Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Society and governance — law, politics, policy, security and institutions — court records, doctrine, democratic theory, information operations.
182 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-006 v2 | Memorandum Opinion (remedies), United States v. Google LLC (D.D.C., No. 1:20-cv-03010-APM, ECF No. 1436) [descriptive title] | Mehta (2025), https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.1436.0_1.pdf. Remedies opinion after the 2024 §2 liability ruling. The court (Mehta, J.) bars exclusive distribution deals for Search, Chrome, Assistant and the Gemini app, with a one-year exit right on all payment deals. It does not ban payments, and it rejects the Chrome and Android divestitures and choice screens. It orders (i) a one-time snapshot of six Search Index fields per document, (ii) Glue and RankEmbed user-interaction training data “at least twice”, capped and privacy-treated, and (iii) five-year search and text-ads syndication on ordinary commercial terms (search capped at 40% of queries in year one). “Qualified Competitors” is rewritten so it can include GenAI firms. The term is six years (five plus one of ramp-up). On GenAI, the court finds that grounded chatbots perform an information-retrieval function similar to general search engines, enough to bring GenAI inside the decree. It also finds that plaintiffs “did not establish that Google’s scale advantage in Search translates into a quality advantage in GenAI search-assisted responses” (op. p. 156). For that reason it refuses to order sharing of Gemini training data. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-004); a primary legal source, and the most detailed judicial record to date of how LLMs, grounding/RAG and the GenAI market were described under oath. It is worth reading for that and for the design of its data-sharing remedy. Its technical content is lay-level, built from testimony, and carries no instruction for ML practice. |
| LIT-012 v2 | Transcript of Show Cause Hearing, Segundo A.P.G. v. Bondi et al. (D. Minn., No. 26-cv-603), Feb. 3, 2026 [descriptive title] | Blackwell (2026), https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FnY2z7eb5efGlHrb2AYBtfqMVDJSUfIu/view. At a 71-minute show-cause hearing on noncompliance with habeas release orders in five cases, Judge Blackwell said that the scale of Operation Metro Surge “is not a justification for diluting constitutional rights” and that the government “cannot … detain first and then sort out lawful authority later”. The record includes a 13-day delay in releasing Oscar O.T., release conditions imposed without the court’s authority on Jose L.C.C., and a Segundo release learned of only through another case. Government counsel attributed the failures to missing training, access and agency cooperation. The court took the matter under advisement. No written order following the hearing could be verified. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-014); worth reading as a primary, certified record of a federal court questioning the executive about compliance with habeas release orders during Operation Metro Surge. It holds colloquy, not findings. Any holding would sit in a later written order, which could not be verified. |
| LIT-014 v3 | Reckless disregard for the truth coming from cops, doctors, and scientists: A rant. | Gelman (2025), https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/24/reckless-disregard-for-the-truth-coming-from-cops-doctors-and-scientists-a-rant/. Gelman argues that scientists (a 3-day study titled “long-term”; the power-pose abstract’s “instantly become more powerful”), a paid medical expert (Ludmerer’s 2002 “no opinion” on smoking and lung cancer) and DHS spokespeople (Lander “assaulting”, Padilla “lunging”, ICE’s unsourced “413 percent” assaults) share one pattern, which he calls “reckless disregard for the truth”. In his account it strengthens a weak case, is carried by journals, courts and media, is accepted as a term of art and goes unpunished. It is negative-sum, and bystanders who tolerate it sustain it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-019); worth reading as a short, clearly argued statement of an incentive account of socially accepted falsehood, with a relevant section on overclaiming in paper titles and abstracts. Its evidence is a handful of anecdotes, and its police examples rest on press accounts that this reading did not check. |
| LIT-015 v2 | Joint Publication 3-12, Cyberspace Operations | Joint Chiefs of Staff (2018), https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16681-joint-chiefs-staff-joint-publication-3-12. JP 3-12 (8 June 2018) defines cyberspace operations as “the employment of cyberspace capabilities where the primary purpose is to achieve objectives in or through cyberspace” (p. I-1). It sorts every non-”cyberspace-enabled” military action in cyberspace into exactly three missions: DODIN operations, DCO (split into DCO-IDM and DCO-RA) and OCO. Missions are categorized “based only on the intent or objective of the issuing authority” (p. II-2). Missions are carried out through four actions: cyberspace security, defense, exploitation and attack. On authorities, the publication says only that authority “is derived from the US Constitution and federal law” (Titles 10, 50 and 32 named as key; p. III-2), plus SecDef policy and President/SecDef orders. Specific authorities are deferred to the unreleased classified Appendix A. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-025); the latest public edition of joint cyberspace doctrine and the primary source for its definitions and mission taxonomy. A December 2022 revision is reported (in secondary sources only, not seen here) to exist with distribution limited to CAC holders; if it is ever filed, this becomes Superseded by it. |
| LIT-022 v2 | Is the United States Still a Liberal Democracy? | Drezner (2025), https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/is-the-united-states-still-a-liberal. Drezner asks whether the US will still be a liberal constitutional democracy in January 2029. He reviews Polity’s downgrades (+10 in 2015 to +5 for 2020, and in February 2025 “at the cusp of autocracy”), the Freedom House fall from 92 to 83 (2014–2021, as quoted from Levitsky & Way) and counter-evidence (continued compliance with court orders; Hickman’s “not there yet”). He then concludes that “it is hard to disagree” with Levitsky & Way’s forecast of competitive authoritarianism, and expects democracy’s “precarity” to be the lasting condition. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-001); a short, fair synthesis of the 2025 democracy-index downgrades, roughly half of it quotation; its central forecast is Levitsky & Way’s (“The Path to American Authoritarianism”, Foreign Affairs, Feb 2025), which is the primary source to read and is not held here. |
| LIT-023 v2 | Russian Hybrid Warfare | Clark (2020), https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Hybrid%20Warfare%20ISW%20Report%202020.pdf. Clark argues from open Russian military writing of 2015–2020, chiefly Military Thought and Army Collection, that Russia treats “hybrid war” as a type of war. In his account it is a strategic-level effort to reorient a target state, in which every action, conventional force included, is subordinate to an information campaign. He concludes that a US strategy centred on deterring great-power conventional war can “technically succeed” while losing. The report ends with 12 recommendations (executive-summary count). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-012); worth reading as a clear, openly sourced statement of the “hybrid war is a type of war, not a toolkit” reading of 2015–2020 Russian military journals. Its representativeness rests on argument, not on a systematic sample, and its forward-looking claims predate 2022 and are not tested here. |
| LIT-024 v2 | Memorandum and Order granting motions to quash, In re Administrative Subpoena 25-1431-032 to Rhode Island Hospital (D.R.I., No. 1:26-mc-00007-MSM-AEM, ECF No. 38) [descriptive title] | McElroy (2026), https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.rid.62049/gov.uscourts.rid.62049.38.0.pdf. Judge McElroy quashed DOJ HIPAA administrative subpoena No. 25-1431-032 (18 U.S.C. § 3486) to Rhode Island Hospital on three independent grounds: 1. no congressionally authorized purpose, because DOJ’s FDCA off-label “misbranding” theory against a prescribing hospital is not legally cognizable (Facteau; 21 U.S.C. §§ 396, 353(b)(2)); 2. issuance for an improper purpose in bad faith; 3. a Fourteenth Amendment informational-privacy violation for the children, with relief extended to all minors because a DCYF-only carve-out would itself expose DCYF wards. The court enjoined DOJ with respect to patient-identifying information and PHI produced under the subpoena, and stated that it quashed the subpoena, “not the enforcement order entered by the Texas court”. An amended order the next day (ECF 44) added “seeking” to the injunction. DOJ appealed (1st Cir. No. 26-1568; argument calendared for Oct 7, 2026). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-024); A primary source worth reading for the informational-privacy holding and the inter-circuit procedural conflict. It is not final: it is on appeal, a First Circuit motions panel (concurrence) has questioned its merits, and it relies in part on QueerDoc, which the Ninth Circuit has since reversed. Read it with ECF 44, the May 18 Texas order and the May 19 First Circuit order. |
| LIT-033 v2 | Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification [DEF CON 32 talk] | Doctorow (2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8. Doctorow argues that platforms follow a three-stage decay cycle: good to users while locking them in, then good to business customers at users’ expense, then taking all the value for themselves. The mechanism is “twiddling”. It became possible when four disciplining forces weakened: competition, regulation, interoperability and tech-worker power. A “new, good internet” needs all four restored, with interop (reverse-engineering rights) and unionisation as the hacker-specific levers. The argument is assertion and anecdote throughout. It carries several checkable factual slips, notably about EU law and the court in United States v. Google. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-041); The most compact first-person statement of the “four forces” version of the enshittification thesis, worth reading as advocacy with its evidence taken on trust. Its figures and legal claims need their own sources before anything rests on them. |
| LIT-043 v2 | This Secret Math Equation let the US Government Spy on Anyone | Kibicho (2025), https://leetarxiv.substack.com/p/dual-ec-backdoor-coding-gui…. The post is a paywalled programming tutorial that implements the Dual_EC_DRBG random-number-generator backdoor in Python, as a chapter of a book on finite fields for programmers. Nothing beyond that framing was reachable. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-25 from the post’s visible front matter; on 2026-10-14 the body was still not reachable, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. The Substack post API returned the post with audience ‘only_paid’, a word count of 1,364 and a body truncated after the introduction and chapter list (no free preview). The public page shows the same. A web search for the title, the author and LeetArxiv found no other copy of the chapter: the forthcoming book it belongs to is not published, and the search results were other authors’ accounts of Dual EC. A paid subscription is not a copy this client can use. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-052 v2 | SCOTUS allows Trump admin to send eight men to South Sudan with no process | Geidner (2025), https://www.lawdork.com/p/scotus-allows-trump-admin-to-send. The post reports that the Supreme Court, “on an apparent 7-2 vote”, held that the district court could not enforce its May 21 remedial order for the men held in Djibouti, because the Court had stayed the underlying April 18 injunction. It quotes the Kagan concurrence and the Sotomayor–Jackson dissent accurately. Against the order, its account of the holding is accurate. Its framing (the headline’s “with no process”, “Permission had been granted”, “seven justices are allowing”) goes beyond what the order decides. It also omits the majority’s reasoning, and it follows the dissent’s count of eight men where the per curiam refers to six. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-048); an accurate secondary account of DHS v. D.V.D., No. 24A1153 (3 July 2025), whose order is the primary source to read and is not held here; its framing goes beyond what the order decides and omits the majority’s reasoning. |
| LIT-055 v2 | Who Goes Nazi? | Thompson (1941), https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/. Thompson’s answer is that susceptibility to Nazism is “something in them”, not race, nationality, creed or class. She argues it through fourteen character sketches of guests at an imagined New York party. People with an inner code, security or happiness “never go Nazi”. The humiliated intellectual, the scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labour boss and the success-chaser “would all go Nazi in a crisis”. It is a journalist’s typology from experience in Germany, Austria and France, and no data supports it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-056); A primary historical text, and the source of a still-circulating heuristic, worth reading as what one experienced anti-fascist observer believed in 1941. It is not evidence for what predicts fascist support. |
| LIT-060 v2 | The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine | Bonica (2025), https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-…. From FEC filings, Bonica reports that a core network of PACs linked to Mothership Strategies raised about 159M went to Mothership, out of 11M reached candidates, campaigns or national party committees, a “fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent”. The headline numbers cannot be reproduced from the published repo: its inputs are missing, it has a fatal undefined variable, and it computes several reported figures nowhere. As documented, its disbursement queries cover only the latest two-year period and at most 1,000 disbursements per committee, largest first, which would bias the $11M downward rather than cap it. The post’s own infographic contradicts several of its figures. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-042); A plausible and important claim about political-fundraising efficiency, not established by what was published. It would be settled by a run that reproduces the figures, with the input files committed, all cycles queried and paginated fully, and independent expenditures and field spending counted explicitly in or out of “reaching campaigns”. |
| LIT-061 v2 | Mike Johnson’s Institutional Betrayal | Moynihan (2026), https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/mike-johnsons-institution…. Moynihan argues that, in the 2026 DHS appropriations lapse, Speaker Johnson refused a vote on the Senate’s bill (which funded DHS except ICE and CBP) and passed a Trump-backed full-DHS bill, then recessed. In doing so he backed a presidential memo directing TSA pay from unspecified funds with a “reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations”. Moynihan calls this ceding Congress’s power of the purse. His distinction is that the President may pay staff during a lapse only from an identifiable appropriation, which exists for ICE and CBP (under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) and not for TSA. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-084); A clear, well-sourced piece of commentary on one episode of the 2025–26 appropriations conflict, worth reading as argument. Its main factual premise (the memo names no appropriation) checks out against the memo, and its timeline comes from news reports it links. |
| LIT-065 v2 | Grand jury transcript, In re Grand Jury Investigation 25 GJ 994, October 9, 2025 (“Broadview Six”) [descriptive title] | U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois et al. (2026), https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28220756-10925/. At the 9 Oct 2025 session (Special June 2024 Grand Jury, 25 GJ 994), AUSA Sheri Mecklenburg opened by telling the jurors she had waited for “the Thursday grand jury” because “I know you and I trust you … and I would never ask you to charge somebody if I didn’t think there was probable cause” (tr. 3). The only witness was FBI Special Agent Evan Hylton (tr. 10–61). He answered mostly “Yes” to leading questions: on the driver’s second-hand account, on his own photos of the car taken 1 Oct, and on social-media identifications of the six. Jurors then pressed on the damage, the conspiracy theory and whether the driver was yet on duty. One said “I personally feel the complete opposite way” (tr. 75). The vote is not in the transcript; press reports it as a “no bill”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-033); This is the complete primary record of the first, reportedly no-billed, presentation. It is the document a reader should consult on the vouching and presentation questions, rather than press paraphrase. |
| LIT-072 v2 | Iranian Hackers Targeted US Officials in Elaborate Social Media Attack Operation | Lennon (2014), https://www.securityweek.com/iranian-hackers-targeted-us-officials-ela…. SecurityWeek relays iSIGHT Partners’ claim that more than a dozen fake personas, supported by a fake news site (NewsOnAir.org), ran a social-media espionage campaign from 2011 aimed at US military, diplomatic, congressional, press, think-tank and defence targets. The purpose was credential phishing and reconnaissance. Iranian origin is inferred from targeting, “technical indicators” and a Tehran working-day schedule, and iSIGHT says it has “no information implicating the ultimate sponsor”. The article’s figure of “over 2,000” is connections to the personas, not confirmed victims. iSIGHT itself says it is “not clear … how many credentials the attack has captured”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-058); a faithful relay of iSIGHT Partners’ public NEWSCASTER disclosure (28 May 2014), which is the primary source to read and is not held here; every passage this article attributes to a ‘closely held report’ is in that public disclosure, and ‘2,000’ counts connections, not victims. |
| LIT-078 v2 | Kerr County Commissioners’ Court, Regular Session, Monday, June 27, 2016 — verbatim transcript [descriptive title] | Kerr County Commissioners’ Court et al. (2016), https://legacy.co.kerr.tx.us/commcrt/minutes/2016/062716CC.txt. This is a routine regular session of the Kerr County Commissioners’ Court, all motions 4–0. In the reports item (tr. 95–98), Commissioner Moser announced a steering-committee meeting “this Thursday” on a Kerr County flood warning system. He said: - an engineering analysis of the entire system would cost roughly 20,000; - Comal County spent about $320,000 on 8 sensor locations plus central command and control; - a countywide system might be “a million dollar thing”. Commissioner Baldwin said the old phone chain “still works” and objected to “these damn sirens going off in the middle of night”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-087); This is a primary local-government record. The flood-warning exchange is captured verbatim and is the reason to read it. It should be read alongside the follow-up meetings, not alone. |
| LIT-083 v2 | Toward interoperable representation and sharing of disinformation incidents in cyber threat intelligence | Sánchez González et al. (2025), ARXIV-2502.20997. The paper shows that a DISARM-labelled disinformation incident can be encoded in plain STIX 2.1 with four object types (IntrusionSet for the incident, ThreatActor, AttackPattern, Location) and three relationships (uses, attributed-to, targets), then served by an open-source microservice platform (DISINFOX) to OpenCTI through a custom connector. Its validation is a demonstration that 118 hand-labelled incidents passed through the pipeline; it reports no measurement of fidelity, usefulness or scale. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-028); a working, clearly described proof of concept for carrying disinformation incidents as CTI. It is an unreviewed preprint with a deliberately minimal mapping and no evaluation beyond “it ingests”; what would settle it is peer-reviewed publication plus evidence that analysts use the shared incidents, or a comparison with DAD-CDM, which the authors themselves name as the emerging standard. |
| LIT-084 v2 | 3rd EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats: Exposing the architecture of FIMI operations | European External Action Service et al. (2025), https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/EEAS-3nd-ThreatReport-March-2025-05-Digital-HD.pdf. The EEAS classifies channels in foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) into four tiers by their tie to a state: official, state-controlled, state-linked (covert, attributed) and state-aligned (non-attributed). It applies the scheme to 505 incidents it detected between 4 Nov 2023 and 4 Nov 2024, involving about 38,000 channels. In a filtered co-involvement graph of 2,055 recurrent channels, 20% are Russian-attributed, 3.5% Chinese-attributed and 76.5% non-attributed. The report states that the sample is illustrative and should not be used to infer general trends. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-060); worth reading as the primary statement of the EEAS’s attribution taxonomy (the Exposure Matrix) and of the covert operations it names. Its figures are counts from an avowedly non-representative monitoring sample, the network method is described only in outline, and several headline numbers need the qualifications recorded here before they are cited. |
| LIT-087 v2 | Assessing grand narratives of economic inequality across time | Feinman et al. (2025), DOI-10.1073/pnas.2400698121. Across a global archaeological house-size compilation (SiteGiniLevel: 1,176 sites, 47,019 houses), site Gini coefficients rise only weakly with the number of political levels (r² = 0.16 all sites, 0.22 apex, 0.27 H50) and with log polity population (r² = 0.11, 0.21, 0.08; values printed on Fig. 2, not in the text). The spread widens at three or more levels. A 0–3 expert-coded autocracy score does about as well (r² = 0.10, 0.18, 0.32; Fig. S4), and its sum with levels (“Hierarchical Clout”) reaches r² = 0.30 (apex), 0.42 (H50) and 0.50 (H100). All tests are bivariate OLS fits with no controls and no correction for many sites sharing polity-level values. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-049); worth reading as the widest quantitative record of premodern wealth disparity and a clear rebuttal of deterministic scale-drives-inequality narratives, a negative claim the scatterplots support well. Its positive claim that governance “matters” rests on bivariate r² from an expert-coded index whose “architecture” dimension overlaps with the house-size outcome, and should be read as suggestive. |
| LIT-088 v2 | The Russian perspective on information warfare: conceptual roots and politicisation in Russian academic, political, and public discourse | Fridman (2017), DOI-10.30966/2018.riga.2.3. Fridman argues that the Russian narrative of a “Western information war against Russia” draws on three independently developed theories: Messner’s subversion-war (myatezhevoyna), Dugin’s net-centric war and Panarin’s information war. In his account, politicisation of the narrative was not led by the Kremlin. It is a mutually reinforcing process: scholars promote it, the government writes it into doctrine and law, and a public receptive to it absorbs it. He cites Levada polling from December 2014 in which 87% saw the West as hostile and 42% said the hostility took the form of information war. His conclusion is that the truth lies “somewhere in the middle” between top-down manipulation and bottom-up demand. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-070); worth reading as a compact, well-footnoted intellectual history of the Russian “information war against Russia” discourse, drawn from Russian-language academic sources. Its account of who drives the politicisation is interpretive, and its chronological argument against Kremlin direction is weaker for Dugin, whose net-centric concept dates from 2007. |
| LIT-092 v2 | DOJ Changes Course | Vance (2026), https://joycevance.substack.com/p/doj-changes-course. Vance reports that on 3 Mar 2026, the day after moving to voluntarily dismiss its appeals in the consolidated law-firm executive-order cases (D.C. Cir. No. 25-5241), DOJ filed a “Motion To Withdraw Motion To Voluntarily Dismiss Appeals”, over the firms’ opposition. She calls the reversal “enormously unusual” and argues it shows DOJ serving “the whims of the president” at a cost to its credibility and the presumption of regularity. She gives further examples from Minnesota habeas contempt proceedings, the Epstein files and Senator Tillis’s call for Secretary Noem to resign. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-063); a short commentary on DOJ’s 3 March 2026 motion in the D.C. Circuit (No. 25-5241) to withdraw its motion to dismiss the law-firm executive-order appeals; the docket is the primary source and is not held here. |
| LIT-094 v2 | Airbnb and its potential impact on the London housing market | Shabrina et al. (2021), DOI-10.1177/0042098020970865. Using Inside Airbnb data, “possible misuse” is defined as entire-home listings available for more than 180 days a year whose host has 2 or more listings. On that definition, about 0.16% of London’s housing stock (≈5,300 homes) was possibly misused in 2018, rising to 3.5–7% in a few central LSOAs. Across LSOAs, misuse correlates weakly with purpose-built flats (r = +0.28), private renting (+0.33) and low dwelling-type entropy (−0.14). In a 33-borough OLS with 4 predictors, logged 2015 misuse has β = 0.084 (p = 0.001) on a min–max-normalised 2015–17 rent change. The paper translates this as “a 100% increase … up to 8%” in rent, which is £90 a year. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-071); worth reading as a descriptive map of possibly non-compliant Airbnb supply in London and for its misuse definition. Its rent result is a 33-observation cross-sectional association whose “8% per doubling” translation does not follow from the reported model, and it should not be cited as an effect size. |
| LIT-119 v2 | Conspiracy Theories and Public Trust | Keeley (2023), DOI-10.5040/9781978734494.ch-011. Public Trust Skepticism — discounting conspiracy theories because they erode trust in institutions — gets things backwards: for an important class of theories it is the sweeping distrust they presuppose that undermines their own credibility, by leading to “epistemic nihilism”. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no open copy: the chapter is in a closed-access Lexington Books volume, PhilPapers refused the request, and the author lists it on his CV without posting it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-128 v2 | Neurodiversity & evaluation: a defense (or not) of affective fictionalism | Fernández Castro et al. (2026), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2026.2638974. Affective fictionalism — reading mental-state attributions as normative evaluations rather than factual reports — is argued to meet three demands the neurodiversity paradigm places on any theory of folk psychology. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis refused the request, no repository copy or preprint was found, and the first author’s site links only to the publisher. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-129 v3 | Epistemic injustice in the clinical care of practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions | Porcher & Santaella (2026), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2026.2623889. When clinicians override a patient’s religious interpretation of her experience in domains where medicine has no interpretive authority (“interpretive exclusivism”), they commit an epistemic injustice — racialised in the Brazilian case — that the authors say only epistemic humility remedies. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis refused the request, and no preprint or repository copy was found (the UFRGS repository did not respond). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-137 v3 | Philosophy of Fame and Celebrity | Robb et al. (2024), DOI-10.5040/9781350401327. The first introductory collection on the philosophy of fame and celebrity, arguing that work on admiration, achievement, epistemic authority, virtue and moral psychology can be brought to bear on what fame is and how it shapes how we live. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and the volume could not be obtained (OpenAlex lists it closed; Crossref shows no licence; the introduction is behind a Bloomsbury Collections login). One chapter, Widdows & MacCallum on “Instafame”, has an accepted version on the Warwick repository, but one chapter is not the volume. It stays Unavailable until the volume is available. |
| LIT-139 v2 | Inductive Risk and Values in Science | Douglas (2000), DOI-10.1086/392855. Hempel’s “inductive risk” (the chance of wrongly accepting or rejecting a hypothesis) arises at three internal stages of science: choosing a methodology such as a significance level, characterising data, and interpreting results. Wherever the non-epistemic consequences of error can be foreseen, weighing them requires non-epistemic values. Douglas shows this on dioxin cancer studies. Three pathologist panels (1978, 1980, 1990) scored the same Kociba rat-liver slides differently (e.g. 34/50, 33/47, 18/50 tumours at 100 ng/kg/day). Choosing between threshold and no-threshold readings of the same data has meant regulatory limits about 100× apart. Values enter only indirectly, through the consequences of error, never as evidence that a claim is true. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-145); worth reading as the canonical, compact statement of the modern inductive-risk argument. It is carefully scoped, with an explicit direct/indirect distinction and exemptions for negligible uncertainty and consequence-free research, and it is well illustrated. Its normative premise, that scientists bear moral responsibility for foreseeable consequences of error, is explicitly left unargued (§2, p. 563). |
| LIT-158 v2 | Status Distrust of Scientific Experts | Desmond (2022), DOI-10.1080/02691728.2022.2104758. Desmond gives a “how-possibly” argument, not a demonstration, that stubborn distrust of scientific experts can be valid reasoning. A low-status truster who is vulnerable in collective decision-making (Premise 1) and has reason to think the prevailing “service-for-prestige” ethos leaves out their core interests (Premise 2) has reason to distrust a high-prestige expert because of that prestige (§6, p. 16–17). The paper explicitly declines to say when those premises are true. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-113); worth reading as a compact, clearly structured rationalising account of distrust in experts that connects the trust literature (Baier, Hawley) with the sociology of professions and prestige; its §6 argument scheme is the citable part, but it shows only validity, not soundness. |
| LIT-172 v3 | Ethics of Parasocial Relationships | Archer & Robb (2025), DOI-10.1093/9780198928188.003.0012. Fan–celebrity parasocial relationships are personal relationships (the fan relates to the celebrity as a unique individual, with reasons for partiality), built from three structural asymmetries: attention, communication and epistemic. These yield an “identity asymmetry”: celebrities mostly direct fans’ identities, while fans mostly interpret celebrities’. Fans who refuse uptake of a celebrity’s changed public persona commit a failure of Darwallian recognition respect. The chapter derives from this a responsibility for fans, which is mitigated when the celebrity’s self-presentation is misleading or ambiguous. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-186); worth reading as the clearest short philosophical analysis of parasociality as a relationship type. Its directive/interpretive split and its recognition-respect argument are portable to other one-sided relationships, though the chapter itself only gestures at them. |
| LIT-174 v2 | Having Their Say: Athletes and Entertainers and the Ethics of Speaking Out | Bunton (2021), https://philpapers.org/rec/BUNHTS. Argues that celebrities’ speaking out on public issues is justifiable only when speakers, journalists and audiences attend to platform, intent and harm, because digital audiences treat celebrity as authority. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: the book has no open or repository version, and the publisher and Google Books show only a description and a limited preview. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-178 v2 | Borges and AI | Bottou & Schölkopf (2023), ARXIV-2310.01425. A short essay, not an argument with evidence. It claims that a “perfect language model”, defined as sampling each next word from a random occurrence of the current text in the infinite collection of all plausible texts, is a fiction machine governed by “narrative necessity”, to which “neither truth nor intention” matters. On that view hallucinations “are just confabulations”, chat-bot answers take the role the user’s framing implies, and fine-tuning and RLHF are attempts to prune the garden “against its nature”. It warns that power over what LLMs write becomes “power over what we think”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-102); worth reading as a short, well-made and much-cited statement of the “LLM as fiction machine” framing, provided it is read as an essay offering imagery. It supplies no evidence, and its central idealization (the perfect LM) is asserted, not argued, to describe trained and aligned chat models. |
| LIT-179 v2 | Algorithmic Nudging: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Oversight | Schmauder et al. (2023), DOI-10.1007/s11245-023-09907-4. A short position paper: two case studies show AI agents learning to exploit documented biases (in Dezfouli et al. 2020 an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70%). Against a Friedman-style judgement of AI nudges by outcome alone, the authors extend Hausman’s “look under the hood” rejoinder and propose obliging developers to consult cognitive scientists, because an AI system may exploit biases that are not yet known. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-171); worth a short read as a clear, citable statement of the case for mechanism-level oversight of AI nudging, but it adds no new evidence: its empirical content is second-hand, and its central worry (AI exploiting undocumented biases) is argued, not shown. |
| LIT-182 v3 | Towards ethical evolution: responsible autonomy of artificial intelligence across generations | Terziyan et al. (2025), DOI-10.1007/s43681-025-00759-9. The paper proposes, without implementation, formalism or experiment, that an AI system which designs further AI systems should pass on one “immutable” principle. The principle is: do not directly harm humanity or violate fundamental human values; monitor and mitigate misuse of your outputs; and make every derivative inherit this principle (p. 12). The mechanisms are a genetic-algorithm analogy, with immutable and mutable “genes”, constrained crossover and filtered mutation, together with “temporal cloning”. The paper is inconsistent about its central notion. The principle is enforced once by a penalty F = Q − α·P (p. 9) and once by “unbreachable” hard constraints (p. 13). And it is “immutable” only in its architecture, while its ethical content stays “adaptable” (p. 14). | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-156); not worth a reader’s time. It is a programme statement whose one concrete proposal is contradicted by the paper’s own later sections. It demonstrates nothing, even though its conclusion says it does (p. 21). It does not engage the alignment work on preserving goals across successors that the problem calls for. A reader interested in value preservation under recursive self-design would do better starting from that literature. |
| LIT-189 v2 | Philosophy of Open Science | Leonelli (2023), DOI-10.1017/9781009416368. Leonelli argues that mainstream, institutional Open Science treats openness as the unlimited, digital sharing of research objects, a transparency-first ordering running transparency → quality (reproducibility) → inclusion. This rests on an object-oriented, “resourcist” epistemology of science. Four implementation cases (GISAID COVID data, open-source software stigma, crop-data linkage, the reproducibility “crisis”) show it can narrow epistemic diversity and entrench epistemic injustice, which lowers reliability. She proposes instead “openness as judicious connection”, grounded in a process-oriented view of research as the cultivation of “active knowledge”. Her Figure 2 inverts the ordering to start from inclusion, and sharing becomes “neither a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition” for reliable OS (p. 8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-098); worth reading as a clear, openly normative philosophical reframing of Open Science by someone who took part in the policy process, and as a compact bridge between social epistemology (epistemic injustice, pluralism) and data practice. Its evidence is four illustrative cases and the author’s own qualitative research, not systematic data, and “judicious” remains a demand for deliberation rather than a criterion. |
| LIT-197 v3 | The Enigma Unveiled: How AI Compromises Free Will in Decision-Making | Sharman (2024), DOI-10.1109/ICAPAI61893.2024.10541271. Argues that AI compromises human free will by shaping decisions, manipulating emotions and lacking responsiveness to reasons, while admitting the debate is unresolved. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (closed access on IEEE Xplore; no copy found via OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, CORE, Europe PMC or the Wayback Machine). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-202 v2 | Consent and the Formation of Preferences | Pettigrew (2026), DOI-10.1111/phpr.70131. Whether consent based on a preference switches the moral facts depends on how the preference was formed, and the criterion is “the space and resources those mechanisms leave for the free exercise of agency” (p. 5, restated p. 9): preferences formed by unjust Sanctions, or by Beliefs formed in an unjustly manipulated evidential environment, diminish consent’s effectiveness, while preferences formed by Attention do not, even when an unjust force imposed the contact. Effectiveness is graded, and because the relevant mechanism is usually opaque, uncertainty about whether received consent is effective is “ubiquitous and quotidian” (p. 10). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-144); worth reading as a short, clearly organised proposal that turns the adaptive-preferences debate into a question about mechanisms and free agency; the criterion is argued by cases and left rough by the author’s own account, and one of the seven mechanisms it promises to sort (Amor Fati) is never sorted. |
| LIT-203 v2 | Conspiracy theorists are not the problem; Conspiracy liars are | Keeley (2024), DOI-10.1080/0020174X.2024.2375771. Many conspiracy theories start not from errant data but from lies and fabricated facts, so the pernicious cases are bad-faith pseudo-explanations — and science has analogous value-driven false starting points. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis, PhilPapers and ResearchGate refused the request, and the author lists the paper on his CV without posting it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-209 v2 | The Phenomenology of Ritual Resistance: Colin Kaepernick as Confucian Sage | Walsh (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11712-020-09759-4. Walsh argues, drawing on Confucian texts (the Analects, Mengzi, Xunzi) and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, that Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. national anthem is “Confucian incivility” enacted bodily within the ritual. On his reading it rebukes the ritual’s current object while staying reverent towards its ideal. He further argues it is “sagely” in a deliberately deflated sense: its “citational force” founds a widely imitated bodily expression of patriotism. The paper is interpretive; it reports no data and states no formal thesis. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-164); worth reading as a careful worked example of how a norm-governed bodily practice can be contested from inside, and of Nivison and Hutton’s diachronic reading of Xunzian sagehood put to use. Its standing is as comparative-philosophy interpretation, and its central normative notion (sagehood as uptake) is under-argued. |
| LIT-282 v2 | The Possibility of Social Choice | Sen (1998), DOI-10.1257/aer.89.3.349. Sen argues that Arrow’s impossibility is a result about voting-type rules, which are forced on social choice by excluding interpersonal comparisons, and that broadening the informational basis escapes it: cardinal utilities without interpersonal comparison do not help (Theorem 8*2 of Sen 1970a, cited), but even ordinal interpersonal comparisons break the exact impossibility, and partial comparability is often enough (pp. 188–189). The comparisons need not be of mental states; he offers capabilities — “to live the way he or she has reason to value” (p. 192) — as one informational basis among several, and shows it at work in poverty, famine and gender deprivation. The liberal paradox, by contrast, is not resolved by interpersonal comparisons and needs a different enrichment: people’s own priorities between liberty and desire-fulfilment (pp. 199–200). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-263); worth reading as Sen’s own map of how his social-choice work, his capability view and his poverty and famine work connect through one idea — informational broadening — though every formal claim in it is cited to earlier papers rather than shown, so it is a guide to the results, not a source for them. |
| LIT-283 v2 | The Capability Approach | Robeyns & Byskov (2011), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/. The entry treats the capability approach as an open normative framework, not a theory. Its core is the commitment to assess well-being and well-being freedom in the space of functionings (achieved doings and beings) and capabilities (real opportunities to achieve them). Everything else is optional specification: purpose, which capabilities count, functionings or capabilities, how to aggregate, and a distributive rule. On this view the approach is not a theory of justice (§4). Sen is reported as refusing any canonical list and appealing to public reasoning without ever specifying the procedure (§3.3). Sen’s paywalled texts appear only as citations: the Dewey Lectures for the well-being/agency freedom split (§2.5), and “Human Rights and Capabilities” 2005 p. 158 for the no-canonical-list quotation (§3.3). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-260); worth reading as the definitional spine of the approach, with its concepts, its specification choices and the list of what a capability theory of justice still lacks. Use it for Sen’s paywalled texts only as a pointer to them, not as a substitute. Its retelling of Sen’s 1979 disability argument conflates two of his arguments and inverts who the “pleasure wizard” is. |
| LIT-284 v2 | Sen’s Capability Approach | Wells (2012), https://iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/. A Sen-centred overview. It presents the approach as Sen’s answer to four concerns: conversion variation, adaptive preferences, the value of options not taken, and informational exclusion. It sets out his critiques of the three pillars of utilitarianism (act-consequentialism, welfarism, sum-ranking) and of Rawlsian resourcism, and his two-stage structure, valuation then evaluation. In that structure selection is a social-choice exercise of public reasoning, able to reach partial agreement through “intersection” and “ranges of weights” (§3b). It reports four criticisms (illiberalism, under-theorisation, individualism, information gaps) with Sen’s replies, and closes on Nussbaum and on how she differs from Sen. It never mentions the well-being/agency distinction, and it cites none of Sen’s human-rights papers. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-257); worth reading as the most Sen-specific short account in the batch, especially §3b’s partial-agreement mechanism and §5’s criticisms with Sen’s replies. It dates from 2012 and was never revised, and it omits agency freedom entirely, so for concepts it needs the SEP entry beside it. |
| LIT-285 v2 | The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal | Sen (1970), DOI-10.1086/259614. Sen proves that no social decision function can satisfy three conditions at once: unrestricted domain (U), the weak Pareto principle (P), and “minimal liberalism” (L*). A social decision function only has to yield a best element in every subset, and need not be transitive or satisfy independence. L* says at least two individuals are each decisive, both ways, over at least one pair of alternatives. I checked the two-case proof and it is correct: it builds a strict social cycle over 3 or 4 alternatives. The Lady Chatterley’s Lover example is a correct 3-alternative instance. Sen’s moral is that “in a very basic sense liberal values conflict with the Pareto principle” (p. 157). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-255); worth reading as the original, six-page statement of the liberal paradox, with a complete and correct proof. Read it knowing two things. Its formal Condition L gives decisiveness over arbitrary pairs, not over a protected personal sphere, which the later rights-as-game-forms literature disputes. And Theorem I as stated tacitly needs at least two individuals. |
| LIT-286 v2 | Review of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice | Zwolinski (2010), https://home.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski/Review%20-%20Sen%20-%20The%20Idea%20of%20Justice%20-%20web%20version.pdf. A short, favourable review of The Idea of Justice that maps its four parts. It reports the book’s case for a comparative, “realization-focused” theory of justice against the “transcendental” pursuit of perfect justice; “positional objectivity” and the impartial spectator; pluralism about freedom (“an inescapably plural idea”, p. 305); and human rights whose realisation need not be the state’s job (p. 364). It judges that the book’s few, repeated ideas “have the potential to change [political philosophy] for the better”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-261); worth reading only as a three-page, page-referenced map of the book. It is too slight to support any claim beyond “the book argues X at p. Y”. It says almost nothing about the capability chapters and offers no criticism. |
| LIT-287 v2 | Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined | Robeyns (2017), DOI-10.11647/OBP.0130. Robeyns defines the capability approach as an open, underspecified framework whose only compulsory content is an eight-part “A-module” (pp. 38–59, table 2.5 p. 74). The eight parts are: functionings and capabilities as core concepts; their value-neutrality; conversion factors; the means–ends distinction; functionings and/or capabilities as the evaluative space; other things may also have ultimate value; value pluralism; and each person as an end, i.e. ethical individualism. Every particular “capability theory” must also fill seven compulsory-but-open “B-modules” (purpose, selection of dimensions, human diversity, agency, structural constraints, functionings vs capabilities, meta-theory) and may add four contingent “C-modules”. On that basis she argues that most standing critiques (no list, individualism, power, political economy, liberalism) are valid at most against particular capability theories, not against the approach. She places Nussbaum’s work as one capability theory, not a rival version of the approach. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-259); worth reading as the most systematic single account of what the capability approach is, and of what a capability theory must add. It is the best route to seeing which disputes are about the core and which are about optional choices. Read it as an advocate’s reconstruction, not a neutral survey: Robeyns says she takes sides in ch. 4 (p. 19), and her verdicts mostly hold that a critique misfires against the approach. |
| LIT-288 v2 | Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice | Nussbaum (2003), DOI-10.1080/1354570022000077926. Nussbaum argues that Sen’s capability approach yields no theory of social justice until it commits to a definite, if revisable, list of central capabilities, each owed to every citizen up to a threshold. She sets out her list of ten (Life; Bodily Health; Bodily Integrity; Senses, Imagination and Thought; Emotions; Practical Reason; Affiliation; Other Species; Play; Control over one’s Environment). She rejects Sen’s talk of freedom as a general good because some freedoms are trivial or unjust. And she argues that political-liberal respect for pluralism favours a short list of capabilities over the promotion of freedom across the board. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-256); worth reading as the canonical short statement of the list-versus-no-list dispute inside the capability approach, and of Nussbaum’s ten capabilities. It is argued by examples, not derived. Its threshold idea is announced but not worked out here. |
| LIT-289 v2 | Equality of What? | Sen (1979), https://ophi.org.uk/sites/default/files/Sen-1979_Equality-of-What.pdf. Sen argues that utilitarian equality (equal marginal utility), total-utility equality (completed as leximin) and Rawlsian equality (maximin/leximin on an index of primary goods) are each insufficient, and so is any combination of them, even for the needs-based part of equality: the test case is a disabled person who has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deprivation (he is contented) and no primary-goods deprivation, yet has an evident claim. He proposes “basic capability equality” — equality in “a person being able to do certain basic things” (p. 218) — as a non-fetishist, culture-dependent extension of Rawls, explicitly only “a partial guide” to the equality part of morality, and says his main (negative) thesis does not depend on this constructive proposal (p. 220). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-258); worth reading as the founding statement of the capability idea and the cleanest short case against welfarist and primary-goods metrics; read it knowing that the positive proposal is a two-page sketch with no account of which capabilities count or how to index them, and that “functionings”, “capability sets” and “freedom” do not yet appear. |
| LIT-290 v2 | A Paradigm Shift in Theorizing about Justice? A Critique of Sen | Valentini (2010), DOI-10.1017/s0266267111000228. Valentini reconstructs Sen’s case against “transcendental institutionalism” (The Idea of Justice, 2009, and “What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice?”, 2006) as three complaints: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for comparative judgements, it is parochial, and it is inflexible. She argues that each rests on a mischaracterisation of Rawls or is true but inconsequential. Her verdict: “If there are transcendental institutionalists, Rawls is not one of them”, and no paradigm shift is warranted. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-262); worth reading as a compact, well-sourced Rawlsian rebuttal of The Idea of Justice’s methodological thesis, with page-referenced reconstructions of Sen’s claims. It is explicitly one-sided (“negative”). It does not engage the capability approach itself. |
| LIT-297 v2 | Autonomy | Dryden (2010), https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/. The article surveys personal autonomy from Plato to relational autonomy and bioethics. Its core (§2.a.i–ii) states the hierarchical view: an agent is autonomous with respect to an action iff her first-order desire is “sanctioned by a second-order volition”, with the origin of that volition irrelevant. It then lists four named objections: Manipulation (answered historically by Christman 1991), Regress/Incompleteness (cited to Watson 1975), Ab Initio, and an unjustified priority of higher orders (Thalberg; Friedman’s integration model). It follows Frankfurt’s reply only through “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (decisive commitment made without reservation, pp. 168–175 of the 1988 collection). Bratman gets one sentence (plans partly constitute identity, Structures of Agency 2007, p. 5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-266); worth reading as the clearest short, named statement of the standard objections to the hierarchical model (manipulation, regress, ab initio) and of the feminist and relational critiques of wholeheartedness; it is thin and dated on Frankfurt’s later view (no satisfaction, caring or love), gives Bratman one sentence, and cites Frankfurt only by pages of the 1988 collection. |
| LIT-379 v2 | Anger makes fake news viral online | Chuai & Zhao (2020), arXiv:2004.10399. On Weibo 2011–2016, lexicon-scored fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and in observational regressions with content, author and topic controls a post’s anger share goes with more retweets and its joy share with fewer (moving 0.1 from joy to anger: about 5.8 retweets across all news, 5.4 within fake news). A survey ties two anger-dominated posts to stronger anxiety-management and information-sharing motives. The paper’s causal reading is not established by its design. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-852) in full; worth reading as a large Weibo study, with English checks, finding that fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news and that a post’s share of anger words goes with more retweets under controls. Read it knowing that its causal language rests on observational regressions with R² of 0.08–0.13, that its fake set is selected for having spread, that its headline 5.8 retweets comes from the all-news model, and that its survey result rests on two anger-dominated posts. The account filed from it is THEORY-329. |
| LIT-391 v4 | Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents | List & Pettit (2011), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591565.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that “there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them”, and that social science, law, morality and politics must take account of this. The account is said to be “entirely unmysterious” and grounded in social choice theory, economics and philosophy. Three parts: the logical possibility of group agents (conditions of agency, aggregation of attitudes, structure), their organisational design (epistemic, incentive-compatibility and control desiderata), and their normative status (responsibility, personhood, identification). Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and neither author has posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length case that organised groups are agents over and above their members, which is the composition side’s premise in the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge; whether it says anything about group consciousness is unknown from what was seen. Rechecked 2026-10-04 with no lawful copy found; two shorter papers by the authors stating Part I’s supervenience thesis were read and filed instead (LIT-705, LIT-700), and the book stays Unavailable because a paper is not a reading of it. |
| LIT-472 v2 | Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together | Guala (2016), DOI-10.1515/9781400880911. Per its publisher, a unified theory of institutions combining three views (equilibria of strategic games, regulative rules, constitutive rules), applied to money, private property and marriage. It then addresses reflexivity, realism, Verstehen and fallibilism in the social sciences, criticises Hacking’s looping effects and interactive kinds, and asks whether causal and ontological dependence can demarcate social from natural science. Only the sample chapter 1 was read: it restates Hindriks & Guala’s case against a rules-only account. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, table of contents, sample chapter and index, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (De Gruyter and Princeton are paywalled, and the Internet Archive has no copy). Only chapter 1, Rules, the publisher’s free sample, was read; it is a lightly expanded version of the first section of Hindriks & Guala (LIT-481). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-482 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle (2006), DOI-10.1177/1463499606061731. Institutional reality is built from three primitives: collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”. The Y status is held only by collective acceptance, and it carries deontic powers, which are desire-independent reasons for action. Institutional facts need language because they exist only as represented. Two revisions of the 1995 book: status indicators (after De Soto), and “free-standing Y terms” (after Barry Smith), such as corporations and money without currency. In those cases there is no X, and “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is ranked as the more general form. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-388), in its parallel English printing in Papers: Revista de Sociologia 80 (2006), pp. 51–71, not in the Anthropological Theory typesetting the DOI names; worth reading as Searle’s own short restatement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485), and as the place where he concedes that “X counts as Y in C” is not the general form. Status functions imposed by collective acceptance carry deontic powers, and deontic powers are desire-independent reasons for action. Read it for the structure, not for an argument about collective intentionality: that is taken as a primitive and referred to his 1990 paper (LIT-490), not defended here. |
| LIT-489 | Institutions | North (1991), DOI-10.1257/jep.5.1.97. Institutions are “the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction”: informal constraints (taboos, customs, codes of conduct) and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). With technology they set transaction and production costs, and so the incentive structure of an economy. Tribal exchange, the Suq and the caravan trade did not evolve from within; early modern European trade did, through merchant law, bills of exchange, insurance and a state bound not to confiscate. Institutional change is path dependent because the institutional matrix has increasing returns. A narrative essay; the definition is stipulated. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-392); worth reading as the economist’s canonical one-paragraph definition of institutions (“the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction”) and as a compact statement of the transaction-cost and path-dependence programme. It is an essay, not an argument: the game-theoretic motivation is one paragraph, the history is narrative, and the definition is stipulated, not defended. For what an institution is, read it beside Hindriks & Guala (LIT-481), who take it as the exemplar of the rules account and say what it leaves out. |
| LIT-494 v3 | The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm | Schein & Gray (2018), DOI-10.1177/1088868317698288. By its abstract: harm is an intuitively perceived continuum, not an objective matter, and acts are condemned in proportion to norm violation, negative affect and perceived harm, where harm is dyadic (an intentional agent damaging a vulnerable patient). Harm leads to condemnation and condemnation to perceived harm (the “dyadic loop”). The theory argues against intuitively harmless wrongs and modular foundations. Unread: the argument and evidence are not known here. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-02 from the PubMed abstract and Crossref record, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The SAGE PDF, listed as free to read, sits behind a bot challenge (HTTP 403); the PubMed record has no PMC copy; a University of North Carolina repository file returned by a search for the paper (cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/w9505f334) reset every connection, so what it holds is unknown; Semantic Scholar points only to the SAGE PDF, and CORE, OpenAlex and the Wayback Machine had no copy. It is the main harm-based rival to morality-as-cooperation, and what it argues is known here only from its abstract and from how other readings in this batch describe it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. Free copy: doi:10.1177/1088868317698288 (SAGE’s PDF, listed as free to read). |
| LIT-499 | Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism | Graham et al. (2013), DOI-10.1016/B978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4. Moral Foundations Theory in full: a nativist, cultural-developmental, intuitionist and pluralist account with five foundations (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity), each tied to an adaptive challenge and an existing evolutionary model. A decade of MFQ work finds liberals rely on Care and Fairness, conservatives on all five, across 12 world regions. Five criteria for “foundationhood” are proposed, and Liberty, Efficiency, Ownership and Honesty are named candidates. Harm monism (Gray) and fairness monism (Baumard) are rejected as Procrustean. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-396); worth reading as the full statement of Moral Foundations Theory and as the text to check morality-as-cooperation’s comparison against. It states the theory’s four claims (nativism, cultural learning, intuitionism, pluralism), reviews a decade of MFQ findings, mostly on political ideology, and offers five criteria for what counts as a foundation. By its own table the Care foundation rests on kin selection and Fairness on Trivers’ reciprocal altruism, and Ownership/theft is already a named candidate, so the claim that MFT omits kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and property does not survive this text. Sanctity, the foundation morality-as-cooperation excludes, is by the same table the one with the least evidence of innate preparedness. |
| LIT-500 | Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures | Atari et al. (2023), DOI-10.1037/pspp0000470. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2: 36 items, six per foundation, for Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, built and tested on 25 populations (N ≈ 8,700) in local languages. Equality and Proportionality correlate weakly (mean r = .21). Purity is the foundation most related to cultural distance from the U.S. (r = .43) and to religiosity. The individualizing–binding split appears in only three of 19 national networks. The MFQ-2 explains more variance in 30 criterion scores than the MFQ-1 (mean adjusted R² .37 against .30). | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-398), from the APA accepted manuscript; worth reading as the current Moral Foundations measure (the MFQ-2) and the theory’s current list of six foundations, with Fairness split into Equality and Proportionality, and as the place MFT answers morality-as-cooperation directly: Curry et al. 2019 “left out Purity as an important and less-WEIRD moral foundation”. Its strongest evidence for that, Purity’s association with cultural distance from the U.S., rests on the one subscale that fails its own measurement-invariance threshold. Its samples are online panels in 25 populations, not small-scale societies. |
| LIT-715 v2 | The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA | Vaughan (1996), University of Chicago Press. The sociological account of the 1986 Challenger launch decision from which the normalization of deviance comes. Unread: the concept is read as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board applies it to Challenger and Columbia, in LIT-734. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref and Open Library, not read: it is an in-copyright book with no lawful open copy known. Its account of the normalization of deviance is read secondhand in the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s chapter “History As Cause: Columbia and Challenger” (LIT-734), which cites it for its central claim. Filed because it is the source usually cited for normalization of deviance. On 2026-10-14 a lawful full text was sought and none was reached. OpenAlex locations for the DOI: one, the doi.org landing page, closed (oa_status closed, no repository full text). Unpaywall: closed, no OA locations. The University of Chicago Press page loads and offers the enlarged edition for sale only; the Chicago Scholarship Online record is subscription-only. The ACLS Humanities E-Book copy on Fulcrum is restricted to institutional login (HTTP 403 here). Europe PMC: no hit. Internet Archive: two scans, both borrow-only lending (printdisabled), which are not a fetchable full text. A web search for an open copy or an author-posted text found only reviews. Its status is not a judgement on merit. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-719 | Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems | Ostrom (2009), Nobel lecture; AER 2010. Polycentric arrangements of many formally independent decision centres can perform better than a single hierarchy. Long-surviving common-pool resource institutions share eight design principles, among them monitoring by users or those accountable to them, graduated sanctions, local conflict resolution and nested layers. Communication and self-chosen sanctions raise cooperation in experiments. Fit to local conditions matters more than the type of regime. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-563): the Nobel Prize lecture in full, from the Nobel Foundation’s PDF. Worth reading as Ostrom’s own summary of fifty years of work: polycentricity defined, the eight design principles of long-surviving common-pool resource institutions in their updated form, the experiments on communication and self-chosen sanctions, the field evidence on local monitoring, and the warning against single policy prescriptions. A retrospective lecture, not a report of new results. |
| LIT-731 | Tiktok’s enshittification | Doctorow (2023), Pluralistic, 21 January. Platforms die in three stages: good to users, then abusing users for business customers, then abusing both to take the value for themselves. It follows from the ease of reallocating value in a two-sided market, and lock-in, blocked interoperability and monopoly sustain it. TikTok’s “heating” of chosen creators is read as stage two beginning. Remedy: end-to-end delivery and freedom of exit. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-573): in full, from the author’s own blog, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Worth reading as the essay that named enshittification and the earliest statement of it the record holds. Platforms are first good to users, then abuse users for business customers, then abuse both to claw back value; each stage is made possible by the lock-in the last one built, and blocked interoperability raises how much abuse users will bear before leaving. The remedy proposed is end-to-end delivery and freedom of exit. Limits: an opinion essay argued from cases, with linked journalism and the author’s own experience as evidence; its TikTok claim is a prediction. |
| LIT-734 | History As Cause: Columbia and Challenger | Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003), Report Vol. I ch. 8, pp. 195–204. Foam debris and O-ring erosion followed the same trajectory: each anomaly was reinterpreted as acceptable and “in-family”, and each flight without disaster justified the next. Budget and schedule pressure, a hierarchy that silenced dissent, and a dependent safety organization sustained the pattern. “History is cause”: Challenger’s institutional causes had not been fixed. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-578): in full, from the official CAIB report as archived by the UNT Libraries CyberCemetery. Worth reading as the Board’s finding that Columbia repeated Challenger’s organizational cause: technical anomalies normalized one decision at a time, under budget and schedule pressure, in a hierarchy that kept dissent from rising, with a safety organization dependent on the program it oversaw. Limits: a two-case comparison within one agency, written as an official finding; the chapter is unsigned, and its concept of normalization rests on Vaughan’s unread book (LIT-715). |
| LIT-736 | Shaping the Institutional Mind | Tollefsen (2025), Philosophies 10(5):112. Advocates and critics of group minds share the “standard view” that ascribing attitudes tracks pre-existing causes. On McGeer’s regulative view, ascription shapes its target. Ascribing knowledge to institutions, as in the collective knowledge doctrine, and issuing institutional narratives shape institutions to be more agent-like. The view stays agnostic about whether institutions really have minds. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-570): in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF (CC BY 4.0). Worth reading for a different answer to why we ascribe beliefs and knowledge to institutions: not because the ascriptions describe pre-existing states, but because, on the regulative view of folk psychology, they shape institutions to be more agent-like. Its main case is the collective knowledge doctrine in corporate criminal law, after which banks built systems to detect reporting violations. Limits: the regulative view is assumed, not argued; the causal story about banks is asserted without evidence; and the paper is agnostic about whether institutions have minds. It does not stand in for her book Groups as Agents (LIT-483), which stays unread. |
| LIT-737 v2 | Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action | Ostrom (1990), Cambridge University Press: from case studies of long-enduring and failed common-pool resource institutions, argues that resource users can and do govern commons themselves, without either privatisation or state control, and proposes design principles shared by the institutions that lasted. Unread: the principles are read in Ostrom’s Nobel lecture LIT-719. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (Cambridge Core is closed). Its design principles are read first-hand in Ostrom’s Nobel lecture (LIT-719), §4E, in the updated wording of Cox, Arnold & Villamayor-Tomás that she adopts there. Filed because an essay the owner is writing cites “Ostrom’s work on differentiated and polycentric governance”. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-743 | Risk management in a dynamic society: a modelling problem | Rasmussen (1997), Safety Science 27:183–213. Risk management is a control problem spanning government, regulators, companies, management, staff and work. Behaviour within a work space moves under an effort gradient and a cost gradient toward the boundary of acceptable performance. In defence-in-depth systems, defences degrade unobserved under cost pressure. Accidents arise from many locally reasonable decisions. Improvement means making boundaries visible, not fighting errors. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-584): the argument in full, the review of research paradigms skimmed, from the author’s manuscript in DTU’s repository. Worth reading for the model of drift. Under a cost gradient from management and an effort gradient from workers, activity migrates toward the boundary of acceptable performance. In defence-in-depth systems one actor’s breach of a defence has no visible effect, so defences erode unobserved. Major accidents come from the interaction of many decision makers adapting to local pressures, not from coincident errors. Built from accident analyses; not a quantitative model. |
| LIT-746 v2 | Brain of the Firm | Beer (1972), Brain of the Firm, Allen Lane; 2nd edn Wiley 1981. The streamlined statement of the Viable System Model in neurophysiological terms, the second edition adding the Chilean application of 1971–73. Unread: the model is read in Beer’s 1984 retrospective LIT-752. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Open Library and Beer’s own references, not read: no copy was sought, the book being in copyright and commercially published. Its model is read first-hand in Beer’s article-length retrospective “The Viable System Model: Its Provenance, Development, Methodology and Pathology” (LIT-752), which restates the five subsystems, the recursion theorem and the pathologies and refers to this book and The Heart of Enterprise for the detail. Filed because it is the book usually cited for the Viable System Model. On 2026-10-14 a lawful full text was sought and none was reached. OpenAlex: the book has no DOI to look up, and its title search refused the request (the shared daily budget was exhausted). Unpaywall: no DOI to query. Crossref: no record for the book, only for reviews of it. Wiley’s product page for the 1995 paperback reissue loads and offers it for sale only (listed out of stock), with no e-book or open-access edition. Europe PMC: no open-access hit for the title. Google Books: its API refused the request (daily quota exceeded). Internet Archive: no text item for this book; Beer’s other books there are borrow-only lending scans, and a community upload titled “Brain of the Firm, Reclaimed” is a transcription not posted by the rights holder, so it was not used (its metadata did not load either). A web search for an authorised copy found none. Its status is not a judgement on merit. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-748 v2 | Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States | Hirschman (1970), Harvard University Press. When firms, organizations and states decline, members and customers can exit or voice their discontent, and loyalty affects which they choose; voice can complement and sometimes supersede exit as a means of recovery. Unread: the argument is read in his 1974 “Further Reflections”, LIT-750. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Open Library, not read: it is an in-copyright book with no lawful open copy known, and the Harvard University Press page did not load. Its argument is read first-hand in Hirschman’s own “Further Reflections” (LIT-750), which restates the thesis, corrects it, and refers back to the book’s chapters in his words. The essay does not give the book’s formal treatment of loyalty. Filed because it is the source of the exit–voice framework. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-750 | ”Exit, Voice, and Loyalty”: Further Reflections and a Survey of Recent Contributions | Hirschman (1974; reprinted 1980, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 58(3):430–453). His advocacy of voice was “too timid”: voice can be felt as a benefit, carries richer information than exit, and suits shared uncertainty; exit can be costly or uninformative. Organizations need floor levels of exit and voice for feedback and fail beyond ceiling levels; managers may favour whichever response least threatens their power. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-566): in full, from the Milbank Memorial Fund’s own archive of its Quarterly. Worth reading as Hirschman’s own restatement and extension of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: voice as a recuperation mechanism that can be a benefit rather than a cost and carries richer information than exit; exit that is costly, or that signals nothing; the floor and ceiling levels of each an organization needs; and managers’ interest in steering members toward the least threatening response. Limits: informal and partly a survey, and it presupposes the book (LIT-748, unread), including its treatment of loyalty. |
| LIT-752 | The Viable System Model: Its Provenance, Development, Methodology and Pathology | Beer (1984), Journal of the Operational Research Society 35:7–25. A retrospective on the Viable System Model. Any system able to keep its identity independently in a shared environment has five necessary and sufficient subsystems, and every viable system contains and is contained in one. The model is offered as a scientific model reached by homomorphic mapping, not an analogy. Breakdowns trace to a failing subsystem, as when Three and Five collapse without Four. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-577): in full except one page, from the 1989 book reprint posted by the Cwarel Isaf Institute, which Beer co-founded. Worth reading as Beer’s own retrospective on the Viable System Model. Five subsystems are claimed necessary and sufficient for any system to keep its identity independently, and the structure recurs, since every viable system contains and is contained in one. Breakdowns are diagnosed as failures of a subsystem: without System Four, Systems Three and Five collapse into each other and the system can only react. Limits: the paper declines to expound or validate the model, the copy lacks the page with the synopsis of the subsystems and its figures, and the applications are recalled, not documented. |
| LIT-753 v2 | Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It | Doctorow (2025), Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, MCD/FSG. The book-length statement of his account of platform decay. Unread: the thesis is read in his 2023 essay LIT-731 and his 2024 talk LIT-033. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Open Library and the author’s own book listing, not read: no copy was sought, the book being in copyright and commercially published. Doctorow’s thesis is read first-hand in his 2023 essay “Tiktok’s enshittification” (LIT-731), the post that named the concept, and in his 2024 DEF CON talk (LIT-033). Filed because it is his book-length statement of enshittification, which the owner’s essay cites. On 2026-10-14 a lawful full text was sought and none was reached, and in particular no Creative Commons or free edition was found, though Doctorow released several earlier books that way. His own site, craphound.com, lists the book among his non-fiction with no “Download For Free” link, where it gives one for older titles such as Context and Little Brother; its Enshittification category page has only tour and podcast posts. The publisher page (us.macmillan.com) returned HTTP 403. Two web searches for a CC licence or free download found none. OpenAlex: no DOI to look up, and its title search refused the request (the shared daily budget was exhausted). Unpaywall: no DOI to query. Crossref holds no record of the book; its one record with the title is a third-party ResearchHub upload of a MOBI file, an unauthorised repost, not used. Europe PMC: no hit. Internet Archive: only talks, podcasts and an audiobook promo, no text of the book. Its status is not a judgement on merit. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-805 v2 | The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship | Fraenkel (1941; Oxford reissue 2017), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716204.001.0001. The analysis of the Nazi state written from inside it: two states coexisted, a normative state that kept the legal order of statutes, courts and administration, and a prerogative state run by the party and bound by no legal guarantee. Unread: registered from the publisher’s abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-07 from Crossref and the publisher’s abstract for the 2017 Oxford reissue, not read: the reissue is paywalled at Oxford Academic and no lawful full text was sought further. Filed because the owner’s essay “The Organization of Will” cites it for the distinction between the normative state and the prerogative state, and for the point that whoever decides when the law applies holds the real authority. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-848 | Large AI models are cultural and social technologies | Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi & Evans (2025), Science 387(6739):1153–1156, Policy Forum. Large models are best understood not as intelligent agents but as a new cultural and social technology: like writing, print and search they give access to what other people have produced, and like markets, bureaucracies and elections they make lossy, uninvertible summaries of it that can be operated on at scale. The questions that follow are the old ones about such technologies: homogenization or diversity, who gains and who loses, and which countervailing institutions emerge. Argued by historical analogy, without data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-09 (NOTE-649) from the authors’ accepted version (Science galley of 25 February 2025, posted on Farrell’s site); worth reading as the compact statement of the view that large models are not agents but a new cultural and social technology, of a kind with writing, print, markets, bureaucracies and elections: lossy summaries of what other humans have produced that let people reorganize it at scale. It is a four-page Policy Forum argued by analogy, with no data. Its one mechanism with consequences is that models fit their training distribution on average, so are least accurate where the data are rare, which may homogenize culture; it sets this against the possibility of “society-like” ecologies of models that keep diversity. |
| LIT-896 v2 | AI as Agency Without Intelligence: on ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and Other Generative Models | Floridi (2023), DOI-10.1007/s13347-023-00621-y. A seven-page editorial. LLMs “do not think, reason or understand” and work statistically on the form of texts, not their meaning, yet they act successfully and, through reinforcement-learning fine-tuning, “learn” to improve. So they are “a new form of agency”, one that has been “liberated … from intelligence”: Agere sine Intelligere. The thesis is asserted, not argued. No criteria for agency are stated, the only mark that separates it from a sea wave’s difference-making is the capacity to learn to make a different or better difference, and the support for “no understanding” is a handful of anecdotal failures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-697); worth reading as the short first statement of Floridi’s slogan that LLMs are “agency without intelligence” (Agere sine Intelligere), which his 2025 paper (LIT-897) develops. Read the last two pages for the thesis. It is an editorial, not an argument. The thesis is asserted in three paragraphs, no criteria for agency are given, and the one citation for the agency notion is Floridi & Sanders 2004 (LIT-898), whose apparatus it does not use. |
| LIT-897 v2 | AI as Agency without Intelligence: On Artificial Intelligence as a New Form of Artificial Agency and the Multiple Realisability of Agency Thesis | Floridi (2025), DOI-10.1007/s13347-025-00858-9. An Editor Letter that “grew so long”. AI is better understood by widening agency to forms without cognition, intelligence or mental states than by widening intelligence to machines. Agency comes in kinds (natural, biological, animal social, artefactual, human individual and social, artificial, social artificial). All of them share interactivity, and the richer ones add graded autonomy and adaptability. AI is computational, data-adaptive agency serving goals set by humans, with no intelligence. The thesis is assumed, and the paper characterises the kind rather than arguing for it. The criteria do not separate AI from other artefacts, and no level of abstraction is stated. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-702); worth reading for the fullest statement of Floridi’s position that AI is “agency without intelligence”: the Multiple Realisability of Agency thesis set against the Artificial Realisability of Intelligence, Floridi & Sanders’ three criteria restated as graded, and a taxonomy that places AI as “a computational, goal-driven form of agency defined by human purposes” with Agentic AI as its collective form. Read it as a taxonomy, not an argument. The case for MRA over ARI is announced and not made, since the paper assumes AI is an agent and asks what kind. AI’s lack of intelligence is asserted. No level of abstraction is ever specified. Interactivity alone makes a river a natural agent, so the permissiveness objection is accepted rather than answered. |
| LIT-899 v2 | Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions | Floridi (2016), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2016.0112. When a network of human, artificial and hybrid agents brings about a morally loaded outcome through interactions that are each morally neutral, nobody intends the outcome, so an ethics that requires intention holds nobody responsible. Floridi proposes holding every causally accountable node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), by default and overridably, with the rule made common knowledge so that agents restrain one another. The mechanism is adapted from back propagation, strict liability and common knowledge, and illustrated by two Dutch Supreme Court rulings. It is argued by design and analogy. Its responsibility is causal accountability used as a corrective, not blame, and the paper does not reconcile this with Floridi & Sanders 2004’s distinction between accountability and responsibility. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-699); worth reading for the line’s one worked rule for who answers for an outcome nobody intended: identify the distributed moral action and the network causally accountable for it, then hold every node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), overridably, with the rule made common knowledge so agents restrain one another. Read §4 and the two Dutch cases (p. 9). It is a design argued by analogy, not a derivation. Its “responsibility” is Floridi & Sanders 2004’s accountability under another name, used as a corrective signal, and the paper never addresses that distinction. In its own boats case the default gives way to ease of rectification, which is a control criterion. |
| LIT-901 v2 | Distributed Morality in an Information Society | Floridi (2013), DOI-10.1007/s11948-012-9413-4. Distributed morality is the case where morally loaded actions of a human, artificial or hybrid multiagent system result from interactions among its members that are each morally neutral or negligible, modelled on distributed knowledge (A knows P∨Q, B knows ¬P, only the “supra-agent” AB knows Q). Two moral thresholds make environments fault-tolerant to small evils and inert to small goods, so managing distributed morality means aggregating possible goods and fragmenting possible evils. ICTs make it common. “Infraethics” is the first-order framework of moral enablers (trust, privacy, transparency …) that is not good in itself. The analogy is looser than it looks: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left open. Responsibility for distributed morality is not addressed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-698); worth reading as the line’s only worked statement of distributed morality (morally loaded actions of a multiagent system arising from interactions each below a moral threshold) and as the source of “infraethics”, the first-order framework of moral enablers that is not morally good in itself. Read pp. 729–734 for the threshold model and pp. 738–740 for infraethics. It argues by a model and four examples and proves nothing. Its analogy with distributed knowledge is not exact: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left unspecified. No criterion of agency is applied to its “supra-agents”, and responsibility for distributed morality, which Floridi & Sanders 2004 promised, is still not given. |
| LIT-1002 v3 | Technology, autonomy, and manipulation | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum (2019), Internet Policy Review 8(2). Manipulation is hidden influence: intentionally and covertly influencing someone’s decision-making by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities, where covert means the target is not and could not easily become aware of it. Surveillance, adaptive interfaces and the habitual invisibility of technology make it easy. Its harm is to autonomy, in both competency and authenticity, and beneficent manipulation carries it too; the paper claims a harm in every case, not that manipulation is always wrong. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-745) in full; worth reading for the standard statement of the covert-influence view: manipulation is “intentionally and covertly influencing their decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities”, with attempted covertness as its mark, and for the argument that its harm is to autonomy and is carried even by beneficent manipulation, through the target’s opacity to herself. Read it knowing that it is a short policy essay, that the definition is stipulated and its intent requirement never examined, that it excludes manipulation of institutions and never considers manipulation by them, and that it claims a harm in every case, not a wrong. |
| LIT-1004 v3 | Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing | Fricker (2007). Names two kinds of wrong done to someone in her capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice: a hearer gives a speaker a prejudicially deflated degree of credibility. Hermeneutical injustice: someone is handicapped in making sense of a social experience by a gap in collective understanding that is owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group she belongs to. Proposes testimonial and hermeneutical justice as corrective virtues of the hearer, each at once intellectual and ethical. Checked against the author’s précis (2008), not the book. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 and read only in part: not the book but the author’s own three-page précis of it (Theoria 23(1), 2008, pp. 69–71, DOI 10.1387/theoria.7, open access under CC BY-NC-ND), read in full in NOTE-832 (Skimmed). The book itself was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report it closed, with no repository copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/32817, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403). PhilPapers returned 403, and no author-posted chapter was found. A full PDF on a Brazilian court library’s repository (bdjur.stj.jus.br) carries the publisher’s copyright notices and no sign of permission, so it was not used. The book’s cases and arguments are therefore known here only as the précis states them. It stays Unavailable until a full copy is supplied (ADR-041): the search for one is recorded, and only a précis was read. It is the reading QUESTION-072 was filed ahead of, and THEORY-317 is filed from the précis. |
| LIT-1039 | Agent-initiated socio-technical reconfiguration: a three-level taxonomy of autonomous AI governance and its recursive challenges | Lahiri (2026), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 9:1881783, Hypothesis and Theory. Extends socio-technical systems theory to agents whose configuration is files they can write. A three-level taxonomy by architectural capability over the coupling mechanism: cannot alter it, tunes its timing, creates new coordination surfaces. The ‘recursive governance challenge’: controls within the agent’s reach inherit the vulnerability they were meant to remove, so durable constraint must sit outside its action space. Theory-building from two vignettes and four public incidents; five propositions, untested. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-732) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2026.1881783/pdf, CC BY), article 9:1881783. Worth reading for its structural point that when an agent’s governing rules are files it can write, controls kept in the same place inherit the exposure and only constraints outside its action space escape (THEORY-223). That is a case of CLAIM-086 with the governed system, not a rival order, holding authority over a constraint’s force; its taxonomy’s top level, new coordination surfaces, is mostly not constitutive influence, and nothing in it bears on whether the agents are self-governing in CLAIM-284’s sense. |
| LIT-1046 | Powerlessness and Social Interpretation | Fricker (2006), Episteme 3(1–2):96–108, drawn from the final chapter of Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization”. It is systematic when the marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and incidental when it is a one-off, localised moment of powerlessness, as for a socially powerful man whose stalking the police cannot hear. A gap with no marginalisation behind it, such as an undiagnosed illness, is bad luck, not injustice. The primary harm is situated hermeneutical inequality. Secondary harms include lost epistemic confidence and, at worst, the social construction of who the subject is. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-859) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s full statement of hermeneutical injustice, drawn by her own note from the book’s final chapter: the definitions, systematic and incidental, the argument that a merely circumstantial gap is bad luck and not injustice, and the account of its primary and secondary harms. Its incidental case shows that, on her terms, hermeneutical injustice does not require membership of a powerless group, which the précis read for LIT-1004 does not say. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1048 | Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice | Fricker (2017), Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, pp. 53–60. Her retrospective statement of the two concepts. Both are “discriminatory epistemic injustice”: testimonial injustice is caused by a prejudice through which the speaker is ingenuously misjudged as epistemically lesser, and hermeneutical injustice by “hermeneutical marginalisation in relation to some area of social experience”. She argues for keeping both strict about intention: a deliberate manipulation of credibility, or a hearer who pretends not to understand, is a related but different wrong. She accepts structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice, as when an un-refreshed list of expert witnesses means some speakers are never asked. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-853) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s own later statement of both concepts, ten years after the book: testimonial injustice is an ingenuous, prejudiced misjudgement of a speaker and never a deliberate manipulation of credibility; hermeneutical injustice is caused by hermeneutical marginalisation and persists however earnestly hearers try; and both are “discriminatory” epistemic injustice, kept apart from distributive kinds. It also accepts Anderson’s structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice, in which a speaker’s word is never sought because of an un-refreshed list. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1049 | Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing | Fricker (2003), Metaphilosophy 34(1–2):154–173. A hearer can take someone’s word critically without inference, through a testimonial sensibility: a socially trained, self-correcting capacity, like an ethical sensibility, in which stereotypes of credibility are a legitimate and needed heuristic. Where they carry prejudice, a speaker receives the wrong degree of credibility “owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearer’s part”: testimonial injustice, shown in Tom Robinson’s trial and in Greenleaf’s dismissal of Marge. The corrective virtue, reflexive critical openness, corrects for the relation between the hearer’s and the speaker’s social identities. Its availability depends on the critical concepts of the hearer’s time, so a hearer may be at fault before he is culpable. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-860) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s first statement of testimonial injustice and of the virtue that corrects it: a hearer’s credibility judgements come from a socially trained testimonial sensibility, which stereotypes properly inform and prejudice can corrupt, so that a speaker gets “the wrong degree of credibility” through “unintended prejudice”. It argues the corrective virtue is reflexive, and that whether a hearer can have it depends on the critical concepts available in their time. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1206 v2 | Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations | Joint Task Force (2020). NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 5: the catalogue of security and privacy controls for federal information systems and organizations, among them separation of duties (AC-5) and least privilege (AC-6). | Deferred — filed 2026-10-18; reading stopped at a skim on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1375), from NIST’s own PDF: the front matter, Chapters One and Two, and from the catalogue AC-3(2), AC-5, AC-6, AC-7, AU-9, CM-5(4), MP-6(7) and PM-12, about a tenth of 492 pages. A catalogue is consulted rather than read through; the controls the record cites are read, and they name collusion as the risk separation of duties leaves. |
| LIT-1216 v2 | Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats, Seventh Edition | Software Engineering Institute (2022). Twenty-two best practices for mitigating insider threat, drawn from the CERT Division’s analysis of more than 3,000 insider-threat cases, each with quick wins, mitigations and mappings to security and privacy standards. | Deferred — filed 2026-10-18; reading stopped at a skim on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1355), from the SEI’s own PDF (175 pages): the front matter, the introduction with its data page, and three of the twenty-two best practices in full, 15 (separation of duties and least privilege), 21 (positive incentives) and 22 (learning from past incidents). The other nineteen practices and the appendices are unread. |
| LIT-1220 v3 | Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams | Edmondson (1999). In a cross-sectional field study of 51 work teams in one office-furniture manufacturer, team psychological safety, a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, was associated with members’ and observers’ ratings of learning behavior, while team efficacy added little once safety was controlled. Learning behavior mediated between psychological safety and observer-rated team performance, and safety between context support and leader coaching and learning. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1404) in full, from a JSTOR-printed copy posted among MIT course readings (https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Performance/Edmondson%20Psychological%20safety.pdf); worth reading as the paper that defines team psychological safety, a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, and finds it associated with team learning behavior in 51 teams of one company, with learning behavior carrying its association with observer-rated performance. Read it knowing that the study is cross-sectional and in one company, that the antecedents and safety come from the same survey, that efficacy’s role is mixed rather than absent, and that its teams are cooperative: it says nothing about compromised or adversarial members. |
| LIT-1222 v2 | A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare | Arrow (1950). No rule that turns every profile of individual orderings into a social ordering can satisfy unrestricted domain, the Pareto condition, independence of irrelevant alternatives and non-dictatorship together: the impossibility theorem. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy; the Journal of Political Economy’s page (University of Chicago Press) and JSTOR are paywalled; EconPapers lists only the journal; a web search found lecture slides and summaries, no copy of the article. The fuller statement, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), was not sought. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1226 v2 | Zero Trust Architecture | Rose, Borchert, Mitchell & Connelly (2020). NIST Special Publication 800-207: an architecture in which no subject, device or network location is trusted implicitly and every session to a resource is authorized by a policy engine and administrator on dynamic policy and enforced at a policy enforcement point; seven tenets, deployment models, threats (subversion of the policy engine first among them) and a migration path, with NIST’s own judgment that the 2020 ecosystem was not mature enough for widespread adoption. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1371) in full, from NIST’s own PDF; worth reading as the reference definition of zero trust: no implicit trust from network location or ownership, every session to a resource authorized by a policy engine and administrator and enforced at a policy enforcement point, on dynamic policy over identity, asset state and behaviour. Read it knowing that it is a guideline that measures nothing, that it moves absolute trust onto the policy engine and administrator and answers their subversion only with configuration, monitoring and audit, and that it leaves an insider acting within an account’s granted access largely outside its reach. |
| LIT-1285 | What’s Wrong with Copying? | Drassinower (2015). Not read. Copyright is reconstructed from inside its doctrine, not from incentives: a work is a communicative act, and infringement is the unauthorized appropriation of another’s speech. The author’s rights reach only communicative uses consistent with others’ rights to respond, so copying needed to answer a work is lawful. | Unavailable — Searched 2026-10-20 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Crossref gives no licence for the DOI, only a De Gruyter Brill text-mining link; De Gruyter Brill answered the DOI page with an empty bot-check response (HTTP 202), and so did the Harvard University Press page for ISBN 9780674743977. Web searches for an open-access edition, a University of Toronto (TSpace) or SSRN deposit of the book, or a CC-licensed copy found none; one library record lists the e-book as licensed to selected US libraries only. Lending-only scans and shadow-library copies were not opened. OpenAlex was not used (out of budget today). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1286 v2 | Copyright’s Paradox | Netanel (2008). Not read. Copyright both funds expression and stands in the way of speech that builds on existing works, Nimmer’s largely ignored paradox. The book traces copyright’s expansion, weighs it as an engine of free expression against its speech burdens, answers the propertarian view, and proposes delimiting copyright by what best promotes robust debate and expressive diversity. | Unfetched — Searched 2026-10-20 for a lawful full text. One exists and this client could not fetch it, so the book is not read and no NOTE is filed. Crossref records a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on the book DOI and on each of its nine chapter DOIs, with full text at academic.oup.com/book/36042; OUP Academic answered every request with a Cloudflare challenge (HTTP 403). The author’s institution holds an item of the same title in eScholarship (UCLA Public Law & Legal Theory Series, Research Paper 08-06, item 7wn8j5gc); a second attempt with a browser user agent fetched its PDF, and it is the book’s Introduction only (14 pp., also SSRN 1099457), not the book. It was not read as the book. The Internet Archive holds the book only as controlled lending. The OAPEN and DOAB APIs refused this client, the OAPEN site and CORE returned bot checks. A 2006 eScholarship item of the same title (3952g11n, Journal of Scholarly Perspectives) is a short earlier piece, not the book. OpenAlex was not used (out of budget today). A copy of the OUP PDF, saved from a browser, would make it readable at once. |
| LIT-1288 | The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood | Boyle (2024). Legal and moral personhood are different lines, and personhood is pressed on two tracks: empathy-driven moral recognition, and legal personality granted for convenience, as with corporations. Run across AI, corporations, nonhuman animals and chimeras, the book argues that ChatGPT broke the link between fluent language and mind, that corporate rights grew without reasoned decision, and that capacity-based criteria cannot escape a species-bound standpoint. Boyle predicts an intermediate legal status for AI. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1014) in full; worth reading as the clearest statement of the two routes to personhood, empathy-driven moral recognition and efficiency-driven legal personality, with the corporation as the working example of the second; for the legal history of how US corporations took Fourteenth Amendment rights without reasoned decision; for the analysis of the Tommy habeas suits; and for the five meanings of “too close to human” in chimera debates. Read it knowing that it is an essay that declines to give a theory, that its AI timing rests on others’ forecasts, that its case against Searle is a burden-of-proof presumption, and that its own view (species membership as of right plus capacity) is argued in a few pages. |
| LIT-1290 | Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling | McLeod and DiCola (2011). Not read. From more than 100 interviews, a history of sampling and of the US lawsuits and licensing practice that now govern it. The clearance system is argued to be inefficient and to limit creativity: at estimated present-day fees, two golden-age albums (Paul’s Boutique, Fear of a Black Planet) could not be released commercially. Reforms are surveyed, including a reverse liability rule. | Unavailable — Searched 2026-10-20 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Crossref gives no licence for the DOI and no full-text link; the Duke University Press book page (dukeupress.edu/creative-license) offers it for sale only, with no open-access edition; De Gruyter Brill, which hosts the Duke e-book, answered with an empty bot-check response (HTTP 202); Project MUSE’s search returned a server error (HTTP 500). Web searches found no open-access, author-repository or CC-licensed copy; library records mark the e-book restricted. McLeod’s earlier, CC-licensed book is a different work. Lending-only scans and shadow-library copies were not opened. OpenAlex was not used (out of budget today). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1291 | The Immanent Rationality of Copyright Law | Balganesh (2017), reviewing Drassinower’s What’s Wrong with Copying? (2015). Drassinower holds that copyright protects the integrity of a work as a communicative act, that infringement wrongs the author as compelled speech, and that independent creation, the idea/expression line and the public domain follow from the equal standing of authors as speakers. The review praises the coherence and defends rationalist theory against the charge that it is faith-based, then objects that the book gives no criterion for what is fundamental, blends explanation with justification without defending autonomy, ignores the private-law structure of liability, and assumes a static and pervasive rationality. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1017) in full; worth reading as a compact and accurate account of Drassinower’s What’s Wrong with Copying? (the work as a communicative act, infringement as compelled speech, independent creation as the anchor, the public domain as constitutive) and as the standard methodological critique of it: no criterion for what is fundamental, explanation and justification run together, the private-law structure of liability left unexplained, and a rationality assumed static and pervasive. Read it knowing that it is a review, so Drassinower’s thesis comes at second hand with page references to the book, that its defence of rationalist theory is aimed at Lemley’s “faith-based” critique as much as at the book, and that one objection (the private-law structure) leans on the reviewer’s own theory. |
| LIT-1293 | Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training (Pre-Publication Version) | U.S. Copyright Office (2025), pre-publication version. Collecting, curating and training on copyrighted works implicate the reproduction right; model weights do so only where they have memorized substantially similar expression. Whether the copying is excused is a fair-use question, use by use. Training a foundation model will often be transformative, but less so the more its outputs serve the originals’ purpose; the non-expressive and human-learning arguments are rejected; market dilution is cognizable harm. The Office recommends letting licensing markets develop, with extended collective licensing if they fail. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1024) in full, in the pre-publication version of 9 May 2025, the only version copyright.gov offers on that date; worth reading as the official US statement of where training touches copyright (collection, curation, training copies, and model weights only where they have memorized a work), as an application of the Warhol v. Goldsmith use-specific test of transformative purpose to generative training (a spectrum, from research and closed non-substitutive deployments to fine-tuning that reproduces a series’s characters), and for its new market-dilution theory of harm under the fourth factor. Read it knowing that it is an agency’s analysis, not a holding; that it predates the 2025 district-court rulings on training; that its account of the facts rests mostly on the parties’ own comments; that the dilution theory is offered as “uncharted territory” with no data; and that a final version was promised but had not appeared by 2026-10-20. |
| LIT-1297 | The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy | Perzanowski and Schultz (2016). Digital media and software-laden devices are sold under licences that deny a sale and DRM that enforces the licence, while the law of exhaustion, built around owning a tangible copy, cannot follow purchases that are copied at every use or never copied at all. Buyers lose resale, lending, repair and privacy, and a survey shows “Buy Now” misleads them. The book proposes treating one-time purchases as sales, judging licences as permissions rather than contracts, exempting owners from anti-circumvention law, and a multifactor test for digital exhaustion. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1026) in full except the last page of the Conclusion, which the copy lacks; worth reading as the standard account of how licences, DRM and the copy-centred law of exhaustion turn digital purchases into conditional access, with the case law from Bobbs-Merrill to Lexmark v. Impression Products, a survey showing that “Buy Now” misleads buyers, and a proposed multifactor test for digital exhaustion. Its diagnosis is the consumer side of Lessig’s copy trigger: exhaustion is tied to owning a copy, and digital use and transfer make new copies. Read it knowing that it is US law as of early 2016, that it is advocacy by two authors who were parties or counsel in several of its episodes, that the survey is their own and of a mock store, and that several of its pending cases have since been decided. |
| LIT-1298 | Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy | Lessig (2008). Digital technology revives a read/write culture in which amateurs remake what they consume. Remix is quotation whose meaning comes from the reference, so it needs the original. Because every digital use makes a copy and copyright regulates copies, the law now reaches every ordinary use and makes RW culture presumptively illegal. The commercial and sharing economies, kept distinct, combine in hybrids. Proposed reforms: free amateur remix, registration after a term, no regulation of the copy as such, and a levy or licence for file sharing. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1023) in full; worth reading as the standard statement of the read/write (RW) against read-only (RO) distinction, of remix as quotation whose meaning depends on using the original, of the copy-trigger argument (digital use always makes a copy, so copyright now reaches every ordinary use), and of the commercial, sharing and hybrid economies. Read it knowing that the economic core (remix does not compete with what it remixes, money crowds out sharing) is asserted rather than shown, that the hybrids are founders’ own accounts of successes, and that the legal reforms are sketches without rates or a line between amateur and professional. |
| LIT-1301 | The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind | Boyle (2008). Intellectual property is a limited monopoly granted to solve a public-goods problem, and its limits matter as much as its rights. A “second enclosure movement” is extending rights over facts, genes, business methods, digital fences and the fragments of music, without evidence that more rights bring more innovation. Cheaper copying makes the limits more important, not less. The book argues for an environmentalism of the public domain. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1021) in full; worth reading as the standard statement of the “second enclosure movement” argument: that intellectual property is a state-made monopoly to be kept as short and narrow as its purpose allows (the “Jefferson Warning”), that the public domain and the limits on rights do as much work as the rights, that cheaper copying makes those limits more important rather than less (the “Sony Axiom”), and that policy runs on faith rather than evidence. Its music chapter traces one melody from a 1951 gospel record through Ray Charles and Kanye West to a 2005 political mashup. Read it knowing that most of it is argument from cases chosen to make the point; the one sustained empirical test is the database right (ch. 9). It treats the commons of the mind as nonrival and open to all, so it does not engage Ostrom’s work on bounded common-pool resources beyond two notes. |
| LIT-1302 | Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith | Supreme Court of the United States (2023), No. 21-869, 598 U.S. 508, opinion of the Court by Sotomayor, 7–2. The first fair-use factor weighs against the Warhol Foundation’s 2016 licence of Orange Prince to a Prince tribute magazine: the licence and Goldsmith’s photograph share substantially the same purpose, illustrating magazine stories about Prince, and the use is commercial. New meaning or message is relevant only to whether the purpose differs and is not enough by itself. Gorsuch concurs; Kagan, dissenting, would count Warhol’s added expression and meaning heavily. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1019) in full; worth reading as the Supreme Court’s statement that “transformative” use under the first fair-use factor is a question of the purpose of a particular use, a matter of degree, and not settled by new expression, meaning or message; that the degree of transformation must exceed what the derivative-work right already covers; that copying is justified most clearly when the copied work is the target (parody against satire); and that licensing markets for derivatives belong to the owner. Kagan’s dissent is the best short case for meaning and aesthetics as the measure. Read it knowing that it decides one factor only, for one use (the 2016 licence of Orange Prince to Condé Nast), and says nothing about the making, display or sale of the Prince Series, nor whether they infringe. |
| LIT-1303 | Worth a Thousand Words: The Images of Copyright | Tushnet (2012). Copyright takes the written word as its model. Courts treat images either as transparent, so that their meaning is obvious and they merely copy reality, or as opaque, so that they cannot be analysed in words. The oscillation produces incoherent doctrine on copyrightability, substantial similarity, joint authorship of comics and fair use. Verbal overshadowing means that describing an image changes how it is seen, so the substantial-similarity test should be abandoned for a reproduction right against exact or near-exact copies. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1016) in full; worth reading as the standard statement that copyright law takes the written word as its model and so oscillates between treating images as transparent (their meaning obvious, a copy of reality) and as opaque (beyond analysis in words), of verbal overshadowing as a reason the substantial-similarity test cannot work, and of the proposal to replace that test with a reproduction right against exact or near-exact copies, leaving the rest to the derivative-works right. Read it knowing that it is US law as of 2011, that the cognitive findings are cited from the psychology literature rather than tested on legal factfinders, that the author flags the verbal-overshadowing effect as possibly smaller than first reported, and that the reform is stated without its implementation (n. 258). |
| LIT-1315 v2 | Media Capture Through Favor Exchange | Szeidl & Szucs (2021). Using Hungarian data, 1994–2016, documents large advertising favours from the government to connected media, shown by state-owned firms’ but not private firms’ advertising shifting at changes of connection status, and corruption-coverage favours back; a structural model separates owner ideology from favour exchange and finds both matter, and counterfactuals show targeted advertising can also shift owner ideology by making ownership profitable to connected investors. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1039) in full, from the open-access published article on the Econometric Society’s site, with the supplement’s regression tables and proofs; worth reading for the cleanest evidence the record holds of two-way favors between a government and connected media, with private advertisers as the control (THEORY-850), for a model whose slant gap splits into owner ideology plus favor exchange (THEORY-860, re-derived), and for the point that targeted advertising can change who owns the media. Read it knowing that the split between ideology and exchange (THEORY-852, Proposed) rests on identifying assumptions the authors call strong for print, and that only advertising and corruption coverage are measured. |
| LIT-1319 v2 | Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals | Di Tella & Franceschelli (2011; NBER 2009, revised 2010). Across the four main Argentine newspapers, April 1998–December 2007, monthly government advertising correlates negatively with front-page coverage of the government’s corruption scandals, within newspaper and month and within newspaper-president pairs: one standard deviation of advertising goes with 0.31 fewer front pages a month, 25 percent of a standard deviation, in the 2010 working paper (0.23 and 18 percent in the published abstract). The association holds for advertising placed by the presidency’s agency and not for autonomous agencies, and not for scandals of non-political actors. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1040) in full, in the NBER working-paper version (revised July 2010); worth reading as a careful within-newspaper, within-presidency measure of how government advertising goes with front-page coverage of the government’s corruption, with placebos on advertising channel and scandal type (THEORY-851). Read it knowing that it shows an association, that the version read reports 0.31 of a front page per standard deviation where the published abstract reports 0.23, that the early advertising series is reconstructed, and that one presidency carries much of the variation. |
| LIT-1320 v2 | Algorithmic Empowerment: The Fair Allocation of Visibility in Platformized Publics | Kwok (2026). Platforms do not distort a neutral flow of communication but produce and allocate visibility, the institutionally produced probability that a communicative act reaches an audience; the Algorithmic Empowerment Principle holds that platforms with gatekeeping power owe structurally disadvantaged groups a fair opportunity for epistemic participation, with duties of epistemic redress in ranking design and visibility audits. | Unavailable — sought 2026-10-21 and no lawful full text reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed; Crossref lists SAGE’s text-mining licence only, with no open-access licence, and carries the abstract, which agrees with the summary. The SAGE article page and PDF (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29777984261494012) returned 403 to curl and to the WebFetch tool. A web search for the title found no preprint or author copy. Online first ten days before this search, so a repository copy may appear. |
| LIT-1321 v2 | Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed | Scott (1998). States make societies legible by simplifying them into standardized, administrable forms (surnames, cadastral maps, planned cities and forests); joined to high-modernist ideology, authoritarian power and a weak civil society, these simplifications override the practical local knowledge (mētis) that working arrangements depend on, and large schemes fail. | Unavailable — sought 2026-10-21 and no lawful full text reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. The book is in copyright (Yale University Press, 1998). OpenAlex lists it closed, with only the three doi.org locations (10.12987/9780300128789, 10.12987/9780300252989, 10.2307/j.ctvxkn7ds) and no repository copy; Unpaywall reports it closed; Semantic Scholar has no record of the DOI. The Internet Archive holds two scans (seeinglikestateh00scot_0, seeinglikestate00jame) in its controlled-lending and print-disabled collections, access-restricted and not openly downloadable, so not a fetch open to this client. Two other Internet Archive items under the title are user uploads, an audiobook and a text marked public domain, which the book is not, and were not used. A supplied copy, a library loan or the Yale e-book returns it to reading. |
| LIT-1323 v2 | Media capture, captured: a new computational methodology to measure deteriorating media freedom | Barnehl & Schumacher (2024). Proposes measuring media capture at the level of the outlet and at monthly or weekly resolution, by scoring each nominally independent outlet between regime-owned outlets and opposition outlets the regime cannot coerce, on the prevalence of topics relevant to the regime’s legitimacy (a structural topic model) and on the tone of sentences mentioning the leader. Applied to Nicaragua, 2018–2022, it separates outlets that moved toward the regime from one that resisted, which annual expert surveys cannot. The score measures alignment; coercion is argued from context. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1047) in full, from the published version in the University of Amsterdam’s repository; worth reading for a way to measure media capture outlet by outlet and month by month, by placing each outlet between regime-owned outlets and uncoercible opposition outlets on agenda and tone, and for its definition of capture as coerced change in editorial choices. Read it knowing that the score measures alignment, not coercion, that the poles are assumed fixed, that it is validated on three Nicaraguan outlets only (THEORY-836), and that the main text reports no uncertainty for the scores. |
| LIT-1324 v2 | The Theory of Economic Regulation | Stigler (1971). Regulation is, as a rule, acquired by an industry and designed and operated primarily for its benefit; the state’s coercive power is a resource that small, concentrated interests can buy through the political process more cheaply than large, diffuse ones can resist. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21; on 2026-10-21 a search for a lawful full text reached none, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Unpaywall and OpenAlex report it closed with no repository copy; Semantic Scholar lists no open PDF; the publisher’s copy is JSTOR’s, paywalled, and RePEc points only to it. Web searches for the title with “pdf” and restricted to .edu, and for a RAND-hosted copy, found commentary and no copy of the article: the Stigler Center’s “George Stigler 50 Years Later” (ProMarket, 2022), Carrigan and Coglianese’s handbook chapter, and Peltzman’s essays. No working-paper version was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, through library access or JSTOR. |
| LIT-1325 v2 | Preventing Policy Capture: Integrity in Public Decision Making | OECD (2017). A report in the OECD Public Governance Reviews defining policy capture as the process of consistently or repeatedly directing public decisions away from the public interest toward a specific interest group or person, by legal or illegal means and by that group’s intent and action; adopting three criteria (an explicit policy goal, a captor’s intent to extract rents, a shift from the goal); and setting out four strategies for preventing it (stakeholder engagement, transparency, independent oversight bodies, organisational integrity). | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1043), chapters 1 and 2 in full and chapter 3 in part, from the OECD’s own PDF; worth reading for its definition of policy capture as consistent or repeated diversion of public decisions from the public interest toward a specific interest, by legal or illegal means, for its three criteria (an explicitly defined policy goal, a captor’s intent to extract rents, a shift of the process from the goal), and for its catalogue of vehicles, which includes supplying research and manipulated information, so that capture can proceed without the decision maker’s knowledge. Read it knowing that it is an institutional report, not research: its definition and criteria are adopted from others, its evidence is cited or is cross-country correlation of perception indicators, and its recommendations are not evaluated. No THEORY is filed from it. |
| LIT-1327 v2 | What Is Ideological Capture and How Do We Measure It? Using Antitrust Reform to Understand Expert–Public Cleavages | Short, Hill & Brown (2025). Ideological capture occurs when experts design regulatory frameworks that marginalize important public values and produce outcomes favourable to special interests even without lobbying; an original survey of the public and of antitrust lawyers finds the consumer-welfare standard marginalizes public concerns yet is deeply popular among the lawyers. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1051) in full, from the open-access (CC BY 4.0) published version on Cambridge Core, without its online appendix; worth reading for its definition of ideological capture, capture through the criteria a regulator adopts with no lobbying needed (THEORY-859), and for a pre-registered survey showing that the public weighs layoffs, quality and lobbying well above price cuts in merger review while antitrust lawyers support replacing the consumer welfare standard 42.6 points less than the public (THEORY-833). Read it knowing that the lawyer sample is a convenience sample of 103, that the verdict of capture also rests on a history drawn from secondary sources, and that the introduction’s “four times larger” and the analysis’s “seven times larger” describe the same gap. |
| LIT-1328 v2 | The grammar of being seen: Verification interfaces and the sociological cost of legibility in digital platform governance | Lan (2026). Argues, on the exchange’s account, that a platform’s standardized verification categories lower its own costs of verification while shifting the burden of fitting those categories onto the people and organizations required to become legible; conceptual rather than empirical. No abstract was available to check this against. | Unavailable — sought 2026-10-21 and no lawful full text reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed; Crossref lists Elsevier’s text-mining licence only and gives the pii S0308596126001679. The ScienceDirect page for that pii returned 403 to curl and to the WebFetch tool, and the Elsevier article API refused the request without a key (400). A web search for the title found no preprint or author copy (author Zihang Lan, ORCID 0009-0002-0017-6906, per Crossref). The summary therefore remains A25’s account, unchecked against even an abstract. |
| LIT-1331 v2 | Epistemic welfare and algorithmic recommender systems: overcoming the epistemic crisis in the digitalized public sphere | Hyzen, Van den Bulck, Puppis, Kulig & Paulussen (2025). Defines epistemic welfare as creating and maintaining the conditions and capabilities for individuals’ epistemic agency in the public sphere, and combines social epistemology, welfare studies and communication research into a framework for judging how well practices and institutions meet epistemic standards. It applies Goldman’s five (reliability, power, fecundity, speed, efficiency) to news organizations’ recommender systems. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1035): every section was covered, but through a fetch tool that returned section-by-section accounts with short quotes, not a verbatim copy, so the quotes are unchecked; the article is open access (CC BY) and the publisher refused direct fetches. Worth reading for its definition of epistemic welfare as the conditions and capabilities for epistemic agency in the public sphere, for its staging of capabilities (literacy turning availability into access, critical skills turning access into knowledge), and for Goldman’s five standards applied to news recommenders. Read it knowing that it is a theory paper with no data, that it treats legacy media rather than platforms, and that a first-hand reading has not been made. |
| LIT-1333 v2 | Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability | Besley & Prat (2006). A model of democratic politics in which media capture is endogenous: even without censorship a government can pay outlets to suppress verifiable bad news, and because one report informs every voter, each outlet must be paid what it would earn as the sole breaker of the story, so the press is captured exactly when buying every outlet at that price, raised by the transaction cost of transfers, costs less than the rent of office. Plurality, costly transfers and audience revenue protect accountability; capture ends turnover. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1031) in full, from the authors’ 2005 working paper in LSE Research Online; worth reading for the model of media capture as a bargain (each outlet must be paid what it would earn as the only one to break the story, so the press is captured exactly when n·τa < r, THEORY-837), for its precise sense of media independence as the transaction cost of transfers, and for the observation that capture needs no deception. Read it knowing that it is static, that news in it is hard and the same at every outlet, that its cross-country table is raw means, and that the published AER text was not compared. |
| LIT-1335 v2 | The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media | McCombs & Shaw (1972). Among 100 Chapel Hill voters not yet committed to a candidate in the 1968 US presidential campaign, the aggregate ranking of issues they named as most important correlated +.967 and +.979 with the emphasis the nine media serving them gave those issues, and leaning voters matched all the news better than news about their own side in 18 of 24 comparisons. Offered as evidence that the media may not tell people what to think but do shape what they think about; the authors say the correlations do not prove it. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1046) in full, from a copy of the published article posted on a UNC Chapel Hill course page; worth reading as the founding test of agenda-setting, for its distinction between influence on what an audience thinks about and on what it thinks, and for its comparison of agenda-setting against selective perception. Read it knowing that its evidence is an aggregate cross-sectional correlation over a handful of issues in one sample of 100 undecided voters in one town, with no test reported, that the direction from media to voters is argued and not identified, and that the authors say the correlations do not prove agenda-setting. The correlations are held as THEORY-842, the hypothesis as THEORY-838 (Proposed). |
| LIT-1337 v2 | The Use of Knowledge in Society | Hayek (1945). The economic problem is not allocating given resources by a known plan but using knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place that exists only dispersed among many people; a price system communicates the part of that knowledge which matters for each decision without anyone holding it all. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1036) in full, from the Econlib reprint of the American Economic Review article, published there with the AEA’s permission; worth reading for the distinction between scientific knowledge and knowledge “of the particular circumstances of time and place”, for the argument that the second cannot be put into statistics for a central authority (THEORY-841), and for the price system as a mechanism that conveys relative scarcities without their causes. Read it knowing that it is an argument from examples with no model or evidence, that it is about the economic order and not organizations, and that it argues for competition, not that removing any given public rule decentralizes decisions. |
| LIT-1339 v2 | Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military | Thomas (2004). A survey of the Soviet and Russian theory of reflexive control: conveying to an adversary information or premises chosen so that the adversary, by its own reasoning, voluntarily makes the decision the controlling side wants; traces the theory from Lefebvre’s work in the 1960s through its military uses. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21; on 2026-10-21 a search for a lawful full text reached none, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed with no repository copy, and Taylor & Francis’s copy is paywalled. The author’s SelectedWorks page (works.bepress.com/tim-thomas, where a search result listed the item) returns Elsevier’s notice that SelectedWorks was discontinued in April 2025. No FMSO copy was found by search. A PDF at rit.edu (www.rit.edu/~w-cmmc/literature/Thomas_2004.pdf, cited in a procon.bg listing under an older path) did not connect; the Internet Archive holds a snapshot of 2022-10-09, but web.archive.org is blocked from this client, and that copy is a posting on a university course or conference page of uncertain licence, not the author’s or the publisher’s, so it would not have been used without a check. So the failure is on availability of a clearly lawful copy, and on access for the archived one. Thomas’s later open writing on the subject (the MITRE report Russian Military Thought, 2019, on DTIC) is a different work and was not read as a substitute. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1340 v2 | Regulatory independence may limit electoral holdup but entrench capture | Schram & Ule (2024). Where elected policymakers set infrastructure prices, investors fearing electoral pressure delay investment (holdup); regulatory independence, modelled as a price fixed by the first policymaker for all periods, can relieve that, but if policymakers’ interests are aligned with the infrastructure owner’s (“regulatory capture”, assigned as a treatment), independence entrenches the capture. Laboratory experiments (59 groups) find capture entrenchment, and uninformed voters too weak to remove it. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1053) in full (main text; the online appendices not read), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (CC BY 4.0); worth reading for a laboratory measurement (THEORY-856) that the commitment which relieves electoral holdup also locks in the interests of whoever designs it, raising prices further when policymakers are aligned with the operator (“capture entrenchment”), and for the authors’ general conclusion that independence helps consumers only when its designers serve them (THEORY-858, Proposed). Read it knowing that capture is assigned as a treatment, not produced, that “independence” is a price fixed by the first policymaker, that groups have three voters and the capture cells 18 groups, and that some effects weaken when the 45.8% of groups with dominated period-1 investment are excluded. |
| LIT-1342 v2 | From access and transparency to refusal: Three responses to algorithmic governance | James, Hynes, Whelan, Dreher & Humphry (2023). Sorts responses to the harms of algorithmic governance into access and inclusion, transparency, and refusal. Argues that the first two rest on public-administration values that reproduce existing structures, and that both are bidirectional: inclusion gives the powerful access to the included, and transparency can be demanded of the governed. Refusal, collective and generative rather than individual exit, is held more promising, though least available to those who depend on the state. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1041) in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF; worth reading for its sorting of responses to algorithmic governance into access and inclusion, transparency, and refusal, and for the point that access and transparency are bidirectional, inclusion giving the powerful access to the included and transparency being demanded of the governed (THEORY-857). Read it knowing that it is a conceptual argument with illustrative cases, mostly Australian, that it shows no comparison of outcomes between the responses, and that it favours refusal on argument rather than evidence. |
| LIT-1365 v2 | National Incident Management System, Third Edition | FEMA (2017). The national doctrine for incident management in the United States: the Incident Command System’s modular organization, Unified Command (in which participating agencies keep their own authority and accountability), and the Safety Officer’s authority to stop or alter activities that are immediately dangerous. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1072) from FEMA’s PDF (a U.S. government work): the Introduction and the Command and Coordination component read in full, with the command-position tables of Appendix A; Resource Management skimmed; Communications and most appendices not read. Worth holding as the doctrine the record’s incident cases are measured against: Unified Command shares the command function among agencies that keep their own authority, transfer of command is formalized with a briefing, and the Safety Officer may alter, suspend or terminate immediately dangerous activities. It also keeps one command function, one action plan and unity of command, which limits A24’s reading that coordination needs no single controller. Doctrine, not evidence of practice. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1372 v2 | Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics | Pierson (2000). Argues that political processes are often marked by increasing returns, so that early events and their timing lock in institutions and paths that later events cannot easily reverse. | Active — read 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1076) through its precursor only, the 1997 EUI Jean Monnet Chair Paper 44 of the same title, read in full from the EUI’s Cadmus repository (open access); the 2000 APSR article itself was not reached (Unpaywall and OpenAlex list only the precursor; Cambridge Core and JSTOR paywalled). Worth reading as the argument that politics is more prone than markets to increasing returns, because of compulsory institutions, collective action and opacity, and holds paths harder, because competition and learning correct weakly, elected officials discount at the electoral cycle and institutions are built to be sticky (THEORY-885). An argument with no data and one illustration. It makes actors’ time horizons a cause of lock-in, but does not say which component of a polity holds authority over which, so it does not already state CLAIM-423. |
| LIT-1373 v2 | Reconstruction of Tradition: Modernity, Tourism and Shaolin Martial Arts in the Shaolin Scenic Area, China | Su (2016). Shaolin martial arts served imperial authorities before 1949 and were restricted and forbidden in the Mao era (1949–1978); since 1978, UNESCO’s heritage conventions, China’s heritage policies and tourism have reconstructed them as “Shaolin Kungfu”. The reconstruction serves contemporary political and economic needs and positions “experts” and local residents unequally. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on access. The article and its 2019 reprint are closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open location for either DOI, Semantic Scholar marks it closed, and CORE has metadata only. Taylor & Francis (tandfonline.com) and the Routledge chapter page (taylorfrancis.com) returned 403 to this client. The Internet Archive has no copy of the article or of the book Martial Arts in Asia (Hong & Ok, eds.), and Internet Archive Scholar answered with an anti-scrape check; ResearchGate returned 403; a web search found no author-posted copy (the author is Xiaoyan Su, Luoyang Normal University, per OpenAlex), only a blog review. The summary is the abstract’s, unchecked. Registered from the owner’s branched exchange of 2026-10-22, “Branch · Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1374 v2 | Post-Incident Analysis: Independent Review of the Brookhollow Apartment Fire | Jensen Hughes (2024). The independent review, commissioned by Sedgwick County and the City of Wichita, of the emergency response to the Brookhollow Apartments fire of 13 October 2023, in which a resident, Paoly Bedeski, died and a partial collapse of the exterior stair roof on two fire crews brought a mayday. It found “no single point of failure” but systemic shortcomings across dispatch and the fire department that “contributed to an unorganized rescue effort”, most of them departures from the agencies’ own procedures, without concluding that they changed the outcome. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1073) from the report as posted by Sedgwick County, which commissioned it. Worth holding as the record’s best documented instance of CLAIM-422’s procedure–capacity gap: the agencies’ written procedures were judged thorough and up to date, and the failures were departures from them (a CAD step dispatchers on several shifts could not recall, a TAC-monitoring rule set aside by informal agreement, a mayday policy not followed, search not resumed for over eleven minutes after a mayday under control within minutes). It does not support “four firefighters caught”; it names two crews and reports no firefighter injured. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1375 v3 | Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games | Putnam (1988). Models international negotiation as two games played at once: a chief negotiator bargains with foreign counterparts while any agreement must be ratified at home, so a deal is possible only where the domestic win-sets overlap. A win-set’s size depends on domestic preferences and coalitions, ratification institutions and the negotiators’ strategies; a small one is both a bargaining advantage and a risk of involuntary defection, and domestic division can make agreement easier. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1436) in full, from the JSTOR scan posted on a course page of the Athens University of Economics and Business (eclass.aueb.gr, course DEOS290), read through the OCR text of another download of the same scan at gwern.net/doc/politics/1988-putnam.pdf, the course copy having no text layer; worth reading as the standard statement of two-level games: a negotiator bargains abroad over a deal that must be ratified at home, so the overlap of domestic win-sets decides whether a deal is possible, and their size who gains. Read it knowing that it is a framework illustrated by cases, chiefly the 1978 Bonn summit, with no formal solution, and that it treats one negotiation at a time. |
| LIT-1378 v2 | NASA: Better Mechanisms Needed for Sharing Lessons Learned | GAO (2002). Found that NASA’s lessons-learned system was little used by its program and project managers, and that the agency had no assurance that lessons from earlier failures were being applied. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1088) from the GAO’s PDF on govinfo.gov (a U.S. government work). Worth holding as a clean instance of procedure without capacity at NASA: agency rules required managers to review and apply lessons, a 2001 census survey found they mostly did not, and NASA measured how often its lessons database was searched but not whether any lesson was applied. It is about the 1999 Mars failures and a 1995 database, not about Challenger or the Shuttle, so it is not evidence that the post-Challenger corrections decayed. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1380 v2 | Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 | Schickler (2016). Argues that the parties’ realignment on civil rights began from below well before the 1960s: from the late 1930s, Northern state Democratic parties, labor unions and new urban constituencies tied economic liberalism to civil rights, and Northern Democrats in Congress moved before national leaders did. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on access. The book is in copyright and not open access: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report the book DOIs and the De Gruyter chapter DOIs (Introduction, chapters 2–4) closed; Project MUSE lists it “Open Access: No” with every chapter restricted; De Gruyter Brill’s page refused this client. Princeton University Press offers no sample chapter. The Internet Archive’s lending library holds a copy (racialrealignmen0000schi, access-restricted), which this client cannot borrow. Web searches found no chapter, précis or symposium posted by the author. A pdfroom.com listing of the whole book shows no sign of permission and was not opened. The summary is unchecked against the text; the publisher’s description agrees with it in outline but dates the crystallization of the new alignment in public opinion, state parties and Congress to “the mid-1940s”. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1381 v2 | Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance | Taylor (1989). Shows that the American women’s movement did not vanish between 1945 and the mid-1960s but persisted in abeyance, in small, committed organizations that kept networks, goals and identity alive and supplied the later movement. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on access. The article is closed (Unpaywall, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar) and on JSTOR behind subscription. No author-posted, repository or course-page copy was found by web search; the ResearchGate items it turned up are other works. Its reprint in McAdam and Snow’s reader Social Movements (Internet Archive socialmovementsr0000mcad) and Rupp and Taylor’s Survival in the Doldrums (survivalindoldru0000rupp) are lending-library copies this client cannot borrow. The summary is checked against the abstract only (OpenAlex): the movement persisted through abeyance structures with five characteristics, temporality, purposive commitment, exclusiveness, centralization and culture. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1388 v2 | The Political Legacy of American Slavery | Acharya, Blackwell and Sen (2016). White Southerners in counties where slavery was more prevalent in 1860 are today somewhat more Republican, more opposed to affirmative action and more racially resentful, and present-day black population share does not explain it. The difference appeared after Reconstruction rather than before the war, and the authors argue it was amplified by planters’ post-emancipation incentives to repress black labor and votes and then passed down locally, through families and institutions they do not separate. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1089) from the journal’s typeset PDF posted by the second author (mattblackwell.org), without the online appendix; worth reading as a careful persistence study: white Southerners in counties with more slavery in 1860 are today somewhat less Democratic, less supportive of affirmative action and more racially resentful (about a tenth of a standard deviation), not accounted for by present black share, and the difference in voting appears after Reconstruction, not before the war (THEORY-889). The association is strong; the causal reading rests on an instrument with an untestable exclusion restriction; the intergenerational transmission is argued with thin evidence. What persists is attitude, not party. |
| LIT-1393 v2 | Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident | Rogers Commission (1986). The presidential commission’s report on the loss of Challenger on 28 January 1986. It traces the O-ring failure to a history of erosion that had been accepted flight by flight, recounts Morton Thiokol’s reversal of its engineers’ recommendation against launch on 27 January “at the urging of Marshall”, and finds the safety, reliability and quality-assurance program ineffective, understaffed and absent from the decision (chapter VII, “The Silent Safety Program”). | Active — skimmed 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1090) from the NASA History Office’s HTML edition of volume 1 (a U.S. government work): chapters V–VIII and the Recommendations in full, chapters III, IV and IX in part, volumes 2–5 not read. Worth holding as the primary source for the Challenger half of THEORY-140: it documents, in 1986, the accepted-erosion trajectory, a launch constraint waived six times without Levels I and II knowing, the deliberate decision not to escalate Thiokol’s objection, a problem record marked “closed” with no correction behind it, and a safety organization subordinate to the offices it checked. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1400 v2 | Peace through Trade or Free Trade? | McDonald (2004). Argues that free trade, not trade as such, promotes peace: removing protective barriers removes a foundation of domestic privilege that strengthens groups likely to support war, weakens free-trading interests that restrain aggression, and builds political support for the state’s war machine. Statistical tests show that higher levels of free trade, rather than trade alone, reduce military conflict between states, and the argument recasts World War I as consistent with commercial liberalism. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed, with only the SAGE page and a RePEc record, which links back to SAGE; the Journal of Conflict Resolution offers paid access. A web search for an author’s or repository copy found none. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1401 v2 | Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion | Farrell & Newman (2019). Global informational and financial networks grow asymmetrically, with a few highly connected hubs, many under US jurisdiction. States with jurisdiction over the hubs and suitable domestic institutions can weaponize interdependence in two ways: the “panopticon effect” (gathering strategic information) and the “chokepoint effect” (denying adversaries access). Case studies of SWIFT and the internet support the framework. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful free copy exists but this client could not fetch it, so no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists the article as hybrid open access at the publisher (doi:10.1162/isec_a_00351, MIT Press Direct, https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/44/1/42/12237/Weaponized-Interdependence-How-Global-Economic); on 2026-10-29 the MIT Press site returned a Cloudflare 403 challenge to curl and to WebFetch, so the failure is on access, not availability. Project MUSE holds it behind a subscription. No author-posted copy was found. A browser fetch of the MIT Press copy is the cheapest way to read it. |
| LIT-1407 v2 | Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments | Kalla & Broockman (2020). Three pre-registered, placebo-controlled field experiments (230 canvassers, 6,869 voters reached, 7 US locations) on attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants and transgender people. In Experiment 1 (2018), a door-to-door conversation with arguments alone had no detectable effect (pooled d = 0.02, p = 0.27), while the otherwise identical, twice as long conversation that added a non-judgmental exchange of narratives reduced exclusionary attitudes (pooled d = 0.08 over surveys from 4 days to about 4.5 months; difference 0.06, p < 0.01). Experiments 2 and 3 replicate on transphobia: d = 0.08 whether or not the canvasser and voter shared their own stories alongside a video narrative, and d = 0.04 by phone. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1396) in full, from the authors’ accepted manuscript on SocArXiv; worth reading as the field experiment that removes the exchange of narratives from an otherwise identical canvass and finds the effect goes with it, and as two replications on transphobia, one with a stranger’s video narrative and one by phone. Read it knowing that the effects are small (pooled d = 0.08 and 0.04) and self-reported, that the argument-only arm is in Experiment 1 alone and was half as long as the full conversation, that “durable” is a pooled effect over waves ending at about 4.5 months whose last wave alone is not significant for prejudice, and that the mechanism is not tested. |
| LIT-1415 v2 | The “Peace Dividend” of International Trade: A New Empirical Approach | Feng, Huang, Li & Meissner (2026). Estimates the causal effect of international trade on interstate military conflict with global bilateral data, 1962–2014, using variation in trade from technological advances in air relative to maritime transport. More trade significantly reduces both the probability and the intensity of conflict, robustly across specifications and confounders; the authors relate this to decoupling, de-risking and protectionism. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. NBER’s PDF (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35078/w35078.pdf and its revision rev0) returned NBER’s “Access denied” page, and IDEAS notes that the full text is limited to series subscribers, so the copy is restricted rather than blocked. OpenAlex lists an SSRN record (doi:10.2139/ssrn.6610721) whose page returned 403 to curl and WebFetch, so whether it carries a free download is unknown. No author copy was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or NBER opens it. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1416 v2 | International Friends and Enemies | Kleinman, Liu & Redding (2024; NBER 2020). Asks whether countries that become more economically dependent on a trade partner realign politically toward it. Dependence is the elasticity of a country’s real income to the partner’s productivity, from a constant-elasticity trade model with sectors and input-output links; about 30 percent of pairs are “enemies”, with negative elasticity. Instrumented by a counterfactual Chinese productivity shock (119 countries, 1980–2010) and by the falling cost of air relative to sea transport (country pairs, 1970–2012), greater exposure raises UN voting similarity (0.094 SD per SD in the pair panel), lowers strategic rivalry except ideological rivalry, and raises formal alliances; bilateral trade does not proxy for it. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1403) in full, from NBER’s copy of the working paper as revised in March 2023; worth reading as a measure of economic dependence that is not bilateral trade, the general-equilibrium elasticity of one country’s real income to another’s productivity, and as a causal estimate, from two instruments, that it moves UN voting, strategic rivalry and alliances. Read it knowing that the effect in the pair panel is 0.094 SD per SD of exposure, that the China evidence is one cross-section of 119 countries, that the air-travel exclusion restriction is argued and not tested, that ideological rivalry does not respond, and that the paper’s own model of alignment is strategic. The journal version of 2024 was not seen. |
| LIT-1418 v2 | Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations | Copeland (1996). Proposes trade-expectations theory to reconcile liberal and realist views of interdependence: what matters is not the present level of trade but a state’s expectations of future trade. A highly dependent state that expects trade to continue has reason for peace; one that expects to be cut off has reason to fight while it still can, so high interdependence with negative expectations makes war likelier. Standardly cited with historical cases from the great-power wars. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed: MIT Press, JSTOR (doi:10.2307/2539041) and Project MUSE offer it behind subscriptions. A web search found no author-posted copy; the later book (Princeton, 2014) is not this work. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1420 v3 | The Contact Hypothesis Re-evaluated | Paluck, Green & Green (2019; preprint 2017). Assembles the 27 intergroup contact studies with random assignment and outcomes measured at least a day later and meta-analyses them. 24 of 27 estimates are positive and the random-effects average is Δ = 0.39 SD, but effects are heterogeneous (I² = 0.85), shrink as precision grows (a study of infinite size is predicted at −0.01), are largest for disability, fall to 0.25 for ethnic, racial, religious and immigrant targets, and average 0.016 in the three pre-registered studies. No study tests interracial or interethnic contact on adults over 25, and none varies Allport’s conditions; the authors conclude these gaps must be filled before the hypothesis can guide policy. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1393) in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF on Cambridge Core; worth reading as the meta-analysis of the 27 randomized contact studies with delayed outcomes and as the check on Pettigrew and Tropp: a pooled Δ = 0.39 that is heterogeneous, shrinks toward zero with precision, is 0.25 for ethnic, racial, religious and immigrant targets and 0.016 in the three pre-registered trials. Read it knowing that every subgroup rests on a handful of studies, that its precision test is borderline (p = 0.049), and that its supplement, with the p-hacking tests and the excluded studies, was not read here. |
| LIT-1421 v2 | Causes of Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885–1992 | Oneal, Russett & Berbaum (2003). Tests the reciprocal relation between economic interdependence and interstate conflict, 1885–1992, with distributed-lag analyses. Economically important trade substantially reduces dyadic militarized disputes, especially fatal ones, even controlling for past conflict, and disputes in turn reduce trade. Democracy and shared membership in intergovernmental organizations also reduce conflict; there is little support for costly signals as the mechanism, no evidence that democratization raises disputes, and allies are not less conflict-prone. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed, with the publisher’s page only; International Studies Quarterly offers paid access. A web search found no author or repository copy, only lists of Oneal’s publications. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1422 v2 | Economic Interdependence: A Path to Peace or a Source of Interstate Conflict? | Barbieri (1996). Tests the liberal hypothesis that trade promotes peace on dyads 1870–1938 (14,341 dyad-years, 270 militarized disputes, 14 wars). Economic linkages strongly affect militarized disputes but not wars, and extensive interdependence increases the likelihood of disputes rather than reducing it. The relation is curvilinear: low to moderate interdependence reduces disputes, extensive interdependence, symmetric or asymmetric, raises them; peace through trade is likeliest between mutually dependent partners. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful free copy exists but this client could not fetch it, so no NOTE is filed. PRIO, which owns the Journal of Peace Research, posts the version of record “in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy”, “free to view and download for private research and study”, at https://www.prio.org/publications/1347; on 2026-10-29 its file link on cdn.cloud.prio.org redirected curl to a Microsoft sign-in page. OpenAlex reports the article closed, and the University of South Carolina’s Scholar Commons record (poli_facpub/33) holds no file. A browser fetch of the PRIO copy is the cheapest way to read it. |
| LIT-1425 | Sales Practices Investigation Report | Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company (2017), with Shearman & Sterling. The root cause of the Community Bank’s sales practice failures was “the distortion of the Community Bank’s sales culture and performance management system”, combined with aggressive sales management. A decentralized structure gave Community Bank leaders autonomy, control functions deferred to them, and the board learned only from the September 2016 settlements that about 5,300 employees had been fired for sales practice violations. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1095): in full, all 110 numbered pages and the front matter, from a copy of the bank’s own PDF. Worth reading as the board’s own account of where the harm in the Wells Fargo sales-practices episode came from. It locates the root cause in the Community Bank’s sales model, performance management and pressure, in a decentralized structure that deferred to the business line, and in control functions that saw cases one at a time. It names and sanctions individual leaders too. It is the company’s report on itself, commissioned by its independent directors. |
| LIT-1430 v2 | The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power | Bakan (2004), Free Press. Per its publisher, it “contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin”. Per the Publishers Weekly review, the corporation is legally mandated to pursue its own self-interest, and so, in Bakan’s words, “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others”. The remedy it proposes is regulation and the democratic control of corporations. Unread: filed from the two descriptions only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: no lawful full text was reached. The author’s faculty repository at UBC (Allard Research Commons, commons.allard.ubc.ca/books/4) holds a record with the publisher’s description but no file, and the book is in print. It is the source of the thesis that the corporation is an “institutional psychopath”, which the record files as a question (QUESTION on corporate psychopathy, 2026-10-23) and does not take from this book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1431 | The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis | Boddy (2011), J. Bus. Ethics 102:255–259. A “very short theoretical paper” arguing that “psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing” the global financial crisis. Its psychopaths are individuals in corporations, not the corporation. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: the article is closed (OpenAlex: no open-access copy, no repository full text), and no author copy was found. Filed to keep apart two theses that share a name: that psychopaths in corporations cause harm (this paper) and that the corporation itself is psychopathic (Bakan, LIT on The Corporation). Its abstract is enough for that; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1465 | A taxonomy of technology design features that promote potentially addictive online behaviours | Flayelle, Brevers, King, Maurage, Perales & Billieux (2023), Nature Reviews Psychology 2(3):136–150. Reviews evidence linking design features to loss of control in online gaming, gambling, cybersexual activity, shopping, social networking and streaming. Proposes a taxonomy based on model-free and model-based learning and control. Model-free: reinforcement schedules (random-ratio rewards such as loot boxes and likes) and personalized triggers (push notifications, recommendations). Model-based: overvaluation of outcomes, features that interfere with deliberation (autoplay, countdowns), partial goal fulfilment (infinite scroll, levels, progress bars) and features that strengthen cognitive biases (near-misses, losses disguised as wins). Providers keep whatever raises use or revenue, and informational asymmetry lets them personalize it. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1096): in full, from the typeset article as deposited in the University of Lausanne’s repository (SERVAL/IRIS). Worth reading as a compact, theory-driven catalogue of the design features of games, gambling, pornography, shopping, social-networking and streaming services that may weaken users’ control. Features are sorted by whether they work on model-free learning (reinforcement schedules, personalized cues) or on model-based choice (overvaluation, features that interfere with deliberation, partial goal fulfilment, cognitive biases). It also names the selection process on the provider’s side: features that raise use, time-on-device or spending are kept, with no psychology needed. The evidence reviewed is mostly cross-sectional, qualitative or indirect, and the authors warn against pathologizing common behaviour. Filed for the record’s question whether potential of a proxy is valence (QUESTION-267), because it describes how a firm optimizing its own metric can install proxy-keyed potential in its users. |
| LIT-1473 v2 | Unconstitutional States of Emergency | Bjørnskov, Voigt & Khesali (2022; working paper 2021). Asks when governments under a state of emergency deviate from their constitution’s emergency provisions, through unlawful declaration, non-compliance during the emergency, or prolonging it beyond its limit. Of 853 emergency declarations in a new dataset, 115 are unlawful. Political turmoil is likelier than natural disaster to be followed by an unlawful emergency, and autocracies likelier than democracies; among 97 responses to domestic events, bicameral systems, recessions and constitutions allowing more grounds for emergency raise the risk. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1125) from the August 2021 ILE working paper, not the version of record; worth reading as the first cross-national count of states of emergency coded for lawfulness. Of 853 national SOEs, 1949–2017, 115 were reported unlawful, 97 of them after political turmoil and 14 after natural disasters; unlawful ones lasted 321 days on average against 115. Coding by news and NGO reports (“suspected to be unlawful”, the authors’ gloss), weak logits, and no data on whether emergency measures outlive the emergency. Several statements in the abstract and conclusion outrun the tables. |
| LIT-1475 v3 | Cooperation under the Security Dilemma | Jervis (1978). Anarchy and the security dilemma, in which what increases one state’s security decreases another’s, make common interests hard to realize. Modelled as a Prisoner’s Dilemma, cooperation is likelier when the costs of being exploited and gains from exploiting are low, gains from mutual cooperation and costs of mutual defection are high, and each side expects the other to cooperate. The dilemma eases when defence has the advantage and defensive postures are distinguishable from offensive ones, giving four security worlds shaped by geography and technology. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turn U16; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list no open copy and no repository full text, and JSTOR and Cambridge Core offer it only by subscription or purchase. Web copies exist only as JSTOR downloads reposted on course and personal pages (sfu.ca, a USP course site), which are not lawful public copies and were not used. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1478 v2 | Routines die hard: Ontological security and audience agency in securitisation | Ku & Finch (2024). Alongside the political agency the Copenhagen School grants a securitising audience, drawing on Giddens they propose ontological agency: control over the stability of one’s everyday routines, exercised to minimise disruption by securitisation. Because routines bracket anxiety, people may ignore securitising moves and emergency measures that would undermine ontological security. Unstructured observations of South Koreans’ responses to military practices securitising North Korea show latent anxiety, ranging from inaction while routines are undisturbed to emotional outbursts when they are disrupted. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1133) from the CC BY version of record; worth reading for the concept of ontological agency, an audience’s maintenance of its routines, which often means ignoring securitisation rather than accepting or contesting it. Its South Korean illustration is chance observation of routine missile launches ignored in Gangneung, and tweets of fear and blame after a malfunction under a news embargo. The authors read the inaction as coping that lets securitisation reproduce itself, with anxiety latent and its management delegated to elites, not as resistance to the security narrative. |
| LIT-1481 v4 | War Making and State Making as Organized Crime | Tilly (1985). European states were built by war makers who behaved like racketeers: they sold protection against threats they themselves produced or exaggerated, eliminated rivals at home and abroad, and extracted the resources to do so, and the administrative apparatus of the state grew out of that extraction. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turn U16; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on access, not availability. A lawful copy exists: Unpaywall and OpenAlex list a deposit in the University of Michigan’s Deep Blue repository (hdl:2027.42/51028, file 256.pdf) as the submitted version. Deep Blue answered every request, to the file, the handle and its API, with a Cloudflare bot check (403 or a script-only page), from curl and a second fetcher; the Wayback Machine holds a 2012 snapshot of the file but reset every connection; CORE’s mirror was blocked the same way. The two Routledge reprints OpenAlex marks free returned 403, and the Internet Archive holds the 1985 volume only for print-disabled lending. Course-site and Anarchist Library postings were found and not used. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied or Deep Blue can be reached. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1485 v4 | Emergency powers in democratic states: Introducing the Democratic Emergency Powers dataset | Rooney (2019). Introduces the Democratic Emergency Powers dataset, coding the formal rules of institutional change during emergencies for all democracies from 1800 to 2012, with a measure of the latent strength of each state’s emergency provisions. Cross-nationally, past and current conflict experience influences the provision and strength of emergency powers, and domestic factors shape which instruments are institutionalized. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, cited at turn U16; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on access, not availability. The article is gold open access (CC BY-NC) at SAGE, as Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar all say, but every request to journals.sagepub.com for its PDF or full text was answered with a browser challenge or 403, from this client and from a second fetcher. No other lawful copy was found: OpenAlex lists no repository copy, Europe PMC holds none, and web searches found no preprint or author copy (Rooney’s Vanderbilt dissertation on emergency powers is a different work). It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied or the publisher’s site can be reached. No NOTE is filed. Free copy: doi:10.1177/2053168019892436 (SAGE gold open access). |
| LIT-1487 v2 | Autocratization and States of Emergency in Comparative Perspective | Dagan & Benvenisty (2026), Israel Democracy Institute. A comparative study of five formerly stable democracies that underwent substantial autocratization (South Korea, India, Hungary, Venezuela and Turkey) finds a clear link between states of emergency and accelerated erosion of democracy and autocratic consolidation. Their intersection undermined democracy through three channels: formal emergency powers; extraordinary powers functionally equivalent to them though not so defined in law; and emergency rhetoric framing measures as urgent and necessary. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1129) from the Israel Democracy Institute’s web page, which is the whole of what is published; worth reading only for its three channels (formal emergency powers, powers functionally equivalent to them, emergency rhetoric) and its account of Hungary’s successive emergencies since 2015. A think-tank summary, not peer-reviewed, with no sources or method, of five cases chosen because they autocratized; the authors say the convergence of emergency and autocratization “is not inevitable”. Not evidence for a causal link. |
| LIT-1489 v2 | Temporary Protection and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Napoleonic Blockade | Juhász (2018). A natural experiment on temporary trade protection: regions of the French Empire that were, for exogenous reasons, better shielded from British trade during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) expanded mechanized cotton spinning more than exposed regions. In the long run they kept higher activity in mechanized spinning and higher industrial value added per capita until the second half of the nineteenth century, but not later. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1122) from the author’s working draft of 17 December 2015, not the version of record; worth reading as the first well-identified evidence that temporary protection can leave a lasting industry behind it. Departments more shielded from British trade by the Napoleonic blockade built more mechanized cotton spinning, kept a larger industry through 1887 and had more productive firms in 1840; industrial value added was higher in 1860 and not detectably from 1896. The long-run instrument is weak (first-stage F mostly below 10). The protection was a war blockade followed by post-war tariffs, not a temporary tariff lifted, and what persisted was the industry, not the protection. |
| LIT-1493 v3 | When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change | Pierson (1993). Public policies shape political change, but research on policy feedback has been anecdotal. Feedback works through two mechanisms: policies give political actors resources and incentives, and they give them information and cues that encourage particular interpretations of politics. Both act on government elites, interest groups and mass publics, and the article sets out a research agenda for general propositions on when policies are politically consequential. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turn U16; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list no open copy and no repository full text, JSTOR and Cambridge Core (which now hosts World Politics’ back issues) offer it only by subscription or purchase, and a web search found no author or institutional copy, only course-site postings behind logins. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1495 v4 | Emergency Powers | Scheuerman (2006). A review of competing models of emergency legal regulation after 11 September 2001. Drawing on political science and sociology, it argues that constitutional relativists, defenders of an extralegal model and common lawyers ignore the institutional dynamics of modern executive power, in which the executive has incentives to declare, perpetuate and exploit emergencies; only a legal-formalist approach such as Ackerman’s attends to them. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turn U16; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on access, not availability. Unpaywall and OpenAlex list the publisher’s version as free to read at Annual Reviews (hybrid, given as CC BY-SA), but every request to annualreviews.org, the PDF and the article page, met a Cloudflare bot check (403), from both this client and a second fetcher. No other copy was found: OpenAlex lists no repository copy, Semantic Scholar has no record of the DOI, and a web search found none. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied or the publisher’s site can be reached; it is the one of its batch to retry first. No NOTE is filed. Free copy: doi:10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.2.061206.074644 (Annual Reviews, free to read). |
| LIT-1499 v3 | Security: A New Framework for Analysis | Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde (1998). The Copenhagen School’s framework for security studies. Security is widened beyond the military to political, economic, societal and environmental sectors, and treated as securitization: a speech act in which an actor presents an issue as an existential threat to a referent object, which, if the audience accepts it, justifies emergency measures outside normal politics. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turn U16; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on availability. It is a commercial book (Lynne Rienner, 1997/98; De Gruyter digital edition 2022) with no lawful open copy: Unpaywall and OpenAlex list it as closed with no repository copy, the De Gruyter page offers no open access, and the Internet Archive’s search found no copy, lending or otherwise. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1587 v2 | Destabilization Rights: How Public Law Litigation Succeeds | Sabel & Simon (2004). Public law litigation has moved from command-and-control injunctions to experimentalist regimes: negotiated, provisional and revisable standards with transparency and stakeholder participation, triggered by a right to disentrench an institution that persistently fails its obligations. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Columbia Law School’s Scholarship Archive holds the article at scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/737, with the PDF at https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1824&context=faculty_scholarship; on 2026-10-29 the PDF returned a Cloudflare ‘Just a moment’ 403 to curl and to WebFetch, though the landing page loaded. OpenAlex lists the record as closed with no other copy; Sabel’s old Columbia papers page (www2.law.columbia.edu/sabel) did not connect; a web search found only a Spanish translation, which does not count. A browser fetch of the Columbia PDF is the cheapest way to read it. The summary is from the abstract and the exchange. |
| LIT-1589 v2 | Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 | ICJ (2019), advisory opinion of 25 February 2019. By 13 votes to 1, the decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed in 1968, because the Chagos Archipelago was detached in 1965 without the free and genuine will of the people of the territory, a colony’s consent given under its administering Power’s authority not counting; the UK’s continued administration is a continuing wrongful act to be ended as rapidly as possible, and all Member States must co-operate to complete the decolonization. Resettlement of Chagossians is called a human-rights issue for the General Assembly and is not decided. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1361) in full, from the UN’s official copy of the opinion, A/73/773 (the Court’s own PDF returned a Cloudflare 403); worth reading as the Court’s holding that a colony’s consent to its own partition, given under the administering Power’s authority, is not the free will of its people, so that Mauritius’s decolonization was not lawfully completed and the UK’s administration of the Chagos is a continuing wrongful act. Read it knowing that it is advisory, that its ‘people’ is the people of the whole colony of Mauritius, not the Chagossians, and that it leaves their return to the General Assembly in one sentence (para. 181) with no operative point; the separate opinions and dissent were not read. |
| LIT-1592 v3 | Rights Essentialism and Remedial Equilibration | Levinson (1999). Against “rights essentialism”, constitutional rights are not defined apart from their remedies: rights and remedies are shaped together, so the practical content of a right depends on how it is enforced. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists a green copy on SSRN, abstract 155564 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=155564, doi:10.2139/ssrn.155564); on 2026-10-29 SSRN returned a 403 to curl and to WebFetch. A CORE PDF named in a search also returned a 403 and could not be identified. Web searches found no author or repository copy. A browser fetch of the SSRN paper is the cheapest way to read it. Fiss’s Forms of Justice (LIT-1600, NOTE-1364), read the same day, states its thesis in advance: a judge ‘will tailor the right to fit the remedy’. The summary is from the abstract and the exchange. |
| LIT-1593 v2 | “That’s When the Nightmare Started”: UK and US Forced Displacement of the Chagossians and Ongoing Colonial Crimes | Human Rights Watch (2023). Interviews with 43 Chagossians in the UK, Mauritius and the Seychelles, 14 others, and a documentary record drawn largely from UK court judgments. It shows UK officials planning the 1965–73 removal with the US and calling the islanders non-permanent to avoid UN reporting, and argues that the expulsion, the continuing bar on return and treatment on racial grounds are crimes against humanity — continuing deportation or forcible transfer, other inhumane acts, and persecution — by the UK, the first jointly with the US. It asks for return, compensation and satisfaction. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1365) in full, from Human Rights Watch’s own PDF; worth reading as the documented account, from UK files quoted in English judgments and 43 Chagossian interviews, that UK officials planned the removal with the US and described the islands as having no permanent population, knowing otherwise, to avoid reporting to the UN, and as the case that the continuing bar on return is a continuing crime against humanity. Read it knowing that it is an advocacy report, that the archival quotations are at one remove, that its interviewees were reached through representative groups, that its continuing-crime theory has not been tested in an international court, and that the governments’ replies in its annexes are page images not read here. |
| LIT-1594 v2 | Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science | Jasanoff (2003), Minerva 41: 223–244. Predictive ‘technologies of hubris’ — risk assessment, cost–benefit analysis, modelling — understate what lies outside their frame, pre-empt political debate and cannot take in challenges to their framing, and formal participation does not cure this. She proposes ‘technologies of humility’, habits of thought organized around framing, vulnerability, distribution and learning: ‘what is the purpose; who will be hurt; who benefits; and how can we know?‘ | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1357) in full, from a copy of the published article on a University of Colorado course page (sciencepolicy.colorado.edu, ENVS 5100); worth reading as the source of the pair ‘technologies of hubris’ and ‘technologies of humility’, and of four focal points — framing, vulnerability, distribution, learning — for deliberating on what predictive methods leave out. Read it knowing that it is a programmatic essay about assessing technologies before adoption, not about measuring harms after, that it argues formal participation is not enough, and that its focal points are proposed and untested. |
| LIT-1598 v2 | Chagos Islanders in Mauritius and the UK: Forced Displacement and Onward Migration | Jeffery (2011). An ethnography of Chagos islanders displaced to Mauritius and onward to the UK: their marginalization, their political organization, and their disagreements over sovereignty, the Diego Garcia base, and negotiation against litigation. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports the book closed with no open location. Manchester University Press sells it in print and as an ebook; De Gruyter Brill, Torrossa, Perlego and library catalogues (JSTOR, Project MUSE) offer only paid or institutional access. Web searches for an open-access edition or an author’s deposit found none. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Human Rights Watch’s report (LIT-1593, NOTE-1365), read the same day, does not cite it but confirms from its own interviews that Chagossians disagree about sovereignty while agreeing on return. |
| LIT-1599 v2 | Responsibility for Failures of Government | Thompson (2014). When many officials contribute to a government failure, individual blame cannot be located, and the remedy is institutional responsibility: assigning prospective duties to design, oversee and correct the structures that produce failures, as well as retrospective accountability. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists a green copy in Harvard’s DASH repository (http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12172792; file https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstreams/7312037d-241d-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b/download). On 2026-10-29 the file returned 429 Too Many Requests (Retry-After 900) to curl and WebFetch on every attempt over about an hour, including after the Retry-After window; the record page loaded once. CORE’s mirror (core.ac.uk/download/28948275.pdf) returned a 403. A browser fetch of the DASH file is the cheapest way to read it. The summary is from the abstract and the exchange. |
| LIT-1600 v2 | The Supreme Court, 1978 Term | Fiss (1979), the Foreword ‘The Forms of Justice’, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 1. Adjudication gives meaning to public values; structural reform, in which a judge reorganizes a state bureaucracy that threatens constitutional values, through a continuing injunction, is a form of it, and dispute resolution has no normative priority over it. The court’s legitimacy rests on its process, dialogue and independence, not on consent. The remedy is instrumental and revisable, not deduced from a violation; because success depends on actors the judge cannot control, the remedy threatens his independence and the right bends to fit it. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1364) in full, from Yale Law School’s repository (openYLS, fss_papers/1220); worth reading as the defence of structural reform as adjudication: courts exist to give meaning to public values, not to resolve disputes, so a judge may restructure a state bureaucracy through a continuing, revisable injunction, in which victim, spokesman and beneficiary come apart and the wrongdoer disappears. Read it knowing that its hard problem is the remedy — rights and remedies jointly fix a value’s meaning, and a judge dependent on others for success ‘will tailor the right to fit the remedy’ — and that Fiss leaves this as a dilemma to live with; the formula ‘Reversal ≠ Repair ≠ Structural reform’ is the exchange’s, not his. |
| LIT-1601 v2 | Violence and the Word | Cover (1986), 95 Yale L.J. 1601–1629. Legal interpretation ‘takes place in a field of pain and death’: a judge’s interpretation is a mandate for the deeds of others in roles, so its meaning depends on a social organization of violence — secondary rules that make wardens heed judicial papers, and plural courts so that no single mind’s interpretation becomes a deed — and must attend to the conditions of effective enforcement. Perpetrator and victim of that violence cannot share its meaning. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1384) in full, from Yale Law School’s repository (openYLS, Yale Law Journal collection); worth reading as the account of legal interpretation as an act whose meaning is bound to deeds others carry out in roles: a judge’s word becomes violence only through enforcers who heed it, so interpretation attends to ‘the conditions of effective domination’, and when the role structure fails the judge’s words change meaning, as in Judge Stern’s Tiede sentence. Read it knowing that it argues from criminal sentencing and the death penalty, in US institutions, that its psychology is Milgram’s, and that it does not treat enforcers faced with rival authorities. |
| LIT-1604 v2 | Autocratic Legalism | Scheppele (2018), 85 U. Chi. L. Rev. 545–583. Leaders elected on a mandate to sweep away the old order use constitutional amendment, legislation and appointments to capture the courts, election bodies, media and other checks on them, borrowing tactics from one another (Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador). They keep democratic and legal forms and avoid the mass rights violations publics have learned to recognize, so the attack on liberal constitutionalism is carried out in the forms of law and seen too late. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1390) in full, from the University of Chicago Law Review’s own PDF (the Chicago Unbound copy returned a Cloudflare 403); worth reading as the profile of elected leaders who capture courts, election bodies and media by constitutional amendment, legislation and appointment, borrowing tactics from one another and avoiding the signals of twentieth-century tyranny. Read it knowing that it is a symposium essay built from case narratives, that the leaders’ intent and the borrowing are inferred, not shown, that its autocrats change the standards and the correctors rather than only the cost of correction, and that its remedy is a page on civic education. |
| LIT-1606 v2 | Noem v. Abrego Garcia | Supreme Court (2025). On the government’s application, the Court left in place the requirement that the government “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador, where it acknowledged he had been removed in violation of a withholding order, and asked the district court to clarify its direction to “effectuate” his return, with deference to the executive in foreign affairs; the government was to be prepared to share the steps it had taken. Three justices would have denied the application in full. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1376) in full, from the Court’s own slip opinion on supremecourt.gov; worth reading as the order that upheld a district court’s power to require the government to “facilitate” release from a foreign state’s custody, on the government’s own acknowledgment that the removal was illegal, while leaving open whether it could require the government to “effectuate” return. Read it knowing that it is a two-page interim order with one paragraph of reasons, that its facts are the parties’ representations, and that the four-page document includes a statement by three justices, not the Court, rejecting the argument that courts lose power once a deportee crosses the border. |
| LIT-1607 v2 | Compliance with Judicial Decisions | Hillebrecht (2024). A review of research on compliance with court rulings, organized by three determinants (the capacity of the institutions that must comply, their political commitment, and the nature of the ruling), proposing compliance as a process rather than a yes-or-no outcome, with systematic noncompliance and time as open directions. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the chapter closed with no repository copy; the DOI resolves to Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/edited-volume/55208/chapter/440434056), which offers it only by subscription and returned 403 to this client; web searches for an author’s copy, a preprint or an SSRN deposit, and Lee Epstein’s page for the handbook, found none. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1609 v2 | Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means | Herd & Moynihan (2018). Learning, compliance and psychological costs in people’s encounters with the state are policy choices that shape who gets benefits and rights, and they fall unequally; burdens can restrict access without any formal change to eligibility. | Deferred — filed 2026-10-27; reading stopped at a skim on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1382): only the Introduction (pp. 1–14), from the Russell Sage Foundation’s free excerpt, was read. No lawful free copy of the whole book was found: OpenAlex reports it closed, Project MUSE lists it as not open access, and the publisher’s page offers only the contents, the authors’ note and the introduction. The introduction supports the summary. Read it knowing that one figure there is inconsistent ($1.2 billion stated as 1.2 percent of GDP). |
| LIT-1610 v2 | The Death of the Irreparable Injury Rule | Laycock (1991). The rule that equity acts only when legal remedies are inadequate does not decide cases: courts choose remedies on other grounds, and irreparable injury matters mainly in preliminary relief, which turns on the risk of harm before final judgment rather than on the final choice of remedy. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed; the DOI resolves to Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/50583), subscription only; the University of Texas law faculty pages list Laycock’s related Harvard Law Review article (103 Harv. L. Rev. 687, 1990) and a Texas Lawyer piece of 1991 with no file attached; web searches found only paid ebooks and library records. The 1990 article is a separate work and is not registered. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1614 v2 | Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government | Pettit (1997). Freedom is non-domination: not being subject to another’s capacity to interfere arbitrarily, whether or not they interfere; a republic secures it through institutions that make public power contestable by those it affects. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed; the DOI resolves to Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/3937), subscription only; web searches found only library catalogue records offering licensed ebook access. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1615 v2 | The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Third Edition | Rosenberg (2023, 3rd ed.). The “constrained court” view: courts produce significant social reform only when other institutions, political actors and conditions already support it, so a judicial victory is not by itself a change in practice. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the third edition closed; the DOI resolves to a BiblioVault landing page; the University of Chicago Press page for the book has its excerpt link disabled and offers no free chapter; web searches found only retailers, paid ebooks and library records. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1618 v2 | Accountability in a computerized society | Nissenbaum (1996). Four barriers erode accountability for harms caused through computer systems: the problem of many hands, the acceptance of bugs as inevitable, the computer as scapegoat, and ownership without liability. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; the author’s own copy exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Nissenbaum’s Cornell Tech site hosts it at https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/accountability.pdf (found by web search, 2026-10-29). curl failed TLS verification on that host (“self-signed certificate in certificate chain”) and WebFetch got HTTP 503 from it and from the site’s front page. OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report the Springer article closed; the CiteSeerX record (10.1.1.40.77) redirects to the Wayback Machine, which reset the connection; the Georgetown handle 10822/890901 returned 404; the old NYU copy at nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/accountability.pdf returned 403. ResearchGate has no full text. The failure is on access, not availability. A browser fetch of the Cornell copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1619 v2 | El-Masri v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia | ECtHR Grand Chamber (2012), unanimous. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was responsible for inhuman and degrading treatment in 23 days’ incommunicado detention in a Skopje hotel, for torture by a CIA rendition team at Skopje Airport carried out with its agents’ acquiescence and help, for handing him to US custody despite a real risk of further ill-treatment it knew or ought to have known of, for his whole captivity in Afghanistan under Article 5 as an enforced disappearance, and for the lack of an effective investigation; EUR 60,000 awarded. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1391) in full, from the Court’s own HUDOC copy of the judgment (93 pages, with both concurring opinions); worth reading as the Grand Chamber’s holding that a state which handed a man to CIA agents is responsible for their torture of him on its territory with its acquiescence, for exposing him to a real risk of ill-treatment abroad, and under Article 5 for his whole captivity abroad, with the burden of proof on the state once he entered its control. Read it knowing that the facts were found by inference against a non-cooperating state, that the receiving state’s responsibility is expressly not decided, and that the person was free by the time of judgment, so the question of who could undo a continuing transfer does not arise in it. |
| LIT-1620 v2 | How a plantation became paradise: changing representations of the homeland among displaced Chagos islanders | Jeffery (2007). Compares songs composed in Chagos with songs composed in exile, and reads how a plantation society came to be represented as a lost paradise in a standardized collective narrative that helped political mobilization; as the exchange reported it, the standardization also complicated legal claims. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the article (JRAI 13(4): 951–968) closed with no repository copy; Wiley’s page offers paid access only; the University of Edinburgh’s research portal, where a deposit would be, returned 403 to curl and to WebFetch, so whether it holds a file is unchecked; web searches found no author’s copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1646 v2 | Opinion Dynamics on Discourse Sheaves | Hansen & Ghrist (2020; SIAM J. Appl. Math. 2021). A discourse sheaf gives each agent a private opinion space and each edge a space of discussed topics, with a linear expression map from each agent into each edge, which may be selective, scaled or sign-reversed (“lie”). Sheaf-Laplacian diffusion converges to the projection onto the global sections: agreement in expression, not in held opinion, so stable polarized distributions exist. Stubbornness, control and observability reduce to relative cohomology. Letting the expression maps diffuse converges to the nearest sheaf of which the opinions are a section (“learning to lie”); joint diffusion is gradient descent on the discord, and a conserved quantity keeps the opinions from collapsing to zero when it starts indefinite. Bounded confidence and antagonism are nonlinear Laplacians. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1222), from the arXiv preprint; worth reading as the clearest formal case of agreement on what is expressed without identity of what is held, and of correspondence maps revised by interaction. Mathematics with toy examples, no data; its expression learning reaches coherence with nothing outside the loop to check it, which the authors call “learning to lie”. |
| LIT-1678 | The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity | Ord (2020). Estimates the risk of an existential catastrophe this century at about one in six, mostly from human sources such as unaligned artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics, and argues that safeguarding humanity’s potential is a defining priority, with reasons drawn from the future, from what we owe the past, and from the present. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-29, not read; set Unfetched the same day under ADR-053: the author offers a free chapter at theprecipice.com behind a newsletter sign-up, which this client did not complete, and Bloomsbury’s chapter preview on Issuu answered HTTP 403. A human reader can likely open the free chapter. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Ord’s “The Precipice Revisited” (2024) (LIT-1720) and Ord’s “Shaping humanity’s longterm trajectory” (LIT-1761). |
| LIT-1681 | A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption | Gardiner (2006). Climate change is a “perfect moral storm”: three problems that threaten ethical action converge in it. The global storm is the familiar reading, a tragedy of the commons between states with no effective global governance, worsened by uncertainty about national impacts, a status quo bias and skewed vulnerabilities. The intergenerational storm is worse. Carbon dioxide’s long life makes climate change resilient, backloaded and deferred, so the benefits of emitting fall to the present and the costs to later generations. That is a Pure Intergenerational Problem, in which every generation rationally overpollutes and the usual remedies are unavailable, because the generations do not coexist. The theoretical storm is that our theories handle uncertainty, intergenerational equity and contingent persons badly. Together they invite moral corruption: by selective attention, each generation can seem to act while exploiting its position in time, and need not admit it, even to itself. Even the prominence of the global model may be such a convenience, since it assumes states represent their citizens “in perpetuity”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1252) from the publisher’s PDF, republished with White Horse Press’s permission on the Rachel Carson Center’s Environment & Society Portal (environmentandsociety.org/node/5976); worth reading as the short statement of why concern for future generations fails in practice: a self-interest that is generation-relative, and a moral motive that can be corrupted without being given up. |
| LIT-1720 | The Precipice Revisited | Ord (2024), a talk revisiting the four largest risks of The Precipice about five years after its text was fixed. Existential risk from climate change is down: emissions now track between the two lower RCP pathways, not RCP 8.5, and the IPCC has narrowed the likely climate sensitivity from 1.5–4.5°C to 2.5–4°C. Nuclear risk is up: the invasion of Ukraine, the coming expiry of New START with a likely new arms race, and the halving of funding for the field when the MacArthur Foundation, about 45% of it, withdrew. Pandemic and AI risk are mixed. Covid showed weak institutions and a unity against a common threat that lasted months, but vaccines came within a year; language models replaced game-playing agents as the frontier, which weakens the classic threat model, while racing between the largest companies and new government attention pull opposite ways. The book’s per-century estimates (climate and nuclear 1 in 1,000, pandemics 1 in 30, unaligned AI 1 in 10) have not moved at their rounding. The world is starting to build existential security. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1317), in place of LIT-1678, which could not be fetched here; worth reading as the author’s own update of The Precipice’s risk estimates, and as the only open text that restates the book’s four headline numbers and its notion of existential security; it does not carry the book’s moral argument. |
| LIT-1773 | Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority | Bostrom (2013). Defines existential risk as a threat of premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or of the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable development: risks of at least crushing severity and pan-generational scope. Gives four classes (human extinction, permanent stagnation, flawed realisation, subsequent ruination), the last two defined normatively. On an aggregative, time-neutral view even Earth alone could hold 10^16 future lives, so cutting the risk by a millionth of a percentage point is worth a hundred million lives. Hence the maxipok rule of thumb for impersonal moral action: maximise the probability of an outcome that avoids existential catastrophe. Other ethical views (Adams’ shared project of humanity, preference satisfaction, custodial duties to ancestors and descendants) concur to differing degrees. Under moral uncertainty, keeping options open recasts sustainability as a trajectory. The risk is neglected: in Scopus, papers on “human extinction” number fewer than those on dung beetles. It is also undersupplied, as a pan-generational public good that even a world state could only partly capture. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1321) from the published version posted on Bostrom’s existential-risk site; worth reading as the standard definition and typology of existential risk, and for the record’s purposes as the one longtermist source that discusses motivation: it diagnoses a “deficit of motivation” and gives, through Adams, a ground in humanity’s shared project. |
| LIT-1791 v2 | Explaining the nature of power: a three-process theory | Turner (2005). Reverses the standard theory of power: group formation produces influence (persuasion, through shared identity and prototypicality), influence is the basis of power (persuasion, authority, coercion), and power produces control of resources, rather than resources producing power. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-29, not read; set Unfetched the same day under ADR-053: the publisher’s own free copy exists (Unpaywall: bronze, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/ejsp.244). On 2026-10-29 Wiley answered HTTP 403, and again on 2026-10-30, when the 403 came with a Cloudflare challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge), which was not retried. The copy in ANU Open Research, the Australian National University’s repository, is restricted until 2037, so it is no lawful free copy now. A human reader can likely open the Wiley copy. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Free copy: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/ejsp.244. |
| LIT-1823 | Learning from Mistakes is Easier Said Than Done: Group and Organizational Influences on the Detection and Correction of Human Error | Edmondson (1996), Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 32(1), 5–28. A study of drug-administration errors in patient-care groups in two hospitals, reported to show that groups differ systematically not only in how often errors occur but in how likely they are to be detected and learned from, with unit climate and leadership bearing on whether errors are reported. Not read; from the abstract as indexed. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-29, not read. A lawful free copy is located at an exact address: an author upload on Edmondson’s ResearchGate profile, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amy_Edmondson/publication/250959492_Learning_from_Mistakes_Is_Easier_Said_Than_Done_Group_and_Organizational_Influences_on_the_Detection_and_Correction_of_Human_Error/links/00b49535113800fcce000000.pdf, of the kind the owner’s ruling of 2026-10-29 counts. On 2026-10-29 it returned 403 to curl and to WebFetch, so the failure is on access, not availability. The search listing labels that file with the DOI of the journal’s 2004 reprint of the article (10.1177/0021886304263849, JABS 40(1), 66–90), so it may be the reprint rather than the 1996 printing; the text is the same article. OpenAlex reports both printings closed with no repository copy, and SAGE’s pages are paid. A browser fetch of the ResearchGate file is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1831 v2 | Can Social Contact Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria | Scacco & Warren (2018), APSR 112(3). 849 randomly sampled Christian and Muslim young men in Kaduna, Nigeria, were randomized to a sixteen-week computer course or a survey-only control, then to a mixed or single-religion class and to a same- or other-religion partner. Four to six weeks after it, no arm changed stated prejudice, but the course raised giving to everyone, and mixed classes discriminated less than single-religion classes in a dictator game (about 70% less) and a destruction game. Against the control, the single-religion classes discriminated more and the mixed classes about the same. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1418) in full, from the published version deposited by the WZB on EconStor (https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/194860/1/f-21548-full-text-Scacco-et_al-Contact-v3.pdf); worth reading as a randomized field test of intergroup contact in a conflict city that measured attitudes and behaviour separately and found that sixteen weeks of cooperative contact left stated prejudice unchanged while reducing discrimination in two incentivized games. Read it knowing that its behavioural measures are games played at home four to six weeks after the course, that the contact effect is mostly a rise in discrimination in the single-religion classes rather than a fall in the mixed ones, that the effect on unfamiliar out-group members holds only for Christians, and that its “pre-analysis plan” was registered in August 2015, after the endline survey, though before the authors had the outcome data. |
| LIT-1832 | Bancoult, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Office | Divisional Court (Laws LJ, Gibbs J), 3 November 2000, [2000] EWHC 413 (Admin), [2001] QB 1067. It quashed section 4 of the BIOT Immigration Ordinance 1971, which barred the Chagossians from the territory, because a power to legislate for the “peace, order, and good government” of a territory does not extend to exiling its population (by the Court of Appeal’s account of it in 2007, §§6 and 57). Its recital of the 1960s files is the source of most of the archival quotations in LIT-1593. Not read. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. BAILII publishes the judgment free at https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2000/413.html, the address Human Rights Watch cites (LIT-1593); on 2026-10-29 it returned a proof-of-work bot check (Anubis, “Making sure you’re not a bot!”) to curl and HTTP 403 to WebFetch, so the failure is on access, not availability. The National Archives’ Find Case Law has no copy (404 at caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/admin/2000/413); the ICLR report ([2001] QB 1067) is paywalled; no other free copy was found by web search. The Court of Appeal’s judgment of 2007 ([2007] EWCA Civ 498, on Find Case Law) quotes this judgment’s §§42, 55 and 57 but none of the archival documents. A browser fetch of the BAILII page is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1841 v2 | Abrego Garcia v. Noem, Order Granting Expedited Discovery (D. Md., ECF No. 79) | D. Md. (Xinis, J.), 15 April 2025. On remand from LIT-1606, the court had directed the government to “take all available steps to facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return and to declare, from personal knowledge, where he was, what it had done and what it would do. Finding that it had disclosed nothing and “appear[s] to have done nothing”, the court reads “facilitate” by the dictionaries and by the government’s own record of facilitated returns, rejects its narrower reading (removing “domestic obstacles”), and grants fifteen interrogatories, fifteen document requests and four depositions, including into who authorizes the detention in CECOT. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1417) in full, from CourtListener’s RECAP copy of the filed order (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.79.0.pdf); worth reading as the district court’s first reasoned answer, on remand from the Supreme Court’s order of 10 April 2025, to the government’s account of what it could do: it fixes “facilitate” as taking the steps available toward release from El Salvador’s custody, measures it against the government’s own past practice of facilitated returns, finds that the government has shown no step at all, and opens discovery into what was done, what will be done and who authorizes the detention. Read it knowing that it is an eight-page discovery order, not a ruling on contempt or on whether return was possible; that its facts are the record of four days; and that what the discovery produced, and everything after it on the docket, is not read here. |
| LIT-1852 | The Nature of Epistemic Injustice | Maitra (2010), Philosophical Books 51(4), a critical study of Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. It reports the book’s definitions with its pages: testimonial injustice is a credibility deficit owed to the hearer’s identity prejudice (pp. 19, 28, 35), and hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding by hermeneutical marginalization, systematic or incidental (pp. 153, 155, 158). It argues the testimonial account is too broad, since a hearer owes a speaker a matched credibility judgement only in some relationships, and too narrow, since epistemic bad luck and stereotypes held through careless evidence-gathering can also wrong a speaker; and that both kinds of injustice mix individual and structural prejudice. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1428) in full, from the author’s draft of 14 July 2010 on her University of Michigan page (https://public.websites.umich.edu/~imaitra/Research/NEI0710.pdf), which the owner ruled a lawful copy on 2026-10-30. The draft is marked “Draft – Please do not cite without author’s permission”, so the record cites the published version (Philosophical Books 51(4), 195–211) and treats the draft only as the copy read. Worth reading as a secondary report of Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (LIT-1004, unread), with page references to the book for its definitions and central cases, and as an argument that testimonial injustice needs a hearer’s obligation to the speaker and can occur without individual identity prejudice. |
| LIT-1858 | Changing Norms to Change Behavior | Miller and Prentice (2016), Annual Review of Psychology 67:339–361. By its abstract (the only source used here): a review of norm-based interventions, which give people information about their peers’ behaviour and attitudes, with special attention to college drinking and environment-friendly behaviour, and of the conditions under which norm information is most likely to change the targeted behaviour. Expected to supply, for CLAIM-415, the review-level evidence on when a misperceived collective norm shapes behaviour and when correcting it does not. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-30, not read. The publisher’s own free copy exists (bronze): www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015013. On 2026-10-30 Annual Reviews answered HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge). The challenge was not retried. A human reader can likely open it. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015013. |
| LIT-1861 | Can populations be healthy? Perspectives from Georges Canguilhem and Geoffrey Rose | Giroux (2021), HPLS 43:111. Canguilhem held that health and disease apply only to individuals taken as organic totalities, because normativity, the capacity to institute new norms, is anchored in the organism; at the population level he preferred “hygiene” or “salubrity”. Giroux argues that debates over units of selection and biological individuality loosen his link between individuality and organism, and that social epidemiology (Rose’s causes of incidence, integral variables such as herd immunity and social capital, multilevel models) gives reasons for a concept of population health not reducible to individual health, while denying populations the ontological unity of an organism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1452), from the published article in PubMed Central (PMC8527978; made available in the PMC Open Access Subset under Springer Nature’s COVID-19 terms), fetched as XML through the Europe PMC REST API. Worth reading for two things. It argues, from social epidemiology (Rose’s population causes, herd immunity, integral variables), that some health properties belong to populations and not to their members, against Canguilhem’s restriction of health to the individual organism. And it quotes Canguilhem’s definition of health as normativity in his own (translated) words: “the possibility of tolerating infractions of the habitual norm and instituting new norms in new situations” (The Normal and the Pathological, 1991, pp. 196–197). The Canguilhem it reports is at second hand. |
| LIT-1905 | Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008 | Massumi, interviewed by Joel McKim, Inflexions 3 (2009); reprinted as ch. 2 of Politics of Affect (2015). Affect, after Spinoza and Deleuze, is an ability to affect and be affected that “governs a transition, where a body passes from one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation”, and the transition is felt. Massumi offers this as “a proposition”, not “a general definition that you can apply”. Microperceptual shocks prime bodies differentially (“affective attunement”); affect “is not a content that can be transported from one event to another”; micropolitics modulates a situation’s unacted-out potential. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1488), from the journal’s own open copy at inflexions.org, HTML and PDF (20 pp.). This is the interview that Massumi’s Politics of Affect (LIT-1907) reprints as its second chapter, and it carries, word for word, the definition of affect that Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) quote from that book. Worth reading as the shortest statement of Massumi’s account of affect, microperception and micropolitics. |
| LIT-1907 | Politics of Affect | Massumi (2015), Polity. Six interviews (2002–2014) on affect and politics. Affect is the capacity to affect and be affected, a felt transition in a body’s capacities; the book builds on it “differential affective attunement”, “collective individuation”, “micropolitics” and “ontopower”. Unread beyond the publisher’s sample; its ch. 2 is read in its first printing, LIT-1905. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. Polity gives it no DOI, and no open copy turned up in OpenAlex or web search. The publisher’s reading sample (content.e-bookshelf.de, 27 pp.: preface, contributors, sources, and the opening of ch. 1) was read. Chapter 2, where the parent’s quotations sit, first appeared as an open interview in Inflexions 3 (2009), filed and read as LIT-1905. |
| LIT-1910 | The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field | Massumi (2017), Open Humanities Press, open access. Three pieces: an interview with Krystian Woznicki on movement and capitalism (ch. 1), a filmed interview with Adrian Heathfield (ch. 2), and an essay on collective expression (ch. 3). Movement is qualitative transformation in relation; capitalism is an ontopower that captures “bare activity”; there is always “an excess of activity over action”. Micropolitics aims at “a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies, co-habiting the field in a way that facilitates each fully realizing itself” (p. 64), which Massumi calls aesthetic. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1486), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Open Humanities Press, CC BY-SA 4.0). The passages Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) lean on were read in context and their quotation checked; most of the book was not read. A book of three long interviews and essays on movement, capitalism, micropolitics and SenseLab practice. |
| LIT-1947 | Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology | Metzinger (2021), Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 8(1):43–66. Argues for a global moratorium on research that risks creating artificial consciousness, on the ground that synthetic phenomenology may create artificial suffering. Unread: a lawful open copy exists and could not be fetched. The argument is known here only from the author’s restatement in Metzinger 2024 (LIT-1943, pp. 484–485). There, artificial consciousness “may involve a consciously experienced sense of self that may in turn generate artificial suffering”, and a moratorium is proposed “until we know definitively, or at least reasonably accurately, what we are doing”. | Unfetched — searched 2026-11-01 for a lawful full text. One exists, but this client could not fetch it, so the paper is not read and no NOTE is filed. The version of record is open access under CC BY, per Crossref, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar, at worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S270507852150003X. It returned a Cloudflare 403 challenge to curl. A copy of the published PDF, which a web search shows headed “J. AI. Consci. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com”, is at philarchive.org/archive/METASA-4. It returned a 403 bot check to curl and to WebFetch, and philpapers.org/archive/METASA-4.pdf did the same. Europe PMC and the Internet Archive hold no copy, and the Wayback Machine’s index reset the connection. The failure is on access, not availability, and a browser fetch of either address is the cheapest way to read the paper. Its argument is known here only from Metzinger’s own restatement in the epilogue of LIT-1943 (pp. 484–485), which cites it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-2002 v2 | Human cooperation is strong among individuals but fragile between groups | Van Lange & Bergmann (2026), doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00580-z. A Perspective. Cooperation is strong in dyads and fragile between groups. Categorization alone yields mistrust and in-group favouritism by bounded reciprocity. Only conflicting interests, real or perceived, turn that into costly competition and hate, and the processes that build in-group cooperation can fuel intergroup conflict. Source of THEORY-1352, read in NOTE-1537. | Active |