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"Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Sir Isaac Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading. Using sustained archival work and multiple critical approaches, Laura Miller asserts that print facilitated the mainstreaming of Newton's ideas. In addition to Newton's reading habits and his manipulation of print conventions in the Principia, she analyzes the implied readership of various "popularizations" as well actual readers whose preferences we can trace and interpret based on the New York Society Library's borrowing records. By beginning with the publication of the Principia, Miller revises the timeline in which Newton's scientific ideas entered eighteenth-century culture"--

The academic literature on taboo language is flourishing not only in fields such as linguistic anthropology or sociolinguistics, but also in disciplines that usually target language itself as the object of study. Although there is more than a century of scholarly writing on taboo language, new and neglected areas and directions continue to provide valuable insights on a universal linguistic behavior. This review tracks four sometimes overlapping clusters: naming and linguistic avoidance behaviors, taboo language and transgression, taboo language in language contact situations, and taboo language in educational settings and other contexts. The discussion in this review includes examples of how taboo language is inextricably meshed with the relationships found among kinship circles, subcultural group members, generational cohorts, and other social groupings. New areas of research that are proving to be attractive to scholars include taboo language in global media translation, subtitling or scalation, language contact situations, and the teaching of taboo terms in second language instruction.

This essay shares some narratives and motivations that led to this special set of JAEAR articles on how knowledge about Asia is generated, constructed and received. What are the benefits, as well as the challenges, of sharing academic research with a broad range of audiences and readerships? When academics move beyond the scholarly text to produce museum exhibits, documentary films, blogs, interviews with journalists, and other forms of media, the results can be highly rewarding but also, at times, at frustrating. The problems we experienced when sharing academic knowledge rarely related to the use of scholarly jargon or esoteric topics, but rather with audience ideologies, stereotypes, and expectations. Our stance as scholars is not necessarily appreciated outside the academy, and can occasionally antagonize the public. In some instances non-specialists misuse or misunderstand our research. This essay, and the articles that follow, ask us to reflect on the production of academic work and its reception in a variety of domains.

AbstractThis essay will consider gendered aspects of Cool Japan ideology as found in government‐sponsored texts and imagery, as well as in other international arenas. Although scholars have recently offered critiques of Cool Japan as a form of nationalistic nation branding, uses of an objectified femininity have rarely been included in these analyses. By displacing female innovations and creativity in cultural production to the margins, Cool Japan reifies and officially promotes male geek culture. We find general dematerialization of the producers of Cool Japan ideology, which in turn becomes characterized as creative, quirky, edgy, and benign, thus masking the way Cool Japan has been produced, critiqued, imagined and endorsed primarily by male elites in Japan and internationally. This discussion suggests that Cool Japan's otaku ethos does not include women and girls who fail to conform to a narrow model of cute femininity, thus maintaining and promoting structures of gender stratification. In addition, the global spread and government exploitation of uncomplicated cuteness (kawaii) often confounds a flat understanding of the aesthetic with a gendered perspective and its expressions in girl culture. Women and girls are contained in Cool Japan ideology, and are not usually represented as shaping, resisting, creating or critiquing Japanese popular culture.

In this commentary on articles published in a thematic collection entitled "Heritage, Nationhood, and Language: Japanese Connections" (Critical Asian Studies 42, nos. 1 and 2) the author observes that languages we speak are "often the product of historical, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic trends, accidents, and forces. They are insufficient to completely define or enclose our identities." Thus, the author wonders, can any language be said to be "the best, most perfect one for any of us?" (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

The Westminster Parliament has been prompted to develop an e-Petitions system in light of the fact that similar tools are now well established in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. The Number Ten e-Petitions site, too, has proved inspirational although discussions within Westminster about the development of a comparable system have focused on the risks associated with it. This paper describes the momentum towards a Westminster-based e-Petitions system, highlighting the dilemmas that have emerged during discussions about the form it should take: should Westminster try to replicate the popular style of the Number Ten website and risk inundation with Parliamentary graffiti? Or would it be better to develop a system that ties in with Parliamentary processes-and do these processes themselves need to change? We discuss the move towards e-Petitions in the context of broader debates about e-Democracy and its role in revitalising political engagement. Adapted from the source document.