Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
It turned out that the melancholy idiom send one to Coventry may not have anything to do with that town. To reinforce this unexpected conclusion, I’ll relate another story. At one time, the phrase up at Harwich existed; perhaps it is still known in the eastern counties.
The first “Brexit” is almost a century old, and it did not even involve Britain. It occurred on 14 June 1926, when Brazil notified the League of Nations it would leave the world organization. Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Venezuela, and Peru, together with Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan, followed in the 1930s. […]
Arrogant people are often intolerant of questioning or criticism. They respond to genuine and even polite challenges with anger. They are bullies that attempt to humiliate and intimidate those who do not agree with, or explicitly defer to, their opinions. The arrogant feel superior to other people and arrogate for themselves special privileges. This sense of entitlement […]
Millions of people live and work in areas where they cannot rely on the state to keep them safe. Instead, their security is provided by armed groups: for example, community or clan militias, warlords, rebel movements, drug cartels, or mafias – i.e. local strongmen that can defend their territory against intruders and keep order within it. But their deal with the population usually goes far beyond providing physical security.
The 2018 movies Crazy Rich Asians, It, Black Panther, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, Mary Poppins Returns, and Beautiful Boy have very little in common with one another, except the fact that all are based on popular books.
I was surprised to learn from my students that many of them are still being taught to write the five-paragraph essay in high school. You know it: an introductory paragraph that begins with a hook and ends in a thesis statement.
All around the world, girls outperform boys on reading tests. Why is this? In and outside of academia, people have been concerned about girls’ under-performance in math, or more generally: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). There have been fewer academic studies and media coverage about boys’ under-performance in reading. This is surprising, since it might offer an explanation for boys’ lagging educational attainment today.
Our Planet, Netflix’s new nature documentary voiced by David Attenborough, arrives on the online streaming platform today. The series explores the wonders of the natural world, focusing on iconic species and stunning wildlife spectacles.
The English-language heyday of classical verse translation, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced works that people still read, enjoy, and study today. Translation has been central in what we now call the reception of ancient poetry through the ages.
A recently published paper in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology has attracted much media attention for its analysis of a subject that has long been debated: how do our beliefs about male-female differences influence our decision-making? Specifically, do our beliefs about the pain expressions of boys and girls influence our assessment of their pain experience? The authors found that when adult […]
It turned out that the melancholy idiom send one to Coventry may not have anything to do with that town. To reinforce this unexpected conclusion, I’ll relate another story. At one time, the phrase up at Harwich existed; perhaps it is still known in the eastern counties.
Through our tax and spending policies, we can expand our economy or let it wither; make society more equal, or less; expand opportunity or continue to let tens of millions of struggling families fend for themselves. There is a way to pay for the government that people want, and shape that government and the economy in ways that serve us all.
We used to think—and many of us were taught in school—that the dinosaurs went extinct many millions of years ago. But now it seems like this might not be the case.
If you go on-line, the chances are that you have encountered memes. What exactly is a meme? Some people take memes to be simply images with added text. The artist Barbara Kruger is often cited as a pre-internet forerunner of this practice.
Recently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted an exhibit called China Through the Looking Glass. The exhibition’s spectacular and unabashed display of Orientalist commodification and appropriation charmed many and repelled others. The exhibition, extended months beyond its original schedule due to its enormous popularity, reminds us how enduring the so-called Asian fetish still is in western culture and how […]
What’s wrong with using the word “spectrum” to describe autism? Perhaps some would suggest that the precise terminology used for referring to these medical conditions is relatively unimportant. In fact, the current terminology facilitates views that distort or oversimplify reality and may be causing harm.