Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Lizzie Shannon-Little
What better way to send shivers down your spine this Halloween than to curl up with a spooky tale? These Classics have been putting the frighteners on people for quite some time, and we’ve got the collywobbles just thinking about them.
By Henry S. Richardson
A huge amount of ethical angst swirls around the topic of informed consent. Can lay people who are considering signing up as subjects in a medical study really be made to understand the risks they are facing?
By Joseph B. Raskin
Service on the first route of the New York City subway system began 109 years ago today, on 27 October 1904. The occasion was marked by ceremonies in City Hall, led by George A. McClellan and representatives of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), the operators of that line. Mayor McClellan saw the opening of the subway as the beginning of a new era for the greater city.
By David Brian Robertson
In the The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay offer us urgent lessons for coping with the kind of gridlock that grips American government today. They were defending a plan intended to replace a failing national government. The proposed Constitution aimed to break a government stalemate that threatened the survival of the infant American republic.
In anticipation of Argentina’s mid-term elections to be held on Sunday, 27 October 2013, Political Analysis co-editor R. Michael Alvarez (Caltech) discussed some of the most important things that we need to know about this contest with Francisco Cantu (University of Houston) and Sebastian Saiegh (UCSD).
The debate over immigration policy is characterized by explosive rhetoric on both sides. Paul Collier, author of Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World, discusses why liberals and conservatives both need to reassess their positions, and how we must find a middle ground based on sound data and research.
By Gianfranco Bertone
A quiet turmoil agitates the international scientific community, as cosmology and particle physics discretely inch toward a pivotal paradigm shift.
The giant detectors that have allowed the much celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson, for which the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded this October, now sit quietly in the depths of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider tunnel — barely fitting in their underground hall, like the green apple in Magritte’s painting The Listening Room —
By Ana M. Valdes
Aging is a complex process of accumulation of molecular, cellular, and organ damage, leading to loss of function and increased vulnerability to disease and death.
By Steven Sielaff
Throughout my time as Oral History Review (OHR) editorial assistant at the Oral History Association’s (OHA) annual conference in Oklahoma City, OK, I saw a number of prevailing themes. In the recent past, the push towards digitization and web-based portals has dominated the professional landscape. This was certainly the case again at this year’s conference.
By Jerome Loving
More than a century ago, on October 25, 1902, we lost a major novelist by the name of Frank Norris, author of McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899). Like Stephen Crane, he died in his prime, but not before writing at least one of the great American novels in the naturalist tradition of Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser.
Celebrate Halloween with Shakespeare and Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO)! Test your knowledge on which characters disguise themselves, what the witches say around their cauldron, why ghosts haunt the living, and who plays tricks in the night …
By David C. Catling
Over 2,300 years ago, in his book De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle asked if other Earth-like worlds exist and dismissed the idea. But now, remarkably, the question is on the verge of being answered scientifically. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, has collected data on the statistical occurrence of small planets that orbit stars at a distance where it’s the right temperature for liquid water and conceivably life.
By Jo Wojtkowski
The 2013 International Law Weekend Annual Meeting is taking place this week at Fordham Law School, in New York City (24-26 October 2013).
By Robert Heinrich
Why think of American history in terms of biography? Perhaps most obviously, looking at individuals’ lives allows us to see behind the curtain of many of the great events and movements in American history.
Today is the birthday of a composer who writes in a radically different musical style than many of us are accustomed to hearing on a day-to-day basis, as we sit on hold with the doctor’s office or hum along with the music piped into the aisles of the grocery store.
By Marsha Bryant
Beer does not resemble wine so much as it resembles music.
– Garrett Oliver