One endearing image of the Thai-American Cold War diplomacy features an image of two ‘kings’ – Bhumibol Adulyadej, the king of Thailand, and Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, on the set of the movie musical G.I. Blues. The meeting took place during King Bhumibol’s state visit to the United States in 1960. His stopover in California was often described as an extended family holiday, therefore being denied its significance as an ingenious diplomatic spectacle. It was this image of the two kings inside the soundstage of Paramount Studios that helped to secure Thailand’s diplomatic allegiance and the future of its monarchy. This chapter traces historical accounts and different perspectives presented in the visual documents of the royal tour of the United States. It focuses on an image captured by a Hollywood photographer, Nat Dallinger, to illustrate how the Thai-US post-war diplomatic event relied on the Hollywood’s ‘dream machine’ to establish itself as an epicentre of goodwill, prosperity, and power. The chapter also proposes that the 1960 diplomatic event, despite its internationalist outlook, was meant for the Thai audience, and its image of diplomacy formulated a ‘mirror stage’ of the Thailand’s post–Second World War identity.

This chapter explores the potential of Construction Grammar for analyzing literary texts. First, it investigates typical features of literary language from a constructional point of view. Fairy tales, for example, are characterized by their opening lines like “Once upon a time …,” analyzed as a concrete, complex construction. Similarly, many authors, styles, and genres are characterized by particular constructions, or the use of particular words and phrases. The second section deals with creative, innovative, and seemingly ‘rule-breaking’ language in a constructional framework, suggesting that Construction Grammar as a usage-based and cognitively plausible model offers the perfect toolkit to analyze seemingly unruly linguistic behavior. The third part deals with literary genres as linguistic units beyond the sentence, arguing that literary texts are also learned form–meaning pairings and can be treated as constructions. Genres as constructions may change dynamically over time and be subject to prototypeeffects. Drawing on numerous examples, this chapter thus demonstrates that literary language and texts can be productively analyzed using concepts and methods of Construction Grammar.

In a new essay, Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp reflects on almost a century’s worth of research on the Roman Republic in Germany and its reception in the Anglosphere. The history of scholarship on the Republic is traced, from Gelzer and Münzer to Syme to Brunt to Millar, with special attention given to the influence of Christian Meier. Key themes of more recent work include political culture, the contio, memory studies, the early Republic, and imperialism.

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.

Longstanding design and reproducibility challenges in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsule implosion experiments involve recognizing the need for appropriately characterized and modeled three-dimensional initial conditions and high-fidelity simulation capabilities to predict transitional flow approaching turbulence, material mixing characteristics, and late-time quantities of interest – for example, fusion yield. We build on previous coarse-graining (CG) simulations of the indirect-drive national ignition facility (NIF) cryogenic capsule N170601 experiment – a precursor of N221205 which resulted in net energy gain. We apply effectively combined initialization aspects and multiphysics coupling in conjunction with newly available hydrodynamics simulation methods, including directional unsplit algorithms and low Mach-number correction – key advances enabling high fidelity coarse-grained simulations of radiation-hydrodynamics driven transition.

The study of Roman history has always been multilingual, and some of the most important work on the Roman Republic is in German. Today, however, fewer and fewer anglophone students and scholars read German. The result is that major work published in German can go unread and uncited. This new essay by Amy Russell surveys the problem and potential solutions, as well as exploring some of the difficulties of translation from German to English and a glossary of untranslatable terms. It is important that we balance the benefits of multilingual publishing with the need to make Roman history accessible to all. Translation and collaboration are among the methods recommended. Translation from German brings specific problems, as some concepts can be expressed more easily in one language or the other; Russell takes a case study of the term Öffentlichkeit and its similarities to and differences from English phrases such as ‘public space’. Those differences have significantly affected how scholars writing in German and English have conceptualized the public and the political in the Roman Republic. A glossary elucidates a range of other hard-to-translate concepts.

This chapter examines the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) pivotal role in fostering peaceful change within global environmental governance over fifty years. UNEP’s inception at the Stockholm Conference, informed by scientific consensus and diplomatic foresight, marked a transformative approach to international collaboration for sustainability. This analysis employs a tridimensional framework – practical, political, and personal – to interrogate UNEP’s impact on environmental governance. It delves into the vision for UNEP at its foundational moment, its operational evolution, and its adaptive strategies in navigating the complex interplay of global power dynamics, from large powers to small states. The chapter highlights UNEP’s leadership in key environmental achievements, notably the reversal of ozone layer depletion and its emergent role in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. By focusing on UNEP’s trajectory and contributions, this narrative underscores the intricate ties between environmental protection and peace. The overarching theme emphasizes the necessity of continuous political mobilization and scientific engagement to address the urgent environmental crises of our time, echoing UNEP’s call for renewed, cooperative, and ecologically conscious global governance.

Neurodegenerative disorders are complex multisystem disorders mainly characterized by aggregations of misfolded proteins (such as misfolded amyloid-beta protein in Alzheimer’s disease) in select regions in the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems. In this chapter the various proteinopathic neurodegenerative movement disorders will be dealt with: synucleinopathies, tauopathies, frontotemporal lobar degenerations with TAU, TAR DNA binding protein-43 (TDP), and/or fused in sarcoma (FUS) proteinopathies, polyglutamine CAG-repeat disorders, and misfolded prion proteins. Abnormal protein deposits can be visualized post mortem with immunohistochemical methods that define the diseases, allow the staging schemes, and establish correlations between neuropathologic and clinical phenotypes. As neurodegenerative disorders often display comorbidity, immunohistochemistry with antibody panels has to be performed to enable assessment of the specific protein aggregations in various regions.

A set functor is an endofunctor on the category of sets. Although the topic of set functors is quite large, there are few if any chapter-length summaries directed to a researcher in the area of this book. This appendix collects the results on set functors that such a person ought to know, including the main preservation properties, such as preservation of weak pullbacks and of finite intersections. It contains the main examples of set functors used in the recent literature and a chart of their preservation properties. Studying monoid-valued functors, it connects the preservation properties of the functor to algebraic properties of the monoid. It presents Trnkova’s modification of a set functor at the empty set needed to obtain a functor preserving all finite intersections.