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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
by Anatoly Liberman Many years ago, I participated in a meeting of Russian and British students in a town that was then called Leningrad. In the Soviet Union, everything, from theaters and community centers to parks and streets, was named after Gorky. At a certain moment, one of the British students began to giggle. When […]
Last month, Jill Quadagno was invited to present her take on the US healthcare system, specifically addressing the question ‘why do so many Americans not have healthcare?’, to a group of leading Democratic senators. Prof. Quadagno has graciously allowed us to publish the text of her presentation below. A few years ago my friend Connie’s […]
by Harm de Blij It is noteworthy that the troubling results of the National Geographic Society’s survey of geographic literacy in America were reported in the media during the same week Joseph Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, an unannounced candidate for the presidency and a former staffer of the New York Times, respectively, published their […]
In his 2000 book, Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, which was named one of the 25 Books to Remember by the New York Public Library, Jonathan Petropoulos laid bare the motives of the thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women who went to work for Hitler “repatriating” to Nazi Germany artwork from across […]
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1773; ed. F. A. Pottle, 1961) A young and enthusiastic James Boswell befriended Samuel Johnson (1709-84), England’s most famous man of letters, in London in 1763. Soon Boswell was urging […]
Based on the results of a survey released this week by the National Geographic Society, young people in the United States continue to struggle with geography and demonstrate a lack of understanding about our world. The consequences of this deficiency in education are serious when you consider the rising level of interconnectivity between nations and […]
by Anatoly Liberman The terms King’s English ~ Queen’s English are familiar to many. They presuppose that the monarch speaks in a way to be admired and emulated. Language obeys the laws of biology (to the extent that it depends on the production of sounds) and of society (since it is a means of communication) […]
by Steven Lubet After more than 10 years of litigation, and countless jokes by late night comics, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Anna Nicole Smith in her litigation over the estate of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall. As everyone knows, Marshall, at the age of 89, married then 26 […]
by Gary Hart In my most recent book published by Oxford University Press, The Shield and the Cloak : The Security of the Commons, I endeavored to make two points: first, that security in the 21st century would be a much more encompassing concept than in the 20th century, Cold War years; and second, that […]
And the winner of the poetry contest is… “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot! Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” came in second. David Lehman, editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, will be on NPR’s Morning Edition tomorrow to discuss the book and, presumably, the contest.
Time Magazine chose Kerry Emanuel for the “Time 100: People Who Shape Our World” feature that hits newsstands today. Emanuel will surely take issue with being called “the man who saw Katrina coming,” but such conclusions are inevitable for the man who published a paper in Nature last summer just before Katrina pointing to the […]