The consequences of alcohol and pregnancy recommendations

By Sarah CM Roberts and Lyndsay Ammon Avalos
What should be the public health messaging on drinking during pregnancy?  The answer isn’t clear-cut. We do know that there is strong evidence that high levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy harm the developing fetus. However, we don’t know conclusively what the impact is of lower level alcohol consumption. That is, we don’t know if there is a truly safe level of alcohol use, nor do we know if the line between safe and unsafe alcohol consumption is the same for all pregnant women.

On Ayn Rand and the 2012 presidential election

Stanford Professor Jennifer Burns recently spoke with the 92nd Street Y about her new book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Pointing out the correlation between Rand and Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, Burns explains how Rand’s philosophy of the “virtue of selfishness” and “favor of the individual” has become a tenant of American politics today.

In memoriam: Christopher Peterson

Oxford University Press is saddened to hear of the passing of Christopher Peterson, who died yesterday in his home. One of the founders of the field of positive psychology, Chris’s focus over the last 15 years had been on the study of happiness, achievement, and physical well-being. His new book, Pursuing the Good Life, is scheduled to be published by OUP this December. 

Addressing mental disorders in medicine and society

By Norman Sartorius
Stigma attached to mental disorders often makes the life of people who suffer from such illnesses harder than the illness itself. Once marked as having a mental illness, the persons who have them as well as their families encounter difficulties in finding jobs, marital partners, housing, or protection from violence. If they happen to have a physical illness as well, they get treatment of lesser quality for it.

A global ingle-neuk, or, the size of our vocabulary

By Anatoly Liberman
The size of our passive vocabulary depends on the volume of our reading.  Those who grew up in the seventies of the twentieth century read little in their childhood and youth, and had minimal exposure to classical literature even in their own language. Their children are, naturally, still more ignorant. I have often heard the slogan: “Don’t generalize!” and I am not. I am speaking about a mass phenomenon, not about exceptional cases.

New York’s “Dress Wars”

By Kal Raustiala
In the depths of the Great Depression, TIME magazine offered readers a glimpse at New York’s “Dress Wars.” Knockoffs, TIME wrote, were everywhere in the garment industry, and “dirty tricks” increasingly ubiquitous: “Among such tricks was the universal and highly developed practice of copying original styles. By the early Depression years it had gone so far that no exclusive model was sure to remain exclusive 24 hours; a dress exhibited in the morning at $60 would be duplicated at $25 before sunset and at lower prices later in the week.”

Achievement, depression, and politicians

By Clark Lawlor

‘For two or three years the light faded from the picture. I did my work. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me.’
Starter for ten: who said this? (Apologies if you haven’t watched University Challenge). It was Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest British prime minister and certainly one who played a crucial role in guiding his nation through the Second World War.

Obama out of practice for first debate

By Elvin Lim
President Obama had a bad night. The key to succeeding in a presidential debate is recognizing that it is not a parliamentary debate. The rules, the moderator, and even the immediate audience (since they are not permitted to applaud) do not matter. Instead, candidates should bare their souls to the camera lenses. There, magic is made.

Reflections on the first presidential debate

By Andrew J. Polsky
As the first presidential debate recedes in the rearview mirror, we may be able to gain clearer perspective on what it means to the 2012 presidential race. For starters, the clear winner was the news media. No one likes a one-sided presidential campaign, and that was the direction of the contest over several weeks prior to the debate.

The triple-negative diet to fight breast cancer

In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’ve pulled the following excerpt from Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer: Hope, Treatment, and Recovery by Patricia Prijatel. She provides a quick guide on how to eat healthy in order to better fight the disease.

The point of no return

By Alyssa Bender

If a theater noob polled a group of theater fans on what classic musicals she must see to jumpstart her theater education, you would be hard pressed to find a fan without The Phantom of the Opera on their list. The show, which opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 9 October 1986, has left an undeniable impact on London’s West End, Broadway, and theater in general.

Canadian Thanksgiving

By Christopher Hodson
Americans, think fast: pause those (no doubt) raucous Columbus Day festivities and tilt an ear to the north. Sounds from beyond the 45th parallel should emerge. These may include Molson-fueled merriment and the windswept yawning of those huge CFL end zones. That’s right, it’s Canadian Thanksgiving! Yeah, they have one too.

The history of the OED Appeals

The efforts of members of the public have been at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary for over 150 years. The Dictionary couldn’t have been written without these contributions. We are calling on language lovers everywhere to help us trace the history of words whose origins are shrouded in mystery, with a brand new Appeals area of OED.com. The OED’s record of appealing to the public for assistance stretches back to its very beginnings—to a time when the project not only had nothing to do with Oxford, but wasn’t even a dictionary.

John Lilburne, footwear, fame, and radical history

By Ted Vallance
Forrest Gump’s momma famously told him that you could tell a lot about a person from their shoes. Footwear features prominently in two images of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, with both the seventeenth- and the nineteenth-century prints depicting Lilburne wearing striking leather boots [link to article]. The Sunderland museum also holds a pair of boots once said to have belonged to Lilburne, though these appear to be of a rather plainer design than those that were so lovingly rendered in his 1649 trial portrait.

Don’t you like the castle?

A remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats — this is the setting for Kafka’s story about a man seeking both acceptance in the village and access to the castle. In The Castle, Kafka explores the relationship between the individual and power, as the protagonist K. asks why the villagers so readily submit to an authority which may exist only in their collective imagination. In the following excerpt from the new Oxford World’s Classics edition, K. first encounters the castle and the strange power it holds over the village.

The Beatles begin, Friday, 5 October 1962

By Gordon R. Thompson

The Beatles’ dream of releasing a record came to fruition fifty years ago today when Parlophone issued the band’s first disc, “Love Me Do.” That night, EMI played the song on its own London-produced weekly radio program Friday Spectacular, broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. In the Beatles’ Anthology, George Harrison recalled that, “First hearing ‘Love Me Do’ on the radio sent me shivery all over.