A. Borisov classified into finitely many series the set of isomorphism classes of germs of toric $\mathbb{Q}$-factorial singularities, of fixed dimension and with minimal log discrepancy over the special point bounded from below by a fixed real number.We extend this classification to germs of toric Fano fibrations, possibly not $\mathbb{Q}$-factorial. As an application, we verify in the toric setting a conjecture proposed by V. V. Shokurov on the existence of bounded complements.

This chapter develops the fundamentals of abelian model structures from the perspective of cotorsion pairs in exact categories. The key notion is that of a Hovey triple. This is a triple of classes of objects which are intertwined to form two complete cotorsion pairs. From a given Hovey triple we define (co)fibrations and weak equivalences as well as the (very good) left and right homotopy relations and their stable categories. The notion of a trivial morphism is introduced and it is shown that the 2 out of 3 property for weak equivalences is equivalent to the statement that each trivial morphism is a weak equivalence. This condition is automatic when the underlying additive category is weakly idempotent complete. At the end of the chapter, Hovey’s correspondence between cotorsion pairs (i.e. Hovey triples) and abelian model structures is proved.

This chapter offers a new and original analysis of what I call the Myth of the Goddess and the Herdsman: here the fundamental claim is that the mortal king engaged in a sexual relationship with a powerful female deity (Inana or Ištar in Mesopotamia, Aphrodite or Venus in the Greco-Roman world). As shown here, this relationship is merely the central episode of a longer story-pattern. The myth in full begins with the preparations of the union and the sexual union itself, and continues with the male lover’s transgression and his divine punishment. The punishment leads to lamentation, which in turn paves the way for a conciliatory ending, which is again achieved by divine intervention. Here the sources include Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from the late third millennium BC onwards, a variety of evidence from the wider ancient Near East, and Greek poems on the mythical early rulers of Cyprus and Troy. The last adaptation – the union of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite, which produced the future Trojan leader Aeneas – was of special importance in the Greco-Roman world, as it was eventually claimed to be the mythical basis of Augustus’ right to rule as the first Roman emperor.

The term ‘Dalitbahujan Anthropocenes’ refers to the untouchable and low-caste population in the country whose bodies, labour, lives, and work have been shaped through their close proximity to industrial development and modernity for several centuries. This proximity is a consequence of historical colonialism and capitalism, systems of hierarchy and discrimination, polluted local environments, and persistent environmental casteism. It is rooted in the belief that Dalit and low-caste bodies possess a ‘natural’ capacity to endure and engage with the dirty and hazardous processes and substances of industrialization, with their labour being seen as essential to the nation's progress. In contrast to the dominant temporality of the Anthropocene, which focuses on a unified human society, the concept of Dalitbahujan Anthropocene disrupts teleological time and challenges singular narratives. It does so by recounting the experiences of Dalit and low-caste individuals within the caste–colonial–capitalist systems, expanding across various contexts such as agricultural fields, coal mining, bonded labour, displacement, migration, famines, and droughts – all in the name of civilization and modernization. Beyond the scope of caste and capitalism, Dalitbahujan Anthropocenes offer a creative alternative perspective on addressing issues related to extraction, waste, urbanism, and development. Nek Chand and his Rock Garden serve as counter-narratives, challenging the caste and Dalit blind spots within the Anthropocene discourse.

Nek Chand Saini (December 1924–June 2015) is widely known for his creation of the Rock Garden in Chandigarh city. Born in Berian Kalan village, 90 kilometres to the north of Lahore, and now in Pakistan, Nek Chand migrated with his family to the Indian side of the Punjab region after Partition in 1947. Until the age of 23, he, his parents, four brothers, and two sisters lived in an agricultural village of Pakistan. As a Partition refugee, Nek Chand moved in several Indian cities – Jammu, Gurdaspur, Karnal, Panipat, and Faridabad, and finally settled down in Chandigarh.

Nek Chand Saini belonged to the Mali caste, which has been characterized in various accounts, and in various regions of India as an occupational ‘Shudra’ caste, traditionally and intimately connected with the occupation of gardening and cultivation-selling of flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

This chapter examines the first systematic efforts to eliminate the Heimat concept. The chapter shows how they emerged in the early 1960s amidst a period of Cold War crisis. Expellee claims to a right to Heimat in the East lurched to the centre of the greatest foreign policy debate of the period and represented a major barrier to rapprochement with the Eastern bloc. Supporters of rapprochement took up two conflicting strategies in confronting expellee Heimat rhetoric. The first challenged how the expellee societies understood the concept, while the second involved arguing that desire for Heimat was inherently fascist. The chapter shows how other generational, demographic, and economic developments also shaped the anti-Heimat movement. While earlier focus on Heimat had been tied to its loss, long-term economic growth, completed reconstruction, and decline in mobility rates led earlier preoccupation with Heimat to ebb. A number of activists on the extra-parliamentary left, many of whom sought re-engagement in the 1970s, also described attachment to local Heimat as inherently exclusionary, reactionary, overly emotional, militarist, or a blockage to international revolutionary change.

In this chapter, analysis focuses principally on asynchronous substrand comments on an Ethan Gamer YouTube video, which are elicited by single main strand comments. Analysis reveals that in most instances, YouTube main and substrand comments interaction has a unique one-way structure, where comments by individual users are addressed mainly to the producer and participant of the video, in this case Ethan Gamer, or to the commenter who posts the main strand comment which elicits the substrand. While adjacency and sequence are disrupted by various software features in the main strand comments, sequentiality is adhered to in the substrand comments where users have access to meaningful written interaction and conversational sequences. However, Ethan Gamer’s replies to commenters’ posts are infrequent. Nonetheless, Ethan Gamer YouTube commenters use the substrand comments tool to connect with both unknown and familiar other users, engaging mainly in talk about gaming hardware, Ethan Gamer’s gameplay, and sometimes to clarify their actual age where adults’ accounts are being used to access YouTube. Nostalgic YouTube substrand posts may also comprise tellings, which suggest commenters’ social orientation through a search for commonality with other users.

Filipazzi, Hacon, and Svaldi proved that there are only finitely many topological types of elliptically fibered Calabi–Yau threefolds. We explore the implications of their results on the boundedness of the geometric quantities in the massless spectrum of the F-theory Calabi–Yau compactifications. A key ingredient is what we call the geometric anomaly equation, and the extension of the gravitational anomaly cancellation in physics, also to singular spaces. We review and extend the dictionary between geometry and physics. We conclude with explicit bounds.

The last two decades have been marked by excitement for measuring implicit attitudes and implicit biases, as well as optimism that new technologies have made this possible.  Despite considerable attention, this movement is marked by weak measures.  Current implicit measures do not have the psychometric properties needed to meet the standards required for psychological assessment or necessary for reliable criterion prediction. Some of the creativity that defines this approach has also introduced measures with unusual properties that constrain their applications and limit interpretations.  We illustrate these problems by summarizing our research using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a case study to reveal the challenges these measures face. We consider such issues as reliability, validity, model misspecification, sources of both random and systematic method variance, as well as unusual and arbitrary properties of the IAT’s metric and scoring algorithm. We then review and critique four new interpretations of the IAT that have been advanced to defend the measure and its properties. We conclude that the IAT is not a viable measure of individual differences in biases or attitudes. Efforts to prove otherwise have diverted resources and attention, limiting progress in the scientific study of racism and bias.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

In April 2018, Starbucks closed all of its branches in the US and required some 175,000 employees to participate in a four-hour training session on implicit bias. Although this was undoubtedly well-meaning, the devoting of substantial resources to such an effort seems wisest if empirical evidence indicates that such training is effective. But in fact, the majority of evaluations of attempts to change implicit bias have shown no lasting effects (Forscher et al., 2019).

We show that a non-toric $\mathbb{Q}$-factorial terminal Fano threefold of Picard rank 1 and Fano index 13 is a weighted hypersurface of degree 12 in $\mathbb{P}(3,4,5,6,7)$.

• ◦ This case study of generic drug markets illustrates the importance of interpersonal relationships in forming a cartel.

• ◦ Price fixing began in 2013 when Teva Pharmaceuticals, the world’s leading generic drugmaker, hired Nisha Patel to be the Director of Strategic Customer Marketing. Ms. Patel was tasked with “price increase implementation” and her approach to raising prices was to form an unlawful agreement with competitors to raise prices. She was well placed to engage in this activity as she had close ties to key salespeople at the major generic drugmakers due to having served as Director of Global Generic Sourcing for one of the largest US drug distributors.

• ◦ Cartels formed in about 90 percent of markets where she had close ties to all market participants, but only about 20 percent of markets where she lacked such relationships.

• ◦ The effects of collusive behavior persisted long after the cartel’s discovery. Though the conspirators discontinued direct communications after learning about the investigation, the evidence is that collusive prices persisted for many years afterwards.

• ◦ Collusion did induce some entry but its impact proved limited in these regulated markets. Many cartelized markets did not attract any entry, and the markets with entry saw a delay of two to four years before production started.

I remain hopeful as scholars like Mukul Sharma add a critical perspective to environmental scholarship, specifically race, ethnicity, and class. His analysis of Dalits, untouchables, the lowest caste in India is traced throughout Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environmental Justice. Sharma is part of growing and critical international scholarship and literature that focuses on marginalized persons of colour and the environment. The value of Sharma's work rests on secondary sources and primary sources with the primacy of voices of people who are both depressed and creative. Dalits tell their own stories and create ecologies. The oppressors are just that – oppressors – and not central to the narrative.

Sharma's intriguing book takes me back to my days as a PhD student in history in the 1990s. During that time, I was excited and afraid, quickly learning there was very little diversity in environmental history. With my dissertation proposal, I did the opposite of what dissertation advisors advise: write your dissertation based on an established area and just get it done. Willfully, I ignored the advice and plunged into the unknown of nascent African American environmental history. I did not know if archival sources, critical to writing such a history, would be fruitful. Little or racist mention of African Americans and the environment stood between my research and completion of my dissertation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many white scholars marginalized and objectified Native Americans and African Americans. Some environmental historians focused on the tensions and comparisons between Native Americans and white voices. Still the narratives of whites and their voices remained at the fore, essentially ecological imperialism, what was done by whites to Native Americans, including spreading disease from Europe to the Americas and Caribbean. Agricultural history seemed a logical path, particularly the scholarship of the American South. Yet African Americans were objects and not the voices from primary sources. Theirs were supporting and cameo roles in relationship to whites and agricultural equipment.

Early in my academic career, I often found myself alone and in environmental history circles the subject matter of African American environmental history was objectified, rejected, or sidelined.