OUPblog | Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the World

Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Etymology gleanings for July 2021: tending my flock

By Anatoly Liberman
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Why climate change education needs more empathy

By Derek Gladwin
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The neuroscience of human consciousness [podcast]

By Steven Filippi and Victoria Sparkman
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Brain

It’s time to use software-as-medicine to help an injured brain

By Henry Mahncke

Multiple mild Traumatic Brain Injuries (“mTBIs”) can put military service members at an elevated risk of cognitive impairment. Service members and veterans were enrolled in a trial with a new type of brain training program, based on the science of brain plasticity and the discovery that intensive, adaptive, computerized training—targeting sensory speed and accuracy—can rewire the brain to improve cognitive function. The trial found that the training program significantly improved overall cognitive function.

OUP Libraries

Are UK public libraries heading in a new direction?

By Katie Warriner, Trisha Ward, Karen Walker, and Ania Zminda

Since early 2020, we’ve seen the phrase “the new normal” used everywhere to describe every aspect of our lives post-coronavirus. Undoubtedly, COVID-19 had a huge impact on the library sector with closures happening globally, equally seen among institutional libraries as well as public libraries. As a result, we’ve seen new initiatives being adopted and revised strategies implemented.

Empire of Ruins

Let’s raise our taxes! Infrastructure and the American character

By Miles Orvell

If the infrastructure—roads, rails, water, and sewer lines—is the foundation of our economy, we are living on ruins and on borrowed time. The fragility of our infrastructure symbolizes the failure of a national ideology that has submerged public welfare under an ocean of private interests.

A Useful History of Britain

Beyond history and identity: what else can we learn from the past?

By Michael Braddick

History is important to collective identity in the same way that memory is important to our sense of ourselves. It is difficult to explain who we are without reference to our past: place and date of birth, class background, education, and so on. A shared history can, by the same token, give us a shared identity—to be a Manchester United fan is to have a particular relationship to the Munich air disaster, the Busby babes, George Best, Eric Cantona, and so on.

The decay of the art of lying, or homonyms and their kin

By Anatoly Liberman

I have been meaning to write about homonyms for quite some time, and now this time has come. Here we are interested in one question only, to wit—why so many obviously different words are not distinguished in pronunciation, or, to change the focus of the enquiry, why language, constantly striving for the most economical and most perfect means of expression (or so it seems), has not done enough to get rid of those countless ambiguities.

The Legacy of Racism for Children

“Stop acting like a child”: police denial of Black childhood

By Keaton Carr, Malia Metelues, Kirsten Spears, and Margaret C. Stevenson

On 29 January 2021, Rochester police responded to an incident involving a Black nine-year-old girl, who they were told might be suicidal. An extended police body camera video of the incident shows the agitated child, her mother, and an officer attempting to de-escalate the situation.

The case for readdressing the three paradigms of basic astrophysics

By Zeki Eker

A long held misunderstanding of stellar brightness is being corrected, thanks to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society based on International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly Resolution B2.

The Realness of Things Past

Have humans always lived in a “pluriverse” of worlds?

By Greg Anderson

In the modern West, we take it for granted that reality is an objectively knowable material world. From a young age, we are taught to visualize it as a vast abstract space full of free-standing objects that all obey timeless universal laws of science and nature. But a very different picture of reality is now emerging from new currents of thought in fields like history, anthropology, and sociology.

On beacons, tokens, and all kinds of wonders

By Anatoly Liberman

Let me begin by saying that the best authorities disagree on the etymology of “beacon,” and my suggestion with which I’ll finish this essay is my own.

Navigating digital research methods: key principles to consider

By Catherine Dawson

What do learners need to know when introduced to research methods? Do learners from all disciplines need to know the same things? How would digital research methods be incorporated? Ten principles emerged from these questions.

The VSI podcast season two: Homer, film music, consciousness, samurai, and more

By The VSI Podcast Team

Listen to season two of The VSI Podcast for concise and original introductions to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves.

A Roman road trip: tips for travelling the Roman Empire this summer

By Kimberly Cassibry

As Europe reopens, consider a Roman road trip that takes inspiration from an ancient travel guide. The Vicarello itineraries describe what we might call the scenic route from Cádiz to Rome. Glimpses of the empire’s superlative architecture can be found along the way, and emerging digital tools can put primary sources at your fingertips.

Whitman and the America yet to be: reconceptualizing a multiracial democracy

By Kenneth M. Price

In this OUPblog, Kenneth M. Price explores American poet Walt Whitman and what has often seemed to many to be a loss of Whitman’s early political and poetic radicalism after the war, and how it can be better understood as his own effort to reconceptualize a multiracial democracy.

Passion's Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind

Shakespeare and the sciences of emotion

By Benedict S. Robinson

What role should literature have in the interdisciplinary study of emotion? The dominant answer today seems to be “not much.” Scholars of literature of course write about emotion; but fundamental questions about what emotion is and how it works belong elsewhere: to psychology, cognitive science, neurophysiology, philosophy of mind. In Shakespeare’s time the picture was different. What the period called “passions” were material for ethics and for that part of natural philosophy dealing with the soul; but it was rhetoric that offered the most extensive accounts of the passions.

Outlandish but not crazy

By Edwin L. Battistella

The study of language has generated a lot of outlandish ideas: various bits of prescriptive dogma, stereotypes and folklore about dialects, fantasy etymologies, wild theories of the origin of language. Every linguist probably has their own list. When these ideas come up in classes or conversations, I have sometimes referred to them as crazy, wacky, loony, kooky, or nutty. I’m going to try to stop doing that.

Why did evolution create conscious states of mind?

By Stephen Grossberg

When we open our eyes in the morning, we take for granted that we will consciously see the world in all of its dazzling variety. The immediacy of our conscious experiences does not, however, explain how we consciously see.