Arts & Humanities

An etymologist among the gods

By Anatoly Liberman
Etymology, a subject rarely studied on our campuses, enjoys the respect of many people, even though they persist in calling it entomology. Human beings always want to know the origin of things, but sometimes etymology is made to carry double, like the horse in O. Henry’s story “The Roads We Take.” For instance, it is sometimes said that etymology helps us to use words correctly. Alas, it very seldom does so. If someone asks us about the meaning of the adjective debonair and is not only informed that a debonair man is genial, suave, and so forth but also that the adjective goes back to the French phrase de bon aire “of good disposition (nature),” this may help.

Is the George Washington Bridge a work of art?

By David Blockley
Happy 81st Birthday, George Washington Bridge! The French architect Le Corbusier reportedly said you are “the most beautiful bridge in the world” – you “gleam in the sky like a reversed arch.” But are you really a work of art? The designer Othmar H. Ammann certainly was conscious of the need to make beautiful bridges.

Changing evangelical responses to homosexuality

By Scott Schieman
Although popular culture war depictions have often presented evangelical elites as intransigent in their opposition to homosexuality, authors of a new study published by Sociology of Religion find that during the last several decades, evangelical elites have actually been subtly but significantly changing their moral reasoning about homosexuality. Based on content analysis of the popular evangelical magazine Christianity Today, authors Jeremy N. Thomas and Daniel V. A. Olson identify the shifts that compose this change.

James Bond: the spy we love

By Cornelia Haase
Premiering today, 23 October 2012, Skyfall is the 23rd film in the highly successful James Bond film series. It has been 50 years since the release of the first Bond film, Dr. No, in 1962. Over the decades, there have been many Bond adventures and we have seen six different actors portraying the MI6 agent, as well as many Bond villains, and the famous Bond girls who don’t seem to be able to resist Bond’s charms.

Sounds of the swing era

By Catherine Tackley

The sound of a big band in full flight must surely rank as one of the defining timbres of twentieth century music. It continues to be preserved by, among many others, Wynton Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, remixed by DJs and artists like Matthew Herbert, re-popularised by stars including Michael Bublé, rejuvenated for a new teen audience by West Coast composer Gordon Goodwin

Nucleic Acids Research and Open Access

By Richard Roberts
In 2004, when the internet was pervading every aspect of science, the Executive Editors of Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) made the momentous decision to convert the journal from a traditional subscription based journal to one in which the content was freely available to everyone, with the costs of publication paid by the authors. There was great trepidation, by the editors and Oxford University Press, that authors would refuse to do this and instead would choose to publish elsewhere.

The unshackled cultivation of Rimbaud

By Martin Sorrell
Among the enfants terribles of literature, Rimbaud holds a pre-eminent place. But he’s been made famous against his will. If he had his way, everything he wrote — save perhaps his factual letters from Africa and elsewhere about trade and the dodgy deals he was trying to clinch – would have been destroyed. All the astonishing poetry that has made him an icon burnt on a bonfire of vanities, but fortunately it was saved.

To fix a broken planet

By Louis René Beres
Whatever our faith-based differences concerning immortality, death has an unassailable biological purpose — to make species survival possible. Nonetheless, we humans need not always hasten the indispensable process with utterly enthusiastic explosions of crime, war, terrorism, and genocide.

The birth of disco

By Denny Hilton

By Denny Hilton
On this day in 1959, a nightclub opened its doors in the quiet city of Aachen, West Germany, and a small revolution in music took place. The Scotch-Club was similar to many restaurant-cum-dancehalls of the time, with one exception: rather than hire a live band to provide the entertainment, its owner decided instead to install a record player…

The top ten dramatizations of Moby-Dick

By George Cotkin

By George Cotkin
Moby-Dick draws readers into it. And many of its more creative readers have sought to capture its grandeur on film and stage. From the first film in 1926 to the present, these attempts have taken liberties with the novel, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. But that is the challenge that Moby-Dick offers its readers, a text that is deep and wide, an ocean of issues and concerns that we must all, in some fashion, navigate

Lofty musing: Has it only been 467 years?

By Meghann Wilhoite

Imagine yourself in a lofty cathedral, silver voices echoing off of vaulted stone, with a slight chill in the close air. Are you there? Ok, now you’re ready for the music of English composer John Taverner. Touted as the most influential composer of his time, Taverner (c.1490-1545) was and continues to be admired for his skill in the creation of polyphonic (‘many-voiced’) music — that is, independent musical lines that layer on top of each other in a way that sounds harmonious; the lines fit together without losing any of their individuality.

The rise of the academic novel

By Jeffrey J. Williams
The academic novel is usually considered a quaint genre, depicting the insular world of academe and directed toward a coterie audience. But it has become a major genre in contemporary American fiction and glimpses an important dimension of American life. In the past twenty years, many prominent American novelists have contributed their entries, including Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, T. C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, and Percival Everett.

American football on TV and the music of the night

By Ron Rodman

Monday Night Football has been a staple of American television for over forty years. The first Monday night broadcast aired on the ABC network on 21 September 1970, with a game between the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns. Ever since, Monday Night Football (MNF) broadcasts have rarely been topped in the Nielsen ratings. After a storied run on ABC, MNF moved to the popular sports cable network, ESPN, in 2006.

The Day Parliament Burned Down in real-time on Twitter

To mark the anniversary of a now little-remembered national catastrophe – the nineteenth-century fire which obliterated the UK Houses of Parliament – Oxford University Press and author Caroline Shenton will reconstruct the events of that fateful day and night in a real-time Twitter campaign on 16 October 2012.

Tennyson in 2012

By Gregory Tate
2012 has been a good year for the Victorian novel. The dizzying number of adaptations, exhibitions, and readings which have been organised to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens testify to the ongoing popularity of nineteenth-century fiction, and of this most famous of Victorian novelists in particular.

Joyce Carol Oates at OUP NYC

OUP has just published the second and revised edition of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, and we were happy to welcome Joyce Carol Oates into our Madison Ave offices recently to sign stock, and to meet staff. Here are some photos of her with OUP employees.