Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Sascha-Dominik Bachmann
Targeted killing by drones (using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or Unmanned Combat Aircraft Systems (UCAS) as weapon platforms) has become an increasingly debated subject. Criticism is not only directed against its overall legality and legitimacy, but also its negative impact on the theatre state as a sovereign state in cases of extraterritorial strikes, a potential lack of efficiency, and a growing uneasiness with its morality.
By Stephanie Dalley
I once gave a general talk about ancient Mesopotamian gardens, and was astonished, when I prepared for it, to find that there was really no hard evidence for the Hanging Garden at Babylon, although all the other wonders of the ancient world certainly did exist.
By Michael J. Gerhardt
On Father’s Day, we rarely celebrate presidents, though we could. All but a handful of our presidents were fathers, and our first president, George Washington, is commonly regarded as the Father of our country. While of course nothing about being president necessarily makes anyone a better parent, many presidents have in fact had their legacies largely shaped by their relationships with their fathers and children.
By Suzanne Walker
The night I saw The Avengers for the first time, I took the train back to my apartment and immediately dashed off the following email to a friend of mine: “The Avengers was amazing, I can’t even describe it. Feeling strangely fearless about life, and my head is filled with too many intellectual thoughts about superheroes.”
Do you know how an author meets the criteria for authorship? Or what should happen to the author’s name if they die before their manuscript is published? This quiz, taken from the AMA Manual of Style, helps you to navigate the ethical and legal considerations and dilemmas most commonly encountered in scholarly scientific publication.
By Christopher Kuner
The recent revelations concerning widespread US government access to electronic communications data (including the PRISM system apparently run by the National Security Agency) leave many questions unanswered, and new facts are constantly emerging. Thoughtful commentators should be hesitant to make detailed pronouncements before it is clear what is actually going on.
Late last year, The Chronicle Review published a cover story on Louis Michael Sediman and the Constitution. In his interview with The Chronicle’s Alexander Kafka, Seidman explains that he began questioning the role of Constitution in the early 1970’s while clerking for Thurgood Marshall, and then working for the D.C. public defender, experiences which offered him the opportunity to see Constitutionalism in practice.
Curated from the pages of Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, this playlist spans over 30 years, offering a chronological tour of industrial music. From its politically charged beginnings in noisy performance art and process-based tape meddling, it moved into 1980s flirtations with rock to its more recent aggressive, synth-driven goth-tinged dance stylings.
It’s the summer of the superhero here at Oxford University Press. We’re publishing two essay collections on the real powers superheroes hold — on our imagination and our understanding of the world. Our Superheroes, Ourselves, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, and What is a Superhero?, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD and Peter Coogan, PhD, look at some of our greatest superheroes (and supervillains) and explore what exactly makes them “super”.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it another Superman-related blogpost to tie in with today’s release of Man of Steel? Hold on to the bulging blue bicep of Oxford University Press and prepare to gaze below in wonder as we take you on a ride over the past 80 years of Superman.
Simon Usherwood
To the casual observer of British politics, we would appear to be heading towards a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU). The Prime Minister has spoken for it, the clamour in the press and in the lobbies of Westminster continues to grow stronger and there is no good reason to speak against it, or so it would seem.
By Roger S. Gottlieb
Suddenly, it seems, meditation is all the rage. Prestigious medical schools (Harvard, Duke, etc.) have whole departments devoted to “Integrative Medicine” in which meditation plays an essential part. Troubled teens are given a healthy dose of mindfulness and their behavior improves. Long-term prisoners in maximum security prisons have gone on ten day meditation retreats, sitting for 12 hours a day in a makeshift gymnasium ashram.
By Anna-Lise Santella
On 12 June, summer officially begins in Chicago when the Grant Park Music Festival, “the nation’s only free, outdoor classical music series of its kind,” opens its 79th season at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. I’m a huge fan of summer music festivals in general — what’s not to like about spending a beautiful night in a beautiful place listening to music I love performed by some of the best musicians in the world? — but of Grant Park in particular.
By David Roberts
Praised in their day as a complete manual of education, and despised by Samuel Johnson for teaching `the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master’, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters reflect the political craft of a leading statesman and the urbane wit of a man who associated with Pope, Addison, and Swift.
By Anatoly Liberman
Although a German word, Pumpernickel (which in what follows will not be capitalized) seems to be sufficiently familiar to the English speaking world not to require a gloss. The origin of the bread (Westphalia, and there perhaps the town of Osnabrücken) has been ascertained, but the etymology of the name remains a puzzle—at least to some extent.
The first time I tried to read The Water-Babies I was 7 or 8 years old. I was sitting on a beach near Margate, during a summer when my other reading had mostly been American comics: Spiderman, Superman, and the rest. Then I opened up a strange story about a hidden underwater world, in which a young chimney sweep is transformed into a newt-like baby who swims around the world righting wrongs, and eventually discovers that the most important battles are inside him. He was like a tiny Victorian superhero.