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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
As Pride Month blossoms with vibrant parades and heartfelt celebrations, it’s the perfect time to reflect and honor the rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ history and culture. Whether you’re looking to deepen your understanding, celebrate diverse identities, or simply enjoy compelling stories, our carefully curated reading list offers something for everyone.
I wish that everything my children will hear about race at school will be salutary, but you and I know it won’t. Their peers will expose them to a panoply of false stereotypes and harmful ideas about race, and much of that misinformation will be shared in the guise of humor.
The Hippocratic Oath, which is taken by physicians and implores them to ‘first, do no harm,’ is foundational in medicine (even if the nuances of the phrase are far more complex than meets the eye). Yet what happens when doctors bring about great harm to patients without even realizing it? In this article, we define microaggressions, illustrate how they can hinder the equitable delivery of healthcare, and discuss why the consequences of microaggressions are often anything but “micro”.
Breaking out of the chains had emerged as a central leitmotif and call for activism at the Eurovision Song Contest long before Swiss non-binary singer, Nemo, performed it as the winning song, “The Code,” at the Grand Finale on May 11 2024 in Malmö, Sweden.
The British composer Sir William Walton (1902-1983), writer of operas, symphonies, concertos, and instrumental music, enjoyed an exclusive publishing relationship with Oxford University Press from the mid-1920s until his death.
New York-based talk shows in the 1970s offered plentiful opportunities for quirky young talents like Bette Midler to sing a song or two and maybe kibitz with the host, regardless of whether they had a Broadway show or film or new record to promote. Midler had none of these when her manager Budd Friedman got her booked on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson not long after she began her legendary run at the Continental Baths.
On 28 January 1969, a blowout on a Union Oil platform six miles off the Santa Barbara coast released three million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. As the first environmental disaster captured in technicolor and publicized across national news media, the Santa Barbara oil spill played an important role in the emergence of the modern environmental movement.
Wilfred Owen is one of the most studied of the war poets, and his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is undoubtedly the best-known example of classical reception in First World War poetry. The poem ends with seven Latin words from Horace Odes 3.2: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. Owen bitterly denounces these words as ‘the old Lie’.
It is a paradox that interest in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome has increased at the same time that the extent of detailed knowledge about Greece, Rome, and the associated languages has declined.
For every weirdo one finds while researching the past’s forgotten personalities, there are probably two or three more just a stone’s throw away whom time did not preserve. Ben Bascom (Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States) assembles a collection of once neglected but now deeply curious stories that offer the underside to more popular narratives about the founding of the U.S and what it meant—and means—to be masculine.
Over the last 50 years, Christian philosophy has ballooned into by far the largest interest area in the philosophy of religion. The Society of Christian Philosophers boasts more than a thousand members in the United States, and similar groups are dotted around the world.
RB lives outside Boston in the United States, PD across the Mersey from Liverpool, England. We have never met in person. We communicated across the distance between America and England via books, via Dickens, trying to use our different lives in the same common purpose: in dialogue with Dickens.
The US Army recently gave a full military funeral to Albert King, a Black soldier killed by a white military police officer in 1941; Charles Bolton considers race in the American South during WWII.
Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw inspiration from and celebrate past and present events important to the community.
In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and entered the mainstream of American politics, with the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marking the deadliest attack on American Jews.
Brush up on your Shakespeare with our quiz!