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PurposeThe association between sarcopenia of kidney transplant recipients and outcome after kidney transplantation (KT) has not yet been fully understood and is still considered controversial. The aim of our study was to analyze the impact of pre-transplant sarcopenia on graft function, postoperative complication rates, and survival of the patients after renal transplantation.MethodsIn this retrospective single-center study, all patients who underwent KT (01/2013–12/2017) were included. Demographic data, rejection rates, delayed graft function, and graft and patient survival rates were analyzed. Sarcopenia was measured in computed tomography images by the sex-adjusted Hounsfield unit average calculation (HUAC).ResultsDuring the study period, 111 single KTs (38 women and 73 men) were performed. Living donor kidney transplants were performed in 48.6%. In total, 32.4% patients had sarcopenia. Sarcopenic patients were significantly older (59.6 years vs. 49.8 years; p < 0.001), had a higher body mass index (BMI = 27.6 kg/m2 vs. 25.0 kg/m2; p = 0.002), and were more likely to receive deceased donor kidneys (72.2% vs. 41.3%; p = 0.002). Interestingly, 3 years after KT, the creatinine serum levels were significantly higher (2.0 mg/dl vs. 1.5 mg/dl; p = 0.001), whereas eGFR (39.9 ml/min vs. 53.4 ml/min; p = 0.001) and graft survival were significantly lower (p = 0.004) in sarcopenic transplant recipients. Sarcopenic patients stayed in hospital significantly longer postoperatively than those who were non-sarcopenic.ConclusionsAt the time of kidney transplantation, sarcopenia was found to predict reduced long-term graft function and diminished graft survival after KT. The early identification of sarcopenic patients can not only enable an optimized selection of recipients, but also the initiation of pre-habilitation programs during the waiting period.

The chief allegorical correlation between the text of The Crucible and Miller’s testimony before HUAC three years later in 1956 seems to center around the refusal of both the fabricated John Proctor and the real Arthur Miller to name names. This parallel has been cited by critics and scholars alike as one of the most ironic moments in the history of HUAC’s twenty-two-year existence. Each man, in his own era, publicly questioned the authority of the governmental agency entrusted with determining the guilt or innocence of members of the community. Each also defined themselves as martyrs in terms of their opposition to that authority. For Miller and Proctor, the moral dilemma involved a refusal to falsely confess and betray a sense of oneself to escape punishment. Forced to expose their private selves in a public arena, both felt the need to criticize the public challenge to their private consciousness.

Recent approaches to studying argumentation in institutions have pointed out the role of institutional rules in constraining argumentation that takes place in institutional contexts. However, few studies explain how these rules concretely affect actual argumentation. In particular, little work has been done as to the consequences of interactional asymmetry which often exists between participants in institutional contexts. While previous studies have suggested that this asymmetry exists as an aberration in the deliberative process, this paper argues that asymmetry is built into day-to-day institutional practices as a means of achieving institutional agendas. This article draws upon findings from workplace and discourse studies to explicate particular dimensions of asymmetry that commonly occur within institutional settings, and establishes a methodological framework to account for how this asymmetry can be operationalized for arguments that favor institutional interests regardless of the underlying strength of the arguments being made. Drawing on a controversial case of institutional argumentation during a hearing of the US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the mid-1950s, this article demonstrates how in using these advantages, HUAC is able to overcome legitimate witness counterarguments to its claims and achieve its institutional goals for the hearing. Though the testimony is admittedly 60-years old, HUAC is a useful case study: the asymmetry in the exchange is clear and we have a historical record to verify the factual accuracy of the claims being made. Additionally, we can see how the subsequent legal reforms that reduced conditions of asymmetry for witnesses were responsible for HUAC’s eventual demise as an institutional force. Though this paper analyzes one particular interaction, these findings are applicable to analysis of argumentation in many institutional settings.

In this article Aamir Aziz argues that Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a wilful and purposeful theatrical response to the operations of Joseph McCarthy and his henchmen. He highlights the theatricality of the McCarthy trials and examines them through the frame of spectacle, as outlined by Guy Debord, to show how Miller used his play theatrically to unhinge the machinations of McCarthyism and the seemingly unassailable frame of an American democracy defending itself against Communist subversion. Miller's play was thus a theatrical intervention into an ideological force field that served to puncture and expose the veil of this spectacle. Aamir Aziz received his doctorate from Universiteit Leiden in 2014, and is now an Assistant Professor in English in the Department of English Language and Literature at University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. He has recently published articles in International Policy Digest, New Authors' Journal, Sydney Globalist, and London Globalist.

Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist examines the long-term reception of several key American films released during the postwar period, focusing on the two main critical lenses used in the interpretation of these films: propaganda and allegory. Produced in response to the hearings held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that resulted in the Hollywood blacklist, these films’ ideological message and rhetorical effectiveness was often muddled by the inherent difficulties in dramatizing villains defined by their thoughts and belief systems rather than their actions. Whereas anti-Communist propaganda films offered explicit political exhortation, allegory was the preferred vehicle for veiled or hidden political comment in many police procedurals, historical films, Westerns, and science fiction films. Jeff Smith examines the way that particular heuristics, such as the mental availability of exemplars and the effects of framing, have encouraged critics to match filmic elements to contemporaneous historical events, persons, and policies. In charting the development of these particular readings, Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist features case studies of many canonical Cold War titles, including The Red Menace, On the Waterfront, The Robe, High Noon, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Anna Sokolow (1910–2000), an American Jewish choreographer known for her social statements, led the workers dance movement and performed as a soloist with Martha Graham. She imbued her dances Strange American Funeral (1935) and Case History No.— (1937) with proletarian ideology that spoke to 1930s working- and middle-class audiences aligned with values of revolutionary and modern dance. These choreographies spoke to a political atmosphere focused on social justice while they appealed to a broad dance-going public. Sokolow's Graham training engendered a modernist aesthetic in her choreography that led critics to consider her work universal instead of marked as coming from a working-class left-wing Jewish dancer. This article argues that while narratives about Sokolow's work downplay her Communist affiliations, these ideals played a critical role in her choreography and in her navigation of international Communist circles. As Sokolow's choreography reinforced her politics, so too did her affiliations support her dance work.

In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and political censure. Beginning in the early 1930s, these films told compelling stories about ethnic urban lower-class desires to \"make it\" in an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and devastated by the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, however, their focus shifted to the problems of a culture maladjusting to a new peacetime sociopolitical order governed by corporate capitalism. The gangster no longer challenged the establishment; the issue was not \"making it,\" but simply \"making do.\" Combining film analysis with archival material from the Production Code Administration (Hollywood's self-censoring authority), Munby shows how the industry circumvented censure, and how its altered gangsters (influenced by European filmmakers) fueled the infamous inquisitions of Hollywood in the postwar '40s and '50s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ultimately, this provocative study suggests that we rethink our ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.

In 1948 Cláudio Santoro found himself in Europe. Having impressed Copland as “the most gifted young composer around,” the young Brazilian decided to study with Boulanger after the United States denied him a visa.¹ In May he traveled to Prague, where he served as a delegate to the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics along with others from Eastern Bloc and Western countries with a significant communist presence. Like them, he faced a dilemma. The Soviet cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov had declared the avant-garde an enemy of the state, and folk-tinged “music of the people” was in the

Anti-radicalism in the United States has a long history. During World War I, it was transformed into anti-communism and became embedded in the political culture of the United States for the next seventy-plus years. There were many varieties of anti-communism, but it can be divided into two main categories: official or governmental, and unofficial or nongovernmental. This article traces the development of those varieties that most impacted the motion picture industry, led to the blacklisting of hundreds of employees, and cast a pall of censorship over moviemaking.

Like any other unions, the three American actor's unions, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), and Actor's Equity Association (AEA) are expected to fight for the rights of their members, whether for better benefits, wages, or working conditions. In the 1950s they were forced into a new and challenging battle. The different methods these unions chose to face and fight the onslaught brought on by the blacklisting of their members are the focus of this article.