makes, and with the connection between its claims and tort’s requirements thus severed, CRT faces a dilemma: it’s either unresponsive to tort’s normative grounds, or it’s inattentive to tort’s extensional structure.

Do CEOs receive the pay they deserve? A new vantage on a familiar question

Objetivo – Este comentário explora as implicações do estudo de Aguinis et al., e em particular a sua afirmação de que a inconsistência entre a remuneração do CEO e seu desempenho é a reflexão de uma injustiça fundamental. Aspectos relacionados com o significado da justiça são apontados no contexto da remuneração do CEO, a influência do CEO sobre o resultado do negócio, e os desafios de afirmar se a remuneração dos CEOs é excessiva, insuficiente ou justa.Design/metodologia/aproximação – Os autores utilizam uma abordagem conceitual, integrando a pesquisa na remuneração e discrição dos executivos para clarificar os argumentos e os resultados de Agunis et al.Resultados – A principal conclusão do comentário é que o grau de equidade do pagamento aos CEOs é um assunto difícil de caracterizar de forma global. A evidência oferecida por Aguinis et al. em relação à distribuição da lei de poder e a pequena sobreposição entre a remuneração e o desempenho do CEO é fascinante, mas as questões de desigualdade e justiça de renda e retribuição raramente geram respostas simples. Portanto, é necessária alguma cautela ao avaliar a conclusão de Aguinis et al. que o mercado de trabalho dos CEOs nos Estados Unidos é fundamentalmente injusto.Originalidade/valor – Os autores instam aos investigadores a avançar sobre o trabalho de Aguinis et al. e prestar atenção ao desafio de conciliar os conceitos de remuneração do CEO e os seus respectivos resultados.

The Grounds of Tort, Part I: Private Wrongs and Practical Reasoning

Tort theory is widely thought to split cleanly into two seams. Some trace tort's foundations to a deontic form of morality; others to an instrumental, policy-oriented system of loss allocation. Civil Recourse Theory (CRT) resists this binary. It argues that torts comprise a basic legal category, and that this category constitutes an autonomous domain of normativity. But while the theory rightly rejects the binary between corrective justice theory on the one hand and the law-and-economics framework on the other, its insistence on tort law's deontic character is more difficult to sustain, and ultimately cannot be vindicated by doctrinal, historical, or institutional arguments considered apart from their philosophical foundations. Using the familiar question whether tort directives are guidance rules or liability rules as a kind of lens, or prism, this paper shows how requirements of practical reasoning undermine CRT's account of private wrongs. If tort's directives are reasons for action, placing them within the normative domain is not something we can do for free: if we are going to claim that they exert robust normative force, we must account for the grounds of this force and why we need to posit it in the face of simpler, less extravagant explanations of a relatively straightforward system of dispute resolution. CRT tries to satisfy its explanatory burden by co-opting Hart's internal point of view, but this leveraging strategy cannot succeed. The internal point of view interprets legal directives as guides to action, but in tort law, as in private law more generally, legal directives merely demand conformity, not compliance. With the connection between its interpretation of tort directives and the internal point of view thus severed, CRT faces a dilemma: it is either critically incomplete in its account of the grounds of private wrongs, or it is insufficiently responsive to the realities of legal practice. In closing, I suggest that the theory's proponents do better by resisting the temptations of middle-of-the-road metaphysics and instead recognize either the moral or the positivist roots of private wrongs.

Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicholas Guyatt

Reviewed by: Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicholas Guyatt Douglas R. Egerton Nicholas Guyatt. Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation. New York: Basic Books, 2016. 403 pp. $29.95. Most Americans associate racial segregation with the Jim Crow South or with the antebellum urban North. Either way, the presumption holds that these were policies imposed by conservative and often reactionary politicians bent on upholding the prevailing racial order and rolling back Reconstruction-era reforms. In this smart and creative volume, British historian and Cambridge University lecturer Nicholas Guyatt argues instead that from the Revolutionary years through the Civil War, white liberals and reformers advanced notions of racial apartheid as a solution for their nation's woes. Baffled by the question of what to do with the early republic's large number of slaves or with the indigenous peoples just west of America's growing cities, progressives, Guyatt suggests, embraced racial separation as the answer, from Thomas Jefferson's advocacy of removal in his Notes on the State of Virginia to Abraham Lincoln's longtime support for African American colonization in Liberia. Guyatt begins by returning to a familiar question, and usually one investigated by Jefferson scholars. Having announced that the United States was a revolutionary nation, and one based on equality and consent of the governed, how might policy makers square such egalitarian pronouncements with the fact that the nation was twenty percent black or that nonwhites inhabited lands coveted by white settlers? One initial answer, and indeed one often repeated in these pages, was for the country to move toward colorblind equality by engaging in interracial relationships. President Jefferson, who, of course, practiced this policy with his enslaved sister-in-law, Sally Hemings, once assured a delegation of Mohicans and Delawares that "You will mix with us by marriage" (144). Jefferson's hopes that white men might incorporate native women into Euro-American society by marriage has been analyzed by scholars at least since Bernard Sheehan in the 1970s. But Guyatt demonstrates how frequently these proposals were advanced by important politicians; among them was William Crawford of Georgia, a onetime secretary of war, and James Monroe's secretary of the treasury. Crawford's advocacy of the strategy was made so frequently that it was discussed in a British tract entitled Colonial Policy, and was briefly endorsed by the editor of the Virginia Argus. When theory was put into practice, however, especially when the genders were reversed and the husband was an Indian, even New England reformers were aghast. While attending Connecticut's Cornwall School, an academy designed to educate those natives who embraced the tenets of "civilization," Elias Boudinot, a mixed-race Cherokee, fell in love with a local girl whose family had ties to the school. After their engagement became public, a mob that included the fiancée's brother torched the academy. Without abandoning their agenda of forced assimilation, white reformers increasingly began to argue that Native Americans had only once choice: relocate West, where the process of cultural adaptation could continue, or remain in the East and face extinction. The flip side of this ideological coin was the deportation of black Americans to West Africa. Here too, proposals for colonization were preceded by discussions of [End Page 147] racial mixing. Jefferson's French acquaintance, the Marquis of Chastellux, writing in Mathew Carey's Columbian Magazine, remarked that as the "well-established commerce" between white masters and female slaves was so common in Virginia, it should actually be encouraged by the government so as to give rise "to a race of mulattoes, which would produce another of Quarterons, and so on until the colour should be totally effaced" (130–31). Not surprisingly, Jefferson declined to shed further light on a practice that every planter's wife knew existed. The result, Guyatt observes, was that antislavery activists increasingly turned to colonization as the most plausible solution. Guyatt's lengthy discussion of the colonization movement becomes the heart of Bind Us Apart, and he does a superb job of pulling together the various strands of this often-misunderstood crusade. Having briefly toyed with the idea, William Lloyd Garrison broke with the...

Are Legal Disputes Just About Money? Answers from Mediators on the Front Line

Are most disputes in mediation just about money? That's an old and familiar question that many lawyers still seem to reply to with an emphatic “yes.” Mediated cases are frequently viewed as a clash of binary claims, subject only to a sorting out of financial winners and losers.

Tempo(e)rality

Tempo(e)rality

Racial Mediums

Perhaps the most striking common thread running through the books under review here, which take on a diverse array of historical and theoretical problems concerning the relationship of race, technology, and media in both national and transnational contexts, is that they replace a familiar question from the 1990s about what race is with one about what race does. Instead of focusing on the parameters of race as a social construct naturalized by media representations, they look to the reciprocating gesture in which the idea of race serves as the cultural ligature holding together the technological and conceptual apparatus of modern media. The move puts the race concept as it developed in the US in the twentieth century into circulation as an actant in a transnational relational field. The significance of this move, it seems to me, is that it has the effect of changing the traditional emphases of ideology critique in three ways. First, and perhaps least surprisingly, these books highlight the fact that media technologies are demonstrably not neutral machines of dissemination, but are subject, even at the level of scientific innovation, to the same ideological formations as the material they record and retransmit. Second, they suggest that reading highly racialized media productions demands careful recognition of the intentionality and participation of nonwhite actors in the historical processes of constructing, conserving, distributing, and archiving this material. And third, once put into circulation, racialized media productions quickly move beyond their field of origin, where they become available for appropriation and remediation in new and often unexpected ways. Local and national racial politics in the US refract differently when articulated and redirected by transnational circulation. It is not just the cultural products that circulate, but also ideas about the media forms, and the media technologies themselves. The archaeology of media technologies explored in these books shows how racial ideology is not merely a subtext of cultural history; racial ideology has been built into the technics of its reproduction.

Lucretius’ Reception of Epicurus: De Rerum Natura as a Conversion Narrative

This paper starts with the familiar question: how appropriate is Lucretius’ use of poetry to present Epicurus’ prose teachings? I suggest that Lucretius used the term lucida in the phrase lucida carmina (at 1.933) to signify not only clarity of exposition but also the truth of illumination. I develop my proposal in two parts. The first part (“Reception”) views Lucretius, with reference to Stoic theory, as a recipient of Epicurus’ prose writings, seeking to communicate his illumination to the recipients of his poem. The second part (“Conversion”) argues, with reference to initiation rituals, that Lucretius sought to convey his illumination by rearranging Epicurus’ teachings into a journey of conversion. This journey has two main stages: a progression toward initiation; and a course of further instruction, intended to firm up the initiate’s commitment to an Epicurean way of life. Lucretius uses poetry both to charm the hearer and to reflect the sanctity of this journey to enlightenment.

Introduction to Symposium on Devika Hovell “Due Process in the United Nations”

Devika Hovell's Due Process in the United returns to the familiar but vexing question of what mechanisms could best provide for UN accountability. Her contribution, as she describes it, is to start with first principles. The article opens by observing that we can neither assess nor try to improve due process mechanisms if we lack a theory of why we need them in the first place: What values underlie the calls for greater transparency and accountability at the United Nations? Why, exactly, should the United Nations provide greater due process at the expense of its budget and agility? The answer, moreover, cannot be assumed to be the same as it is for domestic governments, since the United Nations is a sui generis actor working in an entirely unique context.