Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Mark C. Carnes
General Editor, ANB
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War will be commemorated in the usual ways. But a truly unique approach is provided by the online—and thus searchable—version of the American National Biography, a 27-million word collection of biographical essays on some 18,731 deceased Americans who played a significant role in the nation’s past.
By Anatoly Liberman
The word beestings once had its day in court. About half a century ago, American linguists were busy discussing whether there is something they called juncture, a boundary signal that supposedly helps people to distinguish ice cream from I scream when they hear such combinations. A special sign (#) was introduced in transcription: /ais#krim/ as opposed to /ai#skrim/. The two crown examples for the existence of juncture in Modern English were nitrate versus night rate and beestings versus bee stings. I remember asking
On a summer’s day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding Camera, recently purchased in London. In The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the resulting image as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of literature. In the short excerpt from the book, below, Winchester writes about the pictures of children he took in the years before he photographed Alice Liddell.
If you’re anything like me, then when a friend asks, “Hey, do you wanna go to Taco Tuesday at that new place over by–” you interrupt with, “Whoa whoa whoa. You had me at taco.” I was flipping through one of my favorite Oxford volumes, The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink edited by renowned food historian Andrew F. Smith, and came across
By Elvin Lim
What exactly, for Republicans, is the budget debate about? It is not primarily about the public debt; it is not even about economic growth.
The last two Democratic presidents, Carter, and Clinton both reduced the size of the public debt as a percentage of our GDP. On the other hand, Richard Nixon was the last fiscally conservative Republican. Every Republican president since has contributed to the rise of the public debt’s share of GDP. Indeed, between Reagan and the first Bush, the gross public debt in nominal terms increased fourfold.
Please join us in congratulating composer Zhou Long, as he has been awarded with the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Madame White Snake. The opera (written by Cerise Lim Jacobs) premiered on February 26, 2010 at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. Drawing on a Chinese folk tale, this opera blends musical traditions from the East and the West to tell the story of a powerful white snake demon who longs to become human so she can experience love – but she meets with deceit, doubt and distrust.
By Bill Wiist
Little more than a year after the January 21, 2010 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission, it is already apparent that the effects of the ruling are widespread, contaminate the democratic processes, and could be long-lasting. Because the effects of the ruling on the 2010 election campaign were significant, the potential effects on public health could be pervasive. Finding new ways to undo its pernicious consequences is an important public health goal.
How do you write a smash first novel? Author (and OUP Law Editor) Matthew Gallaway comes to Oxford book club to discuss his book The Metropolis Case (Crown Publishers). Topics include: Pittsburgh, advice for writers…and what’s up with the incest scene?
By Vlatko Vedral
European robins are crafty little creatures. Each year they make a round trip from the cold Scandinavian Peninsula to the warm equatorial planes of Africa, a hazardous trip of about four thousand miles each way. Armed with only their internal sense of direction these diligent birds regularly make the journey without any fuss.
By Ervin Staub
In difficult times like today, people need a vision or ideology that gives them hope for the future. Unfortunately, groups often adopt destructive visions, which identify other groups as enemies who supposedly stand in the way of creating a better future. A constructive, shared vision, which joins groups, reduces the chance of hostility and violence in a society.
A serious failure of the Obama administration has been not to offer, and help people embrace, such a vision. Policies by themselves, such as health care and limited regulation of
My favorite poetry form is the sestina. I like them, I think, because they are incredibly difficult to compose and require a fair bit of calculation. This being National Poetry Month, I thought I’d challenge you all to write one.
Not sure what a sestina is?
By David A. Leon
Making a difference to the health of populations, however small, is what most people in public health hope they are doing. Epidemiologists are no exception. But often caught up in the minutiae of our day-to-day work, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Is health improving, mortality declining, are things moving in a positive direction? Getting out and taking in the view (metaphorically as well as literally) can have a salutary effect. It broadens our perspectives and challenges our assumptions. Looking at recent trends in European life expectancy is a case in point.
By Leif Jerram
We all know that ‘our inner city estates’ are places of despair, desperation and architectural idiocy, right? We know that we need a ‘big society’, and that ‘society’ and ‘the state’ are not the same thing, right? But there are other questions to ask. Let’s start with the most basic one: where will your children live? And with current rates of house-building and house prices where will any working-class person be able to get a house in 2012, let alone 2025? Because when the Liberal, Labour and Tory city fathers of 1920s Liverpool, 1930s Manchester or 1950s Birmingham asked these questions, they came up with robust, vivacious, dynamic answers. For them, the ‘big society’ meant great houses, lots of houses, cheap houses, built in their millions by the private sector and town councils.
By Stanley Corkin
Sidney Lumet never won an academy award and was rarely placed in the company of the elite Hollywood directors, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola. Yet, his body of work suggests the need for a re-evaluation. I have long appreciated Lumet’s mastery of his craft and particularly his ability to use New York’s urban landscape as a character in his films. But it was while working on
By Anatoly Liberman
Toasting, a noble art, deserves the attention of all those (etymologists included) who drink for joy, rather than for getting drunk. The origin of the verb to toast “parch,” which has been with us since the end of the 14th century, poses no problems. Old French had toster “roast, grill,” and Italian tostare seems to be an unaltered continuation of the Romance protoform. Tost- is the root of the past participle of Latin torrere (the second conjugation) “parch.” English has the same root in torrid and less obviously
By Robert Cowan
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” So wrote Salman Rushdie and he should know. Certainly free speech is routinely held up, often unreflectively, as an unambiguous, uncontroversial good – one of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the right for which Voltaire would famously die, even if he disapproved of what was being said. In the age of WikiLeaks, the freedom to disseminate information and its corollary, the freedom to know what those in power have said or done in secret, have found ever more vigorous proponents, but also those who ask whether it has its limits.