Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

January 2023

The neuroscience of consciousness by the Oxford Comment podcast

Mind the gap: the growth in economic inequality [podcast]

Amid the current economic crises, how do we recover? How can we address such financial distress and inequity, and how might we go about enacting more permanent resolution? Listen to Christopher Howard and Tom Malleson on The Oxford Comment podcast.

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"Giving Now: Accelerating Human Rights for All" by Patricia Illingworth, published by Oxford University Press

Charity and solidarity! What responsibilities do nonprofits have towards Ukraine?

In a speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2022, President Biden called on the UN to stand in solidarity with Ukraine. At least 1,000 companies have left Russia because of Putin’s brutal unprovoked war on Ukraine. Some companies left because of sanctions. Others left for moral reasons, often under pressure from investors, consumers, and out of […]

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Word Origins

Gr-words as mushrooms

Some words propagate like mushrooms: no roots but a sizable crowd of upstarts calling themselves relatives. Gr-words are the pet subject of all works on sound imitation and sound symbolism.

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Word Origins

Monosyllabic moping

The Oxford Etymologist the common but etymologically opaque verb “mope”, and other monosyllabic verbs.

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The Age of Interconnection by Jonathan Sperber

Infectious disease in the twentieth century

In the first half of the century, the three great killers among endemic diseases—smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis—raging around the world (we think today of malaria as a tropical malady but in the 1920s there were outbreaks as far north as Siberia) were each responsible for more deaths than the 80 million who died in both world wars. Innovations stemming from the Second World War, an immense hothouse of technological progress, made it possible to contemplate combatting infectious disease on a global scale.

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