Commanding a clear view: Words, concepts, and social science

To lay my cards on the table at the outset: I am broadly sympathetic to Frederic Schaffer’s overall campaign in favor of conceptual elucidation: “investigating the ways in which the social world is built up linguistically and the ways in which social actors deploy concepts to pursue their goals.” On numerous previous occasions I have been, like Schaffer, decidedly critical of scholarly efforts to “fix” the meaning of a concept (like the West or civilization) and then to use that scholarly reconstruction as a base from which to legislate appropriate and inappropriate practical claims using that concept—as though our task as scholars were to correct the social world rather than to explain and understand it. So Schaffer’s careful explication of techniques for elucidation, grouped under the headings of “grounding,” “locating,” and “exposing,” provides a refreshing alternative to the sort of advice about concept analysis one typically receives from scholars engaged in the kind of project I think rather problematic

A tale of two cognitions: The Evolution of Social Constructivism in International Relations

Abstract Constructivism in International Relations (IR) is popular, but constructivists seem disappointed. Allegedly something has been lost. Such criticisms are misplaced. There was never a uniform Constructivism. Since constructivism is socially constructed, to argue that constructivism has evolved “wrongly” is odd. This paper explains the dissatisfaction with constructivism followed by a second reading of its evolution as a tale of two cognitions. These two cognitions distinguish genera in the constructivist “family”. A criticism against one genus based on the cognition of the other is unfair. A focus on cognitions and the use of genera helps in perceiving constructivism’s future evolution

Resilience, resistance, infrapolitics and enmeshment

A great deal has been written in the International Relations literature about the role of resilience in our social world. One of the central debates in the scholarship concerns the relationship between resilience and resistance, which several scholars consider to be one of mutual exclusivity. For many theorists, an individual or a society can either be resilient or resistant, but not both. In this article, we argue that this understanding of the resilience–resistance connection suffers from three interrelated problems: it treats resilience and resistance as binary concepts rather than processes; it presents a simplistic conception of resilient subjects as apolitical subjects; and it eschews the ‘transformability’ aspect of resilience. In a bid to resolve these issues, the article advocates for the usefulness of a relational approach to the processes of resilience and resistance, and suggests an approach that understands resilience and resistance as engaged in mutual assistance rather than mutual exclusion. The case of the Palestinian national liberation movement illustrates our set of arguments

Semaglutide and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with obesity and prevalent heart failure: a prespecified analysis of the SELECT trial

Background: Semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist, reduces the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in people with overweight or obesity, but the effects of this drug on outcomes in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and heart failure are unknown. We report a prespecified analysis of the effect of once-weekly subcutaneous semaglutide 2·4 mg on ischaemic and heart failure cardiovascular outcomes. We aimed to investigate if semaglutide was beneficial in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease with a history of heart failure compared with placebo; if there was a difference in outcome in patients designated as having heart failure with preserved ejection fraction compared with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction; and if the efficacy and safety of semaglutide in patients with heart failure was related to baseline characteristics or subtype of heart failure. Methods: The SELECT trial was a randomised, double-blind, multicentre, placebo-controlled, event-driven phase 3 trial in 41 countries. Adults aged 45 years and older, with a BMI of 27 kg/m2 or greater and established cardiovascular disease were eligible for the study. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) with a block size of four using an interactive web response system in a double-blind manner to escalating doses of once-weekly subcutaneous semaglutide over 16 weeks to a target dose of 2·4 mg, or placebo. In a prespecified analysis, we examined the effect of semaglutide compared with placebo in patients with and without a history of heart failure at enrolment, subclassified as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, or unclassified heart failure. Endpoints comprised MACE (a composite of non-fatal myocardial infarction, non-fatal stroke, and cardiovascular death); a composite heart failure outcome (cardiovascular death or hospitalisation or urgent hospital visit for heart failure); cardiovascular death; and all-cause death. The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03574597. Findings: Between Oct 31, 2018, and March 31, 2021, 17 604 patients with a mean age of 61·6 years (SD 8·9) and a mean BMI of 33·4 kg/m2 (5·0) were randomly assigned to receive semaglutide (8803 [50·0%] patients) or placebo (8801 [50·0%] patients). 4286 (24·3%) of 17 604 patients had a history of investigator-defined heart failure at enrolment: 2273 (53·0%) of 4286 patients had heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, 1347 (31·4%) had heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, and 666 (15·5%) had unclassified heart failure. Baseline characteristics were similar between patients with and without heart failure. Patients with heart failure had a higher incidence of clinical events. Semaglutide improved all outcome measures in patients with heart failure at random assignment compared with those without heart failure (hazard ratio [HR] 0·72, 95% CI 0·60-0·87 for MACE; 0·79, 0·64-0·98 for the heart failure composite endpoint; 0·76, 0·59-0·97 for cardiovascular death; and 0·81, 0·66-1·00 for all-cause death; all pinteraction>0·19). Treatment with semaglutide resulted in improved outcomes in both the heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HR 0·65, 95% CI 0·49-0·87 for MACE; 0·79, 0·58-1·08 for the composite heart failure endpoint) and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction groups (0·69, 0·51-0·91 for MACE; 0·75, 0·52-1·07 for the composite heart failure endpoint), although patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction had higher absolute event rates than those with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. For MACE and the heart failure composite, there were no significant differences in benefits across baseline age, sex, BMI, New York Heart Association status, and diuretic use. Serious adverse events were less frequent with semaglutide versus placebo, regardless of heart failure subtype. Interpretation: In patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular diease and overweight or obesity, treatment with semaglutide 2·4 mg reduced MACE and composite heart failure endpoints compared with placebo in those with and without clinical heart failure, regardless of heart failure subtype. Our findings could facilitate prescribing and result in improved clinical outcomes for this patient group. Funding: Novo Nordisk

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Three Thoughts About What ‘#occupyirtheory’ Might Mean

It is a basic principle of a broadly pragmatist approach to theoretically analyzing politics of all kinds that the important innovations emerge in worldly practice before they show up in academic writings. Theory – and theorists – follow along behind overt political action, extracting and systematizing insights in such a way that they become more widely available than they would if they simply remained in their original context. In so doing, theory and theorists provide conceptual instruments—including explicit visions of alternate futures that may have been only implicit in worldly practice—that can inform future political practice, albeit in ways that belie or even contradict the abstract, idealizedpurity of the kinds of theoretically-informed explanations produced by academics