Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selection while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 26 June, Bradford Morrow leads a discussion on My Antonia by Willa Cather.
By Eric Sandweiss
Three weeks come and gone, and what do we have to show for it? Not quite 6000 new miles on the odometer. A nice, even tan across parts of my head that, in earlier years, never knew sunlight. Eleven orphaned socks. A fuel pump that wouldn’t survive the Continental Divide. Me, I’m rethinking life on the road.
This Day in World History
On 24 June 1901, two Spanish artists joined in an exhibition of their works at the Paris gallery of Ambroise Vollard. One of these artists was Francisco Iturrino, who had lived off and on in Paris since 1895 and whom Vollard had mentored. The other was a not-yet-20-year-old named Pablo Picasso, who had been befriended by Iturrino and the gallery owner.
By Roger Luckhurst
You must surely have been tempted on occasion to curse Julian Fellowes, if not for the script of Young Victoria, then for the creation of Downton Abbey, that death star of good old-fashioned aristocratic virtue and due deference. For a little while, all public debate seemed to be sucked through the funnel of Downton discourse, coinciding as it did with the election of all those shiny Eton boys to government in 2010. But don’t worry: he may already be cursed.
By Eric Sandweiss
In 1938, Charles Cushman commenced his Kodachrome journey across America. At the same time, architects and city planners began to extend the tools of historic preservation beyond their original applications. From Santa Fe to Charleston, city councils experimented with new powers, daring to extend protections once reserved for isolated battlefields, Great Men’s homes, or government buildings to include entire neighborhoods, and arguing that the public benefit derived from preserving architectural character outweighed an individual owner’s rights to do with his property what he wished.
By Paul Cockshott
This year is being widely celebrated as the Turing centenary. He is being hailed as the inventor of the computer, which perhaps overstates things, and as the founder of computing science, which is more to the point. It can be argued that his role in the actual production of the first generation computers, whilst real, was not vital. In 1946 he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), a very advanced design of computer for its day, but because of its challenging scale, initially only a cut down version (the Pilot ACE) was built (and can now be seen in the Science Museum).
We’ve all had the experience: you’re listening to the radio on your morning commute or walking through the mall one Saturday afternoon when a tune catches your ear. There’s something familiar about it, but upon further listening you know that it’s a new song. What about it sounds the same as the song already in your head?
By Gordon Thompson
Perhaps the most significant unresolved controversy surrounding the recording of the Beatles first single “Love Me Do” rests on the question of whether or not EMI had finalized a contract with them. To wit: on 6 June 1962, were the Beatles auditioning or were they already under contract? Documentation and personal memories conflict such that no single answer can claim to be definitive, even as the evidence suggests a nuanced social interplay between Parlophone’s George Martin and Beatles manager Brian Epstein.
“The ghost-stories are begun by all but me,” John William Polidori wrote from Geneva on 17 June 1816 as one of five participants in perhaps the most famous literary competition of all time. Polidori was the handsome, arrogant, and often quick-tempered outsider in a group that also included Percy Shelley, radical poet and thinker, and a married man; his lover, Mary Godwin, the only child of the philosopher William Godwin and the passionate advocate of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft; Lord Byron, the most celebrated (and then notorious) literary figure of the age; and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s step-sister and Byron’s newest mistress.
By Raymond Wacks
Are public figures entitled to privacy? Or do they forfeit their right? Is privacy possible online? Does the law adequately protect private lives? Should the media be more strictly controlled? What of your sensitive medical or financial data? Are they safe and secure? Has the Internet changed everything?
By Rachel Montagnon
Since 2005, when London won the Host City contract for this year’s Olympics, there has been an intensity of interest in how the London Organising Committee (LOCOG) would go about the protection of the Olympic image and in the detail of the UK Government’s legislative attempts to exclude those who would attempt to take advantage of that image, without paying for the privilege.
Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selection while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 12 June, NPR arts correspondent Lynn Neary leads a discussion on Wuthering Heights.
On 12 June 1827, a Swiss writer named Johanna Spyri was born. While living in Zurich, she began to write about life in the Swiss countryside. It is there in the Alps that her most famous character Heidi lives. While Heidi has captured the hearts of readers around the world, it is first her abrasive grandfather that she must charm.
By Philip V. Bohlman
For Rambo Amadeus, Montenegro’s entry in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), Europe’s annual spectacle of musical nationalism was over the moment it began. Randomly placed as the opening number in the first semi-final evening on 22 May, Rambo won only disdain from the millions of Eurovision fans who follow the build-up to Eurovision week. For Eurovision’s loyal minions Rambo did everything wrong: A bit portly, with unkempt hair and a poorly-fitting tuxedo, he rapped coarsely, unapologetically attacking the European financial crisis head-on.
By Dominic McHugh
When the Tony Awards are announced this evening, no doubt most people will be looking at the big categories like Best Musical and Best Original Score. And these are the awards that are most likely to be exploited in the shows’ publicity in future months — rightly so, since it’s the coherence of the end product that makes or breaks a production in the long run.
By Eric Sandweiss
Route 66 is more famous and less necessary than ever. Gray-haired couples on motorcycles cruise past its boarded-up motels. Families stop at themed rest areas to eat at picnic stands shaped to resemble the iconic roadside attractions that the decommissioned highway no longer supports. Historic markers draw curious travelers off the interstate and onto meandering two-lane roads that peter out in quiet small-town Main Streets.