“Remember, remember the fifth of November”

By Daniel Swift
“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” instructs the old nursery rhyme, and offers a useful summary: “Gunpowder, treason and plot.” But we have never been sure quite what, or how, we should be remembering. On 5 November 1605 a small gang of Catholics and minor noblemen plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, during the State Opening at which King James I would be present. One of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, was caught with the gunpowder before he set it off. The other plotters were soon caught, and all were executed.

Contrasting profiles in hope

By Anthony Scioli
I have made a career of studying hope. As a clinical psychologist most of my focus has been on the role of hope in relation to anxiety and depression, or the healing power of hope when confronting a serious illness. As a result of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign of “hope and change” I have increasingly been asked to comment on the role of hope in presidential politics. In 2010, I decided to do some research on hope and the presidency to see what I might learn.

Russia’s toughest prisons: what can the Pussy Riot band members expect?

By Judith Pallot
The onion dome of Russian Orthodox Church dominates the skyline of women’s correctional colony number 14 (IK14) in Part’sa. The Governor of the colony, showing Laura and I around, told us that five prisoners – all tuberculosis sufferers – who volunteered to help build the Church were miraculously cured of their disease. It was a story we were to hear repeated several times on our research trip to women’s penal colonies in S-W Mordoviia.

How to avoid programming

By Robert St. Amant
What does a computer scientist do? You might expect that we spend a lot of our time programming, and this sometimes happens, for some of us. When I spend a few weeks or even months building a software system, the effort can be enormously fun and satisfying. But most of the time, what I actually do is a bit different. Here’s an example from my past work, related to the idea of computational thinking.

How to survive election season, oral history style

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards
Every presidential election, similar concerns arise: Don’t the campaign ads seem especially vicious? Has the media coverage always been this crazed? Will we ever actually get to vote? While I know many who become more motivated the more absurd the election season becomes, I tend to become disenchanted with the whole process, wondering how my one small vote could compete against the Koch Brothers or Morgan Freeman.

Curly-murly, flippy-floppy boom-booms

By Mark Peters
There are many words I love. Some of my favorites are abyss and buttmunch. I also love many categories of words, such as euphemisms and variations of the f-word. One of my favorite types of word makes my heart go thump-thump and pit-a-pat: reduplicative words. Reduplicative words are far more than a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, though they’re often a load of gaga.

Who owns the Paracel, Spratley, & Senkaku Islands?

By Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
The idea that the twenty-first century will be marked by the ascendency of Asia, and more specifically the rise of China as a global superpower, has gained broad currency in academic discussions, policy decisions, and general public opinion around the world. After focusing on the Middle East for much of the last two decades, the United States has recently declared a pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, for example, while opinion surveys show majorities of Americans already believe China’s economy has overtaken that of the US.

500th anniversary of the dedication of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling

By Anne Leader

Today marks the 500th anniversary of the dedication of Michelangelo’s magnificent Sistine Ceiling on the vigil of All Saints’ Day (otherwise known as Halloween) in 1512. The anniversary comes at a time of growing debate about whether the Vatican should impose limits on who can enter the chapel and how.

Requiem Mass settings

By Lucy Allen
The clocks have gone back, the days are colder, the evenings are darker, and poppies are starting to appear on everyone’s lapels. As November approaches our thoughts turn to Armistice Day (11th November) and to commemorating the fallen. Orders for the music of Requiem settings keeps the OUP Hire Library busy at this time of year, but with so many different Requiem versions, how does one select which to perform? We asked OUP staff and their families for their favourite; read on to find out which they chose.

Evidence-based policies

By Jeremy Hardie
Everybody likes evidence based policy – who could favour a policy that is not confronted with the facts? – but after twenty or more years trying to make it work, we have ended up with some quite strange results, at least in the US and the UK.

Monthly etymology gleanings for October, part 1

By Anatoly Liberman
I have received many questions and comments and will respond to them pell-mell.
Any more ~ anymore in positive statements. A correspondent from Pennsylvania wondered why those around him use anymore as meaning “these days, nowadays” (for example, Anymore, I just see people wearing skinny jeans with flip flops) and whether this usage owes anything to Pennsylvania Dutch. I am almost sure it does not.

Dances of Death

By Jessica Barbour
An eerie image emerged from Europe’s 14th-century bubonic plague epidemics into popular imagination: Death, in skeleton form, leading living souls in a processional dance to the grave. This idea, the danse macabre, was evoked by artists and writers across the continent, a cultural reaction to daily lives spent surrounded by death. I was introduced to the genre in school when I first heard Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, a boisterous seven-minute work for orchestra written in the 1870s.

A Halloween ghost story

Looking for a fright ? The ghost stories of M.R. James, considered by many to be the most terrifying in English, have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb. So we’re presenting an extract from ‘Casting the Runes’ in the Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, edited by Darryl Ince, to get you in the mood for Halloween.

Parents: does size matter?

By Linsay Gray
What can the height of a person tell us about them and their children? Although determined to an extent by genes, the height of a fully grown man or woman can be considered as a “marker” of the circumstances they experienced early in life. These childhood circumstances include illness, living conditions, diet, and maybe even stress. Such early life circumstances have been shown to be linked to health risks later in life…

With final debate over, ground game intensifies

By Elvin Lim
Mitt Romney barely passed the bar on Monday night’s debate. He was tentative and guarded, not just because he was being strategic, but because he wasn’t (understandably) in command of the facts of foreign policy of which a sitting president is in command. Barack Obama ‘won’ the debate, but it will have minimal impact on altering the fundamental dynamics of the race.

The unquestioned center

By Andrew J. Polsky
The third presidential debate made clear why Governor Mitt Romney has chosen not to wage a campaign based on foreign policy: there is simply no political gain in it. On issue after issue, he took stands effectively indistinguishable from those of President Barack Obama. Romney quibbled over details of timing or emphasis, asserting he would have taken action sooner or more forcefully. But on a wide range of questions — no military intervention in Syria, withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, use of drones, sanctions on Iran — the challenger’s positions are substantively the same as the president.