First, I argue that constantly stressing the clash between democracy's shining ideal image and its decidedly unlovely reality often induces a cynicism about the democratic process that is uncomprehending and mostly undesirable. Second, I suggest that the continual overselling of equality by democratic idealists has encouraged the rise of a destructive and profoundly antidemocratic form¬¬I call it hyperdemocracy¬¬Third, I argue that adherence to the democratic image can logically lead some minorities to fear that, if the form is actually about equality, majority rule, and active participation, they stand to be persecuted in a democracy. Finally, I append a few cautionary comments about the burgeoning field of transitology which sometimes tends to advance a perspective that can inspire a damaging short ¬term perspective in new democracies, and I also question the usefulness of the concept of "democratic consolidation."

The current popular debate on poverty focuses on the underclass. Poverty is considered, in this context, a problem of unskilled, uneducated individuals or of groups ofpeople whose lifestyles mire them in poverty. In this article, the author argues that the focus on the underclass, and subsequent use of individually and culturally focused explanations for poverty, skew our understanding of the problem and divert our attention from appropriate policy responses. Using evidence from four different periods of immigration into Ameri­ can cities, an argument is presentecffor the importance ofstructural and institutional factors in understanding the success or failure of each group to find work and move up. The author concludes that these factors are better able to account for poverty and justify increased attention to structural conditions in poverty.

This essay responds to the cluster “Medieval Studies and Secondary Education” by suggesting that we shift our attention away from our understandable, but often unproductive, anxieties about the obsolescence of Medieval Studies within school curricula and towards the promotion of the professional health and intellectual pleasure of the exhausted and harried secondary school teacher. In addition to lauding the efforts of medievalists to enhance and expand the appeal and relevance of our disciplines through immersive activities and the provincialization of Europe, this response explores and evaluates the feasibility of proposals to offer online and in-person summer seminars on medieval topics, to augment easily accessible online resources for teaching the Middle Ages, and to develop mentorship structures within universities and professional societies that connect prospective and practicing teachers with medievalists in educator preparation programs.

Matter wave interferometry with laser pulses has become a powerful tool for precision measurement. Optical resonators, meanwhile, are an indispensable tool for control of laser beams. We have combined these two components, and built the first atom interferometer inside of an optical cavity. This apparatus was then used to examine interactions between atoms and a small, in-vacuum source mass. We measured the gravitational attraction to the source mass, making it the smallest source body ever probed gravitationally with an atom interferometer. Searching for additional forces due to screened fields, we tightened constraints on certain dark energy models by several orders of magnitude. Finally, we measured a novel force mediated by blackbody radiation for the first time.

Utilizing technical benefits of the cavity, we performed interferometry with adiabatic passage. This enabled new interferometer geometries, large momentum transfer, and interferometers with up to one hundred pulses. Performing a trapped interferometer to take advantage of the clean wavefronts within the optical cavity, we performed the longest duration spatially-separated atom interferometer to date: over ten seconds, after which the atomic wavefunction was coherently recombined and read out as interference to measure gravity. This work demonstrates the feasibility and utility of bringing a cavity to atom interferometry.