Time blindness is a common symptom ascribed to individuals experiencing ADHD or the spectrum of ADHD symptoms. However, it is most often characterized as a deficit to functioning properly, whether this is in the workplace, schools, or relationships. Like much of the information surrounding neurodiversity, “time blindness” is a gross oversimplification of people with ADHD’s felt experience of time. For individuals with ADHD, measuring changes in attention and shifts in chronoception (the perception of time) can be achieved through an analysis of art practice. This paper looks critically at the role that time plays in the lives of neurodiverse and neurotypical people alike.
California has been suffering from a “housing crisis” for the past several years, an issue which many have regarded as a symptom of a housing supply shortage. Many researchers, policymakers, journalists, and voters alike have pointed to the relatively (at least compared to other states) slow pace of entitling proposed housing projects as a major culprit for why California’s housing shortage persists. These “entitlements” generally include zoning-related permits (e.g. site development permit) and environmental review determinations (e.g. California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA). Importantly, despite the reforms at the state level, local governments have almost exclusive control on the number of local commissions and committees (“land use approval bodies”) that a housing project needs to seek approval from on a project. This paper provides evidence of a positive correlation between the length of time that California housing projects take to acquire land-use entitlements with the number of local land-use approval bodies (such as planning commissions and design review commissions) that have jurisdiction over said entitlements. Using data points on over forty local jurisdictions of varying sizes and geographies (e.g. Central Coast, Los Angeles Area, Bay Area, Central Valley), this paper confirmed the hypothesis with statistical significance in six different development contexts. In the other two regressions, which concerned affordable housing and mixed-income housing project approval timelines, respectively, there was a negative relationship between this approval time and the number of approval bodies. An additional two development contexts, single family and multifamily projects requiring a full scale environmental impact report (EIR) did not reach statistical significance in the regression tests.
This paper examines the relationship between local newspaper presence and democratic participation, focusing particularly on how news deserts affect political accountability and civic engagement in rural America. Currently, 3.5 million Americans live in counties without any local news coverage. The impact is especially severe in the South, where every state has at least one county without a newspaper. While existing research demonstrates that newspaper closures reduce civic engagement in urban areas, I argue that these effects are significantly more severe in rural regions where geographic isolation and limited digital infrastructure compound the impact. Using comparative quantitative analysis of electoral competition in rural versus urban counties across North Carolina and Arizona from 2020 to 2024, Cooperative Election Study political knowledge data (2020–2022), and a Montana case study, this paper investigates the mechanisms through which declining local news coverage impacts democratic institutions. My findings reveal three key mechanisms through which news deserts reshape local democracy: degraded information access about government activities, reduced electoral competition as evidenced by declining candidate recruitment, and weakened accountability, as shown through case studies of undetected official misconduct. This paper contributes to our understanding of how the erosion of local journalism threatens democratic governance in rural America and suggests the potential emergence of a two-tiered system of democratic participation divided along geographic lines.
This project examines Argentine novelist Ernesto Sábato’s “The Angel of Darkness” (1974) through the lens of literary magical realism. It seeks to expand the current definition of magical realism by building upon the specific parameters defined by prominent critics of the mode—namely, Louis Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris’s “Five Characteristics.” In reconsidering the nature of “magic” within these texts, “magical” instances can encompass a broader variety of phenomena. This research focuses on the normalization of violence, the omniscience and invisibility of the police state, and the metafiction present and abundant within “The Angel of Darkness” to establish Sábato within the magical realist mode.
United States foreign policy is governed by the American system of checks and balances which fosters a tug-of-war dynamic between the legislative and executive branches. This institutional friction, observed by those involved in policy development, implementation, and analysis, has produced a pattern of unpredictable and politicized decision-making, driven by legislative constraints and ad hoc exceptions. This volatility is particularly evident in US diplomacy in the Middle East, as demonstrated by its attempts over the last five decades to facilitate a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict and to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran. In these cases, key US diplomatic tools including economic assistance, diplomatic recognition, terrorist designations, foreign aid restrictions, and sanctions have been applied through a series of executive orders and congressional legislation. These policies, sometimes seemingly narrow in scope or aimed at isolated issues, have played a long game of constraint that ultimately impairs executive flexibility and diminishes US diplomatic credibility, impeding long-lasting resolutions. This long game is revealed through case studies of failed diplomatic efforts in Israel–Palestine and Iran, analyzed through legislative history—a perspective that has yet to be fully explored in existing scholarship.
