June 2015

Being defaced: John Aubrey and the literary sketch

By Kate Bennett

John Aubrey might have made an excellent literary agent. When Charles II was restored, Aubrey told Thomas Hobbes to come down to London straight away to get his portrait painted. It was a successful bid for patronage. Aubrey correctly calculated that Hobbes would meet the King at the studio of Samuel Cooper, ‘the prince’ of miniaturists. Cooper painted two watercolour miniatures, ‘as like as art could afford’. One the King took away for his ‘closet’ at Whitehall Palace, and another was not finished.

Climate change and self-adapting law

By David D. Caron

How would law look different if we had always known about climate change? One difference – I would suggest – is that it would have been constructed so as to self-adapt to the changing context that it seeks to govern. What does it mean to self-adapt? An example of self-adapting law can be found in long term supply agreements.

Islamic State and the limits of international ethics

By John Williams

The moral outrage at the actions of Islamic State (IS) is easy to both express and justify. An organisation that engages in immolation, decapitation, crucifixion and brutal corporal punishment; that seemingly deploys children as executioners; that imposes profound restrictions on the life-choices and opportunities of women; and that destroys cultural heritage that predates Islam is despicable. What drives such condemnation is complex and multifaceted, however.

OUP staff discuss their favourite independent bookstores to celebrate Independent Bookshop Week

In support of Independent Bookshop Week, a campaign run by the Booksellers Association that supports independent bookstores, we asked the Oxford University Press UK office what their favorite independent bookstores were.

How is the mind related to the body?

By Nicholas Jolley

At one point in the recent film The Imitation Game the detective assigned to his case asks Alan Turing whether machines could think. The dialogue that follows is perhaps not very illuminating philosophically, but it does remind us of an important point: the computer revolution that Turing helped to pioneer gave a huge impetus to interest in what we now call the mind-body problem. In other words, how is the mind related to the body? How could a soggy grey mass such as the brain give rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of consciousness?

Getting to know our Institutional Marketing team for Latin America

From time to time, we try to give you a glimpse into our offices around the globe. This week, we are excited to introduce three members of our Institutional Marketing team for Latin America. Seth, Molly, and Juan work with libraries and other institutions around the world, from setting up educational webinars to holding Library Advisory councils, from updating librarians on new journals and websites to providing them with tools to help faculty and students.

Murders in rural Mississippi: remembering tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement

By Carol V.R. George

On June 21, Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi will hold its fifty-first memorial service for three young civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan at the start of the Freedom Summer. Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were activists who planned to create a voting rights school at the church, located in rural Neshoba County.

The role of logic in philosophy: A Q&A with Elijah Millgram

By Elijah Millgram and Svantje Guinebert

Elijah Millgram, author of The Great Endarkenment, Svantje Guinebert, of the University of Bremen, to answer his questions and discuss the role of logic in philosophy. On other occasions, you’ve said that logic, at least the logic that most philosophers are taught, is stale science, and that it’s getting in the way of philosophers learning about newer developments. But surely logic is important for philosophers. Would you like to speak to the role of logic in philosophy?

Sweetness around the world

No matter where in the world you go, pastries are a universal treat. From Turkish baklava to Italian cannolis, French croissants to American cherry pie, these morsels of sweetness are a culinary tradition that knows no borders. Whether you’re boarding an overseas flight or hanging around the neighborhood, we’ve hand-picked several pastry shops from the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets to add to your personal itinerary.

Palliative care around the world

By Joe Couling

With a failing NHS and an ageing population in Britain, palliative care is a topic currently at the forefront of healthcare debate. Whether to abandon treatment in favour of palliation, is a challenging decision with profound implications for end-of-life care.

For refugees, actions speak louder than words

By James Milner

Calls for more to be done to respond to the plight of refugees will likely intensify as we get closer to 20 June, World Refugee Day, when groups in more than 100 countries will host events and issue reports to increase awareness about the needs of refugees and to mobilize a more effective response.

Just a face in the crowd

By Niloufer Selvadurai and Julia Hörnle

The widespread practice of uploading photographs onto internet social networking and commercial sites has converged with advances in face recognition technologies to create a situation where an individual can no longer be just a face in the crowd. Despite the intrusive potential of face recognition technologies (FRT), the unauthorised application of such technologies to online digital images so as to obtain identity information is neither specifically prohibited nor a critical part of the international law reform discourse.

The Jurassic world of … dinosaurs?

By David Norman

The latest incarnation (I chose that word advisedly!) of the Jurassic Park franchise has been breaking box-office records and garnering mixed reviews from the critics. On the positive side the film is regarded as scary, entertaining, and a bit comedic at times (isn’t that what most movies are supposed to be?). On the negative side the plot is described as rather ‘thin’, the human characters two-dimensional, and the scientific content (prehistoric animals) unreliable, inaccurate, or lacking entirely in credibility.

Ramadan and remembrance

By Sophia Rose Arjana

Ramadan is an important time for Muslims, whether they live in New York City, Tehran, Cairo, or Jakarta. While there is great diversity in Islam, for most Muslims this month reflects an intensification of the religious devotion and contemplation that characterizes many Islamic traditions from prayer (salat) to pilgrimage (hajj/ziyarat). Ramadan is structured around food, a lack of food, and prayer—the early meal before dawn, the fasting during daylight, the meal at the end of the day, and the daily prayers.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pipe Dream

By Ethan Mordden

The seventh of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s stage works, Pipe Dream came along at a particularly vulnerable time in their partnership. After the revolutionary Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945)—with, above all, two of the most remarkable scores ever heard to that point—they disappointed many with Allegro (1947).

Six people who helped make ancient Naples great

By Jessica Hughes

The city that we now call Naples began life in the seventh century BC, when Euboean colonists from the town of Cumae founded a small settlement on the rocky headland of Pizzofalcone. This settlement was christened ‘Parthenope’ after the mythical siren whose corpse had supposedly been discovered there, but it soon became known as Palaepolis (‘Old City’), after a Neapolis (‘New City’) was founded close by.