Geography

Conference setting international time begins

This Day in World History – Why does most every country in the world agree on how to determine what time it is? You can thank the International Prime Meridian Conference, which began on October 13, 1884, and lasted nearly ten days. The twenty-five countries that gathered in Washington , D.C., agreed to accept the line of longitude that passed through Britain’s Royal Observatory as the prime meridian—the line of 0° longitude (just as the Equator is 0° latitude). The nations also agreed that the time at Greenwich would be the standard time against which all other times would be compared—Greenwich Mean Time.

Geography matters: The impact of austerity and the path to recovery

By Vassilis Monastiriotis
After fifteen years of fast growth and, by Greek standards, monumental achievements (from EMU accession in 2001 to winning the UEFA Championship in 2004), Greece has found itself at the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008/09 again at the epicentre of global attention. But this time the publicity is unintended and for all the wrong reasons.

Back to school special
Part 2: Early literacy data

By Sydney Beveridge, Social Explorer

With the new school year approaching, Social Explorer is taking a closer look at education data today and over the years. In this installment, we are looking at some of the earliest reported census data related to education.
The Census Bureau first reported literacy data on reading and writing in 1840. At the time, 91.5 percent of the adult white population (over the age of 20) was literate.

Memo from Manhattan: Eye of the storm

By Sharon Zukin
Everyone knows by now that Tropical Storm Irene, which blew through the East Coast last weekend, flooded the beaches, suburbs and some inland towns but did little lasting damage in New York City. I have seldom felt so lucky to live on a high floor with no river view and on a street with very few trees.

Phantom states and rebels with a cause

By Daniel Byman and Charles King Three years ago this month, Russia and Georgia fought a brief and brutal war over an obscure slice of mountainous land called South Ossetia that had declared its independence from Georgia. Flouting international law, Russia stepped in to defend South Ossetia and later formally recognized the secessionists as a […]

Memo from Manhattan:
Main Street, Greenwich Village

By Sharon Zukin

E. B. White was correct when he wrote more than sixty years ago that New York is a city of neighborhoods, and he was even more correct that every neighborhood has its own “little main street.” “No matter where you live,” he says, “you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar.., a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen” and on to the “hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop.” Except for the coal

Eat your potatoes and grow big and strong

As a proud potato-eater of Irish descent, I was often told by my grandmother Rafferty, “Eat all your potatoes if you want to grow tall and strong.” It seems my grandmother was on to something. Between 1000 and 1900, world population grew from under 300 million to 1.6 billion, and the share of population living in urban areas more than quadrupled, increasing from two to over nine percent. The increase in population accelerated dramatically over time and occurred almost entirely towards the end of the period. Many demographers, historians, and economists alike have speculated as to the reasons for such growth on a global scale. The authors of

You’ve Been McGuggenized!

By Michelle Rafferty

When my friend sent me a link with the subject line: Carmel in WSJ! I clicked with trepidation. The last time my hometown made national news it involved a sodomy hazing incident and the high school basketball team. Phew. It was only a minor dispute over an expensive new piece of suburban architecture:

Linked Up: the Trenta, Pirate Talk, Kobe Bryant

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written a Linked Up, but with releasing a new episode of The Oxford Comment, working “frak” into my daily vocabulary, and trying to keep up on developments in Egypt, I’ve not found the time! Hopefully, today’s will make up for it. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

P.S. I promised our Twitter followers that if they came up with at least 5 good questions about insects I would have an entomologist answer them, so send in yours!

Saved! Exotic Bird on Upper West Side

The Oxford Comment guest star Jon (featured on Episodes 1 and 4.5) recently wrote in with this shocking, yet true story:

Essays to read with fear and delight

By Sharon Zukin
I have yet to hold the full collection in my hands, but like many North Americans I have read with fear and delight the essays from Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet, published in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times over the past two years. These are the most significant pieces of writing I read in 2010 and perhaps the most significant writing I am likely to read for the rest of my life.

Memory Chalet is Judt’s memoir, composed, dictated and published between his diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2010, and his death soon after in 2010. It seems he did not write these essays for publication, but they speak to so many lives and concerns that this may be his most universal, most meaningful book. Certainly the essays are a memory chest for Judt’s children, but they are also a reckoning with his complicated heritage: privileged by intellect, promoted by

Is the current run of severe European winters caused by global warming?

By Arnold H. Taylor
At the time of writing, the British Isles and much of Europe are experiencing their second cold winter with record low temperatures. Roads are blocked by snow, trains are disrupted and airports closed. Meanwhile, conditions over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean are unusually mild. The reason for this is that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a great swaying of the weather patterns over the region, is currently in a weak phase.

California and the East Coast: A Love Story

By Alex McGinn, Publicity Intern

It’s no secret that East Coasters are skeptical of the West Coast. Southern California seems particularly peculiar to most inhabitants of the northeastern seaboard; perhaps its picturesque landscape, balmy weather, and laid back lifestyle seem out of touch with the realities of fast-paced East Coast cities. But what some of these West Coast cynics may not know is that SoCal’s most influential “boosters” were refugees of the northeast.

Thinking about this, I turned to The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America by Lawrence Culver. Here are a few important Yankees who escaped their overworked and seemingly miserable East Coast fates to become the earliest developers of some of Southern California’s most iconic getaways.

Memo From Las Vegas: What’s the Matter with Casino Capitalism?

Tweet By Sharon Zukin Taking a position on Las Vegas is like taking an option on a company’s stock: if you like the place, you’re betting that free markets, human power over nature and boundless shopping opportunities will continue to rule the world.  If you don’t like it, you’re a killjoy…or a sociologist. I made […]

Oil Companies Can’t Watch Themselves – And They Know It

Tweet By Benjamin Ross The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been plugged, but the fire on another oil platform recently is a disturbing reminder of the unfinished business that it leaves behind. The root cause of the disaster – an absence of outside supervision that allows profit-driven managers to set their own priorities – has […]

Eyjafjallajokull

(almost the) 2010 Place of the Year

By Jan Zalasiewicz

Volcanoes can take one by surprise. That was the case with Mount St. Helens, that famously erupted sideways rather than upwards, and it was certainly so, two millennia back, when sleeping Vesuvius awoke to bury Pompeii and many of its citizens. Eyjafjallajokull may not have been quite so dramatic, but its effects, in tearing a large hole in our complex and delicate network of global airline communication, certainly rippled around the world.

To a geologist, the presence of a volcano on Iceland isn’t at all surprising. After all, Iceland is literally, and continuously, splitting apart, as this island sits exactly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. That mighty planet-sized fracture is continuously oozing magma, as the Americas pull ever farther apart – by a couple of centimeters a year, maintained for over a hundred million years – from Africa and Europe.