Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2016 has truly been a year to remember — from the amazing competition of the Rio Olympic Games to shock Brexit from Europe, and from environmental woes to the American presidential race. Famous faces have had no shortage of opinions on current events, with celebrities, athletes and politicians not being shy to express their views.
The Twitter poll has closed and the results are in: our Place of the Year for 2016 is Aleppo. Aleppo lead the polls for longlist and shortlist consistently, and news from the city has dominated coverage of the Syrian Civil War in 2016.
The public holds exaggerated views of the quality of the scientific foundations of a surprising number of forensics sciences, as well as of the courts’ scrutiny of that evidence. The most significant of the weaknesses were made plain in a report by the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which concluded: “The bottom line is simple: In a number of forensic science disciplines, forensic science professionals have yet to establish either the validity of their approach or the accuracy of their conclusions.”
Our current understanding of the Universe suggests that it is composed of an invisible component called “dark matter”. This mysterious type of matter represents more than 25% of the entire matter and energy of which the Universe is made. The matter that we are used to “seeing” in our everyday life and that represents the building blocks for both our bodies and stars that shine in the sky, represents only 5% of the Universe.
With Christmas in less than two weeks, there is no better way to get in the holiday spirit than by revisiting one of our favorite Christmas scenes from classic literature.
Following the announcement that this year’s W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Award winner was A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less, we are celebrating the achievement of Christopher Hood and Ruth Wilson, and taking the opportunity to revisit the work of our existing winners. Part 1 looked at the recent winners from the past 10 years; now we will look back to our winners from 1988 to 2004.
In recent weeks, relations between indigenous groups and the Canadian government have soured further over the Trans Mountain Extension Project–the controversial proposal for extending oil pipelines in British Colombia and Alberta. This proposal, and other similar pipeline proposals, has led to a notable unification of indigenous groups in opposition. The ‘pipelines dispute’ between the government and a large section of its indigenous population has been rumbling on throughout the first year of Justin Trudeau’s leadership, but it intensified significantly at the start of November.
On September 21, 2006, Governor George E. Pataki of New York and Governor Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey with New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gathered at Ground Zero for a hastily-called celebratory news conference to announce that the Board of Directors of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had approved a series of agreements expected to “expedite the redevelopment process.” “The time has come to build this,” said the Port Authority’s chairman, Anthony R. Coscia.
Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have been detonated on over two thousand occasions for the purposes of testing and demonstration. With world events more uncertain than ever before, an in-depth look at nations’ nuclear capabilities (and intentions) is crucial to security services and diplomats all over the world.
With the Oxford Place of the Year competition drawing to a close, we’ve put together an infographic to explain why the Mediterranean Sea, geographic epicenter of the migrant crisis, earned a place on the shortlist alongside Aleppo, the U.K., and Tristan da Cunha.
December 10 is International Human Rights Day, as recognized by the United Nations. Human dignity, freedom from discrimination, civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights for all should go without question. Whether it be from “the Hindu Vedas; the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi; the Bible; the Quran (Koran); the Analects of Confucius; the codes of conduct of the Inca,
Rushing seems to be about speed. But is it? There is the juxtaposition of what we see on the outside and what is going on in the inside, the movement over time of our understanding of another person’s experience, the various ways in which we grow into our own existential understanding, the ways in which we learn how we age into illness or into health, the ways in which we come to see how we move.
She’s been called “the myth of Amherst,” “the woman in white,” and a “recluse,” but the truth about Emily Dickinson and her writings is still being revealed, 130 years after her death. It’s an intriguing story of love, betrayal, and unlikely collaborations, and one that provokes several questions about the role that special collections and archives play in revealing important literary
In the present day , the human rights regime reflects individualism, the free market, private property, minimum government, and deregulation: the central characteristics of globalizing capitalism. Civil and political rights provide the foundational values for sustaining these characteristics. While the global human rights regime does include economic, social, and cultural rights, this set of rights are relegated to the status of aspirations.
International human rights law has come to face compound challenges in the recent two decades. Long gone the optimism that followed the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of 1993 which confirmed that the major changes in the international political scene at the time, and the aspirations of all the peoples around the world were finally moving in the same direction. Since then, political support for human rights globally has suffered a significant decline.
Today is Human Rights Day. This holiday commemorates when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In 1950, the Assembly passed resolution 423 (V), which invited all States and interested organizations to observe 10 December of each year as Human Rights Day.