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This is the second of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK “Monte Testaccio” When considering quantities, we would ideally like to have some estimates for overall production from particular potteries, and for overall consumption at specific settlements. Unfortunately, it […]
What does it really mean to be happy? What does your brain really want? Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, will be on “Science Friday” with Ira Flatow this afternoon. LINK This is actually the second week in a row an Oxford author has appeared on “Science Friday.” Last week, Kerry […]
Welcome to the OUP blog! Those of you looking for that “original content” we’ve promised can reference: Nancy Sherman’s post on America’s treatment of our Iraq War veterans… Harm de Blij’s post on why geography education really does matter… Jill Quadagno and Jerome Kassirer commenting on the problems in our health care system… And Donald […]
The thirty-sixth edition of Tangled Bank, the bi-weekly round-up of science blogs, is up at B and B. There is some fascinating reading in there, including a link to last week’s post on the Fall of Rome.
Kerry Emanuel, author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, appeared on NPR’s “Living on Earth.” From the transcript: Emanuel: It’s quite possible that it isn’t one-way. It may very well be two ways: that the hurricane activity feed back on the climate system. And one of the ways that that can happen […]
The Disappearance of Comfort It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially […]
Fifty years ago this past Sunday, the brutal slaying of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, laid bare the raw savagery and blatant disregard for decency and law that permeated the Jim Crow South. When Till’s mother insisted on an open casket funeral and Jet magazine published photos of his […]
Glowing coverage of Simon Blackburn’s Truth continues apace! This week, a review in Salon.com! A choice paragraph from Andrew O’Hehir’s review: By now you may be nodding sagely, or you may be flinging your half-decaf latte across the room in a white-hot rage. But whichever side you’re on, and even if your impulse is to […]