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Empirically observed intertemporal choices about money have long been thought to exhibit present bias, i.e. higher short-term compared to long-term discount rates. Recently, this view has been called into question on both empirical and theoretical grounds, and a spate of recent findings suggest that present bias for money is minimal or non-existent when one allows for curvature in the utility function and transaction costs are tightly controlled. However, an alternative interpretation of many of these findings is that, in the interest of equalizing transaction costs across earlier and later payments, small delays were introduced between the time of the experiment and the soonest payment. We conduct a laboratory experiment in Kenya in which we elicit time and risk preference parameters from 494 participants, using convex time budgets and tightly controlling for transaction costs. We vary whether same-day payments are made immediately after the experimental session or at the close of the business day. Using the Kenyan mobile money system M-Pesa to make real-time transfers to subjects' phones allows us to make the soonest payments truly immediate. We find strong evidence of present bias, with estimates of the present bias parameter ranging from 0.902 to 0.924-but only when same-day payments are made immediately after the experiment. This result suggests that present bias for money does in fact exist, but only for truly immediate payments.

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The medieval foliate head has proven to be a powerful icon in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the US and UK, not only of human interdependence with non-human nature but also of sexual and racial boundary crossings among humans. This decorative motif known popularly as the Green Man – a human head made of leaves, or with vegetation sprouting from it – was almost ubiquitous in English and Western European church sculpture from the late eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. These aesthetically intricate, affectively intense images represent bodies that are strange mixtures, weird amalgams: they picture intimate trans-species relations. Drawing on recent theories of queer inhumanism, this chapter analyses uptakes of foliate head imagery in festivals (including Burning Man), sexual subcultures (the Radical Faeries), and literature (Randolph Stow’s Girl Green as Elderflower), focusing particularly on traumatic postcolonial contexts out of which new queer worlds are imagined.

A prophecy prompts Margery in The Book of Margery Kempe to visit the grave of her confessor Richard Caister in Norwich. Her extreme devotional style, thrusting her into the immediate reality of the divine now, contrasts with the dry chronological and institutional timekeeping of a priest there. This article examines the clash of temporalities involving Margery Kempe: in her narrative world, Margery inhabits a time zone different from the people around her. It describes Margery’s experience before the pietà in Norwich in the context of history and time, past and present, analyzing mysticism’s problematization of the body in time and exploring the potentials of multiple temporalities of queerness. It discusses the realm of queer history, with Margery Kempe, her first modern editor Hope Emily Allen, and the author as its subjects.