Ritalin®: Panic in the USA

 Ritalin® is a popular pharmaceutical. It keeps young people quiet and focused, but attracts intense opprobrium. Beginning with an account of the dimensions of Ritalin®’s use in the United States and controversies surrounding it, this article outlines how this might be understood in moral-panic terms and examines the role of the psy-function and various conflicts of interest, coverage in popular culture, and governmental responses. In many cases, progressive academics and activists have criticised moral panics, recuperating moral-panic folk devils as semiotic guerrillas struggling against authority. In this instance, however, the scene is too complex and multifaceted for that heroisation. There are no good guys; there is lots of panic, from all political-economic quarters. Some of it is justified—and none of it is straightforward

\u3ci\u3eAnoplophora Glabripennis\u3c/i\u3e Within-Tree Distribution, Seasonal Development, and Host Suitability in China and Chicago

Established populations of the Asian longhorned beetle, Anoplophora glabripennis (Motschulsky) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae), were first reported in the United States in New York in 1996, Illinois in 1998, and New Jersey in 2002. A federal quarantine and an eradication program were implemented in 1997, involving tree surveys and removal of infested trees. We recorded the number of A. glabripennis life stages found at several locations along the main trunk and major branches of naturally infested trees in China (species of Populus, Salix, and Ulmus) and Chicago, Illinois (species of Acer, Fraxinus, and Ulmus) during 1999 to 2002. Typically, A. glabripennis initiated attack near the crown base along both the trunk and main branches. The one exception to this pattern was on Populus trees in China that had branches along the entire trunk, in which case A. glabripennis initiated attack along the lower trunk. Larvae were the dominant overwintering stage in both countries. A host suitability index for A. glabripennis was calculated for each tree with the formula: (number of living life stages + number of exit holes) / number of oviposition pits. The mean host suitability index was higher on Populus and Salix than Ulmus in China, and generally higher on Acer and Ulmus than Fraxinus in Chicago. Eleven genera of trees (N = 1465 trees) were infested by A. glabripennis in Chicago; in decreasing order of tree frequency they included Acer, Ulmus, Fraxinus, Aesculus, Betula, Salix, Celtis, Malus, Pyrus, Sorbus, and Tilia. When the proportion of each genus of infested street trees (N = 958 trees in 7 genera) was compared to its proportion of all Chicago street trees based on a 2003 inventory (N = 539,613 trees in 45 genera), A. glabripennis showed a significant preference to infest the genera Acer and Ulmus. Based on our results, inspectors should focus their efforts on upper trunks and lower branches of Acer and Ulmus trees

Althusser, Foucault, and the Subject of Civility

This paper seeks to paint a picture of how discernible links between Althusser and Foucault can assist us to theorise the life of cultural subjects inside established and emergent liberal-capitalist states. Althusser\u27s querying of a humanistic foundation to political philosophy and the social contract is connected to Foucault\u27s contention that modernity invented the subject as a centre of inquiry and that centre became the site constructing obedient citizens

The Nordic Story

Nordic cultural and communications studies have long been crucial contributors to numerous fields. Readers of Media and Communication are fortunate to have expert guides for this thematic issue on Sports Journalists as Agents of Change: Shifting Political Goalposts in Nordic Countries. Anders Graver Knudsen, Harald Hornmoen, and Nathalie Hyde‐Clarke have brought together - and themselves contributed to - a veritable tour d’horizon of the topic, with significance both for the region and research more generally

Media Studies

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the 21st century

Shower scene from HQ

This essay traces a 1990s image and a 21st–century confession in the context of the legal trajectory of former athlete Andrew Ettingshausen’s genitals and his body as a commodity. It does so in the light of debates about contemporary masculinity and sports. Throughout, we shall be stalked by the image of his penis, its representation in a magazine, subsequent evaluations by courts of law —and the need to protect and develop Ettingshausen’s marketability

Stuart Hall

The collection is sure to be a vital resource for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates seeking authoritative overviews of key concepts and people in communication and critical cultural studies

The discourse on media is dominated by reactionary cant.

This brief note examines two interrelated themes that I think need to be at the core of studying the media industries. Neither will be popular, because they are critical and they veer away from the norms of US graduate schooling and Englishlanguage journals. The first is that we need to focus on cultural labor. The second is that we need to focus on the environment, specifically the media’s destructive impact on the world’s ecology over centuries. These critiques sometimes help encourage workers to organize and corporations to reform, but they have yet to gain major currency in academia outside environmental science. A decent future for the cognitariat and the earth depends on the centrality of these topics to each course, publication, policy, and initiative undertaken by and about the media. Business as usual needs to be shaken up

Cybertarian flexibility - when prosumers join the cognitariat, all that is scholarship melts into air

Cybertarian flexibility - when prosumers join the cognitariat, all that is scholarship melts into ai

WikiLeaks, the state, and middle-aged media

WikiLeaks, the state, and middle-aged medi