Facebook is no picnic

By Susan J. Matt
Lately, loneliness has been attributed to our digital technologies, but its real, root cause is our mobile individualism. America’s mobility rates have declined over the last few decades, but we still move more than most other industrialized peoples. This longstanding pattern in American life means that our social networks are often disrupted, leaving us uprooted and alone. While Americans have long struggled to connect with each other, the contemporary generation faces particular challenges.

Norway gives women partial suffrage

This Day in World History
On 14 June 1907, Norway’s Storting (Stortinget) demonstrated the difficulty faced by women’s suffrage advocates around the world. On the one hand, the national legislature approved a bill that would allow some of Norway’s women to vote for lawmakers and even to win seats in the Storting. On the other hand, the male lawmakers limited voting rights to women who had the right to vote in municipal elections.

How not to infringe Olympic intellectual property rights

By Rachel Montagnon
Since 2005, when London won the Host City contract for this year’s Olympics, there has been an intensity of interest in how the London Organising Committee (LOCOG) would go about the protection of the Olympic image and in the detail of the UK Government’s legislative attempts to exclude those who would attempt to take advantage of that image, without paying for the privilege.

Criticizing the OED

By Anatoly Liberman
The literature on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary is extensive, but I am not sure that there is a book-length study of the reception of this great dictionary. When in 1884 the OED’s first fascicle reached the public, it was met with near universal admiration. I am aware of only two critics who went on record with their opinion that the venture was doomed to failure because it would take forever to complete, because all the words can not and should not be included in a dictionary, and because the slips at Murray’s disposal must contain numerous misspellings and mistakes.

How New York Beat Crime

By Franklin E. Zimring
For the past two decades New Yorkers have been the beneficiaries of the ‘argest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the developed world. In less than a generation, rates of several common crimes that inspire public fear — homicide, robbery and burglary — dropped by more than 80 percent. By 2009 the homicide rate was lower than it had been in I961. The risk of being robbed was less than one sixth of its 1990 level, and the risk of car theft had declined to one sixteenth.

Boris Yeltsin elected Russia’s first President

This Day in World History
On 13 June 1991, millions of Russians went to the polls for the first time in an open election to choose a president. Emerging as winner was 60-year-old Boris Yeltsin, a maverick with a reputation for alcohol abuse who had for some time advocated political and economic reforms.

The sex lives of mushrooms

The overnight appearance of mushrooms in a meadow or on a suburban lawn is a marvelous sight. It is one of many awe-inspiring, magical processes that have evolved among the fungi, yet this group remains the least studied and most poorly understood kingdom of organisms.In the video below, internationally renowned mushroom expert Nicholas Money talks us through the strange beauty – and strange sex lives – of mushrooms

10 questions for Lynn Neary

Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selection while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 12 June, NPR arts correspondent Lynn Neary leads a discussion on Wuthering Heights.

Is Team Obama cracking under pressure?

By Elvin Lim
How quickly fortunes change. For the first time this election season, the Republicans look poised not only to match Obama’s fundraising ability, but to beat him at it. There is certainly no way that Obama is going to enjoy the 3 to 1 advantage he had over McCain four years ago. All this is also to say, then, that for the first time this year, Mitt Romney could be the frontrunner in the presidential race.

Reforming the Farm Bill

By Amanda Kay McVety
On 5 June, the US Senate began discussing its draft of the 2012 farm bill. The final bill will govern American farm and food policy for the next five years, and quite a bit of attention is being paid to proposed changes in the funding of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) and environmental sustainability programs. But more than America’s health is at stake because the bill will affect farmers and families around the globe. What happens here matters there. Government subsidies to “farmers” (often actually massive agribusinesses) in the world’s wealthiest nations make life harder for everyone in the world’s poorest.

Where is Heidi?

On 12 June 1827, a Swiss writer named Johanna Spyri was born. While living in Zurich, she began to write about life in the Swiss countryside. It is there in the Alps that her most famous character Heidi lives. While Heidi has captured the hearts of readers around the world, it is first her abrasive grandfather that she must charm.

Europe in Spite of Itself

By Philip V. Bohlman

By Philip V. Bohlman
For Rambo Amadeus, Montenegro’s entry in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), Europe’s annual spectacle of musical nationalism was over the moment it began. Randomly placed as the opening number in the first semi-final evening on 22 May, Rambo won only disdain from the millions of Eurovision fans who follow the build-up to Eurovision week. For Eurovision’s loyal minions Rambo did everything wrong: A bit portly, with unkempt hair and a poorly-fitting tuxedo, he rapped coarsely, unapologetically attacking the European financial crisis head-on.

Climate change, coral reefs, and social capital

By Tim McClanahan and Josh Cinner
Human relationships with nature can follow different paths. Sometimes the path leads to the collapse of both ecosystems and society. History shows that the directions down this path are simple; unsustainable practices lead to severe environmental damage. This damage has various harmful feedbacks into society, particularly through food production.

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh executed

This Day in World History
Early in the morning of 11 June 2001, Timothy McVeigh was executed for planning and carrying out the worst terrorist attack in United States history to date: the bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Eleven children in an-office daycare center were among the 168 people killed in the blast. Five hundred more people were wounded.

Titanic Street

One of the intriguing aspects of the Titanic story is the way it offers insights into particular locations. A particularly good example is Oxford Street in Southampton. Southampton became established as England’s main passenger port following the transfer, from 1907, of the White Star Line’s transatlantic express service from Liverpool. By 1912, the city was home to steamship companies that included the Royal Mail, Union Castle, and American Lines.

Let’s hear it for the music team!

By Dominic McHugh
When the Tony Awards are announced this evening, no doubt most people will be looking at the big categories like Best Musical and Best Original Score. And these are the awards that are most likely to be exploited in the shows’ publicity in future months — rightly so, since it’s the coherence of the end product that makes or breaks a production in the long run.