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Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty by Samuel Issacharoff, published by Oxford University Press

Populism and the future of democracy

The democratic world is struggling to find political leadership. On the conservative side of the spectrum, the parties of the center-right have watched their constituencies fade and their political role be supplanted by a populist upsurge. On the left of the spectrum, the picture is no rosier.

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"The All-Consuming Nation: Chasing the American Dream Since World War II" by Mark H. Lytle, published by Oxford University Press

COVID-19 and consumerism: what have we learnt?

Writers often worry that someone will scoop them before they finish, or an unexpected event will undo years of research and writing. Two weeks after naturalist Rachel Carson published her first book, Under the Sea Wind, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Despite excellent reviews, the book sold fewer than a thousand copies. The COVID-19 pandemic became my […]

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The neuroscience of consciousness by the Oxford Comment podcast

Women in sports: Althea Gibson, Billie Jean King, and their legacies [podcast]

Women’s history in sports has in fact been a long series of shocks that have reshaped the world of athletics as well as the possibilities that exist for women everywhere. In episode 80 of The Oxford Comment, we discussed tennis greats Althea Gibson and Billie Jean King and the legacies for women in sports with scholars Ashley Brown and Susan Ware.

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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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The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500

Bringing the Church back in: European state-formation, AD 1000-1500 [long read]

European state-formation would have looked very different if rulers did not constantly have to negotiate with a strong clergy, independent townsmen, and the nobility over, inter alia, the wherewithal for warfare, succession and public peace. But the medieval Church shaped European societies in other ways than this. It was the one institution of late antiquity that survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and it carried the torch of the Roman world after the Empire collapsed.

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Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today

Defining “democracy”

One week before the 2022 US midterm elections, President Joseph Biden delivered a prime-time address at Union Station in Washington, DC. Biden suggested that something foundational, fundamental, was at stake. He reminded listeners of the definition of democracy.

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