In April 2026, Capcom’s Pragmata became a surprise commercial success. This game is a science-fiction video game about a lunar research facility, a rogue artificial intelligence, and a revolutionary 3D-printing technology capable of ending material scarcity. This essay reads Pragmata through the lens of economic justice, drawing on John Rawls’s account of fair equality of opportunity to argue that the game’s central conflict turns less on who owns the goods a transformative technology produces than on who is permitted access to the technology itself. Situating Pragmata within recent scholarship on video games, economic justice, and institutional power, the essay traces how the game’s plot, its central human–android relationship, and its own commercial success within a highly consolidated games industry together dramatize a live question in 2026: who will control the next transformative general-purpose technology, and on what terms. The essay argues that the game’s doubled position, as both a critique of monopolised innovation and a product of one, is not a contradiction to be resolved but the most honest thing it has to say.

The language of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly omnipresent in human discourse. Many point out that a growing reliance on AI for communication is intellectually and socially deleterious, but its consequences for our moral lives and identities are even deeper than those that contemporary critique is sometimes capable of recognizing. To illuminate these consequences, I turn to the Roman orator, philosopher, and statesman Cicero, whose rhetorical and ethical theory of decorum shows how, by diminishing our eloquence, AI also diminishes our virtue at a time when rhetoric has become increasingly suspect as inimical to civic virtue and civility itself.

In this article, we want to present the creole lifestyle as a showcase of conviviality, creativity, healthy living, and so forth. This is a triumph over the debasement and disparity represented by slavery and the plantation, from which the creole culture and lifestyle emerged. The creole garden, originally created by the slaves as a source of sustenance, became the matrix of the creole lifestyle and culture. It became the source of not only sustenance, but also sharing between neighbours, experimentation for the development of the creole cuisine and herbal medicine, and a source of pride through the visual appeal of the garden.

Adults tell teenagers to think about the future, delay gratification, and make better choices, as if waiting were purely a private matter of willpower. The research suggests something more complicated. Children and adults alike wait longer when the people promising a reward have proven reliable, and less when those people have not. This essay, written directly for teenage readers, examines what schools teach about time through deadlines, grades, portals, notifications, feedback, and the small promises adults make and either keep or break. Rereading Orwell’s Animal Farm, it argues that the humanities matter not because they teach students to wait or obey, but because they teach students to judge what deserves their patience, effort, and trust.

From the pyramids of Egypt to the Titanic, LEGO® produces intricate representations of the past for its adult fans. Despite their popularity, these LEGO® sets have gone unnoticed by scholars of public history. This article proposes that LEGO® for adults is a distinct genre of public history. It analyses the 2025 set “The Evolution of STEM,” which “legofies” various moments in the history of STEM, including three historic scientists: George Washington Carver (1864–1943), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934). I argue that the legofication of the past offers a distinct form of participatory history infused with playfulness and nostalgia, in which consumers literally construct the past. However, legofying the past also entails simplifying complex historical realities into easily consumable and celebratory narratives. This produces a form of micro-commemoration in which consumers buy, build, and display LEGO® monuments in their homes, while also participating in the contestation and co-creation of historical meaning in public.

This article examines how everyday language deals with topics that feel difficult to name directly, especially those related to death, sex, the body, and desire. It shows how euphemism and metaphor are not simply decorative figures of speech, but central tools societies use to manage what feels uncomfortable or unspeakable. By combining familiar examples with a brief historical perspective, the piece illustrates how both words and silences reveal values, fears, and assumptions a culture might have. The article introduces key ideas from the humanities in an accessible way, inviting young readers to reflect on the language they use and hear every day, and to consider how those linguistic choices shape the way people imagine the world and relate to one another.

Despite the Indian state’s commitment to education for all, many groups of children find themselves marginalised from educational spaces. While it is now acknowledged that children with disabilities are one such highly marginalised group and have received policy and research attention, children who have disabled family members often remain invisible within these discussions. In the absence of a formal care policy in India, where care is organised within families and shaped by cis-heteropatriarchy, the conceptualisation of access demands an understanding of the interdependent nature of lives and how marginalities are shaped not only by disability but also close proximity to disability. This article analyses the narratives of adult children of mothers with psychosocial disabilities to highlight the barriers to school access experienced because of invisible, familial disabilities. Further, by paying attention to these everyday experiences of schooling of marginalised and invisibilised childhoods, the article problematises the assumptions around which modern schooling is organised. The article argues that centring disabilities and interdependence within educational access debates provide opportunities for challenging norms essential to disability justice as well as broader access to education for all.

Isabella d’Este Gonzaga (May 17, 1474—February 13, 1539), La prima donna del mondo, was a Renaissance marchioness and prolific art patron. Her motto, “No Hope No Fear,” appeared across her personal apartments in the Palazzo Ducale Mantova (now a museum) and objects she commissioned. This article argues Isabella d’Este Gonzaga was an imaginative collector with a strong, adaptative, and unified vision for exhibitions that furthered museum history, in no small part because of her position as a woman in an extremely gender-imbalanced era. While her motto has been a source of reinterpretation from its 16th-century inception, it has never been examined as a curatorial philosophy encompassing her method and focus on three specific values: balance, fortitude, and retreat. Glossing her surviving letters, collections, and the spaces she intentionally designed to house them captures her as a project manager with a centralized esthetic ruled by neither hope nor fear. Using a cross-disciplinary approach between museum studies and art history, this essay reconnects a selection of her proto-museum spaces and artifacts to reconstruct Isabella d’Este Gonzaga’s curatorial philosophy.

This article considers the relationship between my work as a medievalist and my poetic practice. After discussing three poems in which I draw on my academic research, it investigates how my own writing has shaped my understanding of medieval poetry, using two lyrics of Thomas Wyatt’s as examples.

This article examines the two rationales most frequently invoked in the defense of the humanities: the practical skills they teach (preparing graduates for a wide range of jobs), and the civic-mindedness they instill (preparing students for active and responsible citizenship). As desirable as these aims may be, the article juxtaposes them with a more viable account of what the humanities accomplish suggested by Stefan Collini. It describes what the humanities do as an open-ended process of understanding instances of human meaning-making that affords a kind of gratification that cannot be quantified. Arguably, this redescription will not fix the institutional challenges faced by today’s academic humanities. It does point the way, however, to a more promising, less defensive future, in the form of public humanities, countering the diminished status of the scholarly-academic humanities by expanding into new venues and engaging with new publics.

At a moment when immigration in Canada is framed through targets, housing pressures, labour shortages, and social capacity, this article argues that public humanities can reframe immigration as a question of civic memory. Immigrant Memories of Brantford, a public history initiative launched in 2019, brings together heritage organizations, university researchers, theatre practitioners, and community members to recover and interpret the immigrant and racialized histories of Brantford, Ontario, through museum exhibitions, oral history, theatre, walking tours, and public programming. Brantford’s public identity has long centred on manufacturing achievement while the immigrant workers, families, businesses, churches, and mutual-aid networks that built industrial urban life have remained largely outside the public story. This article frames the project as participatory civic memory work: a public humanities practice that decentralizes historical authority and turns objects, places, and performances into public arguments. It also theorizes civic memory as the collective stories a city tells about who built it and who belongs in it, stories that shape belonging for newcomers today. Immigration is not only a policy issue; it is also a struggle over public memory and belonging.

Playing for a national football team is a source of great national pride, but the relationship between a national team and expressions of national identity is not always straightforward. Representational politics are central to national football teams; not every player in the team is deemed to embody the core essence of that particular nation. This article asks what it means to be a nation in the world of football within the post-colonial context. I explore public perceptions toward the French men’s football multiethnic team since 1998, when multicultural fever surrounded France’s first-ever World Cup win, to illustrate contestations over who is deemed an authentic citizen of a nation. I argue that national identity can transcend borders for both footballers and fans alike, even if expressions of national identity demonstrate some affinity to a former colonial empire. I also explore the phenomenon of French-born players who decide to play for another country (such as a former colony), further signifying the fluidity of national identity whereby one feels a sense of belonging to more than one country. I conclude with some optimism for how multiethnic national football teams today can serve as models for multiculturalism amid rising authoritarian populism and ethnonationalism.

The Biltmore Estate preserves the history, art, and architecture associated with the Vanderbilt family’s vast Gilded Age estate in Asheville, North Carolina. This article argues that through pricing and curation, the Biltmore inadvertently recreates the stratified class systems of the Gilded Age in modern-day museum-goers. This example provides an opportunity to observe the visitor class systems present in other museums—such as Colonial Williamsburg, the International Spy Museum, the Tenement Museum, and the Tate Modern—and to theorize the different forms they may take: the free entry model, the flat fee, the two-tiered admission system, and the add-on system.

There is an inadequate understanding of how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) governance initiatives have been operationalized in low- and middle income countries (LMICs). This scoping review examines peer-reviewed literature on this topic. We searched EMBASE, CAB Abstracts, Scopus, CINAHL, Web of Science, PubMed, and Hinari databases for articles on AMR governance within and across human, animal, environment, and plant health from 2000 to 2024. We screened articles for inclusion and used thematic analysis to synthesize information from included articles. We identified 50 articles, which suggest that AMR governance in LMICs is predominantly shaped by the Global Action Plan. National Action Plans are the most widely adopted AMR governance tool, but with little contextualization and uneven implementation progress. Although the One Health (OH) approach is central to AMR containment, complex coordination and power hierarchies across a diverse range of global, regional, and country-specific AMR stakeholders with distinct roles, capacities, and interests, undermine its use, and contribute to inequities in containment responses. Strengthening AMR governance in LMICs requires institutional and political commitment, just and equitable involvement of OH stakeholders, and the mainstreaming of AMR containment into existing structures to leverage existing resources, skills and institutional capacity while contextualizing responses to local needs.

This article uses microhistory as a theoretical framework to examine the Nguyễn Văn Huyên Museum in Lai Xá village, Hanoi, as both a curatorial project and an epistemological intervention. Established by Nguyễn Văn Huyên’s son, the museum recovers the life and career of Nguyễn Văn Huyên (1905–1975), the first Vietnamese doctoral of letters at the Sorbonne, the first Vietnamese scholar employed by the EFEO as a researcher, and the Minister of Education of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for twenty-nine years. Drawing on Carlo Ginzburg’s concept of the “exceptional normal” and “clues,” Clifford Geertz’s thick description, and Natalie Zemon Davis’s attention to the texture of lived experience, the article argues that the museum operates as a microhistorical text in three ways: it restores Nguyễn Văn Huyên’s pre-1945 intellectual career from the double erasure of colonial surveillance and postcolonial nationalist historiography; it reads French colonial administrative documents as evidence of an epistemology that treated Vietnamese scholarly agency as inherently threatening; and it demonstrates that private family museums can accomplish what state institutions are structurally prohibited from doing, telling stories that complicate and supplement the national narrative. Intimate scale, the museum insists, is not a limitation on historical understanding but its most productive condition.

In 2025, the Chinese National Museum of Ethnology commissioned newly stitched Dragon Boat Festival toys from state-certified intangible cultural heritage practitioners. The toys sat behind glass reserved for fragile antiquities and remained in storage after the exhibition closed, yet they were never accessioned as state-protected cultural property. Why would the museum not recognise as collectable an object it had commissioned, displayed, and preserved? An official and popular image of China as a continuous civilisation might read this hesitation as the cultural authority of antiquity at work. Drawing on 10 months of embedded fieldwork, we reverse this explanation. Following the toys from acquisition proposal to display case, we show that each stage produced decisions defensible under existing documents, rules, or display conventions. These decisions aligned with a grading habit that recognises value only where age or scarcity can already be claimed, so the toys’ newness and reproducibility predetermined their exclusion. What looks like a cultural disposition is therefore better understood as a set of museum policies and practices that we term the “gravity of antiquity”: the pull towards the old that a museum’s collection and the instruments calibrated to it exert on whatever arrives next, producing an exclusion no single decision intends but all cumulatively uphold.

In August 2026, Beijing hosted the second World Humanoid Robot Games, where machines boxed, danced, and tossed arrows into a bronze vessel in a game descended from Confucian ritual. It is a good moment to watch two word-histories collide. “Robot” entered the language in 1920 as the Czech word for forced labor; “human” and “humane” were once a single word that quietly split. We have built machines in the servile image our vocabulary foretold, and in the same decade asked it for tenderness. Drawing on shipment figures, billboard campaigns, empathy research, and the odd afterlife of a Barcelona doll brothel, I argue that companion machines sell intimacy without obligation—and that the humane, unlike the human, is a practice that must be trained.

Using the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child as a frame of reference, this essay examines current Supreme Court decisions and Congressional bills in order to highlight the struggles over the bodies and minds of young people in the United States. It uses Barbara Kruger’s 1989 artwork, “Untitled (Your body is a battleground),” to link the struggles for reproductive and bodily autonomy for women with parallel struggles for the bodily autonomy of young people.