Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Imagine a person who spends their entire life sitting on the couch watching and rewatching Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. He does nothing else, gains no education, no relationships with other people, no family, no friends.
In science, perhaps the most famous recent award is for the prediction of the existence of the Higgs Boson particle, discovered at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Overall, the most famous recipient ever is likely Marie Curie. She went down in history as the first person to win two. She took Nobel Prizes in 1903 and 1911 for getting radium and polonium out of pitchblende, with her own elbow power.
The origin of Engl. dog will not look like a uniquely formidable problem if we realize that the names of our best quadruped friend are, from an etymological point of view, impenetrable almost all over the world. The literature on dog is huge, and the conjectures are many.
Scandal hit just before Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch debuted his most recent film, Much Loved/Zine li fik, at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes in May of 2015. Footage of the film about the lives of three prostitutes in Marrakech was leaked online, touching off a furor in Morocco.
It is hard to imagine two politicians that are further apart ideologically than Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Nonetheless, these two presidential candidates have a lot in common: their outsider status, their unrealistic fiscal plans, and a desire to punish foreigners for America’s economic problems.
From the goosebump-producing thrills of Wilkie Collins’s fiction and the melodramas on offer at the Royal Princess’ Theatre to the headlines blaring in the Illustrated Police News, the Victorians savoured the sensational. The attention-seeking title above is patently untrue, yet, for more than five decades, John Henry Newman (the Cardinal) was emotionally, spiritually, and textually connected with Maria Rosina Giberne, a wholly intriguing figure.
When the Earth is viewed from space, it’s mostly blue. In fact, the ocean covers over 70% of our planet. Life began in the world’s oceans, and today – billions of years later – we’re no less dependent on it. From the diverse organisms which call it home, to the complex ways it helps keep global climates in check, our own survival is undeniably linked to that of the ocean.
Affekt (the ability of music to stir emotions) is the foundational pillar for eighteenth-century style. It was achieved through attention to detail and proper execution. And done in good taste, which implies a deep understanding of proper practices of the time. Nearly every notational and performance decision was based on affekt—everything from formal structure to note values, dynamics to articulation, and accompaniment patterns such as Alberti bass.
After the fall of the Berlin wall and before the collapse of Lehman, the political mood was such that banks were able to persuade the world that high levels of profit and remuneration were justified: the banks told the world that their industry had a key role in wealth-creation.
Much has been written about the potential of immigration reform to level the playing field for unauthorized children and youth in the United States. Research shows that in addition to, or perhaps ahead of, advocacy for immigration reform, including passage of the DREAM Act legislation in every state of the Union, there is a real need to work with Latino immigrant families on realizing the relationship between levels of formal schooling of immigrant children and parents.
A month before Joan of Arc’s heresy was cleansed by fire on this day in 1431 CE, a spokesman for her Burgundian accusers railed against her: “O Royal House of France! You have never known a monster until now! But now behold yourself dishonored in placing your trust in this woman, this magician, heretical and superstitious.”
In April 2016, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, successfully challenged the conditions of his confinement on human rights grounds. In 2011 Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in the centre of Oslo and then shot sixty nine political activists at a summer camp on the island of Utoya. He was sentenced to twenty one years imprisonment.
We often want to know how likely something is. There seems to be close link between likelihood and belief – if something is likely, you would be justified in believing it, and if something is unlikely, you would not be justified in believing it. That might seem obvious, and the second part might seem especially obvious – surely you can’t be justified in believing something that’s unlikely to be true? I will suggest here that, sometimes, you can.
Although there was hostility towards witchcraft and sorcery well before the 16th century, it is in this time period where we see religious and legal punishment juxtaposed with the increasing use and enjoyment of special effects in plays to convey magic and the supernatural.
It’s Australian Library and Information Week, so we asked Alison Bates, Library Resources and Access Manager at RMIT University in Melbourne, to fill us in on what motivated her to become a librarian in the first place, keeping her work/life balance, and how realising the impact you can have in your role is the key to job satisfaction.
We all have that one teacher who inspired us, guided us to our calling in our formative years, whose lectures and project assignments become a piece of our professional identities. So, here it comes: one of my history teachers was singularly, as my teenage self might put it, the pits.