Editor's Picks

Ourselves Unborn: The Legacy of Roe v. Wade

This Saturday is the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Believe me when I say that I could write for days on the significance of the decision, and even more about recent news and the current state of reproductive rights. If I tried, I could probably recount verbatim the conversation I once had with Sarah Weddington (the lawyer who argued Roe at the young age of 26!). But I won’t. For now, I will simply offer the following excerpts from Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America by Sara Dubow. To those of you who celebrate it, I wish you the happiest of Roe Days.

2011: A year for War & Peace

By Nick Mafi, Publicity Assistant

To further praise Count Leo Tolstoy’s monumental novel War & Peace is about as necessary as adding another Duane Reade in Manhattan. But that’s still not going to stop me from telling you why you should must read my all-time favorite book this year.

Time to get Wilde

By Anatoly Liberman

Oscar Wilde is most often quoted for his infinite wit, and those who know him are mainly aware of his comedies. Some people are still charmed by his fairy tales (“The Happy Prince” and a few others; you should have seen how my undergraduate students – those poor products of popular culture – listen to this story!) and cannot shake off the attraction of The Picture of Dorian Gray. But usually he is mentioned, if at all, in the context of his innumerable mannerisms, the overblown cult of the beautiful, homosexuality, and tragic imprisonment. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a famous title, but I wonder who reads the poem today. More than anything else, Wilde wanted to sound brilliant, which did not cost him the least effort, because he was brilliant. His paradoxes have become proverbial.

The Dollar: Dominant No More?

By Barry Eichengreen

If the euro’s crisis has a silver lining, it is that it has diverted attention away from risks to the dollar. It was not that long ago that confident observers were all predicting that the dollar was about to lose its “exorbitant privilege” as the leading international currency. First there was financial crisis, born and bred in the United States. Then there was QE2, which seemed designed to drive down the dollar on foreign exchange markets. All this made the dollar’s loss of preeminence seem inevitable.

The tables have turned. Now it is Europe that has deep economic and financial problems. Now it is the European Central Bank that seems certain to have to ramp up its bond-buying program.

Books by the Numbers

By Dennis Baron

People judge you by the words you use. This warning, once the slogan of a vocabulary building course, is now the mantra of the new science of culturomics.

In “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” (Michel, et al., Science, Dec. 17, 2010), a Harvard-led research team introduces “culturomics” as “the application of high throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture.” In plain English, they crunched a database of 500 billion words contained in 5 million books published between 1500 and 2008 in English and several other languages and digitized by Google. The resulting analysis provides insight into the state of these languages, how they change, and how they reflect culture at any given point in time.

Lark Rise to Candleford and Rural England

“Unlike many of her contemporaries, Thompson has little to say of Nature with a capital ‘N’. It is the detail of the natural world, the more or less minute, which preoccupies her. Laura cannot remember a time when she and her brother had to ask the names of birds, trees, and flowers. This knowledge, unconsciously acquired, rings with authenticity.”

December 1960: A wild time for the Beatles

By Gordon Thompson

The Beatles reinvented themselves several times over their career, from comic mop-tops to psychedelic gurus to post-modern self-directed artistes; but perhaps one of their most remarkable transformations occurred before most of Britain or the world even knew they existed.

Fifty years ago, as the winter 1960 seeped into Britain, the Beatles returned from a little over three months on the stage boards of Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller where they had put in hundreds of hours of performance. Back in August, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Stu Sutcliffe had recruited Pete Best (and his relatively new drum kit) at the last minute for their very first club residency in the St. Pauli District of West Germany’s busiest port.

The Battle “For the Cure” – The Phrase, That Is

By Gayle A. Sulik

Laura Bassett wrote a scathing essay in Huffington Post about Susan G. Komen for the Cure‘s legal dealings to win control over the phrase “for the cure.” According to Bassett, “Komen has identified and filed legal trademark oppositions against more than a hundred…charities, including Kites for a Cure, Par for The Cure, Surfing for a Cure and Cupcakes for a Cure – and many of the organizations are too small and underfunded to hold their ground.”

Why would the largest, best funded, most visible breast cancer organization put so much energy

Why We Can’t Manage Without Fowler

By Duane W. Roller
Sitting on my desk, never out of reach, is one of the most durable of the Oxford World’s Classics: H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. First published in 1926, and now in its third revised edition, it has been a staple of writers for nearly a century. Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) was an English schoolmaster who turned to lexicography and worked on a number of Oxford University Press dictionary projects. But he will be forever remembered for his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, usually known by professional writers just as “Fowler.”

And what is Fowler? It is basically an encyclopedia of the usage of the English language. It provides a variety of nuggets on how to write English properly. If, like this writer, you can be

When a Language Dies

By David Crystal
There’s a language dying out somewhere in the world every two weeks or so. It’s a far greater crisis, proportionately speaking, than the threat of extinction facing plants and animals. Half the world’s languages are so seriously endangered that they are likely to disappear this century. That’s 3000 languages, maybe.

Perceiving Death in the News

Images of people about to die surface repeatedly in the news and their appearance raises questions: What equips an image to deliver the news; how much does the public need to know to make sense of what they see; and what do these images contribute to historical memory? These images call on us to rethink both journalism and its public response, and in so doing they suggest both an alternative voice in the news – a subjunctive voice of the visual that pushes the ‘as if’ of news over its ‘as is’ dimensions – and an alternative mode of public engagement with journalism – an engagement fueled not by reason and understanding but by imagination and emotion.

In About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Barbie Zelizer suggests that a different kind of news relay, producing a different kind of public response, has settled into our information environment.
Click through to watch a video from the Annenberg School for Communication.

Cleopatra’s true racial background (and does it really matter?)

By Duane W. Roller

Racial profiling and manipulation have existed for a long time. It has become an issue in modern politics, and over 2500 years ago the Greek historian Herodotos wrote that ethnicity was often turned to political ends. Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt, is often a victim of racial profiling.

Surprise! “Men are Hornier than Women.”

By Roy F. Baumeister
The problem of recognizing the reality of the male sex drive was brought home to me in a rather amusing experience I had some years ago. I was writing a paper weighing the relative influence of cultural and social factors on sexual behavior, and the influence consistently turned out to be stronger on women than on men. In any scientific field, observing a significant difference raises the question of why it happens. We had to consider several possible explanations, and one was that the sex drive is milder in women than in men. Women might be more willing to adapt their sexuality to local norms and contexts and different situations, because they aren’t quite so driven by strong urges and cravings as men are.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on London Labour and the London Poor

London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of literature, and a groundbreaking work of sociology. It centres on hundreds of interviews conducted by Mayhew with London’s street traders, beggars, and thieves, which provide unprecedented insight into the day-to-day struggle for survival on London’s streets in the 19th century.

The Reputations of Mark Twain

By Peter Stoneley
The last couple of years have been an up-and-down period for the reputation of Mark Twain (1835-1910). It started well with a special issue of Time Magazine in 2008 which reminded readers of Twain’s goodness, and of the fact that the “buddy story of Huck and Jim was not only a model of American adventure and literature but also of deep friendship and loyalty.”

OK, OK, let’s do a Q & A.

Q. Why write a whole book about OK? I mean, it’s just…OK.

A. Ah, but it’s OK the Great: the most successful and influential word ever invented in America. It’s our most important export to languages around the world—best known and most used, though used sometimes in weird ways. It expresses the pragmatic American outlook on life, the American philosophy if you will, in two letters. And in the twenty-first century, inspired by the 1967 book title I’m OK, You’re OK (which is the only famous quotation involving OK), it also has taught us to be tolerant of those who are different from us. On top of all that, its origin almost defies belief (it was a joke misspelling of “all correct”) and its survival after that inauspicious origin was miraculous. And strangely, though we use it all the time, we carefully avoid it when we’re making important documents and speeches. So, wouldn’t you say OK deserves a book?