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Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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Dialect and identity: Pittsburghese goes to the opera

By Barbara Johnstone
On a Sunday afternoon in November I am at the Benedum Center with hundreds of fellow Pittsburghers watching a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It’s the second act, and Papageno the bird-man has just found his true love. The English super-titles help us decipher what he is saying as he starts to exit the stage.

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Extreme makeover: England’s new defamation law

By Matthew Collins
Britain’s complicated and claimant-friendly defamation laws, honed in important respects in the Star Chamber, have rightly attracted worldwide criticism. In 2008, the New York State legislature condemned their deployment against American nationals as ‘libel terrorism’. In 2010, the US Congress passed a law with the express purpose of preventing British defamation judgments from being recognized and enforced in the land of the First Amendment.

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A New Year’s Eve playlist

Compiled by Taylor Coe
After reflecting on music that they were thankful for a few weeks ago, we have now asked Oxford University Press staffers to share music that reminds them of the New Year.

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Your Place of the Year

As we wrap up the Oxford Atlas Place of the Year project for 2013, we thought we’d open the floor for some personal Places of the Year — that is, locations which have made a significant impact in our individual lives in 2013. Below are year-end picks from some OUP USA staffers.

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Preparing for AALS 2014

By Sinead O’Connor
As 2013 draws to a close, we take the time to ask ourselves, “What does the coming year hold?” At this year’s Annual Meeting, the Association of American Law Schools asks attendees a similar question, “What does the future hold for legal education?”

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Is science inconsistent?

By Peter Vickers
An important part of life is judging when to be sceptical about scientific claims, and when to trust in those claims and take actions accordingly. Often this comes down to the task of weighing up evidence. But we might think that when the science in question is internally inconsistent, or self-contradictory, we have an easy decision.

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Top OUPblog posts of 2013: Editor’s picks

By Alice Northover
As editor of the OUPblog, I’m probably one of only a handful who read everything we publish over the course of the year. Even those posts which are coded and edited by our Deputy Editors I carefully read through in the hopes of catching any errors (some always make it through). So it’s wonderful to reflect on the amazing work that our authors, editors, and staff have created in 2013. Without further ado, here are a few of my favorites from the past year…

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Ellie Collins’ top books of 2013

By Ellie Collins
Thomas Pynchon may have a reputation for writing dense and difficult novels, but Bleeding Edge is something of a page-turner: a thought-provoking thriller. The novel follows Maxine Tarnow, a smart-talking, rogue fraud investigator with a pistol in her purse, and is set somewhere between New York in 2001, leading up to the events of 9/11, and the Deep Web – the dark, buried underworld of the internet, teeming with hackers, code-writers, criminals, and lost souls. Maxine’s investigations lead her into a series of fraught and disorienting encounters with a billionaire CEO, secret agents, drug-dealers, a man with a supernatural sense of smell, and a foot fetishist (amongst others), against a backdrop of weird parties, karaoke joints, a haunted hotel, an offshore waste disposal depot with its ‘luminous canyon walls of garbage’, and the unnerving virtual reality of DeepArcher – an online world, or program. Bleeding Edge melds strange coincidence, conspiracy, and the obtusely unexplained into a brilliant and far-reaching narrative that has stayed with me long after reading.

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Reflections on a year in OUP New York

By Chris Reid
One year. It sounds like a long time, but it feels so much less. Just over a year ago, during the buzz of the Olympics, I packed my bags to move from traditional Oxford to the metropolis that is New York.

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Benazir Bhutto’s mixed legacy

By T.V. Paul
Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been prime minister of Pakistan twice: first in December 1988, and a second time in October 1993 after the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) managed to win two elections under her leadership. Both times the presidents (heads of state) dismissed Bhutto before she completed her full term.

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Buddhism and biology: a not-so-odd couple

By David P. Barash
Science and religion don’t generally get along very well, from the Catholic Church’s denunciation of the heliocentric solar system to vigorous denials — mostly from fundamentalist Protestantism this time — of evolution by natural selection.

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Let them eat theorems!

By Kenneth Falconer
“This is not maths – maths is about doing calculations, not proving theorems!” So wrote a disaffected student at the end of my recent pure maths lecture course. Theorems, along with their proofs, have gotten a bad name.

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The Erie Canal: a tour

By Kate Pais
Before Bill and Hilary, DeWitt Clinton was one of the most famous Clintons that New York could lay claim to. His legacy, mocked at the time as “DeWitt’s ditch”, is the famous Erie Canal. Connecting New York City to the Great Lakes through Lake Erie, this notable trade route cost seven million dollars and cut the expense of shipping to the Midwest significantly.

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