The Perils of Public Intellectualism

Against the background of prophetic and rabbinic thought and action, where ideas of God and the good allowed morality and spirituality to inform one another, Goodman considers the role of public intellectuals today. He cites the expanding electronic media for lengthening the reach and broadening the franchise but narrowing the gaze and the audience of those intellectuals who seek a public role and warns against oversimplification, shrillness, and the hazards of the echo chamber, where pigeonholing and niche marketing shrink one’s audience to the already convinced.

Newspaper markets and municipal politics: how audience and congruence increase turnout in local elections

Media coverage of politics is widely considered essential to political participation. However, studies on local elections do not yet generally take the effect of the media environment into account. This article posits that the territorial fit between newspaper markets and municipal boundaries makes citizens’ exposure to locally relevant news more likely. We use fine-grained data on newspaper readership in order to assess the effect of the territorial structure of the newspaper market on turnout in municipal elections in Switzerland. The analysis shows that newspaper audience in a municipality and the congruence of newspaper markets with municipal territories both have substantial positive effects on levels of turnout in municipal elections. The findings suggest that future research on local political behavior should better acknowledge the influence of the media environment – which can be adequately measured by newspaper audience and congruence. Implications are that current structural changes in the media system bear threats to local democracy via the territorial upscaling of media markets.     

Validity of the use of porcine bone in forensic cut mark studies

Porcine bone is often used as a substitute for human bone in forensic trauma studies, but little has been published on its comparative mechanical behavior. The factors affecting mechanical properties and therefore selection of bone models are complex and include the age of the animal at death, and physiological loading conditions, the latter being of particular relevance when using a quadrupedal animal as a human substitute. The regional variation in hardness of adult and infant porcine bones was investigated using Vickers’ indentation tests and compared to published data for human limb bones to relate differences to inherent genetic effects and loading influences, and to examine the validity of the porcine‐human model. Significant differences in hardness were observed both along and around the adult porcine humerus and femur, but no significant differences were found along the length of the infant bones. Significant differences were found between the forelimb and hindlimb, but only in the infant specimens. The hardness values for porcine adult cortical bone from the femur (52.23 ± 1.00 kg mm^?2) were comparable to those reported in the literature for adult human cortical bone from the fibula, ilium, and calcaneus. These data will help inform subject selection in terms of both species and bone type for use in future trauma studies.     

Afterword: turning and twisting histories of women’s education: reading reflexively and diffractively

ABSTRACT

The Afterword discusses continuities and differences in how researchers are positioned in feminist themes and emerging feminist perspectives as they play out in debates around researcher reflexivity and diffraction as methodological strategies. The first section of the Afterword highlights the ongoing commitment to reflexivity when generating knowledge in women’s and gender history. The second part focuses on the challenge to reflexivity posed by diffractive methodologies that argue that knowledge is created from being entangled in the world, rather than reflecting on or during the production of historical work. This section discusses two examples of diffractive practice in archival research taken from the special issue. The third section outlines diffractive reading in more detail and provides two examples of diffractive reading of texts. Finally, the Afterword invites readers to undertake a diffractive reading of the articles in the special issue and provides some questions about diffraction for consideration.     

The Effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion on Migration

The expansion of Medicaid to low‐income nondisabled adults is a key component of the Affordable Care Act's strategy to increase health insurance coverage, but many states have chosen not to take up the expansion. As a result, for many low‐income adults, there has been stark variation across states in access to Medicaid since the expansions took effect in 2014. This study investigates whether individuals migrate in order to gain access to these benefits. Using an empirical model in the spirit of a difference‐in‐differences, this study finds that migration from non‐expansion states to expansion states did not increase in 2014 relative to migration in the reverse direction. The estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out a migration effect that would meaningfully affect the number of enrollees in expansion states, which suggests that Medicaid expansion decisions do not impose a meaningful fiscal externality on other states.     

The changing nature of urban affirmative action programs: the search for race-neutral alternatives

In January, 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court cast in doubt the legality of minority set-aside programs. The Court required government set-aside programs to meet a “strict-scrutiny” standard of review and required cities to first explore race-neutral means for increasing minority firm participation prior to utilizing any type of rigid quota system. This paper examines how four cities have reacted quite differently, with some cities continuing old practices, and others developing a mixture of new policies and implementation structures. It is argued that the Supreme Court's decision will have only a minor impact on minority contracting programs, with cities seeking to combine affirmative action contracting programs with those that stress economic development.     

May You Live to Be 150!

Daniel Callahan urges us to deliberate with a view to halting trends that might result in extending human lives to, say, 150 years. The socio-economic disruptions, he argues would be insupportable; changes affecting us all should not be left to personal choice or ceded to the juggernaut of untrammeled scientific inquiry and biomedical innovation. Goodman agrees that the ramifications of social change are often unpredictable, especially given the magnitude and accelerating pace of technological advance. But such changes are also polyvalent and will bring opportunities as well as challenges. Ageing, Callahan argues, is not a disease. So the desire to push back its boundaries is a medical aspiration, not a medical need. But that claim involves a category error. For although ageing is not a disease but a process, it is a process that makes us vulnerable to quite a variety of diseases and debilities. Morally, Goodman argues, it is wrong for “us” to seek to set limits to one another’s lives. Clearly most human beings would prefer any advances in life’s duration to proceed pari passu with preservation of the quality of life. But quality should not be made a fig leaf for sordid economic concerns. Human life is an intrinsic, not instrumental value. Humans can be creative long into old age, but persons should not be counted worthless just because they are no longer active, say, in the marketplace. Population is not pollution. But that equation raises its head ominously when Callahan grounds the mandate for collective deliberations about life extension on the analogy of laws restricting a supposed right to pollute. Citing prophetic visions of an age of reconciliation between the generations, Goodman sees community and communication—a mandate and an ethos of service—as critical to the effort to rise to the moral challenges that will present themselves as the trend toward life extension takes hold.

The changing demography of multifamily rental housing

Abstract

The residents of multifamily rental housing are different from both homeowners and single‐family home renters, and these differences have implications for the housing market and for public policy. This article describes apartment residents today, discusses recent changes in their number and characteristics, projects their future growth and composition, and highlights business and policy implications of future changes.

For purposes of business and public policy, a segmentation of apartment residents into three submarkets is useful: the “affordable” market serving low‐ and moderate‐income households, some of which receive government housing assistance; the “lifestyle apartment market” serving higher‐income adult households; and the substantial “middle market.” The number of apartment renters is likely to grow moderately over time. The combination of multifamily structure type and rental tenure form offers unique opportunities not only for provision of affordable housing but also for revitalization of downtown areas and balanced “smart” growth in suburban areas.