Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
After being told they have breast cancer, many female smokers say “what the heck?” and continue to smoke, figuring they have nothing more to lose. A new study finds that’s not true—that quitting is advantageous even after such a dire diagnosis. The study included more than 20,600 women with breast cancer. Those who quit had a 33% lower mortality rate from breast cancer than those who kept smoking.
Platform businesses are the current darlings of digital disruption. Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, and their ilk dodge the overheads of traditional businesses. Their services are provided by private contractors and not by employees with all of their expensive entitlements.
Music at that time was special— magical even— and its effect would have been diminished by constant presence even if that were possible for the musicians, which it was not. David Lindley, indeed, points out that, in contrast to the modern use of filmic underscoring, music in Shakespearean theatre was ‘always part of the world of the play itself, heard and responded to by the characters on- stage’.
It would seem so obvious that they are information junkies. With 70 plus percent of the population over the age of 10 walking around with their smart phones—more computer than telephone—they often hold them in their hands so they can instantly keep up. E-books are popular, while the sale of hardcopy books continues to rise. The New York Times boasted in 2016 that it now had over a million online subscribers. A number close to that reads the Harvard Business Review.
Soon after the Flinstones’ cartoon period, formally called the Stone Age, humans started to use metals for constructing tools, weapons, or ornaments which tremendously boosted human development. Since then, metal utilization has been evolving and nowadays, metals are a central pillar for all kind of routine and technological uses. You can find aluminium in most of your pots and pans
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has already delivered more high energy data this year than it had in 2015. If any new particle were found, it would open the doors to bright new horizons in particle physics.
Recent months have seen the release of two movies about great jazz trumpeters from the 1950s and 60s: Miles Ahead (Don Cheadle, 2015) focusing on Miles Davis, and Born to Be Blue (Robert Budreau, 2015) focusing on Chet Baker (although Miles plays an important role in the latter too: his second cinematic revival in one year). The similarities don’t end there: both films are semi-fictional, homing in on a moment of crisis in their respective protagonists’ real lives and spinning a mostly fictional story around it.
One area of research in Foreign Policy Analysis is the study of war. In contemporary wars strategic narratives provide a grid for interpreting the why, what and how of the conflict in persuading story lines to win over various audiences – both in the area of operations and at home. The point of departure for scholars utilizing the concept of strategic narrative is that people make sense of war by means of stories through which shared sense is achieved.
The 21 May 2016 drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour riding in a taxi in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, raises questions about the law governing State defensive action. Fourteen years after the first US counterterrorist drone strike in Yemen, legal consensus remains elusive.
Anthropologist Edward Sapir once wrote, “Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.” Sapir was talking about the irregularities of language. For me, this leakiness is especially evident in what I think of as doppelgrammar words.
Sixteen established Republican party candidates have slowly ended or suspended their presidential candidacies and party leaders are trying to divine whether Donald Trump’s unthinkable ascent actually spells the end of their party as we have known it since the late 1960s.
Logic is a deep subject, at the core of much work in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science. In very general terms, it is the study of what (conclusions) follows from what (premises)—logical consequence. The Early Modern philosopher, Immanuel Kant, held that Aristotle invented logic, and at his hands it was complete. There was nothing left to be done. He was notoriously wrong.
At this year’s OUP and BB National Mooting Competition, one of the UK’s most prestigious mooting competitions, the team of the University of Manchester was victorious. The original moot problem, written by barrister Ros Earis for the final, focused on whether or not a landlord was liable for an injury caused to his tenant by a broken paving stone close to the front door of the property, despite not being informed of the defect.
Over the past few years, Britain has commemorated Shakespeare’s life, works, and death in parallel with an extensive remembrance of the First World War and those who served in it. The elision of Shakespeare’s work with this particular conflict is not a new trend: 100 years ago, similar celebrations of Shakespeare were occurring in the midst of wartime, and both Britain and Germany were employing his image and plays for propaganda and recruitment purposes.
I fear death, you might think, because the fact that I will die robs the things I do in my life of their meaning or their value or their worth. This, if it were true, would justify the feeling of vertigo and emptiness that comes when we reflect that we will die.
Moustafa Bayoumi presented his book This Muslim American Life as part of the Oral History Workshops at the Columbia University Oral History MA Program.