This chapter surveys some of the ways in which the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics has led to a various views of the world with spiritual and moral implications; the perspective of this chapter is that most of these views are not demanded by the actual theory and experiments of quantum mechanics.

The primary focus in Chapter 7 is election administration, which includes ballot contents (e.g., what name a candidate could use on the ballot and additional information that should or could appear on the ballot such as incumbency status of a candidate), ballot form or format (retention or contested), scheduling issues, validity of the election, and a range of other issues. The chapter concludes with a relatively brief discussion of election contests, including type of election being contested (partisan or nonpartisan, primary or general), and the issue raised in the contest; two of the cases involved name issues raised after the election, one a name change and the other the use of the candidate’s birth name rather than her married name.

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.

Rich historical records from pre-modern Japan allow us to imagine ‘sexuality’ despite the absence of an explicit lexicon referring to it. The chapter examines three systems of thought: the Kami (Deities) Way, Mahayana Buddhism, and Confucianism. The Kami Way was the native cult and the spiritual foundation for Japan’s first state. Inscribed in its texts such as the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712 CE) are vivid descriptions of deities’ bodies and performances steeped in symbolic meanings. Buddhism’s treatment of sexuality varied as widely as its diverse offerings of doctrines and practices. At least for the priestly figures, however, it denounced desire for and intercourse with women but affirmed sex with men. Confucianism, which arrived from the continent alongside Buddhism, taught social order and disapproved of all human relations, including sexual ones, that threatened the stable moral order and the gender hierarchy. The three systems of thought operated symbiotically, and reflected and shaped social rules, norms, and power relations of a given historical moment. Mostly more celebratory than condemning of the sexual body, pre-modern sources have no vocabulary for virginity as a boundary to be guarded or conquered, nor a body-altering institution such as the castration of eunuchs.

This chapter considers contemporary environmentalism through the lens of ecotopia, a modification of the utopian form that includes the ecological as a core consideration. The idea that the nonhuman world should have meaningful political status is a radical transformation of the usual terms of utopia, rendering certain utopian tropes (like the technology-fueled extinction of vermin or pests) impossible while activating other new possibilities both for the transformation of the social and for individual self-actualization. In particular, ecotopias are distinct from most utopias in their abiding suspicion of technology; in an era of escalating climate disaster, this suspicion of technology becomes increasingly urgent even as it becomes complicated by the perceived need for some miraculous techno-fix to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change even in ecotopia. A short coda discusses real-world ecotopian projects, attempts to make such visions real as a model to others for what might yet be.

This chapter considers the place of Sigmund Freud in the formation of the earliest historical questions raised about sexuality in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century psychiatric and sexological thought. It then considers a range of ways historical thinkers have used Freudian concepts, as well as the grounds on which such uses have often been explicitly rejected by others. It argues that the emergence of historiography of sexuality bears only a partial and largely indirect debt to Freud, who has less often served as a model of historical inquiry and more often served to define what one should not do. Freud is commonly attributed the status of having sown the seed that enabled historiography of sexuality to emerge globally by relativizing morality and denaturalizing sexual biology in the notion of polymorphous perversity. However, this endeavour was far from assimilable to the emerging norms of early-twentieth historical inquiry, with the result that the earliest histories of sexuality found little inspiration in Freudian thought. Post-World-War-Two uses of Freudian sexual concepts by the Frankfurt School philosophers to explain the origins of Nazism within the European Enlightenment have helped less to understand the sexual politics of Nazism or the anthropology of genocide than to malign sadomasochism.