Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Kenneth Barish
For this back-to-school season, I would like to offer some advice about one of the most frequent problems presented to me in over 30 years of clinical practice: battles over homework. I have half-jokingly told many parents that if the schools of New York State no longer required homework, our children’s education would suffer, but as a child psychologist I would be out of business.
By David Constantine
Goethe was born almost dead on 28 August 1749. He opened his eyes, he lived, only when the midwife rubbed his heart with wine. Perhaps that uncertain start awoke a determination in him to stay alive as long as possible. There’s a wry saying in German: Alle Menschen müssen sterben — ich auch, vielleicht (All men must die — me too, perhaps). And that’s how Goethe lived, cannily keeping out of the way of death, cramming as much life as he could into the time allowed.
This is my last blog on the music and TV broadcasts for the 2012 Olympic games — I promise. But I just saw a new video ad that I must share. In my last blog post, I noted the remarkable feat of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), who, under the baton of Philip Sheppard, recorded the national anthems of all 205 participating nations in the Olympic games in a little under 52 hours of studio time.
By Jesse Rodin
No figure in Western music poses a greater challenge to the writing of history than Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521). That’s because there is no composer of comparative fame — musicians regularly speak Josquin’s name in the same breath as Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms — about whom so very little is known.
By Geoffrey Kabaservice
Will you be tuning in to watch this year’s Republican and Democratic national conventions in the hope of seeing something of historic significance? The managers of both conventions are working hard to make sure that you don’t get your wish. From their standpoint, the best convention is a precooked and tightly controlled event that passes placidly and without controversy into the annals of national forgetfulness.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on this day, 27 August, in 1770. Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is one of the greatest works of moral, social, and political philosophy. It contains significant ideas on justice, moral responsibility, family life, economic activity, and the political structure of the state — all matters of profound interest to us today. Here is an extract from Hegel’s thoughts on the Family.
By Daniel Davis
Taking an elderly friend or relative to hospital is a painful experience for most people, and is often made worse when they become confused and disorientated during their stay.This acute confusional state is called delirium.
By David C Barker and Christopher Jan Carman
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the new Republican vice presidential nominee, has many virtues as a candidate. He is smart, charismatic and energetic, and he hails from a competitive but usually blue-leaning state that the GOP would like to secure into the red column. But one of Ryan’s virtues stands out above the rest for the Tea Partiers and other conservatives whom Governor Romney is still trying to win over.
Today, John Gittings and Martin Kemp will be discussing icons of peace. Human history is dominated by war, but can we forge a different narrative? In The Glorious Art of Peace, former Guardian journalist John Gittings argues that progress depends on a peaceful environment, identifying iconic proponents of peace such as Confucius and Gandhi. Art historian Martin Kemp’s Christ to Coke looks at the creation of some of our peacetime icons and traces the things they have in common.
By Mark McCormack
Leading British gay rights charity, Stonewall, have produced a new report into the extent of homophobia in British schools. Surveying 1,600 sexual minority youth, it finds that 55% of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) students experience homophobic bullying, 96% hear “homophobic remarks” and that homophobia frequently goes unchallenged. This builds on their 2007 report, which argued that homophobia was “endemic” and “almost epidemic” in British schools. These are harrowing findings, but they obscure rather than reveal the social dynamics of many British schools today.
By David Acheson
I’ve just had a great time at the 2012 Edinburgh International Book Festival, even though it was a rather strange experience for a mathematician. In the Author’s Yurt (sic), for example, I was surrounded by fiction writers, with lots of pointy beards and wild hair. As it happens, I used to write detective stories when I was a young boy, so once had vague dreams of becoming a fiction writer myself.
By Jason Brennan
Paul Ryan — possible future Vice President of the United States — calls Ayn Rand one of his principal inspirations. He once claimed (and later denied) that Atlas Shrugged was required reading for his staff. He even gives copies of Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, which is a touch ironic, since Rand was an ardent atheist.
By Karen L. Schiltz, Ph.D.
Getting ready to go back to school can be a challenge. It is even more of a challenge when you suspect something is not quite right with your child. As parents, we do not want our child to have problems. We deeply want our child to be o.k. in everyday life. When our child suffers, we suffer as well.
When we gaze back at the ancient world of the Roman Republic, what images are conjured in our minds? We see senators clad in togas, and marching Roman legions. The Carthaginian Hannibal leading his elephants over the Alps into Italy, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon and his murder on the Ides of March. These images are kept fresh by novels and comic books, and by television series like Rome and Spartacus: Blood and Sand.
‘It is not the critic who counts,’ Theodore Roosevelt famously argued: ‘not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who spends himself in a worthy cause’. The arena in question was The Guardian’s ‘Rethinking Democracy’ debate at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and my ‘worthy cause’ was an attempt to defend democratic politics (and therefore politicians) from the anti-political environment in which it finds itself today.
By Richard R. John
Did the government invent the Internet? In a 23 June 2012 Wall Street Journal article, journalist L. Gordon Crovitz answered “no.” “It’s important to understand the history of the Internet,” Crovitz contended, “because it’s too often wrongly cited to justify big government.” Crovitz gave the credit instead to researchers at Xerox PARC who in the 1970s developed the Ethernet to link different computer networks.