Pleasure was a problem for members of the Roman elite – or so moralists felt. In his treatise on the good life, Seneca stresses the insidious threat posed by the attractions of sensual pleasure, while asserting that only the subhuman will want to surrender themselves completely ... Seneca’s language presents pleasure as fluid, both engulfing and invading its hapless victims. His insistence on its seductive dangers could be read as betraying a certain fascination with pleasure.

The case study examines the construction of the Imperial Pacific casino in Saipan, a US commonwealth in the Western Pacific, by Chinese firms employing Chinese workers. The focus is on the serious labor abuses that transpired and the legal and other consequences faced by the companies as a result. The case sheds light on the structure and operations of these Chinese construction projects, including the layers of subcontracting and how efforts to maximize speed and minimize costs resulted in numerous violations of local laws. The case also examines what actions the abused Chinese workers on such projects may take to enforce their rights and address their mistreatment. The case study therefore provides a useful tool to consider the issues involved in hiring and supervising contractors, such as cost, contract provisions, subcontracting, monitoring, and liability. The case also provides a platform to explore what legal, advocacy, and other tools workers and their advocates can use when legal violations and labor abuses occur. Additionally, this case study provides a uniquely detailed account of the events that transpired in Saipan because the author served as a lawyer representing the abused workers in a lawsuit alleging that they were subjected to forced labor.

Raw data require a great deal of cleaning, coding, and categorizing of observations. Vague standards for this data work can make it troublingly ad hoc, with much opportunity and temptation to influence the final results. Preprocessing rules and assumptions are not often seen as part of the model, but they can influence the result just as much as control variables or functional form assumptions. In this chapter, we discuss the main data processing decisions that analysts often face and how they can affect the results: coding and classifying of variables, processing anomalous and outlier observations, and the use of sample weights.

The Romans laid claim to a particular pre-eminence in the spheres of both fighting and morality. Seneca presents the activities of the guardian of morals as parallel to those of the general; each has made a vital contribution to the res publica. As a Stoic, Seneca was committed to the notion that the ties which bind all human beings to one another transcend those which bind the individual to any particular state, and yet for the Romans there was only one res publica, Rome itself. By using the traditional vocabulary of Roman moralists, by taking as examples the figures of Scipio and Cato, Seneca situated his text in a long line of Roman moralising. Seneca wrote his moral and philosophical works over two hundred years after the time of the elder Cato, who lived in the second century BCE; Cato’s writings in turn referred back to the virtues of still earlier Romans, maiores nostri (’our ancestors’). The highpoint of Roman moral virtue was always already situated in an idealised past.

Accordingly, the inquiry endures as to what specific art galvanized the modern world’s original treatise on painting. How Alberti’s remarkable journey through the art of his past and present is both reflected and refracted in De pictura demands examination of the lines of transmission through education and career in Alberti’s decisive locales before Florence.

In this chapter, COBRA teams up with another hunting team to sting a predator in West London. It turns out to be a controversial sting as the predator seeks to avenge himself by taking police action against COBRA.

This chapter talks of the challenges faced by police in dealing with hunters and, more generally, describes the fragility of their relationship to citizen activists.

This chapter introduces the hunting community as one rife with inter-team and interpersonal conflicts that are fought out online in deeply unpleasant ways. It also shows how COBRA are keen to differentiate themselves from other teams by professionalising what they do.