This chapter examines the state-organized cultural literacy movements of postrevolutionary Cuba and the dynamics of the demands of the collective sphere, along with individuation and standing out. The chapter analyzes the model of the socialist worker-amateur citizen fostered by the revolutionary state, arguing that the figures of the amateur and the “art instructor,” as well as the creation of local casas de cultura [houses of culture], became antidotes to capitalist consumer culture. Along with their positive, diversifying effects, the chapter suggests, there came a deep suspicion toward practitioners of so-called elitist culture, demonstrating how, within this process, the state emerged as both benefactor and punisher.

Using data from direct observations, experimental mesocosms, field experiments, and complex computer models, the IPCC has made a very strong case supporting the hypothesis that human behavior is leading to rapid and substantial climate change. One important anthropogenic effect is changes to the carbon cycle, primarily greater CO2 export into the atmosphere from industrial activity. In recent years, both oceans and terrestrial sources have taken up some of this excess CO2, but ocean uptake is particularly problematic, because it leads to acidification. There are many other important greenhouse gases that influence Earth’s surface temperatures, including methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and a diverse group of halocarbons. Though less abundant, these gases have a much greater global warming potential than CO2, on a per molecule basis. Many effects of greenhouse gases on global climate are complex; for example, a particular halocarbon can increase and decrease surface temperatures via different mechanisms. There are many different types of climate models that use the movement of the atmosphere around Earth, and the interaction of the atmosphere with the oceans and with biological processes, to project future climate. Though there are quantitative differences between the projections of each model, these models all project a much warmer and wetter global climate over the next century, with northern latitudes experiencing the greatest impact of climate change.

The tremendous biological diversity of some plant communities may be a reflection of the variety of direct and indirect interactions that plants have with predators, competitors, and mutualists. Ecologists have several ways of measuring biological diversity; some diversity indices, such as the Shannon index, integrate species richness and evenness. Alpha diversity measures species richness within an area, beta diversity measures species turnover, while gamma diversity is the combined species richness of all communities under consideration. Biotic and abiotic factors can influence community diversity directly and indirectly. For example, in southwest Finland, host plant abundance directly and positively influenced lepidopteran species abundance. In the African savanna, herbivorous mammals indirectly and negatively affected bird diversity by consuming trees and reducing the abundance of insects that served as food for the birds. Abiotic factors influencing community diversity include the type of habitat, geological heterogeneity, nutrient levels, and the type and intensity of disturbance. Ecologists predict that diverse communities will be more stable than less diverse communities, but that the populations of species in diverse communities will be less stable.

How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

This chapter examines the work of numerous creative artists in multiple media and genres, some of whom wrote works that formed part of the Cuban literary canon, but whose lives and identities were seen as problematic for the revolutionary state. Focusing particularly on figures whose intersectional identities somehow threatened hegemonic biases, the chapter elucidates the extent to which a preoccupation with sexual practices and gender identities was at the core of the Cuban revolutionary state and the homophobic legacies it inherited from the bourgeois past. The chapter teases this out by exploring critical and theoretical rereadings, in addition to numerous musical, literary, theatrical, and cinematographic works and productions from multiple postrevolutionary periods, wherein queerness emerges as central to the nation and its diaspora.

Late April 1965: A students’ protest escalates into a violent attack against Ali Yavar Jung, AMU's vice-chancellor. The very next day, the education minister, M. C. Chagla, announces the closure of the institution and the suspension of the University Act. He then swiftly passes an ordinance to extend government's control over AMU and to ‘eradicate’—he promises—‘the communal and reactionary element’ in the university.

Narrated in this way, the incident might appear to be the culmination of internal rivalries that unfolded after partition over the re-orientation of the university. Yet the controversies erupting at AMU did not remain confined to the university for very long. The adoption of the government's ordinance soon sparked an unprecedented wave of mobilisation, within and beyond the campus, which rapidly transformed into a large-scale campaign for the recognition of AMU's minority status. As the president of the Jamaat-e-Islami argued, the problem of the university quickly became, in the eyes of many university members and Muslim leaders, ‘the problem of the entire Muslim community of India’.

Mushirul Hasan regards the 1965 protests at AMU as a symptom of the sectarian passions that characterised the post-Nehruvian period. Like him, other scholars interpret the post-Nehruvian period as one of crisis—a crisis of the state's legitimacy and democracy, epitomised by the emergency, and a crisis of Indian secularism, symbolised by the rise of communal violence and the coming to power of the Hindu right in the 1990s. Sunil Khilnani, for instance, contrasts Nehru's supposed achievements—the establishment of a strong state and a stable social order—with the rise of political competition and the emergence of group-based demands in the latter period. He argues that this political competition encouraged politicians to resort, increasingly, to identity politics in order to mobilise their electorates. For him, this process of identity creation was dangerous as it often led to conflict, not just competition, thereby corrupting democratic principles.

I admit there has been a lot of negativity in this book. But that’s how most scientists will tell you that science works, following the twentieth-century philosophy of Karl Popper. Science proceeds, in this view, through the falsification of hypotheses. That is the engine of science, and definitely a good thing. But scientists also generally don’t like to acknowledge that their own hypotheses have been falsified. Hence the perseverance of many of the folk views of human heredity and variation, in swaths of popular culture and in shrinking niches within the scholarly community itself.

My goal here has not been to describe human variation, but to help the reader understand it. Many decades ago, a book like this one would have been a mostly descriptive survey of the peoples of the world: stocky circumpolar peoples, tall and skinny Somalis, short Indonesians, darkly complexioned Sri Lankans, pale Swedes, and so forth.

Over 5000 years, the world population has grown from 10 million to 8 billion. This has taken place in two distinct phases that begin with steeper-than-exponential growth due to the population–technology interaction but later came to a halt, blocked by limits in Earth’s carrying capacity. These two phases stand out when data are graphed in a novel way, with time as well as population on logarithmic scales. Each phase can be fitted using a novel “tamed quasi-hyperbolic” T-function. The ancient phase reached a population of 220 million by year 1, dropping to 190 million by year 400. The present phase slowly picked up speed, reaching its maximal relative (percent) growth rate around 1970 and absolute (in million) around 2010. It projects to a population maximum of 11 billion. The entire process conforms to a “PCT model”: population–carrying capacity–technology interaction. Population growth comes from population itself, as long as population is smaller than capacity. Capacity growth comes from increase in technology, as long as capacity falls short of an ultimate carrying capacity. Technology growth comes from technology itself but also from population.

While worldwide population density increased, that of the of most populous states stubbornly remained between 5 and 10 persons per square kilometer, from 3000 BCE to 500 CE. Expansion into less densely inhabited regions may not have paid off. The range has widened since. In hemmed-in India, density approaches 500 per square kilometer, while the largest empire, Russia, remains at 9, far below the world average of 60. It is not certain that imperial peace outweighs imperial taxes so as to boost population and hence, presumably, wellbeing. The evidence is mixed. Inexplicably, the population share of the most populous empire kept increasing proportional to the square root of world population from 3000 BCE to 1800 CE, but since then it has been decreasing. At the same time, the area share of the most populous empire kept increasing proportional to world population, and it also has been decreasing since 1800. In a crowded world, some five-millennia regularities are breaking down. We live in interesting times.

This chapter examines Cuban fiction about slavery emerging in the 1830s–1840s: Petrona y Rosalía (1838) by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel; Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; the short story “Cecilia Valdés” (1839) by Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), who later developed it into the novel Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano; and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The chapter contextualizes the analysis in tensions between the demands for labor and “ad hoc moral alibis” characterizing Plantation America, particularly the improvised concepts of racial differentiation – Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation – typifying responses to these tensions. The analysis of this literature as speculative writing that looks simultaneously toward the past and future links it to the sometimes improvisational and speculative nature of the new plantation-based societies, which were themselves entangled between speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom, and to the intensified anxieties about Cuba’s racialized future generated by the 1841 demographic census.

The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.