Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Mexico is the 2018 Place of the Year, and we are celebrating its win. To get to know Mexico better, we asked our friends at OUP Mexico what they love most about their country. From fresh guacamole to the warmth of the people, their responses bring Mexico to life.
Politics matters for tax as tax matters for politics. The high-minded Scottish economist Adam Smith had ‘four maxims of taxation’: 1) Tax should be progressive.
2) Tax should be certain, not arbitrary.
3) Tax should be paid at the time most convenient to the contributor.
4) Tax should take as little from the contributors as possible to pay for the state.
The entrance of the United States into World War I on April 6, 1917 inspired a flood of new music from popular songwriters. Simultaneously, the first recording of instrumental jazz was released in April 1917, touching off a fad for the new style and inspiring record companies to promote other artists before year’s end.
I joined King’s College Choir as a boy treble in 1964. This was a time of real energy in the media, recording and concert world, and this possibly brought a different kind of perspective to David’s work with the choir. There were a number of firsts for the choir around this time.
Terror comes into English in the late fourteenth century, partly from Middle French terreur, and partly directly from Latin terror. The word means both “the state of being greatly frightened” and “the cause of that state,” an ambiguity that is central to its future political meanings. In Early Modern English, terror comes to stand for a state of fear provoked on the very edge of the social.
This December, the OUP Philosophy team marks the end of a great year by honouring three of 2018’s top Philosophers of the Month. The immeasurable contributions of Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the field of philosophy ensure their place among history’s greatest thinkers.
The unapologetic authoritarianism of guru-disciple relationship makes it a revealing case study through which to analyze power relations, particularly those related to physical touch and sexuality. As I argue in a recent article, “Guru Sex,” in the guru-disciple relationship there are social conventions surrounding touch, what I call haptic logics.
In mid-January, a group of divers from the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM) project connected two underwater caverns in eastern Mexico, revealing what was believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet.
Everyday choices are guided by a person’s strongest character virtue, and show what they value most in life. This personality quiz,based on a psychometrically validated personality test developed by expert psychologists, will help you discover what your defining character virtue is and how it can help guide your future life choices.
Paul Brown is best known for his work as an artist creating visual art that uses self-generating computational processes. Yet before Paul started creating art with computers, he worked with Nova Express, one of the main psychedelic light shows performing in Manchester and the North of England during the 1960s and early 1970s.
“[Brexit] was a big fundamental decision: an emotional decision,” said Nigel Farrage in an interview with The Guardian’s John Harris in September 2018. For once at least the former UKIP leader, a key figure in the campaign to Leave the European Union, was 100% right.
You have more than six hundred muscles in your body. Pick one of those muscles at random—say one of the eight in your tongue. Its cells will contain protein fibers. These consist of long chains of amino acids, which in turn contain nitrogen atoms. Now pick, at random, one of those nitrogen atoms.
The entrance of the United States into World War I on April 6, 1917 inspired a flood of new music from popular songwriters. Simultaneously, the first recording of instrumental jazz was released in April 1917, touching off a fad for the new style and inspiring record companies to promote other artists before year’s end.
Within the brain, there are many different substructures, each connected by axons and dendrites to multiple other substructures. In the 1970’s, neuroanatomy courses meant memorizing something that looked as complicated as the New York City subway map.
For many years I have been studying not only the derivation and history of words but also the origin of idioms. No Indo-European forms there, no incompatible vowels, not consonant shifts, but the problems are equally tough.
The US Constitution declares itself to be “the supreme law of the land.” Unfortunately, the meaning of the constitutional text is not always clear. Consider the abortion case Roe v. Wade.