From madman in the basement to self-sacrificing champion: the multiple faces of Spike

Towards the end of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike undergoes an identity crisis and leaves Sunnydale in search of a solution. 'Neither a monster nor a man', Spike yearns for reconciliation of his divided self. The answer comes in the form of the return of his soul. This article explores how the return of Spike's soul does not deliver a reconciled Spike but rather one which has been exponentially fragmented. In a show that prides itself on complex character development, Spike undergoes the most dramatic character arc of anyone on the series, taking place in one season in an almost schizophrenic fashion. Through close analysis of mise-en-scène and narrative structure this article demonstrates how each of these personas is presented as distinct and explores how identity in this season is not defined by growth and evolution but rather the recognition that we are each made up of a multitude of selves

Electric Banana, Mongolian Sky

Although these poems stretch from Las Vegas to Mongolia---two peculiar and exotic places---and a few points in between, they remain tethered to the quotidian of life. They illustrate familiar details of the human experience such as love, learning, distance, and change. The poems of Electric Banana, Mongolian Sky aim to, as William Wordsworth states in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, as far as [is] possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and at the same time to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and further and above all to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them .. the primary laws of our nature; It is in this spirit that these poems were composed, even as the speaker moves between being both an outsider and insider, at home and abroad Electric Banana, Mongolian Sky captures the lyric musicality of the usual in unusual ways

Victor Fresco's Santa Clarita Diet : Television Horror

This chapter examines twenty-first century TV horror, using Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet as its main focus. Examining aesthetics, setting, structure and embodiment, we argue that the series continues horror's tradition of transgressing boundaries

Asymptomatic primary infection with Epstein-Barr virus: observations on young adult cases

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is typically acquired asymptomatically in childhood. By contrast, infection later in life often leads to infectious mononucleosis (IM), a febrile illness characterised by anti-EBV IgM antibody-positivity, high loads of circulating latently-infected B cells, and a marked lymphocytosis caused by hyper-expansion of EBV-specific CD8+ T cells plus milder expansion of CD56dim NKG2A+ KIR– NK cells. How the two situations compare is unclear due to the paucity of studies on clinically-silent infection. Here we describe five prospectively-studied asymptomatic infections identified in a sero-epidemiological survey of University entrants. In each case the key blood sample had high cell-associated viral loads without marked IM-like CD8 lymphocytosis or NK cell disturbance. Two of the highest viral load cases showed a coincident expansion of activated EBV-specific CD8+ T cells but overall CD8+ T cell numbers were either unaffected or only mildly increased. Two slightly lower load cases, which serology suggests may have been caught earlier in the course of infection, also showed no T or NK cell expansion at the time. Interestingly, in another higher load case where T and NK cell responses were undetectable in the primary infection bleed, EBV-specific T cell responses did not appear until several months later, by which time virus loads in the blood had already fallen. Thus some asymptomatic primary infections have very high circulating viral loads and a cell-mediated immune response that is qualitatively similar to IM but of lower magnitude. However, others may be quite different and ultimately could reveal novel mechanisms of host control

How facts travel: The model systems of sociology

The discussion in the sociology of science about the role of model systems in biology provides an invitation to reflect on whether and how similar devices operate in sociology. This paper shows that sociology relies on objects of study that receive a disproportionate amount of attention and implicitly come to stand in for a specific class of objects. But, unlike other disciplines, sociology has no agreed language or theory to classify the discipline-specific objects that it studies, which hinders explicit reflection on the use of model systems across sociological subfields. In contrast to other disciplines, which use model systems, physical copies of sociological model systems usually do not travel. Because of this, the relationship between specimen and epistemic object is less standardised in sociology than in other disciplines, which creates problems for the accumulation of knowledge. Sociology also encounters unique problems of access to model systems