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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
For the uninitiated, the commentary on a rugby game – foot-up, hand-off, head-up, put-in, knock-on – can make it sound more like a dance routine than the bruising sport it really is. If you don’t know your forwards from your backs, or have no idea why a player might opt to go blind, this guide is for you.
Recently, I went to a top oral surgeon at a university hospital to have a fairly routine procedure. While I was being prepped for surgery the attending nurse took me through the usual battery of questions.
James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell are best known for a dramatic balloon ascent in 1862, in which they launched from Wolverhampton and reached heights above the top of Everest within an hour. The aeronauts went on to perform many highly successful ascents, recording invaluable data of the upper atmosphere. On one trip in 1864, Glaisher noted a characteristic warm, south-westerly wind blowing above the country. His thoughts proved to be well over a hundred years ahead of their time.
National governments now recognize online hate speech as a pernicious social problem. In the wake of political votes and terror attacks, hate incidents online and offline are known to peak in tandem. This article examines whether an association exists between both forms of hate, independent of ‘trigger’ events.
It was quite a shock for me when the independent psychiatrist asked me during my forced stay in the mental hospital what I thought of my diagnosis “schizophrenia”. It was the first time I heard my diagnosis. For the rest of our conversation the diagnosis “schizophrenia” echoed in my head. I associated “schizophrenia” with: being […]
Mary Astell is widely considered one of the first and foremost English feminists. Her pioneering writings address female education and autonomy in the early modern period and had a profound influence on later generation of feminists. Astell was born into a middle class family in 1666. Her father was Newcastle coal merchant who died when […]
Some more finger work: in the posts for September 25 and October 2, 2019, the etymology of the word finger was discussed. Some comments on the first one require further notice.
Final -r. I deliberately stayed away from the origin of -r in fingr-, though I did mention the problem.
Many of us know the name Jack the Ripper. Perhaps we associate it with a dark shadow wearing a top hat and holding a knife in the middle of a foggy street in Victorian London. But not many of us know that this image is very far away from any reliable fact that has reached us about the 1888 tragic events that took place in Whitechapel.
Philosophers once predicted that religion would die out as societies modernize. This has not happened. Today, more than four out of every five people on Earth believe in God. Religion seems to be serving a purpose that modernization does not replace. New research finds that people become more religious when hit by natural disasters. They are more likely […]
Imagine that, while walking along a pier, you see two strangers drowning in the sea. Lo and behold, you can easily save them both by throwing them the two life preservers located immediately in front of you. Since you can’t swim and no one else is around, there is no other way these folks will […]
This October marks the thirty-third anniversary of the passing of Rudolph Flesch, the patron saint of brevity.
Mental Illness Awareness Week occurs every year in the first full week of October. This year, we’re focusing on the breaking down the barriers that prevent individuals with mental health issues from receiving adequate treatment.
When did you last look up at the night sky? Before the advent of streetlights, paying attention to the heavens above us would have been an everyday part of existence, as commonplace as noticing the weather. Now, as many of us hurry from brightly lit office buildings to the cosy lights of home, few remember […]
The arrival of a new child destroys a household’s ordinary sense of time. At least, it did for us. When our first son was born last fall, two leading scholars had just published books that each, in their own way, describe how contemporary US fiction has been shaped by the dramatic rise of human rights in global politics since the 1970s.
Finger seems to be a transparent word, but this transparency is an illusion, for what is fing- (assuming that we understand what -er is)? Our story began last week (see the post for September 25, 2019), and I attempted to show that one of the two best-known etymologies of finger, namely, from the numeral five, is “less than fully convincing” (a common academic euphemism for “nearly unacceptable”).
Refugees are people who have been forcibly displaced across a border. What do animals have to do with them? A lot.