Front and back cover caption, volume 41 issue 6 Front cover caption, volume 41 issue 6 Midlife crisis In this issue, Hadas Weiss examines the midlife crisis as a middle‐class malaise. These paired images from American Beauty (1999) illuminate why this film became the definitive visual reference for suburban entrapment. Together, they reveal the totalizing nature of the trap: confinement exists in both professional and domestic life. The office scene shows spreadsheet columns transformed into prison bars. The fluorescent lighting and corporate sterility capture what Weiss identifies through digital ethnography: decades of career investment producing only ‘the same day on repeat’. The numerical data filling the screen visualizes the tyranny of measurement and accountability. Workers grow exhausted. Constant reinvestment never delivers genuine security. This image has continued to circulate widely online because it gives material form to an otherwise abstract predicament. The domestic image extends confinement into private life. Window bars mirror the spreadsheet's vertical lines. The house, that quintessential middle‐class investment, offers no refuge. Those experiencing this crisis question whether demonstrating that ‘the way to go through life is to be miserable and tortured, just for a nice house’ justifies the cost to selfhood. The paired images reject conventional narratives of dramatic rupture or reckless escape. They reveal instead a pervasive condition where professional and domestic domains operate under identical capitalist logic. This analysis shows what anthropological method can reveal. Weiss's digital ethnography of Reddit testimonies captures the complex whole of contemporary middle‐class experience. She connects individual testimonies to structural conditions. Thousands of anonymous posts reveal patterns that isolated individuals cannot see. This holistic approach shows how the midlife crisis emerges from specific economic arrangements rather than personal failure. Ethnographic attention to everyday digital discourse reveals the contradictions embedded in contemporary capitalism. The method documents how people name their predicament using available cultural resources, including these iconic film images. Back cover caption, volume 41 issue 6 The Moulds at the End of the Corridor In this issue, Jamie Cross examines how moulds reveal multispecies life entangled with inequality and austerity politics. Mould colonises a wall in UK social housing. A narrow corridor leads to a wall overtaken by common indoor moulds such as Stachybotrys or Aspergillus, which thrive on damp, poorly maintained substrate. Peeling paint and discoloured plaster evidence chronic moisture ingress from neglected infrastructure. The article uses such scenes to interrogate recent interest in ‘metabolic politics’: the governance of the transformative capacities of non‐human life in the Anthropocene. Indoor moulds expose the limits of celebratory narratives about human‐fungal collaboration, revealing instead how microbial life is patterned by classed, racialized and climatic inequalities. By examining microecologies in the UK, from scientific spaces to social housing, the article expands the scope of environmental anthropology, medical anthropology and science and technology studies, offering new ways to trace the politics of exposure and the atmospheres we inhabit. By focusing on indoor environments rather than exterior ecologies, it challenges anthropology's recent fascination with forests, farms and ‘wild’ multispecies encounters. Our most intimate relations with fungi unfold not in matsutake forests but in corridors like this one, where poor tenants inhale spores that middle‐class anthropologists can study from a distance. In a warming world that creates new conditions for mould species to thrive, these corridors expose how multispecies theory risks romanticizing entanglement while overlooking who actually lives with, and suffers from, fungal intimacy.

Front and back cover caption, volume 41 issue 5 Front cover caption, volume 41 issue 5 WHEN EMPATHY BECOMES REVOLUTIONARY In December 2014, at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, hundreds of anthropologists transformed the lobby of Washington's Marriott Wardman Park Hotel into a site of collective mourning and protest. Bodies sprawled across the marble floor, participants held signs declaring ‘Black lives matter’. One invoked anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's searing words: ‘If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’ This die‐in, organized in response to the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and countless others, marked a moment when the discipline, built on crossing cultural boundaries to understand different ways of being, refused to remain silent about state‐sanctioned violence against Black communities. A decade later, Chip Colwell's guest editorial in this issue reminds us why this moment of professional witness has acquired a new urgency. In an era when empathy itself has become politically contested, dismissed as weakness by authoritarian movements, stripped from government vocabulary as ‘woke’, anthropology's methodological commitment to suspending judgment and entering other worldviews becomes a revolutionary act. As Hurston knew, and as Colwell affirms, silence equals complicity. The die‐in embodied the first act of empathy: identifying with humanity's suffering. Yet Colwell challenges anthropologists to undertake a second act: using ethnographic methods to understand injustice ‘in all its dimensions’, examining not only victims but also the systems and worldviews that perpetuate harm, including those of perpetrators. A third act demands empathy toward ourselves, recognizing the limits of what any single individual can achieve, and the risks associated with immersing oneself in others’ pain. This deeper empathy transforms protest into sustained ethnographic engagement. The bodies on that lobby floor embody anthropology's distinctive tradition of bearing witness across difference, from Cushing's defence of Zuni land rights to contemporary struggles for racial justice. In times when authorities deride understanding ‘the other’, ethnography becomes essential revolutionary work towards a new future. Back cover caption, volume 41 issue 5 GLOBAL FRAGILITY In this photograph from Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Melissa Demian consults with a local community group on violence prevention work that, until recently, was supported by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Local practitioners methodically planned for sustainable peace‐building while their distant institutional partner was being dismantled overnight. In her article in this issue, Demian reveals how USIP's sudden collapse exposes the fiction that fragility is confined to certain geographical regions. USIP partners in Papua New Guinea spent months developing violence prevention strategies, building community networks, and translating abstract policy into concrete local actions, believing they were part of a 10‐year American commitment to addressing conflict drivers in Papua New Guinea, a partnership framed through contemporary security concerns and historical obligations dating to the Second World War. Yet in March 2025, these partners suddenly lost their access to USIP resources, the project suspended in administrative limbo. Ironically, those designated as requiring ‘stabilization’ continued their work while the stabilizers proved unstable. The community members gathered here, deemed vulnerable to state fragility by international policy, have demonstrated more resilience than the Washington‐based organization meant to assist them. Who truly occupies positions of precarity in the global development landscape? Local peace‐builders in Morobe Province, despite operating in a so‐called ‘fragile state’, maintained their networks and secured alternative funding. Meanwhile, USIP, with its half‐billion‐dollar headquarters and congressional mandate, was shut down at executive whim. Perhaps the real fragility lies not in the grassroots organizing of Papua New Guineans, but in the fickleness of distant powers whose commitments evaporate as quickly as their geopolitical anxieties shift.

This guest editorial argues for renewed intellectual engagement between anthropology and economics, two disciplines that became estranged during 20th‐century debates over human motivation and cooperation. With anthropologists largely rejecting economic theories following the formalist‐substantivist controversy, this ‘disciplinary divorce’ has impoverished anthropological analysis by limiting available theoretical tools. Contemporary anthropologists often mischaracterize economic arguments – particularly regarding barter theory – while remaining unaware of insights from heterodox economic schools that increasingly draw on anthropological methods and findings. Both disciplines share a fundamental concern with developing a general theory of value, making collaboration essential. The institution of money serves as an especially productive site for such interdisciplinary dialogue, functioning simultaneously as a social institution and technology that addresses the coordination problems inherent in complex societies. Bitcoin's emergence as the first natively digital, nonstate medium of exchange presents an unprecedented opportunity to examine how monetary institutions evolve and impact social relationships. By moving beyond disciplinary boundaries and engaging seriously with economic theory, anthropologists can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of value across human societies while advancing both fields’ shared intellectual project of explaining social organization and cultural change.

Corruption has been characterized as a disease of failed states and poor statecraft – a deviation from virtuous development that corrupts economic progress. The dominant paradigm, in which international institutions and policy‐makers concur, is one of hard binaries between state and society, law and crime. This article resists binary thinking through ethnographic fieldwork in Mae Sot, a Thai‐Myanmar border town. Rather than strangling development, border corruption – as varied as patronage‐based bribery and ethnic extortion – has been at the heart of state‐building on the periphery and a key characteristic of capital accumulation in global value chains. By immobilizing and categorizing migrant workers, corruption regimes create the flexible labour conditions necessary for border capitalism while simultaneously opening spaces for migrant negotiation and resistance. These complex dynamics reveal how corruption functions not as an exception but as a structuring norm, producing overlapping states of inclusion and exclusion that serve state control and capitalist interests while continually contested by those subjected to them.

This article argues that payments and payment infrastructures extend beyond economic and legal frameworks. The act of paying involves more than fulfilling financial transactions by transferring monetary value. This view obscures the moral, relational, technological, and political aspects of payments. This article employs the legal definition of payments as performances, broadening it through an anthropological lens. This approach reveals payments as processes rich in cultural and social implications rather than just financial transactions. The article demonstrates that new forms of capitalist expansion emerge through the performance of value transfer. This represents the ‘affective turn’ in the commodification of payments, where the sensorial, emotional, and relational dimensions of value transfer maximize profit extraction. The commodification of payments as performances raises new multidisciplinary research questions that help us understand payments as consumable products.

This article considers how people think about history in terms of its ‘sides’. When people claim to be on the ‘right side’ – or denounce others as being on the ‘wrong side’ – of history, they simultaneously evoke a (culturally specific) concept of ‘history’ and morally evaluate its passage. This article thinks about this process with reference to the interplay between what Michael Lambek identifies as ‘historical consciousness’ and ‘historical conscience’. In a global sociopolitical context which is increasingly fragmenting and where the old order is challenged, the evocation of history's sides is a means by which people find fixity and morally inscribe themselves into time.

This article examines the biopolitics of care within Madagascar's live mangrove crab trade. It reveals how care operates as a governance mechanism beyond ethical or affective practice. Care in this context is both technoscientific and embodied, shaped by regulations, market demands and labour hierarchies. I argue that the care provided to crabs – whether through nursing facilities, cold‐chain logistics or the attentive handling by female traders – serves to sustain life and optimize vitality for economic purposes. This tension highlights the crucial yet often overlooked political dynamics of care in sustaining the global live seafood commodity chain. By recognizing the diverse forms of care within the seafood industry, the article also uncovers the socio‐economic inequalities and ecological precarity embedded in these asymmetrical care practices.