Keep Calm and . . . What?

By Moses Rodriguez, Orhun Kantarci and Istvan Pirko
So all the test results are back, and you’re seeing the patient (and perhaps his /her partner) to report that the patient is in the early stages of multiple sclerosis (MS) or is recovering from a clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) indicative of MS. “What’s the next step?” they may ask. Maybe you’ll tell them to go home and continue training for that cross-country bike trip or planning the wedding or designing a website for their new start-up company.

The power of popular songs

By Saartje Vanden Borre and Elien Declercq
1883. In Tourcoing, a French industrial town right on the border with Belgium, the local celebrity and writer of Flemish origin Jules Watteeuw published Le marchand d’oches for the first time. His song about a Flemish rag-and-bone man who had migrated to Northern France to make a living but kept dreaming about his hometown as the Garden of Eden, was a huge success.

The reign of Alexander the Great

The relatively short reign of Alexander (336 to 323 BC) marked one of the major turning-points in world history. The Greek city states continued to function after his death, but the world order had changed and a new era began, which came to be labelled the Hellenistic period. For Alexander, like many an autocrat, departed without leaving a viable succession plan.

Do American children use calorie information at fast food or chain restaurants?

By Dr. Holly Wethington
Federal law in the United States requires restaurants with at least 20 locations nationally to list calorie information next to menu items on menus or menu boards. This law includes the prominent placement of a statement concerning suggested daily caloric intake on the menu. While national menu labeling has not been implemented, some fast food and chain restaurants have begun to post this information voluntarily.

Does part-time employment help or hinder single mothers?

By Roger Wilkins
A significant demographic trend in recent decades, in Australia and a number of other developed countries, has been the growth in lone parent families as a proportion of all families. In 1981, 13 per cent of Australian mothers with dependent children were lone parents; by 2006, this had risen to 20 per cent.

Kinky Boots

By Liz Wollman
Young Charlie Price (Stark Sands) of Northampton, England, has just unwillingly inherited his family’s struggling shoe factory. His girlfriend wants him to sell it to a condominium developer and move to London, where they can live a properly upwardly mobile life. Torn between his family obligations and his desire to do something other than run a shoe factory, Charlie meets a drag queen named Lola (born Simon; played by Billy Porter), who happens to break a heel and mention that he would do anything for a better-made pair of fabulous boots to wear during drag performances.

Ocean of history

By David Igler
On 8 June—a day known around the world as World Oceans Day—we should take a few moments to consider the history as well as the plight of our watery globe. The earth is mostly covered by water, not land, and that water is largely responsible for all forms of human and non-human life. The oceans are instrumental to everything; they form the basis of the earth’s water cycle, provide sustenance to much of humanity, and serve as a barometer of the mounting climate crisis.

The origin and text of The Book of Common Prayer

Despite its controversial history, the Book of Common Prayer is an influential religious text and one of the most compelling works of English literature. How has this document retained its relevancy even after numerous revisions? What can it teach us about British history and the English language? We spoke with Brian Cummings, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Common Prayer, about the importance of this text.

Paul Ortiz on oral history

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards
As regular readers might have guessed, the Oral History Review staff has spent the last few months obsessing over oral history’s bright, digital future. However, now that special issue 40.1, Oral History in the Digital Age, is out, we’re taking a break — just a break! — to recall the oral history projects that run on something other than tagging and metadata. To that end, we were lucky enough to catch up with Professor Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida.

The beauty pageant and British society

By Rebecca Conway
Next week sees the culmination of the 2013 search for Miss England. Aspiring beauty queens from across the nation will compete for the title and the chance to contend for the Miss World crown in front of a global audience of one billion television viewers.

What’s the future of seamount ecosystems?

Philip Mladenov
Seamounts are distinctive and dramatic features of ocean basins. They are typically extinct volcanoes that rise abruptly above the surrounding deep-ocean floor but do not reach the surface of the ocean. The Global Ocean contains some 100,000 or so seamounts that rise at least 1,000 metres above the ocean floor.

Think spirituality is easy? Think again…

By Roger S. Gottlieb
The modern idea of spirituality—divorced from religious tradition, dependent on a personal choice of creed, centered on feeling good and avoiding stress—easily invites criticism or even contempt. Many see it as an evasion of religious truth and moral responsibility, a narcissistic choose-your-own-at-the-mall self-indulgence that has nothing to do with serious religious, ethical, or political life.

Five reasons to watch the Tony Awards on Sunday

By Liz Wollman
The Tony Awards is consistently the lowest-rated broadcast of all televised entertainment awards shows, which helps explain why it is also the most awesome. I’m not being snide, here—either about the teeny spectatorship or about the awesomeness. As to the former point, here’s some perspective: The 2012 Academy Awards ceremony was watched by 39.3 million people, while the 2012 Tony Awards ceremony was watched by six million people.

Oh Mother, where art thou? Mass strandings of pilot whales

By Marc Oremus and C. Scott Baker
Biologists since Aristotle have puzzled over the reasons for mass strandings of whales and dolphins, in which large groups of up to several hundred individuals drive themselves up onto a beach. To date, efforts to understand mass strandings have largely focused on the role of presumably causal environmental factors, such as climatic events, bathymetric features or geomagnetic topography. But while these studies provide valuable information on the spatial and temporal variation of strandings, they give little insight into the social mechanisms that compels the whales to follow their counterparts to an almost certain death (at least without human intervention).

Where no kiss has gone before

By Tim Allen

I grew up with Star Trek. When I was 10, I helped my mom put together an intricate scale model of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701, if you’re curious). I knew that LeVar Burton could tell me about a warp core before I knew that he would read me a children’s book, and I knew that Klingon was a learnable language long before I had ever heard of human languages like Tagalog or Swahili.

Multifarious Devils, part 2. Old Nick and the Crocodile

By Anatoly Liberman
In our enlightened age, we are beginning to forget how thickly the world of our ancestors was populated by imps and devils. Shakespeare still felt at home among them, would have recognized Grimalkin, and, as noted in a recent post, knew the charm aroint thee, which scared away witches. Flibbertigibbet (a member of a sizable family in King Lear), the wily Rumpelstilzchen, and their kin have names that are sometimes hard to decipher, a fact of which Rumpelstilzchen was fully aware.