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The Covid-19 crisis is unique in several respects. This devastating recession does not have an economic origin, will dance largely to the tune of non-economic factors, and is truly global. The policy response has been equally unique, in terms of speed, size and scope, eliciting an unprecedented concerted effort combining monetary, fiscal and prudential policies. This has contained the fallout. At the time of writing, financial markets have rebounded to the point of looking exuberant, but it all feels more like a truce than a peace treaty. The crisis is transitioning from the liquidity to the solvency phase in a context of limited and shrinking room for policy manoeuvre. All this raises difficult near- and longer-term challenges. Rebuilding policy buffers in all policy areas is likely to be the policy challenge of the decade ahead.

On Apr 19,2022, Sigma Xi held the inaugural event of the Pariser Global Lectureship for Innovation in Physical Sciences. The endowed lectureship was established earlier this year to connect chapters and members with leaders in science and engineering. In honor of pioneering chemist Dr. Rudolph Pariser, the lectureship recognizes researchers worldwide for their achievements in bridging the gap between basic and applied research for the betterment of humanity. The black-tie event was hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chapter of Sigma Xi, with festivities held at the historic Carolina Inn. The evening was highlighted by keynote speaker Dr. Yosuke Kanai, a member of the UNC Chemistry Department. His presentation, \"Going Quantum for Proton Beam Cancer Therapy,\"' reflected the creativity and research excellence exemplified throughout Dr. Pariser's life and career. Administered through Sigma Xi's Distinguished Lectureships Program, the Pariser Global Lectureship may be awarded twice annually by nomination or invitation only. Lecturers may be invited by the Sigma Xi executive office, in consultation with the Committee on Lectureships.

Since 2007 a number of investigators have compiled statistics on the length in words of speeches in plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on a change to shorter speeches around 1600. In this article we take account of several potentially confounding factors in the variation of speech lengths in these works and present a model of this variation in the period 1538–1642 through Linear Mixed Models. We confirm that the mode of speech lengths in English plays changed from nine words to four words around 1600, and that Shakespeare’s plays fit this wider pattern closely. We establish for the first time: that this change is independent of authorship, dramatic genre, theatrical company, and the proportion of verse in a play’s dialogue; that the chosen time span can be segmented into pre-1597 plays (with high modes), 1597–1602 plays (with mixed high and low modes), and post-1602 plays (with low modes); that some additional secondary modes are evident in speech lengths, at 16 and 24 words, suggesting that the length of a standard blank verse line (around 8 words) is an underlying unit in speech length; and that the general change to short speeches also holds true when the data is viewed through the perspective of the median and the mean. The change in speech lengths is part of a collective drift in the plays towards liveliness and verisimilitude and is evidence of a hitherto hidden constraint on the playwrights: whether or not they were aware of the fact, playwrights as a group were conforming to a structure for the distribution of speech lengths peculiar to the era they were writing in. The authors hope that the full modelling of this variation in the article will help bring this change to the attention of scholars of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.