Seduction French-style—why read Colette?
If I met you at a party and we started chatting and telling each other about our favourite authors, and I mentioned Colette, you might look blank.
What’s the matter with moral fundamentalism?
Inspired by fellow philosopher Anthony Weston, I often ask my ethics students to create a diabolical toolkit of rules that would torpedo public dialogue. The idea here, I explain, is to spell out rules that would maximize the distance between “us” and “them,” ensuring that possibilities for cooperatively setting and achieving social goals—like peace, security, justice, public health, or sustainability—go forever unnoticed. For example, consider things like “prepare your comeback instead of listening” or “be angrier and talk louder than others.”
Racism, jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”
Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than thirty-five years I’ve been reading and teaching the story, each time with an undiminished sense of awe and appreciation for how Baldwin issues a prophetic warning about the outcome of racism while making deeply felt gestures of hope and reconciliation.
8 must reads in sport history [reading list]
Human civilization has always celebrated movement. Whether as recreation in everyday life, or elite competition to honour the gods of Olympus, sport has been a cornerstone of human culture for both spectator and competitor since records began. From the cricket crease to the athletics track to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, discover the history of sport in 8 books and bibliographies from Oxford University Press.
Two nonidentical twins: rump and runt?
Rump and runt are not twins, but they sound somewhat alike, and they may be “distantly related,” to use a phrase sometimes occurring in dictionaries, though this phrase is too vague to be useful. Rump surfaced in texts only in the fifteenth century, and but for the Rump Parliament (1648-1653), famous in British History, the word would probably have been relegated mainly to talks about animals and bird.
Diary of a dead man
This blog post introduces readers to the well-traveled remains of an Egyptian mummy now residing in Houston, Texas. If old Ankh-Hap still had his original hands and an endless supply of papyrus, he might have made entries like these in a diary of his afterlife.
Goethe in shirt-sleeves
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Germany’s greatest poet, then and now. At the age of thirty-seven he was on the way to being the centre of a national culture, and a European celebrity.
A whale of a blog
The title of this post embodies everything I despise about cheap journalism, but the temptation was too strong, because today’s topic is indeed the origin of the word whale. I was planning the story for quite some time, and then suddenly the media informed the world that a spade-toothed whale had been washed up on South Island beach (Australia).
Abominable mysteries
One hundred twenty-five million years ago, the earth exploded with a kaleidoscope of color with the rapid evolution of flowering plants, the angiosperms. The explosion coincided with the rapid increase and diversification of bee species, the new artists of the landscapes.
Rediscovering Piano Time
It’s an eventful time in the OUP Music office, as we’ve just sent to press the latest editions of the Piano Time method books by Pauline Hall. It’s always exciting to see the publication of a new title, but these books feel extra special.
Data protection, the LED, and the evolving landscape of AI governance
In May 2024, OUP attended the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conference in Brussels where academics, practitioners, and policymakers from the fields of data protection and privacy, as well as politics and technology, gathered to discuss the latest in legal, regulatory, academic, and technological development in privacy and data protection.
Bounded rationality: Being rational while also being human
The middle of the twentieth century was an optimistic time in the study of human rationality. The newly rigorized science of economics proposed a unified decision-theoretic story of how humans ought to think and act and how humans actually think and act. For the first time, we had good scientific evidence that humans were by-and-large rational creatures.
A listener’s guide to Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life [playlist]
The music has been hidden—unseen and unheard—for centuries. Listen to the playlist and hear a historic soundscape unfold—songs of compassion and hope, created to accompany the final breaths of life.
Words, emotions, and the story of great
First of all, many thanks to our two readers who sent me letters on sw-words and the linguistic environment of the adjective tiny.
How to choose the right journal
There are likely to be many suitable journals in your field, but targeting the right journal is an important decision, as where you choose to publish can influence the impact and visibility of your work.
Israel, Palestine, and reflections on the post-9/11 War on Terror
How can the United States best help Israel defend itself against terrorist atrocity? Obviously, sustaining the alliance and friendship with the United States is vital for Israel and its security. Equally clearly, the scale and nature of Israeli violence in Gaza since October 2023 has placed new and great strain on the US relationship.