Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Miley Cyrus has shocked the world anew with a recent CANDY Magazine photo shoot by over-the-top fashion photographer Terry Richardson. Cyrus sticks her tongue out with enthusiasm—and does much more. In one image, she is “dressed” in a police officer’s uniform, except that she is not wearing a shirt and a pair of handcuffs is displayed prominently.
On leaving school, my advisor reminded me to always take time to think. That seemed like a reasonable suggestion, as I trudged off to teach, write, and, of course, think. But the modern academy doesn’t share this value; faculty are increasingly prodded to “produce” more articles, more presentations, more grant applications, and more PhD students.
On 7 January, 2016, I asked Google, “what religion is Barack Obama”? After considering the problem for .42 seconds, Google offered more than 34 million “results.” The most obvious answer was at the top, accentuated by a rectangular border, with the large word “Muslim.” Beneath that one word read the line, “Though Obama is a practicing Christian and he was chiefly raised by his mother and her Christian parents…” Thank you, Google.
It’s that time of year again! We invite you to submit your entry for Grove Music’s Spoof Article Contest, and as usual the winning entry will be announced on April Fool’s Day. Spoof articles have been part of Grove’s history for several decades; it seems that our authors have always had an inclination toward humor.
International arbitration expert Loukas Mistelis talks to George Miller about current arbitration issues. Together they discuss how the international arbitration landscape has developed, how arbitration theory has attempted to catch up with practice, and ask whether the golden age of arbitration is now passed.
Grandparents provide a significant amount of care for grandchildren in the United States. Some grandparents provide occasional care, others provide daycare while the grandchild’s parents are at work, and others are fully raising their grandchildren.
Reports that luminaries of the ‘establishment,’ including Archbishop Carey, were queuing up to write letters directly to the Director of Public Prosecutions in support of Bishop Peter Ball, who was eventually convicted of numerous sex offences, is hardly a revelation. Bishops of the Church of England move in the rarefied circles of the establishment, such as the London clubs.
2015 will probably go down as the ‘year of migration’, certainly in Europe. All the contradictions of globalisation were coming to a head. All the ‘blowback’ from Western interventions in the Maghreb and in the Levant were coming home.
Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, authors of the newly-published third edition of Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, provide insight into the legal challenges that the Affordable Care Act faced, including the Supreme Court ruling in 2015.
Oxford University Press is pleased to welcome René Prêtre as one of the the new Editors-in-Chief of Multimedia Manual of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (MMCTS). We got to know Dr. Prêtre during an interview and discovered how he came to specialise in cardio-thoracic surgery, how he sees this field in the future, and what he has in store for the Manual.
After the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014, hardly anyone contests that the World Health Organization (WHO) made fatal mistakes during the crisis. It reacted too late and did too little to contain the outbreak before it got out of control. And it once again exposed its deeply entrenched dysfunctions that make it so difficult for the organization to live up to its role as the central standard setter, coordinator and crisis manager in global health
The United Kingdom Parliament is currently in the pre-legislative scrutiny phase of a new Investigatory Powers Bill, which aims to “consolidate existing legislation and ensure the powers in the Bill are fit for the digital age.” It is fair to say this Bill is controversial with strong views being expressed by both critics and supporters of the Bill. Against this backdrop it is important to cut through the rhetoric and get to the heart of the Bill and to examine what it will do and what it will mean in terms of the legal framework for British citizens, and indeed for those overseas.
When opening a work of Shakespearean biography, it’s not unusual to find some sort of lament about a lack of data – albeit that it quickly becomes clear that this has not stood in the way of producing a substantial volume. However, rather than dwell on how this can still be done, perhaps we should re-examine what we mean when we say there is little to go on.
The Liar paradox is often informally described in terms of someone uttering the sentence: I am lying right now. If we equate lying with merely uttering a falsehood, then this is (roughly speaking) equivalent to a somewhat more formal, more precise version of the paradox that arises by considering a sentence like: “This sentence is false”.
So here’s the question: Is religion evolutionarily advantageous? We can’t ever know for sure what life was like for our prehistoric ancestors, but I hypothesise that supernatural punishment was a very important promoter of cooperation and a way to reduce self-interest, which was vital to the evolution of human societies.
When I first heard the suggestion that religion is primitive science, I put it down to ignorance on the part of people who had not studied these things. Having not studied religion, they did not understand what our ancestors’ religious statements were really doing.