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A wry and poignant reminiscence of a 15-year-old gay Jewish boy in Brooklyn in the 1960s, and his unexpected trajectory from a life behind a rack of dresses in his grandmother bra and girdle store, to the halls of Payne Whitney, the Harvard of psychiatric clinics, populated by a captivating group of wealthy neurotics who subtly begin to change him in unexpected ways. The other patients include a famous Broadway producer who becomes his unlikely mentor, an elegant woman who claims to be the ex-mistress of newly elected president John F. Kennedy, a snooty Ivy League architect, and a seductive young Contessa. At the center of the story is a brilliant young psychiatrist who promises to cure a young boy of his homosexuality and give him the normalcy for which he so longs. With a gimlet eye and a gift for storytelling, Gaines captures his childhood shtetl like a Thornton Wilder play: a busy shopping street in the shadow of a elevated line; a chorus of harpy saleswomen; a dotty aunt; a lonely woman dying of multiple sclerosis; a loving but wildly philandering grandfather; a giant, empty movie theater at the corner, his portal to the outside world; and a pair of tormenting bullies who own the corner candy store and whose daily taunts drive him to the edge. Lyrical, passionate and illuminating, this is the crowning achievement of a skillful storyteller who has woven a tale that delights and disturbs.--From dust jacket

Climate change is already producing ecological, social, and economic impacts on fisheries, and these effects are expected to increase in frequency and magnitude in the future. Fisheries governance and regulations can alter socio-ecological resilience to climate change impacts via harvest control rules and incentives driving fisher behavior, yet there are no syntheses or conceptual frameworks for examining how institutions and their regulatory approaches can alter fisheries resilience to climate change. We identify nine key climate resilience criteria for fisheries socio-ecological systems (SES), defining resilience as the ability of the coupled system of interacting social and ecological components (i.e., the SES) to absorb change while avoiding transformation into a different undesirable state. We then evaluate the capacity of four fisheries regulatory systems that vary in their degree of property rights, including open access, limited entry, and two types of rights-based management, to increase or inhibit resilience. Our exploratory assessment of evidence in the literature suggests that these regulatory regimes vary widely in their ability to promote resilient fisheries, with rights-based approaches appearing to offer more resilience benefits in many cases, but detailed characteristics of the regulatory instruments are fundamental.

Resource management and conservation increasingly focus on ecosystem service provisioning and potential tradeoffs among services under different management actions. Application of bioeconomic approaches to tradeoffs assessment is touted as a way to find win-win outcomes or avoid unnecessary stakeholder conflict. Yet, nearly all assessments to date have ignored inherent uncertainties in the provision and valuation of services. We incorporate uncertainty into the ecosystem services analytical framework and show how such inclusion improves optimal decision making. In particular, we show: (1) "suboptimal" solutions can become optimal when uncertainties are accounted for; (2) uncertainty paradoxically makes stakeholders value conservation despite their lack of preference for it; and (3) substantial losses or missed gains in ecosystem service provisioning can be incurred when uncertainty is ignored. Our results highlight the urgency of accounting for uncertainties in ecosystem services in tradeoff assessments given the widespread use of this approach by government agencies and conservation organizations.

Developed democracies proliferated over the past two centuries during an unprecedented era of economic growth, which may be ending. Macroeconomic forecasts predict slowing growth throughout the 21st century for structural reasons such as aging populations, shifts from goods to services, slowing innovation, and debt. Long-run effects of COVID-19 and climate change could further slow growth. Some sustainability scientists assert that slower growth, stagnation, or de-growth is an environmental imperative, especially in developed countries. Whether slow growth is inevitable or planned, we argue that developed democracies should prepare for additional fiscal and social stress, some of which is already apparent. We call for a 'guided civic revival', including government and civic efforts aimed at: reducing inequality; socially integrating diverse populations and building shared identities; increasing economic opportunity for youth; improving return on investment in taxation and public spending; strengthening formal democratic institutions; and investing to improve non-economic drivers of subjective well-being.