What were the Red Sea Wars?
An inscribed marble throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis offers us a rare window into the fateful events comprising what has come to be known as the “Red Sea Wars.”
Whose Odyssey is it anyway?
By Justine McConnell
The death of Martin Bernal in June attracted less media attention than one might have hoped for the man who brought an unprecedented attention to the contemporary study of Classics. His 1987 work, Black Athena, was not the first to argue for a strong, pervasive African influence on the culture of ancient Greece, but it was the first to receive widespread notice.
Sophie Elisabeth, not an anachronism
An intriguing post popped up in my Tumblr feed recently, called “The all-white reinvention of Medieval Europe” from the blog Medieval POC. Both in this post and generally throughout the blog the author makes the point that “People of Color are not an anachronism.”
Walter Scott’s anachronisms
By Ian Duncan
One of Sir Walter Scott’s creations has been much in the news lately: his country house at Abbotsford was formally reopened to the public by Her Majesty the Queen on 3 July 2013, following a £12 million restoration.
Buddhism beyond the nation state
By Richard Payne
Concern with the limitations imposed by presuming contemporary geo-political divisions as the organizing principle for scholarship is not new, nor is it limited to Buddhist studies. Jonathan Skaff opens his recent Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580–800 by quoting Marc Bloch’s 1928 address to the International Congress of Historical Sciences (1928).
Are HD broadcasts “cannibalizing” the Metropolitan Opera’s live audiences?
By James Steichen
When the Metropolitan Opera launched its high-definition broadcast initiative in 2006, hopes were very high. The basic concept was simple: the Met would offer live cinema broadcasts of its Saturday matinee performances to a network of movie theaters around the country.
10 questions for Wayne Koestenbaum
Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. On Tuesday 16 July 2013, writer Wayne Koestenbaum leads a discussion on The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka.
Breaking Bad: masculinity as tragedy
By Scott Trudell
In the opening shots of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, a pair of khaki pants is suspended, for a tranquil moment, in the desert air. The pants are then unceremoniously run over by an RV methamphetamine lab with two murdered bodies in back. When the camper crashes into a ditch, the driver Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) gets out.
A children’s literature reading list from Oxford World’s Classics
By Kirsty Doole
For many of us that love reading, the seeds are sown in childhood through the books we read or have read to us.
In memoriam: George Duke
By Ted Gioia
When a famous musician dies, journalists reach for a handle, some short phrase to summarize what a performer did to gain a dose of fame. Keyboardist George Duke, who died on Monday at age 67, resists such pigeonholing.
Is yoga religious? Understanding the Encinitas Public School Yoga Trial
Practicing yoga is more popular than ever, with plenty of studios to be found across the US. As yoga has now begun to enter school curriculum, some parents and their children are unhappy, feeling that programs such as these are religious.
An interview with Sara Japhet
Biblical scholar Sara Japhet has been a leading authority on the two books of Chronicles since the publication of her landmark works The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Hebrew 1977; English translation 1989), followed by I and II Chronicles: A Commentary in 1993.
Memo From Manhattan: The Tompkins Square Park Riot
By Sharon Zukin
Today, the sixth of August, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park riot in New York’s East Village. Though on that night many neighborhood residents were protesting in the streets, the riot was caused by police brutality.
Twelve facts about the drum kit
Drummers are often seen as the most unintelligent and unmusical of band members. Few realize how essential the kick of a pedal and tap of the hi-hat are for setting down the beat and forming the tone of the band. So what is there to the drum kit besides a set of drums, suspended cymbals, and other percussion instruments?
Why we should commemorate Walter Pater
By Matthew Beaumont
Pater’s most celebrated and controversial book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) is about the distant past, superficially at least, and therefore risked seeming irrelevant even in his own time. It could not however have inspired a generation of undergraduates, including Oscar Wilde, to embrace aestheticism, and a cult of homoeroticism, as his critics claimed, if it had not also been a coded polemic about the present.
A lion: Joseph Paxton in the nineteenth century and today
By Tatiana Holway
Two hundred years ago today, on 3 August 1813, Joseph Paxton turned ten. In a farm hand’s family of nine children, this was likely to have been a nonevent. A decade after that, the day would also have come and gone like any other.