Short essay authored by Dr. Philip Evanson, Associate Professor Emeritus of History at Temple University (1967-2005), concerning post-COVID-19 economic policies and political circumstances in Brazil under the presidential administration of Jair Bolsonaro as of late February 2022.

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Mixtures of gaseous hydrogen chloride (38-150 Torr) and isoprene (38-80 Torr) were allowed to react in Pyrex IR cells equipped with sodium chloride windows. The disappearance of reactants to form, initially, 3-chloro-3-methyl-1-butene and 1-chloro-3-methyl-2-butene was monitored and subsequent formation of multimeric products, some of which were brown, were observed. Such products may contribute to the formation of, or be found on, atmospheric particles.

In Harm’s Way is a collaborative ethnography of violence in the Argentine neighborhood of Arquitecto Tucci by Javier Auyero, a University of Texas at Austin sociologist and Maria Fernanda Berti, an elementary teacher in Buenos Aires. Arquitecto Tucci is a fictitious name for the place in metropolitan Buenos Aires where the authors did their work. Auyero and Berti identify Arquitecto Tucci as a “relegated” community at the urban margins, meaning stigmatized, removed, and subordinated, with “extreme levels of infrastructural deprivation,” and suffering from “crushing” violence of “overwhelming intensity and frequency” capable of “shattering” and “unraveling” routine daily existence. The authors confess to being “astonished” by the high level of violence they found as they began their project and set out in search of the best way to analyze their findings. However, at no time did they seem discouraged to the point of abandoning the effort which paid off in an important, useful book. The book includes four chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. The authors reach out in all directions in an effort to explain violence in Arquitecto Tucci. Primary sources include more than 100 interviews with residents, but also interviews with health professionals and police conducted over 30 months. The interviews perforce became the main sources, not the least because of the poor quality of public statistics on crime and public health. Beyond interviews, newspapers seemed especially helpful in providing accounts of homicides and other crimes. The great challenge is delineating what might be called a total ethnography of violence for Arquitecto Tucci, one that would provide a convincing or at least plausible analysis of all the violence, be it interpersonal or collective, private or public. The limitations of compartmentalized approaches, the “specialized and balkanized” studies of different disciplines were duly noted. However, such studies were not disregarded, but selectively brought forward throughout the book to help in analysis. The book is therefore rich in analysis that draws on many disciplines. Arquitecto Tucci is a high-crime community with many poor and even destitute people. It is woefully lacking in infrastructure and other amenities of middle-class life. Paradoxically, it also exhibits considerable vitality derived from a recently established commerce that sets it off from the rest of Argentina. We learn that Arquitecto Tucci was a once-prosperous, working-class community that flourished in tandem with Argentina’s industrial growth from the l930s to the 1960s. Up to 1990, it was even a favorite resort

Colombia has a long and complex history of violence quite unlike any other nation. The Thousand Day War from 1899 to 1902, and the later La Violencia (The Violence) conflict of 1948 to 1958 grew ou...

Mother's Cry: A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. By Lina Penna Sattimini. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii, 188. Bibliography. Index. 21.95 paper. - Volume 69 Issue 4

Proline derivatives with a C(γ)-exo pucker typically display a high amide bond trans/cis (K(T/C)) ratio. This pucker enhances n→π* overlap of the amide oxygen and ester carbonyl carbon, which favors a trans amide bond. If there were no difference in n→π* interaction between the ring puckers, then the correlation between ring pucker and K(T/C) might be broken. To explore this possibility, proline conformations were constrained using a methylene bridge. We synthesized discrete gauche and anti 5-fluoro- and 5-hydroxy-N-acetylmethanoproline methyl esters from 3-syn and 3-anti fluoro- and hydroxymethanopyrrolidines using directed α-metalation to introduce the α-ester group. NBO calculations reveal minimal n→π* orbital interactions, so contributions from other forces might be of greater importance in determining K(T/C) for the methanoprolines. Consistent with this hypothesis, greater trans amide preferences were found in CDCl(3) for anti isomers en-MetFlp and en-MetHyp (72-78% trans) than for the syn stereoisomers ex-MetFlp and ex-MetHyp (54-67% trans). These, and other, K(T/C) results that we report here indicate how substituents on proline analogues can affect amide preferences by pathways other than ring puckering and n→π* overlap and suggest that caution should be exercised in assigning enhanced pyrrolidine C(γ)-exo ring puckering based solely on enhanced trans amide preference.

N-acetylmethanopyrrolidine methyl ester and its four 5-syn/anti-fluoro and hydroxy derivatives have been synthesized from 2-azabicyclo[2.2.0]hex-5-ene, a 1,2-dihydropyridine photoproduct. These conformationally constrained mimics of idealized C(β)-gauche and C(β)-anti conformers of pyrrolidines were prepared in order to determine the inherent bridge bias and subsequent heteroatom substituent effects upon trans/cis amide preferences. The bridgehead position and also the presence of gauche(syn)/anti-5-fluoro or 5-hydroxy substituents have minimal influence upon the K(T/C) values of N-acetylamide conformers in both CDCl(3) (43-54% trans) and D(2)O (53-58% trans). O-Benzoylation enhances the trans amide preferences in CDCl(3) (65% for a syn-OBz, 61% for an anti-OBz) but has minimal effect in D(2)O. The synthetic methods developed for N-BOC-methanopyrrolidines should prove useful in the synthesis of more complex derivatives containing α-ester substituents. The K(T/C) results obtained in this study establish baseline amide preferences that will enable determination of contributions of α-ester substituents to trans-amide preferences in methanoprolines.