Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
When heads of state and other leaders of 195 nations reached a landmark accord at the recent United Nations COP21 conference on climate change in Paris, they focused primarily on sea level rise, droughts, loss of biodiversity, and ways to decrease greenhouse gas emissions in order to reduce these consequences. But arguably the most serious and widespread impacts of climate change are those that are hazardous to the health of people.
The storyteller has always been a figure of magic, and the circle a magic figure. This is Rudyard Kipling, casting his spell around 1902, the year the Just So Stories for Little Children were published. He is on a liner sailing from Southampton to Cape Town in South Africa, where the Kipling family had taken to spending the winter.
People frequently ask whether the study of history can help in managing humanitarian crises. This question is particularly timely given the massive outflow of refugees from Syria and the problems of admitting large numbers of refugees to other countries, including the United States.
When we think of Christmas cards, we usually picture images of holly, robins, angels and candles, or snow-covered cottages with sledging children, Nativity scenes with visiting Wise Men, or benevolent Santas with sacks full of presents. Very rarely, I imagine, do we picture a summer woodland scene features lounging female figures in classical dress and a lyre-playing cherub.
Nowhere is media’s influence on social attitudes more evident than among the millions of fans following Star Wars. Decades after the franchise’s creator, George Lucas, made his first iteration of the fictional galaxy filled with aliens, Stormtroopers, and the Force, his vision has captivated fans with countless iconic moments.
The star-studded new film The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis’s best-selling expose of the 2008 financial crisis. Reviewers are calling it the “ultimate feel-furious movie about Wall Street.” It emphasizes the oddball and maverick character of four mid-level hedge fund managers in order to explain what it would take to ignore the rating agencies’ evaluations and bet against the subprime industry—that is, their own industry.
Seemingly all the US presidential candidates, in both parties, agree that “something more” should be done about Daesh or ISIS. Most of them, especially the Republican candidates, seem to think that doing more involves more unrestrained bombing (it is unclear if any of them recognize the similarity to demands for unrestrained bombing of Vietnam).
This year, 2015, has seen a special landmark in cultural history: the 2500th anniversary of the official ‘birth’ of comedy. It was in the spring of 486 BC that Athens first included plays called comedies (literally, ‘revel-songs’) in the programme of its Great Dionysia festival.
Todd Haynes’ new film Carol is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s semi-autobiographical novel The Price of Salt, first published in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Daring for its time, the novel depicts a passionate lesbian romance between Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a well-off middle-aged New Jersey housewife divorcing her husband, and nineteen-year-old Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), who works as a department store salesclerk.
In this episode of the Oxford Law Vox podcast, banking law expert Nikoletta Kleftouri talks to George Miller about banking law issues today. Together they discuss some of the major legal and policy issues that arose from the financial crisis in 2008, including assessing systemic risk and whether the notion of “too big to fail” is on the road to extinction.
‘What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw with the broom,’ asks Dickens’s narrator in Bleak House. As the novel develops, it offers various possible answers, including disease, family, money, and friendship.
It’s that time of year again: chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, halls are decked with boughs of holly, and everyone’s rockin’ around the Christmas tree…. As idyllic as this sounds, sometimes the holiday season just doesn’t live up to its expectations of joy, peace, and goodwill.
Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, took an acid trip in late 1950s that reportedly allowed him to revisit the mental and spiritual condition that had inspired him to swear off booze in the first place. Although AA has no religious affiliation, the numerous references to God throughout the twelve steps make its emphasis on interior discovery and redemption an indispensable part of the program.
Recently, debates about inequality have risen to the forefront in academic and public debates. The publication of the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013 did not, to say the least, go by unnoticed. And many other prominent economists have partaken in the debate about global inequality: Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Angus Madison, just to name a few.
Labeling ISIS simply a terrorist organization or an apocalyptic sect of fanatics does very little in terms both of explaining and of confronting the phenomenon. What – among other things – lies at the basis of its emergence, behind and through its acts of brutality, is a different vision of international community, one hostile to that which the vast majority of states and international organizations share.
The world of wine is developing rapidly, so much so that the updated fourth edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine has added 300 new entries, including wine apps, aromatics, minerality, social media, and tasting notes language. The wine map as a whole has changed with countries like Hong Kong and many in Northern Europe developing as substantial wine producers.