School of Professional Studies (SPS)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan stands to lose more than any other party from the establishment of a State of Palestine. While the potential dangers and complications for Israel of such a state could be significant, Jordan would face threats to both its social stability and its foundational idea: that it governs the Arab population on both banks of its eponymous river. In addition to the substantial political and security difficulties such a state would create for Jordan, it could also jeopardize its continued viability by shifting the locus of political leadership for a majority of Jordanians away from Amman and towards Ramallah.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If and when the Palestinian Authority (PA) collapses, Jordan will bear the greatest brunt of the resulting humanitarian crisis. Such a collapse could be triggered by several factors, but will almost certainly lead to a mass exodus of Palestinians from Areas A and B. While Israel will probably opt for a minimalist containment approach, the government in Amman will have to choose: it can either come to the aid of the Palestinians in the territories, or it can allow them to enter Jordan for help. Israel and Jordan are both likely to favor the first option, which may then facilitate a solution to the problem of governance in the territories.

Food occupies a central position in every culture and it is therefore of great interest to understand the evolution of food culture. The advent of the World Wide Web and online recipe repositories have begun to provide unprecedented opportunities for data-driven, quantitative study of food culture. Here we harness an online database documenting recipes from various Chinese regional cuisines and investigate the similarity of regional cuisines in terms of geography and climate. We find that geographical proximity, rather than climate proximity, is a crucial factor that determines the similarity of regional cuisines. We develop a model of regional cuisine evolution that provides helpful clues for understanding the evolution of cuisines and cultures.

In early 1991, as Anthony Powell was listening to BBC Radio, he heard an advisement for an Alan Bennett adaptation of an episode from Marcel Proustǯs novel A la recherche du temps perdu. DzOn the whole, the best-known one.dz the announcer intoned. Powell waggishly wrote this down in his journal, as of course Proust published no other novel than his great seven-book sequence, his earlier, unfinished autobiographic work, Jean Santeuil, only being published posthumously. But would the same be true of Powell? Would Ǯon the whole, the best known onedz be an understatement?

Tricontinental Modernities: Vargas Llosa's Late Turn Against Imperialism in El sueño del celta 1. Revising the Celtic In its mixture of the personal and political, concentration on an individual making difficult moral choices, and wide historical lens, Mario Vargas Llosa's El sueño del celta (2010), published only weeks after he garnered that year"s Nobel Prize for Literature, is reminiscent of many of his earlier novels. I wish to contend that, even more, it is an effective sequel to his 1981 novel La guerra del fin del mundo, not only treating many of the same themes but providing a contrast between Vargas Llosa in the immediate wake of his disillusionment with left-wing radicalism and of the Peruvian writer after more or less thirty years being on the center-right. Whereas the Brazil-set novel seemed directed at the errors of leftist utopianism, the more recent work indicts imperialism in Africa Latin, America, and Europe. This essay will show how this "tricontinental; agenda is complemented by a "modernity" that, for Vargas Llosa, is both ideological and stylistic.