Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Who said academics don’t know how to use social media? Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, has certainly proved them wrong. After reading this article by Glenn Greenwald, Robin turned to Facebook.
I’ve been seeing gods everywhere lately. Not gods like Thor, Ganesha, and God. My cinnamon rolls have been deity-free, if not gluten-free. It’s lexical gods I can’t seem to escape. Everywhere I look someone is thanking, cursing, or begging some specific group of supreme beings. For example, I’ve recently spotted the following religious invocations: • […]
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom
As my friends know, it doesn’t take much to make me think of Mark Twain. And even people I’ve never met who have followed my writings on China know about my obsession with Twain, since I’ve managed to bring him into discussions of a wide range of China-related topics, from Shanghai history (he never went
Beginning in the early 1980s, the structure of Chinese media changed. Newspapers, magazines, and television stations received cuts in their government subsidies and were driven to enter the market and to earn revenue. In 1979 they were permitted to sell advertising, and in 1983 they were allowed to retain the profits from the sale of ads. Because people were eager for information and businesses wanted to advertise their products, profits were good and the number of publications grew rapidly.
By Dennis Baron
There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.
Despite the criticism leveled at marketing, why has marketing continued its inexorable march into every aspect of life? Since the end of World War II, two major trends have been affecting the practice of marketing: customer power and self-service. Both trends have been accelerated by the Internet.
Tweet Who, we sometimes ask, at the dinners and debates of the intelligentsia, was the 20th century’s more insightful prophet — Aldous Huxley or George Orwell? Each is best known for his dystopian fantasy — Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 — and both feared where modern technology might lead, for authorities and individuals alike. […]
By Elvin Lim
If Congressman Anthony Weiner loses his job because of a few lewd pictures, he would probably have lost the most among a long line of unfaithful politicians for having sinned the least. Bill Clinton’s encounters happened in the Oval Office (among other places). At least Larry Craig managed to graze another foot at a bathroom stall. But Anthony Weiner didn’t even go much beyond Twitter. There is a chance that Weiner would endure the political storm (as Senator David Vitter and President Bill Clinton did), by waiting the scandal out and hoping that the uproar subsides. But two things stand in the way.
By David Banks
When I began training as a journalist in 1987 and bought the requisite copy of McNae it was a slim volume that could be folded into your pocket on visits to court. The last edition, the 20th came in a shade under 700 pages, despite the best efforts of Mark Hanna and myself to slim it down. As well as successive governments’ enthusiasm for legislation that impinges on the media, one of the other reasons for its growth in size has been the emergence of new legal threats like privacy.
By Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umlitá
Increasingly often, the press offers explanations of human behaviour by drawings, photographs, and graphic descriptions of sections of the brain which show that part of our grey matter that is activated when we think about something or plan an action. We are told that how we behave depends on the functioning of certain neurons. We hear about new disciplines such as neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, neuroethics, neuropolitics, neuromarketing, and even neurotheology (over 20,000 results on Google!).
By Gayle Sulik
A blogger who goes by the name of The Accidental Amazon recently asked: “When did breast cancer awareness become more focused on our breasts than on cancer? Is it because our culture is so obsessed with breasts that it slides right past the C word?”
The Amazon’s questions are important — but they are inconvenient; blasphemous to the pink consumption machine, disruptive to the strong societal focus on pink entertainment,
By Karen Greenberg
The most amazing fact about the more than 700 previously unseen classified Guantánamo documents released by WikiLeaks and several unaffiliated news organizations the night of Sunday, April 24, is how little in them is new. The information in these documents — admittedly not classified “top secret” but merely “secret” — spells out details that buttress what we already knew, which is this: From day one at Guantánamo, the U.S. national security apparatus has known very little about
In the name of giving credit where it’s due, I’d like to do something a little different today and highlight some quality content on other university press blogs. Long live academic publishing!
Are we living in the “anti-60s”? This episode compares the counterculture movement to the blogosphere and pop music today….Bieber vs. Beatles! Hippies vs. Hipsters! Let the showdown begin.
DISCLAIMER: None of these links are in the spirit of April Fools, so worry not. You’re not going to click anything that will cause a startling pop-up or download something you don’t want on your computer. We wouldn’t do that to you. (Or would we?) (No, we would not.) -Lauren & Kirsty
By Philip Howard
Political discontent has cascaded across North Africa and the Middle East. Entrenched dictators with decades of experience controlling political life have fallen or had to make major concessions. In the West, some observers discount the role of digital media in political change, others give it too much emphasis.
Digitally enabled protesters in Tunisia and Egypt tossed out their dictator. The protests in Libya have posed the first