Stylistics, pop culture, and educational research: A systematized review and case study

This paper explores how educational research and stylistics, fields that rarely intersect, can be in closer dialogue in the study of pop culture texts, artefacts of interest to scholars in both disciplines. I establish in a systematized critical interpretive synthesis that educational research tends to treat pop culture texts as documents. I show that this in turn tends to drive content-focused analyses that stay, from a linguistic point of view, at the surface of the texts. In response, I offer a stylistic analysis of a pop culture text, an episode from the situation comedy The Big Bang Theory that features an English language learner. I employ conversation analysis to interpret the dialogue and demonstrate how a linguistic approach opens up readings on the discursive construction of phenomena such as belonging and exclusion

SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity are associated with genetic variants affecting gene expression in a variety of tissues

Variability in SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity between individuals is partly due to genetic factors. Here, we identify 4 genomic loci with suggestive associations for SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and 19 for COVID-19 disease severity. Four of these 23 loci likely have an ethnicity-specific component. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals in 11 loci colocalize with expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) associated with the expression of 20 genes in 62 tissues/cell types (range: 1:43 tissues/gene), including lung, brain, heart, muscle, and skin as well as the digestive system and immune system. We perform genetic fine mapping to compute 99% credible SNP sets, which identify 10 GWAS loci that have eight or fewer SNPs in the credible set, including three loci with one single likely causal SNP. Our study suggests that the diverse symptoms and disease severity of COVID-19 observed between individuals is associated with variants across the genome, affecting gene expression levels in a wide variety of tissue types