Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
On the afternoon of 27 April 1859, two top-hatted businessmen, standing in a gravel pit outside the French city of Amiens, were about to change history. Joseph Prestwich and John Evans had brought with them a photographer, scientific witnesses, and a great deal of zeal and perseverance to answer a longstanding question: how old was humanity?
Pensions provision in the UK has been quietly revolutionised in recent years. However, far from rescuing pensions from demographic doom, recent policies have in fact further endangered our ability to secure a decent retirement income for citizens—in ways, I believe, many policy-makers are barely cognisant of.
Economies cannot grow unless they have well-functioning stock markets. Up until now, China was a striking exception to this rule. However, for China’s growth to continue, it recognizes that a well-functioning stock market must play a major role. Therefore, two important questions are the following. First, what is the nature of the agency problem in China? Second, what is the potential solution to this problem?
Imagine you are the victim of an unfortunate accident. Unable to move or speak, you lie helpless in your hospital bed. How would anyone know that you—your thoughts, feelings, and experiences—are still there?
The German for “to give a shot, to vaccinate” is “impf-en.” “Impf-” is an exact cognate of English “imp.” How can it be? This week, the Oxford Etymologist explores the language connection between vaccines, mischievous children, and Icelandic elves.
Research for Transcending Dystopia over the course of almost a decade was truly a journey, piecing together disparate snippets that have been transmitted in different repositories to gain insight into the musical practices and lives of Jews in postwar Germany. Among the 26 archives and private collections I consulted, two experiences stand out—the first being somewhat unusual, the second being quite extraordinary.
For Women’s History Month, we have compiled a reading list of titles that explore women’s representation in politics and present bold ideas to improve the future for us all.
How did the Republican Party arrive at such a confused and divided state that Sen. John Thune had to ask whether it wanted “to be the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility, free markets, peace through strength and pro-life” or “the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon”? In reality, the party is both, and it has been so for some time.
[infographic] Cattle well-being and performance is negatively impacted by extreme heat stress. Introducing shade as a mechanism to mitigate this is one way to offer relief.
The early modern period in India (roughly from 1550 to 1750) has been increasingly understood as a time of heightened religious self-awareness—the fertile soil from which Hinduism emerged as a unified world religion. Yet it was also a tumultuous period of intense rivalry across scholarly and religious communities.
This year, LGBT+ History Month coincides with the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s momentous sexological work The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, originally published on 24 February 1871. The occasion prompts reflection on Darwin’s highly equivocal handling of sex variations in the natural world, including intersexualities (“hermaphroditism”), transformations of sex, and non-reproductive sexual behaviours.
Was Darwin a one-trick pony? The scientists who most laud him typically cite just one of his ideas: natural selection. Do any know that his theory of evolution—like his take on psychology—was drawn from a comprehensive analysis of organisms as agents? This fact has long been eclipsed by the “gene’s-eye view” of adaptation which gained a strangle-hold over biology during the twentieth century—and hence over sociobiology and today’s “evolutionary” psychology.
What is the origin of the name Louvre? Dictionaries and websites say unanimously that the sought-for etymology is unknown or uncertain. Perhaps so, but we will see.
In observance of Black History Month, we are celebrating our prize-winning authors and empowering scholarship spanning a variety of topics across African American history, the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, and more. Explore our reading list and update your bookshelf with the most recent titles from these eminent authors.
Isaac Newton is known as the scientist who discovered gravity, but less well-known are the many years he spent in metropolitan London, and what precisely he got up to in that time…
John Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice” was published fifty years ago. What is the connection between Rawls’s abstract theorizing about justice and work aiming to address real-world injustices?