Social Class

Discussion of class structure in fifth-century Athens, historical constitution of theater audiences, and the changes in the comic representation of class antagonism from Aristophanes to Menander

Prospective individual patient data meta-analysis of two randomized trials on convalescent plasma for COVID-19 outpatients

Data on convalescent plasma (CP) treatment in COVID-19 outpatients are scarce. We aimed to assess whether CP administered during the first week of symptoms reduced the disease progression or risk of hospitalization of outpatients. Two multicenter, double-blind randomized trials (NCT04621123, NCT04589949) were merged with data pooling starting when = 50 years and symptomatic for <= 7days were included. The intervention consisted of 200-300mL of CP with a predefined minimum level of antibodies. Primary endpoints were a 5-point disease severity scale and a composite of hospitalization or death by 28 days. Amongst the 797 patients included, 390 received CP and 392 placebo; they had a median age of 58 years, 1 comorbidity, 5 days symptoms and 93% had negative IgG antibody-test. Seventy-four patients were hospitalized, 6 required mechanical ventilation and 3 died. The odds ratio (OR) of CP for improved disease severity scale was 0.936 (credible interval (CI) 0.667-1.311); OR for hospitalization or death was 0.919 (CI 0.592-1.416). CP effect on hospital admission or death was largest in patients with <= 5 days of symptoms (OR 0.658, 95%CI 0.394-1.085). CP did not decrease the time to full symptom resolution

Utopianism

Among the many paradoxes of Old Comedy, perhaps the most striking is that it combines acute social commentary and political interventions with the expression and realization of wishes of the most thoroughly impossible kind, in the creation of a transformed world or an alternative society. A golden age returns or is found elsewhere or integrated into Athenian society or politics; nostalgic visions of the recent past are (re-)constituted; a good life is sought with the birds or the fishes; protagonists seek equal distribution of wealth and absence of labour; women achieve power; there is an end to war. Such comic utopianism poses in a particularly sharp fashion the problem of the individual aims and actions of comic characters, the problem of the politics of individual authors or of the genre as a whole, and the problem of humour, as Athenian realia collide with culturally, historically or logically impossible worlds.&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt; Such collisions of worlds afford the opportunity to explore both social/political critique and aspirations. They are a key source of humour and rarely systematic, but by playing with, representing and developing social, political and economic ideals, the transformations of comedy play a distinct role in the speculative thinking of the period. In being prepared to contemplate and explore, however humorously, notions such as economic equality, women as political agents, or, from a modern perspective, perhaps the most laughable of all, a world at peace, Old Comedy seems in its own way to have been at the forefront of public speculation, going beyond and perhaps even leading the radical edge of Greek ideas. Over the course of its development, however, Greek comedy proceeded to move decisively against these sorts of transformative plots and worlds. In place of flagrant impossibilities, novel social or political schemes and the enactment of change that an audience can choose to believe in, Middle and New Comedy ushered in a stable, apparently realistic world in which the comedy of manners and morals takes place. And yet, as I shall argue, this comic world of Menander, in its own way, is just as utopian as the self-consciously extravagant worlds of Aristophanes and his contemporaries.&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt