Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Imagine what your life would be like if you did not know where you are or who you are with, and a young man told you, “We’re home and I’m your son.” Those who do not need to imagine are the 55 million people living with Alzheimer’s and the 10 million living with Parkinson’s, respectively, as they experience similar challenges every day.
Brain-imaging technique reveals chatting between TV episodes increases mind match up, even when the topic isn’t TV-related.
Amidst the tapestry of history, there exist threads often overlooked, woven by the hands of remarkable women who defied the constraints of their time. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, amidst the burgeoning intellectual and cultural movements of Europe, the fascinating phenomenon of female mediumship emerged as one such thread in the history of Western psychology.
Before I come to the point, a short remark is due. Some of our readers may have noticed that two weeks ago, they did not receive Wednesday’s post. This happened because of a technical problem, but the post “Some Gleanings and the Shortest History of Bummers,” is available.
Over the years since writing about tapevoice I have lost most of my hearing and rely on various interfaces—captions, American Sign Language, lip-reading, conversation slips, and body language—that distribute the voice through multiple modalities. What I call “distributed voice” refers to the multiple forms through which the voice is produced and reproduced. But the idea of a voice dissevered from its source in the body and distributed through other media touches on larger communicational ethics in an era of digital information, social media, “fake news,” and broadband connections.
It’s newsworthy, apparently, when the cover of Vogue magazine features a woman over 70 years old. The New York Times recently devoted an article to the photograph of Miuccia Prada on the March 2024 cover, breathlessly noting that Prada was wearing little if any makeup, did not appear to be “posed,” and remarkably was not gazing at the camera, “looking elsewhere, thinking of something else.” Ordinarily, one would not think it surprising to see images of a powerful, wealthy, highly-educated—and attractive—woman in the public sphere. But her age
Many families imagine summer as a time of endless fun and warmth. But summer is full of parenting challenges, including disrupted schedules and kids having more free time while parents have less. Such parenting challenges make this a great moment to consider how to weave music into activities and routines of family life to make things a little easier and a little more fun—an approach I call “parenting musically.”
Quite recently, the Polish linguist Kamil Stachowski has published a paper “On the Spread and Evolution of pudding” (the source is the journal Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 141, 2024, 117-137).
The list of ways we humans produce greenhouse gases is long and varied, starting with the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas, which releases prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide. That most important greenhouse gas is also emitted by deforestation, the making of cement, the cultivation and harvesting of crops, and the raising of cattle, pigs, and chickens.
In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie-pan-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at remarkably high speed. Within days, journalists began referring to the objects as “flying saucers.”
Most people these days speed across the Apennines between Florence and Bologna through road or rail tunnels without really noticing. But if, as I did, you travel more slowly along that ridge on foot, you’ll get some impression of how these modest peaks had once been seen as “the dreadfull … Appennines”.
Much of George Orwell’s work is historically grounded, yet his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, remains of great interest even as it nears seventy-five years in print. Is Orwell still relevant today? Popular answers appeal to Orwell’s supposed ability to anticipate the future, say, the increase of surveillance technology and prevalence of authoritarian regimes. I contend Orwell remains relevant for a different reason: better than most, he understood the need to critically engage with potential allies and how to do it.
To mark the release of the much anticipated 11th edition of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (OHCM), Oxford University Press spoke with the three new authors of this edition: Peter Hateley, a GP based in New Zealand; Dearbhla Kelly, a Critical Care Medicine fellow in Oxford; and Iain McGurgan, a Neurology Resident in Switzerland. The author team shared their experiences of writing the world’s best-selling medical handbook.
As an OUP editor who has also completed a PhD, one of the most common questions I am asked is how to turn a thesis into a book. My only-slightly-flippant answer is don’t.
Every English dictionary with even minimal information on word origins, will tell us that lord and lady are so-called disguised compounds. Unlike skyline or doomsday (to give two random examples), lord and lady do not seem to consist of two parts. Yet a look at their oldest forms—namely, hlāf-weard and hlæf-dīge—dispels all doubts about their original status (the hyphens above are given only for convenience).
Many autocrats come to power with good intentions only to morph into monsters. A new model explains common drivers of this inexorable slide.