Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

September 2018

Science, where are we going? From intellectual passion to a market-driven system

By Gianfranco Pacchioni

With over 10 million active researchers, more than 2 million scientific articles published each year, and an uncontrolled spread of bibliometric indicators, contemporary science is undergoing a profound change that is modifying consolidated procedures, ethical principles that were deemed inalienable and traditional mechanisms for the validation of scientific outputs that have worked successfully for the last century.

Selecting repertoire for upper voices – a conductor’s perspective

By Joanna Tomlinson and Neil Ferris

Choosing inspiring and appropriate choral repertoire for young people can be a challenge but with a huge amount of new music and arrangements being written for upper voice choirs, conductors have some fantastic options to choose from.

Does TCJA Tax Churches? Should It?

By Edward A. Zelinsky

Does the new federal tax law, commonly known as the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA), tax churches as some have argued? If so, is this tax appropriate? The answers are “yes” and “yes.” The TCJA provisions taxing qualified transportation fringes treat secular and religious employers alike, including houses of worship. In a world of […]

Is Mars still alive?

By Stephen James O’Meara

Less than 50 days after this year’s World Space Week (4-10 October)—a global network of over 1,000 space-related organizations celebrating the role space plays in bringing the world together for peaceful purposes—NASA’s InSight spacecraft is scheduled to land near the Red Planet’s equator to take the planet’s pulse.

Spotify Playlist: Broadway tunes in pop culture

By Laurence Maslon

Popular singers have been covering Broadway for years, introducing show tunes into the mainstream of music. These covers have popularized iconic Broadway tunes and broadcasted show tunes to a larger audience beyond Broadway.

Blood is thicker than water

By Anatoly Liberman

Not too long ago (12 October 2016), I wrote a post about the etymology of the verb bless and decided that my next topic would be blood, because bless and blood meet, even if in an obscure way. But more pressing business—the origin of liver (21 March 2018) and kidney (11 April 2018)—prevented me from meeting that self-imposed deadline. Today, Dracula-like, I am ready to tackle blood.

Northeast India: a new literary region for IWE

By Nandana Dutta

It’s a young literature – this body of English writings from the eight states of India’s Northeast. Often evaluated in comparison with the rich tradition of Assamese literature (from the largest state in the region and going back several centuries) and overshadowed by the growing dominance of a ‘mainstream India-centred’ Indian writing in English, it began to emerge into the literary-critical scene at the turn of the 20th century, without a splash and with extreme modesty.

Re-thinking post-war theatre architecture

By Alistair Fair

The official opening on 14 June 2018 by the Queen and Duchess of Sussex of Chester’s new cultural ‘hub’, Storyhouse, offers a timely moment to consider the theatre as a building type. Storyhouse is an interesting re-thinking of what an Arts building can be. It combines a theatre, cinema, library, and café, in an attempt to break down boundaries between artistic and institutional structures.

Was it right to pass Israel’s Nation-State Basic Law?

By Gideon Sapir

Recently, Israel’s Knesset passed by a 62-55 margin, Basic Law: Nation-State. Israel does not have a formal constitution, but rather a set of basic laws with quasi-constitutional status. Among these basic laws are those that deal with structural issues, as well as those that anchor human and civil rights.

Beyond “The Brady Bunch:” stepfamilies in later life

By I-Fen Lin and Susan L. Brown

When we think about stepfamilies, images of the perennially popular TV show The Brady Bunch likely spring to mind. Young single parents unite in marriage, bringing together their children from prior unions to form a stepfamily.

Not your grandmother’s women’s lib movement: Femen’s uncivil disobedience

By Candice Delmas

Oksana Shachko died on 23 July 2018. She co-founded the feminist socialist collective Femen in her native Ukraine ten years ago, to fight against patriarchy’s three central forms—dictatorship, the sexual exploitation of women, and established religion. One of Femen’s first protests was a guerrilla theater performance protesting sexual harassment at the university.

Malaria Prevention: An Economic Perspective

By Bénédicte Apouey, Gabriel Picone, and Joshua Wilde

In 1998, the Roll Back Malaria partnership – the largest global platform in history for coordinated action towards reducing the burden of malaria – was created to fund a series of health initiatives and malaria control interventions in affected countries. However, in spite of large successes in reducing both the incidence of and fatalities from […]

Multiple inheritances: how the art of Romare Bearden reflects 21st century identities

By Mary Schmidt Campbell

Bearden’s collages, which burst onto the art world scene in the fall of 1964, made a compelling aesthetic argument for multiple cultural inheritances. He called his vision “the Prevalence of Ritual,” and it was first manifest in Projections, black and white photographic blow ups of collages.

What would Margaret Cavendish say?

By Deborah Boyle

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was a philosopher, poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and she had opinions. Lots of them, on topics from the cause of thunder, to the qualities of a good book translator, to the value of diverse opinions themselves (her assessment on this last point: “Several Opinions, except it be in Religion, do no harm.”).

Philosopher of the Month: Arthur Schopenhauer [slideshow]

By OUP Philosophy Team

This September, the OUP Philosophy honors Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) as the Philosopher of the Month. Schopenhauer was largely ignored by the academic philosophical community during his lifetime, but gained recognition and fame posthumously.

Pain is real to patient and provider when empathy is present

By Beth Hogans

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.” ― George Orwell, 1984 In 2004, the World Health Organization in cooperation with the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and the […]