Finding the classics in World War I poetry
It is a paradox that interest in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome has increased at the same time that the extent of detailed knowledge about Greece, Rome, and the associated languages has declined.
Messy, messy masculinity: The politics of eccentric men in the early United States
For every weirdo one finds while researching the past’s forgotten personalities, there are probably two or three more just a stone’s throw away whom time did not preserve. Ben Bascom (Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States) assembles a collection of once neglected but now deeply curious stories that offer the underside to more popular narratives about the founding of the U.S and what it meant—and means—to be masculine.
The art of the bee
The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They’ve painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities and have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment.
A chronology of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China [timeline]
In Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China’s emergency response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government’s handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. This timeline adapted from the book walks through the day by day chronology of the initial outbreak and explores how both the virus and information spread.
Mental disorder or something magical?
Each generation finds their own way of understanding mental distress. The ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers of World War I were understood at the time to be of weak character, although now we might diagnose them with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Dab-dab and a learned idiom
I receive questions about the origin of words and idioms with some regularity. If the subjects are trivial, I respond privately, but this week a correspondent asked me about the etymology of the verb loiter, and I thought it might be a good idea to devote some space to it and to its closest synonyms.
Has Christian philosophy been having it too easy?
Over the last 50 years, Christian philosophy has ballooned into by far the largest interest area in the philosophy of religion. The Society of Christian Philosophers boasts more than a thousand members in the United States, and similar groups are dotted around the world.
State supported Covid-19 nudges only really worked on the young
A Swedish study reveals vaccination nudges barely influenced the older, more vulnerable people who needed them but younger people complied. Why?
Of politicians as newsreaders and other curiosities of our brave new digital world
Few will have been surprised by Ofcom’s recent verdict that GB News broke due impartiality rules by featuring politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Esther McVey as news presenters. However, the regulator’s decision to handle GB News with kid gloves by putting it on notice whilst refraining from imposing statutory sanctions raised an eyebrow or two.
In search of the MacGuffin
I considered opening this post in the style of Dashiell Hammett: Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal.
Unlocking the Moon’s secrets: from Galileo to giant impact
It is a curious fact that some of the most obvious questions about our planet have been the hardest for scientists to explain. Surely the most conspicuous mystery in paleontology was “what killed the dinosaurs.”
How to co-write a book 3,000 miles apart: In Dialogue with Dickens [long read]
RB lives outside Boston in the United States, PD across the Mersey from Liverpool, England. We have never met in person. We communicated across the distance between America and England via books, via Dickens, trying to use our different lives in the same common purpose: in dialogue with Dickens.
Unscheduled gleanings and a few idioms
I receive questions about the origin of words and idioms with some regularity. If the subjects are trivial, I respond privately, but this week a correspondent asked me about the etymology of the verb loiter, and I thought it might be a good idea to devote some space to it and to its closest synonyms.
“Unparalleled research quality”: An interview with Tanya Laplante, Head of Product Platforms
As part of our Publishing 101 blog series, we are interviewing “hidden” figures at Oxford University Press: colleagues who our authors would not typically work with but who make a crucial contribution to the success of their books. Tanya explains how, as research behaviours have changed, we use digital platforms to ensure that our authors’ books reach readers worldwide.
Is it democratic to disqualify a popular candidate from the ballot?
That a popular candidate could be disqualified from running and removed from the ballot might, at first glance, seem at odds with the very idea of democracy. For that reason, despite his evident role in instigating an insurrection, many Republican senators demurred and chose not to impeach former President Donald J. Trump on 13 January 2021.
A Sand County Almanac at 75: the evolution of the land ethic
A lot changes in 75 years. In 1949, when Oxford University Press published Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac with “The Land Ethic” included, there were about 2.5 billion people alive on Earth. The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was just over 310 parts per million. The average global temperature was 0.6 degrees Celsius below the average for the twentieth century.