Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
S.B. 185, recently signed into law by California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., requires California’s public employee pension plans to divest their investments in publicly-traded companies that derive half or more of their revenue from “the mining of thermal coal.”
We are not the only species to have a culture. However, the speed at which human culture changes is extremely rapid and can lead to baffling and dislocating effects. How, then, can people make sense of these changes?
The term fragile state originated as an alternative to “failed state” – a worldview predominated by assertions about “weak” or “strong” states, with very weak states referred to as “failures”, “failed states”, etc. A lot of critics rightly pointed out the naivete of a single dimension in conceptualizing the myriad ways in which states and societies can go wrong.
In a widely quoted interview with USA Today, Ben Bernanke said that ‘It would have been my preference to have more investigations of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.’ He makes it clear that he thought some Wall Street executives should have gone to jail.
As a long-time student of politics I have often found myself assessing various kinds of attempts to create new democratic processes or arenas. From citizens’ juries through to mini-publics and from area panels to lottery-based procedures the scope of these experiments with ‘new’ ways of doing politics has taken me from the local ward level right up to the international level.
Last year in 2014, Ukraine made its way into our Place of the Year shortlist, garnering 19.86% of votes. Though Scotland beat out Ukraine for the top spot (with its impressive 37.98% of votes out of five on the shortlist), that by no means undermines everything this Eastern European country has gone through. Serhy Yekelchyk, author of The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know, reflects on how Ukraine has transformed in recent years.
Where does our food come from? A popular slogan tells us that our food comes from farms: “If you ate today, thank a farmer.” Supermarkets cater to the same idea, labelling every bag of produce with the name of an individual farm.
Imagine someone close to you disappears. She no longer shows up on the day on which she always visited. She does not call or write. No one says where she has gone or if she is coming back. To make matters worse, you cannot ask about her. You experience feelings of sadness, anger, disappointment, and grief, to name a few. The only way you have to express yourself is through your behavior.
Does media policy impact the rising political polarization in the United States? The US Congress passed The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that comprehensively overhauled US media policy for the first time since 1934, resulting in relaxed ownership regulations intended to spur competition between cable and telephone telecommunications systems.
On 19 October 1945, George Orwell used the term cold war in his essay “You and the Atom Bomb,” speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
The US Supreme Court has been a vessel for controversy, debate, and deliberation. With a variety of cases filtering in and out of the Supreme Court each year, one would suspect that the decisions would be varied.
You don’t need to follow the news too closely to know that 2015 has been a roller coaster of a year. Last week we announced our longlist for Place of the Year 2015, but since then some of you have been asking, “why is x included?”, or “why is y worth our attention?”
Many people fear that Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader will throw Labour into a policy war so long drawn out that it will end up in the zombie world of the undead and unelectable (like the Liberal Democrats). Corbyn has already been subjected to unfavourable comparisons with previous Labour leaders but in truth he is incomparable.
Companies care about the job satisfaction of their employees, because this is in their very own interest. In fact, dissatisfied workers perform poorly, are often absent and impose hiring costs as they switch employers frequently. Managers, as well as management researchers, agree on the importance of job satisfaction, since the Hawthorne experiments suggested in the 1920s that employees like attentive employers.
That time of the year is upon us again – Strictly Come Dancing is on the telly, Starbucks is selling spiced pumpkin lattes, and the kids are getting ready for a night of trick-or-treating. It can mean only one thing: Open Access Week is upon us.
The growth of United States’ shale oil and gas production over the last decade has been nothing short of phenomenal. Already the premier natural gas producer, Already the premier natural gas producer, the United States is poised to surpass Saudi Arabia and Russia as the largest oil producer and will likely become a net exporter of both oil and gas within a decade or more.