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Throughout the United States, in 2020 and 2021, the Trump presidency and the covid-19 pandemic brought to light clashes in shared and lived realities among Americans and displayed them in jarring and perplexing scenarios—with a deadly toll. Strange martyrdoms and enacted oaths of loyalty to Trump in the form of people not getting vaccinated, not taking precautions, often attacking those who did, and throwing themselves away by (simply) dying are collective examples of what Jacques Lacan called the passage à l'acte and are symptoms of a profound decay of political culture. Radicalization of what Timothy Snyder has called "sadopopulism" and Chris Hedges has called "corporate totalitarianism" have led to a pervasive sense of impotence among large swaths of global populations who have been, and are being, abandoned and discarded, made victims of radical neglect, disappearance, and silencing—the covid martyrs a category among them.

This article offers an analysis of First Reformed, written and directed by Paul Schrader (2017), as the story of a Calvinist pastor in upstate New York who decides to take extreme action in the face of the political, social, and psychic catastrophe wrought by the seeming invincibility of the triple alliance of capital, state, and religion, and the savage destruction of nature. A close reading of the film leads to a reconsideration not only of Heidegger's notion of the Gestell but also of the work of Walter Benjamin in 1938–1940, which, in light of our present-day political conjuncture, has once again taken on urgent relevance. This is the "messianic" and "theological" Benjamin, as well as the Benjamin who in his thinking about how we understand and record history always remained implicitly faithful to negativity and to the unconscious.

Abstract. Classical statistical methods for flood frequency estimation
assume stationarity in the gauged data. However, recent focus on climate
change and, within UK hydrology, severe floods in 2009 and 2015 has raised
the profile of statistical analyses that include trends. This paper considers how parameter estimates for the generalised logistic
distribution vary through time in the UK. The UK Benchmark Network (UKBN2)
is used to allow focus on climate change separate from the effects of
land-use change. We focus on the sensitivity of parameter estimates to
adding data, through fixed-width moving window and fixed-start extending
window approaches, and on whether parameter trends are more prominent in
specific geographical regions. Under stationary assumptions, the addition of new data tends to further the
convergence of parameters to some final value. However, addition of a
single data point can vastly change non-stationary parameter estimates.
Little spatial correlation is seen in the magnitude of trends in peak flow
data, potentially due to the spatial clustering of catchments in the UKBN2.
In many places, the ratio between the 50-year and 100-year flood is
decreasing, whereas the ratio between the 2-year and 30-year flood is
increasing, presenting as a flattening of the flood frequency curve.

Twenty-first century life sciences have transformed into data-enabled (also called data-intensive, data-driven, or big data) sciences. They principally depend on data-, computation-, and instrumentation-intensive approaches to seek comprehensive understanding of complex biological processes and systems (e.g., ecosystems, complex diseases, environmental, and health challenges). Federal agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF) have played and continue to play an exceptional leadership role by innovatively addressing the challenges of data-enabled life sciences. Yet even more is required not only to keep up with the current developments, but also to pro-actively enable future research needs. Straightforward access to data, computing, and analysis resources will enable true democratization of research competitions; thus investigators will compete based on the merits and broader impact of their ideas and approaches rather than on the scale of their institutional resources. This is the Final Report for Data-Intensive Science Workshops DISW1 and DISW2. The first NSF-funded Data Intensive Science Workshop (DISW1, Seattle, WA, September 19–20, 2010) overviewed the status of the data-enabled life sciences and identified their challenges and opportunities. This served as a baseline for the second NSF-funded DIS workshop (DISW2, Washington, DC, May 16–17, 2011). Based on the findings of DISW2 the following overarching recommendation to the NSF was proposed: establish a community alliance to be the voice and framework of the data-enabled life sciences. After this Final Report was finished, Data-Enabled Life Sciences Alliance (DELSA, www.delsall.org) was formed to become a Digital Commons for the life sciences community.