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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
In the previous post, I answered the first question from our correspondents (idioms with the names of body parts in them) and promised to answer the other one I had received during the break. The second question concerned the book titled The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections.
In the annals of American suburban history, Lakewood stands as an icon of the postwar suburb, alongside Levittown, NY, and Park Forest, Ill. Noted not only for its rapid-fire construction—17,500 homes built from 1950-1953—it was also critiqued for its architectural monotony, alarming writers at the time who feared that uniform homes would spit out uniform people. That worry quickly faded when the demography of Lakewood began to change.
In a speech to the Economic Club of Washington in 2018, Jeff Bezos described how Amazon made sense of the challenge of if and how to design and implement a loyalty scheme for its customers. This was a highly consequential decision for the business; for some time, Amazon had been searching for an answer to the question: “what would loyalty program for Amazon look like?”
A junior software engineer came up with the idea of fast, free shipping. But a big problem was that shipping is expensive. Also, customers like free shipping, so much so that the big eaters at Amazon’s “buffet” would take advantage by free shipping low-cost items which would not be good for Amazon’s bottom-line. When the Amazon finance team modelled the idea of fast, free shipping the results “didn’t look pretty.” In fact, they were nothing short of “horrifying.”
Chick Webb’s drumbeats resonate through much of James McBride’s fast-paced new novel “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.” McBride, one of America’s most beloved authors today, weaves Webb into this story early on.
The Oxford Etymologist shares his monthly gleanings on cob, shark, cowan, and more.
In January 2024, the Linguistic Society of America celebrates its 100th anniversary. And one thing you can be sure of is that “Happy Birthday” will be sung.
Real time of space-time is one of the dimensions on which we comprehend and describe reality. Time neither flows, nor flies, or drags on; it doesn’t run out and is not a commodity that can be wasted.
The Oxford Etymologist shares a new explanation for “highfalutin” from a reader of the blog, which, if accepted, “will be a small step forward in the study of word origins.”
100 million Americans hold medical debt which causes people to forgo or be denied necessary medical care. Luke Messac, a historian and physician, looks at five unexpected things about medical debt.
At first glance, the significance of a piece of research may not be obvious, either from a paper submitted to a journal or from a published article. Its novelty, importance, and future impact are often uncertain, needing time to become clear to the research community.
The 2023 award of the Nobel Prize for literature to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse brings Norwegian literature into focus for English-speaking readers and provides a fresh angle from which to view the writings of Knut Hamsun.
Maryemma Graham on writing “The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker”, the complete, authorized biography of America’s first award-winning Black writer.
250 years ago, Ji Yun compiled one of the world’s largest premodern encyclopedias for the Chinese court. This fall Oxford University Press launches the first endowed bilingual translation library of Classical Chinese Literature thanks to a generous gift by Ji Yun’s descendant, Agnes Hsin-mei Hsu-Tang and her husband Oscar Tang.
On 23 February 2022, I drove back to Michigan after giving a talk at the University of Kentucky on genome diversity in Ukraine. My niece Zlata Bilanin, a recent college graduate from Ukraine, was with me. She was calling her friends in Kyiv, worried. A single question was on everyone’s mind: will there be a […]
Jonathan Wikeley explores Vaughan Williams’s “Four Last Songs”, looking at the textual meaning, the process of arranging for choir, and composer’s philosophy of “letting go” of the music.
In this blog post, we hear from OUP’s society publishing collaborators and the ways in which they support diverse communities, including through open access publishing.