The first complex civilizations in the central Andes—those of Chavín de Huantar in the north and Paracas in the south—were very different but also very obviously shared many of the same religious ideas. This period saw the spread of metallurgy, international art styles and religious cults and the beginning of many practices which formed the basis for later civilizations as well.

Almost all platforms for user-generated content have written policies around what content they are and are not willing to host, even if these policies are not always public. Even platforms explicitly designed to host adult content, such as OnlyFans,1 have community guidelines. Of course, different platforms’ content policies can differ widely in multiple regards. Platforms differ on everything from what content they do and do not allow, to how vigorously they enforce their rules, to the mechanisms for enforcement itself. Nevertheless, nearly all platforms have two sets of content criteria: one set of rules setting a minimum floor for what content the platform is willing to host at all, and a more rigorous set of rules defining standards for advertising content. Many social-media platforms also have additional criteria for what content they will actively recommend to users that differ from their more general standards of what content they are willing to host at all.

In February 2021, the Australian federal government enacted the “News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code,” which requires Facebook and Google to pay domestic news outlets for linking to their websites. It was a first-of-its-kind mechanism for redistributing revenue from Big Tech platforms to legacy journalism, and it has attracted global attention from policymakers looking to halt the internet-fueled decline of the traditional news industry. Thus, the success or failure of what critics call Australia’s “link tax” has significant implications for the future of both the World Wide Web and the news industry writ large.

A central tenet of contemporary First Amendment law is the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas – that the solution to bad speech is more, better, speech.1 This basic idea is well established in both judicial and scholarly writing – but it is not without its critics. My contribution to this volume adds a new criticism of the marketplace-of-ideas metaphor. I argue that there are circumstances where ostensibly “good” speech may be indistinguishable by listeners from bad speech – indeed, that there are cases in which any incremental speech can actually make other good speech indistinguishable from bad speech. In such cases, seemingly “good” speech has the effect of “bad” speech. I call this process by which ostensibly good speech turns the effects of other speech bad “a noisy speech externality.”

As the Ice Ages drew to a close South American societies had to deal with rapidly changing climates and a subsequent necessity for a change in subsistence base. On the coast people lived in small villages and gathered seashells and fished, whereas in the highland we see the domestication of camelids and in all areas the first steps towards agriculture.

Indian corn, Zea mays, was an important crop in Mesoamerica and popular theories of its appearance in South America all rest on its having been brought there (by means unknown) at an extremely early date. Recent analyses, however, show fundamental differences in the two groups of maize, suggesting that maize spread south well before it had become domesticated in Mesoamerica.

In this chapter, we develop a comprehensive model where we include assessments of each campaign event (e.g., September debate) and issue (e.g., election integrity, worries about COVID-19) when predicting overall evaluations of Biden and Trump in November as well as changes in feeling thermometer scores from September to November. These models show that views about the first presidential debate and attitudes toward major campaign issues (i.e., election integrity, COVID-19, social justice protests) explain views of the candidates in November and predict shifts in evaluations over the length of the campaign. Finally, we estimate changes in vote preference from September to November and we find that elements of the campaign (e.g., views about the presidential debate, support for social justice protests) produce important changes in vote preferences. In other words, we find strong evidence that the 2020 campaign mattered.

Does the South American continent have a future? Between gross exploitation by European and Asian countries, corrupt and incompetent local governments, many in thrall to foreign interests, environmental degradation, overpopulation and weak economies plus widespread looting of archaeological sites to supply European and North American museums, the future does not seem very bright.

It was 1971 and Los Angeles Times editor Nick Williams had what he called a “terribly uneasy feeling.” In a letter to one of the paper’s Washington correspondents, he wrote of his suspicion that journalism had “lost credibility … with an alarming percentage of the people.” If the plummet continued, Williams fretted, journalists will have “destroyed or weakened a keystone of our Constitution.”1

The internet has remade both the media and the social institutions that surround the media. Speech was not cheap in the twentieth century. News organizations had to buy newsprint, paper, distribution networks, transmitters, spectrum licenses – all kinds of things that cost much more than a Facebook page – if they wished to reach an audience. But the few news organizations that could cover these costs held a safe market position, and from this perch, they wielded a great deal of epistemic and moral authority in their communities. They became “gatekeepers” with the power and the responsibility to decide what information, and what claims, were fit to print. Much of media law, and particularly First Amendment law, seems to have developed around the assumption that news organizations could and would play this gatekeeping role, and that the government should therefore rarely need to.

South America was cut off from Eurasia for some 15,000 years and is generally ignored by North Americans and Europeans in any manner but superficial tourism. Yet the separate development of such features of civilization as agriculture, monumental architecture, conquest states and elite art allow us to test our own, Eurasian centric views, of what is a civilization and how do they arise.

Metal working in South America has at least two independent foci: the Altiplano of Peru/Bolivia and the closely related coastal technologies, with an emphasis upon hammered and joined sheet metal ornaments and the very different, casting oriented, traditions of the northern Andes. These latter features gold and gold alloys whereas the Peruvian traditions also used different kinds of bronze.

Presidential debates are now a fixture in the landscape of fall campaigns for the presidency. They attract worldwide media attention, as well as the interest of tens of millions of potential voters, and are held in close proximity to Election Day. In 2020, the first general election debate was a donnybrook. In this chapter, we show that citizens develop clear opinions about who won the debate and who performed well; more people viewed Biden as the winner of the first debate and his performance ratings were significantly higher than Trump’s ratings, except among Republicans. We also demonstrate that people who have low tolerance for conflict develop significantly more negative views of Trump’s performance and are significantly more likely to consider Biden the winner of the debate. Furthermore, people’s level of racism and conspiratorial thinking shape views of Trump’s and Biden’s performances during the first presidential debate. Finally, evaluations of the candidates’ performance in the debate as well as people’s views of who won the debate influence overall evaluations of Trump and Biden and produce significant changes in the ratings of Trump and Biden from September to October.