Fatal Pediatric COVID-19 Case With Seizures and Fulminant Cerebral Edema

The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, can present with a wide range of neurological manifestations, in both adult and pediatric populations. We describe here the case of a previously healthy 8-year-old girl who presented with seizures, encephalopathy, and rapidly progressive, diffuse, and ultimately fatal cerebral edema in the setting of acute COVID-19 infection. CSF analysis, microbiological testing, and neuropathology yielded no evidence of infection or acute inflammation within the central nervous system. Acute fulminant cerebral edema (AFCE) is an often fatal pediatric clinical entity consisting of fever, encephalopathy, and new-onset seizures followed by rapid, diffuse, and medically-refractory cerebral edema. AFCE occurs as a rare complication of a variety of common pediatric infections and a CNS pathogen is identified in only a minority of cases, suggesting a para-infectious mechanism of edema. This report suggests that COVID-19 infection can precipitate AFCE, and highlights the need for high suspicion and early recognition thereof

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization

Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must consider the broad geographies and spatialities of oppression, which we illustrate with a brief analysis of the Occupy movement. Finally, we introduce the next five articles in this special issue, all illustrating the importance of the geographies and spatialities of urban social struggle

Beyond the 'Futureless Future':: Edward O. Bland, Afro-Modernism and The Cry of Jazz

The Cry of Jazz, a “thesis film” from 1959 directed by Edward O. Bland, is a long-neglected landmark in black independent cinema recognized today not for its theories about jazz but for its contentious racial politics.  Bland, however, was a composer and music arranger, not a professional filmmaker, and the astringency of his film’s racial claims emerges from a particular theoretical approach to the formal structures of jazz music and their historical evolution.  This article explores the relationship between musical form and racial identity as presented in The Cry of Jazz.  Emphatically insisting on the music as an African American mode of expression, the film develops a critical musicology of jazz that effectively transposes Frankfurt School-like social claims about capitalist dehumanization to American conditions of racial domination.  In doing so, however, Bland also argues that any further advance of African American musical culture depends on a sharp break with jazz traditions as well as the destruction of the ghetto.  The result is not only a more uncompromising contribution to 1960s-era black cultural radicalism than is typically recognized but also a distinctive reformulation of the Afro-modernist aesthetic.  By linking racial change in Jim Crow America to an aesthetic fusion of avant-garde classical and African American vernacular styles, The Cry of Jazz puts forward a high-modernist, composer-centered conception of black art music as cultural emancipation

Beyond the 'Futureless Future':: Edward O. Bland, Afro-Modernism and The Cry of Jazz

The Cry of Jazz, a “thesis film” from 1959 directed by Edward O. Bland, is a long-neglected landmark in black independent cinema recognized today not for its theories about jazz but for its contentious racial politics.  Bland, however, was a composer and music arranger, not a professional filmmaker, and the astringency of his film’s racial claims emerges from a particular theoretical approach to the formal structures of jazz music and their historical evolution.  This article explores the relationship between musical form and racial identity as presented in The Cry of Jazz.  Emphatically insisting on the music as an African American mode of expression, the film develops a critical musicology of jazz that effectively transposes Frankfurt School-like social claims about capitalist dehumanization to American conditions of racial domination.  In doing so, however, Bland also argues that any further advance of African American musical culture depends on a sharp break with jazz traditions as well as the destruction of the ghetto.  The result is not only a more uncompromising contribution to 1960s-era black cultural radicalism than is typically recognized but also a distinctive reformulation of the Afro-modernist aesthetic.  By linking racial change in Jim Crow America to an aesthetic fusion of avant-garde classical and African American vernacular styles, The Cry of Jazz puts forward a high-modernist, composer-centered conception of black art music as cultural emancipation