Culture sounds the alarm: Tbilisi at the crossroads

By Peter J. Schmelz and Nana Sharikadze

This fall has been a season of momentous elections—and not just in the United States. Over the past several weeks, after two rounds of voting, Moldova voted to return to office its pro-EU President, Maia Sandu, as well as (despite noted Russian interference) narrowly approving a referendum in favor of Moldova joining the European Union. By contrast, in the Republic of Georgia, in a parliamentary election held on October 26 dogged with similar claims of internal and external vote-rigging, the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed a majority of the vote.

The once unpronounceable word “bloody”

By Anatoly Liberman

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.

Ten classics for your winter reading list

By Ruby Dunn and Keerti Wadhawan

One of the good things about spending more time indoors during the winter months is having more opportunities to spend an evening with a compelling book. If you are stuck on what to read this winter, we have put together a collection of ten riveting page-turners!

Don’t be afraid to switch tenses

By Edwin L. Battistella

Reading a book on the 1992 chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, I came across this sentence:  “Twenty years ago, to the very day, Fischer had swept to victory, to become crowed as the 11th World Champion, against the self-same Spassky, then the Soviet World Champion.”

How to escape from a maze

By J. C. D. Clark

Assume you know nothing about the First World War, but had heard the name and wish to learn about it. Reasonably, you turn to the latest scholarship on the subject, only to find fundamental differences of view among professional historians.

The risks of dopamine agonists for the treatment of restless legs syndrome

By Andrew R. Spector

An extraordinary breakthrough of modern medicine occurred in 2005 when the FDA approved ropinirole for the treatment of restless legs syndrome (RLS). With the first drug ever approved for this misery-inducing condition, patients finally had a highly effective treatment with relatively few side effects.

A ride on an unbroken colt

By Anatoly Liberman

The blog Oxford Etymologist is resuming its activities. I expected multiple expressions of grief and anxiety at the announcement that I would be away from my desk for a week, but no one seems to have noticed. Anyway, I am back and ready to finish the series on the four cardinal points. Since it is in the west that the sun sets, I relegated this post to the end of my long story.

We need to support our health and social care system

By Jermaine M. Ravalier

Far too often health and social care workers are blamed. The decision of the conservative government to prevent social care workers from bringing their families to this country from abroad, for example, suggests that the immigration which is needed to keep the care system afloat is a problem. Indeed, nearly one in five of the social care sector area international, and The King’s Fund suggest that without them the sector will struggle to function. As such governmental actions have inevitably had knock on effects on the availability of care provision in this country. We need a political system that supports and guides health and social care workers. Not one which demonises and detracts from them.

What does democracy look like?

By Robert B. Talisse

“This is what democracy looks like!” is a popular rallying cry of engaged democratic citizens across the globe. It refers to outbreaks of mass political action, episodes where large numbers of citizens gather in a public space to communicate a shared political message.

That we associate democracy with political demonstration is no surprise. After all, democracy is the rule of the people, and collective public action is a central way for citizens to make their voices heard. As it is often said, democracy happens “in the streets.”

Westward Ho

By Anatoly Liberman

The blog Oxford Etymologist is resuming its activities. I expected multiple expressions of grief and anxiety at the announcement that I would be away from my desk for a week, but no one seems to have noticed. Anyway, I am back and ready to finish the series on the four cardinal points. Since it is in the west that the sun sets, I relegated this post to the end of my long story.

Understanding fossil-fuel propaganda: a Q&A with Genevieve Guenther

By Genevieve Guenther and Sarah Butcher

2024’s UN climate summit in Azerbaijan is a key moment for world leaders to express their convictions and plans to address the escalating stakes of the climate crisis. This month we sat down with Genevieve Guenther—author of The Language of Climate Politics, and founder of End Climate Science to discuss the current state of climate activism and how propaganda from the fossil fuel industry has shaped the discourse.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”: tragedy and the environmental crisis

By Laurence Publicover

Our environmental crisis is often described in tragic terms. Weather events shaped by global warming are deemed tragic for the communities affected. Declines in fish populations are attributed to the so-called tragedy of the commons. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, has spoken of a “tragedy of the horizon”: that the “catastrophic […]

The crisis in the palm of our hand: smartphones in contexts of conflict and care

By Jethro Norman, Matthew Ford, and Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde

The rapid global proliferation of smartphones and their associated information infrastructures has been a defining feature of the past decade’s global crises. Yet, while the digital is now a topic of keen interest for scholars working on virtually everything that constitutes the international, the smartphone as an object of study in and of itself has been largely elusive.

Remembering the fallen

By Ian Atherton

This year as usual, on either Remembrance Sunday or Armistice Day, many people in the UK will gather at a local war memorial to remember the country’s war dead, those of the two World Wars and other conflicts since 1945.

In the spirit of Oswald

By Jeffrey Abugel

It’s been more than 60 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those who remember where they were and what they were doing on that fateful day in 1963 are becoming smaller in number. Since that afternoon in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald has been viewed as a glory-seeking sociopath who, according to every official account, acted alone. No one offered him the adulation or hero worship he so desired.

 All the way back: “South”

By Anatoly Liberman

This essay owes its title to local patriotism. In Minnesota, which has recently become one of the centers of world politics and in which I happen to live and teach, when people move in the direction of the state’s northern border, they often describe their travel as “going up north.” I too am moving in that direction with my heavy burden of words of unknown origin