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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
To start a conversation based on mathematics may seem to some to be one of the tasks inevitably converging towards the plot-line of Mission Impossible. Well, certainly there are more pressing things that would occupy people’s minds, concerning international politics, the future of Europe, and the future of the Middle East. What’s new?
Sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by UN peacekeepers is not fresh news. It has been going on for years. It first hit the headlines over ten years ago, and the scandal drove the UN to take action. Yet recent allegations over SEA by French peacekeepers in 2014 have brought the issue to the forefront again, and have motivated the UN Secretary-General to escalate the UN’s response to SEA in its peacekeeping operations.
It’s a multi-million dollar global industry. It’s been with us since the dawn of civilization. And it’s constantly developing. The wine business is an intriguing marker of human activity – economic changes, consumer fashions, globalization, social and technological developments.
Moral dilemmas are ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Can we protect the bodily integrity of women and their unborn children at the same time? How can we protect the free will of adults while at the same time denying them to engage in self-harming activities, like (assisted) suicide or drug use?
Together with Ulysses, Abraham is the earliest culture hero in the Western world. More precisely, as Kierkegaard, who called him ‘the knight of faith,’ reminds us, he has remained, throughout the centuries, the prototype of the religious man, of the man of faith. The wandering Aramean from the Book of Genesis, who rejected his parents’ idols and native Mesopotamia to follow the call of the One God to the land of Canaan, started a saga reverberated not only in early Jewish literature, but also in the New Testament (Galatians 3: 6-8), and in early Christian literature.
Please welcome another newbie to the Social Media team at Oxford University Press, Elizabeth Furey, who joined the gang in August 2015, just two weeks ago, as an OUPblog Deputy Editor and Social Media Manager! You can learn more about Elizabeth below.
This August we are featuring Lao Tzu, the legendary Chinese thinker and founder of Taoism, as Philosopher of the Month. He is best known as the author of the classic ‘Tao Te Ching’ (‘The Book of the Way and its Power’). Take our quiz to see how much you know about the life and studies of Lao Tzu!
Ten years have passed since Katrina. New Orleans is in the midst of celebrating a remarkable renewal. I still live in the same apartment that I lived in before the storm. It looks the same, perhaps a bit more cluttered, but the neighborhood has certainly changed.
This summer intrepid travelers everywhere are strapping on backpacks, dousing themselves in mosquito spray, and getting their inoculations — ready to embark on journeys that will take them into contact with some of the most virulent viruses and nastiest bacteria on the planet. Even those of us who aren’t going off the beaten track may end up in close quarters with microbes we’d rather not befriend. Explore some of the most common infectious diseases around the globe and how to identify them in this infographic.
We asked Michael Dear to describe his day-to-day experiences of borderland communities. Most of my travel time is devoted to listening to people, observing, and trusting to serendipity. People on both sides of the border are generally helpful and friendly. Once I got lost in fog on my way to the mouth of the Rio Grande at the Gulf of Mexico, and pair of Mexican cops offered me a ride along the beach in their truck. And they came back later to pick me up!
Greece is not alone in suffering from budget cuts arising from the era of austerity. In the UK, local councils, libraries, museums – all public services have been cut. Criminal Justice has not escaped this cost-cutting. The consequence has been fewer police officers on the streets, less money for legal aid lawyers, and closures of Magistrates courts.
On 27 August 1955, the first edition of the Guinness Book of Records–now Guinness World Records, was published. Through listing world records of both human achievements and of the natural world, what started as a reference book became an international franchise, gaining popular interest around the globe. In celebration of this anniversary of weird and wonderful world records, we’ve selected a few favourites from talented individuals featured in our online products.
The steel drum originated in the late 1930s on the island of Trinidad and was played as part of a steel band, a percussion ensemble contrived by lower-class rebellious teens. Learn more about the steel drum’s complex history, development, and current form with our 10 fun facts.
I am constantly perplexed by the recurring tendency in western history to connect creativity with mental disability and illness. It cannot be denied that a number of well-known creative people, primarily in the arts, have been mentally ill—for example, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Robert Schumann, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath.
This is my 500th post for “The Oxford Etymologist,” nine and a half years after this blog started in March 2006, and I decided to celebrate this event by writing something light and entertaining. Enough wrestling with words like bad, good, and god! Anyone can afford a week’s break. So today I’ll discuss an idiom that sounds trivial only because it is so familiar. Familiarity breeds not only contempt but also indifference.
After finishing this season’s Oxford World’s Classics reading group season, I obsessed over the characters, Dickens’s literary finesse– nothing was out of bounds of curiosity. The adaptation that caught my attention the most was BBC’s television miniseries that broadcasted on PBS in the US.