Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Martin Sorrell
Among the enfants terribles of literature, Rimbaud holds a pre-eminent place. But he’s been made famous against his will. If he had his way, everything he wrote — save perhaps his factual letters from Africa and elsewhere about trade and the dodgy deals he was trying to clinch – would have been destroyed. All the astonishing poetry that has made him an icon burnt on a bonfire of vanities, but fortunately it was saved.
By Patricia Fara
Darwin and evolution go together like Newton and gravity or Morse and code. The world, he wrote, resembles ‘one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice.’ Competitive natural selection in a nutshell? Yes – but that evocative image was coined not by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), but by his grandfather Erasmus (1731-1802). Although Charles Darwin is celebrated as the founding father of evolution, his neglected ancestor was writing about evolution long before he was even born.
Many questioned how the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games Opening Ceremony was going to make a mark after the spectacular Beijing Olympics only four years earlier. While Beijing presented the Chinese people moving as one body — dancing, marching, and presenting a united front to the world — the British answer was a chaotic and spirited ceremony, shifting from cricket matches to coordinated dance routines, Mr Bean’s comedic dream to a 100-foot Lord Voldemort.
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?
In 1945 the British Medical Journal marked the centenary of the birth of Victorian neurologist William Richard Gowers (1845-1915), noting that his name was still a household word among neurologists everywhere, and that ‘historical justice’ required that he should be remembered as one of the founders of modern British medicine.
On 5 June 1851, the abolitionist journal National Era began running a serial by the wife of a professor at Bowdoin College. A deeply religious and well-educated white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe was an ardent opponent of slavery. As she wrote to the journal editor, Gamaliel Bailey: “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak… I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.” The work, eventually titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or Life Among the Lowly, became a national sensation.
By Professor Louis René Beres
Admiral Leon “Bud” Edney
General Thomas G. McInerney
For now, the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath still occupy center-stage in the Middle East and North Africa. Nonetheless, from a regional and perhaps even global security perspective, the genuinely core threat to peace and stability remains Iran. Whatever else might determinably shape ongoing transformations of power and authority in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia, it is apt to pale in urgency beside the steadily expanding prospect of a nuclear Iran.
In classrooms across the country on September 11, 2001, lesson plans were abruptly abandoned. Students and teachers gathered around televisions, sharing the sense that “history” was being made before their eyes. Patricia Latessa, a Cincinnati high school teacher, turned on the cafeteria television “and watched history unfold.” She reflected as she watched about how the scenes of airplanes flying into buildings would impact her students
The U.S. Census first collected data on librarians in 1880, a year after the launch of the American Library Association. They only counted 636 librarians nationwide. Indeed, one respondent stated that he was the ‘Librarian of Congress.’ The number of librarians grew over the next 100 years however.
By Andrew Robinson
Everyone knows that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death. The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are decorated with elaborate paintings and hieroglyphic writings about death and the afterlife. But what is not so familiar is that ancient Egypt was the first civilization to picture and put in writing an ethical connection between earthly behaviour and an individual’s existence after death—so crucial in the later development of Christianity.
The NAACP was doing its job when it accused the Tea Party movement of harboring “racist elements,” but it didn’t necessarily go about it in the most productive way. All it took was for supporters of the Tea Party movement like Sarah Palin to write, “All decent Americans abhor racism,” and that with the election of Barack Obama we became a “post-racial” society, and the NAACP’s charge was soundly “refudiated.” Or, as Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell put it to Candy Crowley on CNN on Sunday, he’s “got better things to do” than weigh in on the debate. He was elected to deal with real problems, not problems made up in people’s heads. Case closed.
In honor of Mother’s Day we are taking a closer look at grandmothers. In the post below is an excerpt from Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health.
Dennis Baron looks at the dilemma of being old in the internet age.
Anatoly answers questions.
Anatoly’s second installment of January gleanings.
Who should have the right to visit Thomas Jefferson’s grave?