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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign yesterday and the air in America is abuzz with what will happen next in the Republican nomination race. We sat down to chat politics with Sam Popkin, author of the upcoming The Candidate: What It Takes to Win – and Hold – the White House. We asked how Mitt Romney will fare in a general election and why he has been underestimated as a candidate.
By Anatoly Liberman
My February blog on dude has been picked up by several websites, and rather numerous comments were the result of the publicity. Below, I will say what I think of the word’s “true” etymology and quote two pronouncements on “dudedom,” as they once appeared in The Nation. But before doing all that, I should thank the readers who pointed to me the existence of some recent contributions to the subject.
By William A. Schabas
On 3 April 2012, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued a two-page statement declining to proceed with an investigation into alleged atrocities perpetrated in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009. A distinguished commission of inquiry set up in 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council and presided over South African judge Richard Goldstone concluded atrocities had taken place. It recommended that investigations be taken up by the Court. The disappointing statement from the Prosecutor reveals his ideological bias, and confirms the politicization of the International Criminal Court.
By Geir Lundestad
Since around 1870 the United States has had the largest economy in the world. In security matters, however, particularly in Europe, the US still played a limited role until the Second World War. In 1945, at the end of the war, the United States was clearly the strongest power the world had ever seen. It produced almost as much as the rest of the world put together. Its military lead was significant; its “soft power” even more dominant.
La Monte Young remains an enigma within the music world, one of the most important and yet most elusive composers of the late twentieth century. A musician who lives in near-seclusion in a Tribeca loft while creating works that explore the furthest extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication, acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality, Young has had a profound influence on the development on minimalism, which is seen in a variety of music today. We sat down with music scholar Jeremy Grimshaw, author of Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young, to discuss the life, work, and the controversy surrounding La Monte Young.
This Day in World History
On April 10, 1516, the government of Venice officially confined the city’s Jews to one small area of the city—the first Jewish ghetto. This area remained the required home to the city’s Jews until Napoleon took the city in 1797 and abolished it. Nevertheless, the old ghetto remains the center of Venetian Jewry.
By Kirk Curnutt
According to literary legend, the author of The Great Gatsby sold his soul. Perpetually cash-strapped, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent much of his twenty-year career cranking out popular fiction for the Saturday Evening Post and other high-paying “slicks.” While Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner racked up double digits in the novels column, Fitzgerald completed a paltry four and a half, with only one of them (Gatsby, of course) truly great. By contrast, he produced 160 short stories, earning a total of $241,453 off the genre – more than $3 million in today’s dollars.
By Christina Bohannan and Herbert Hovenkamp
The Supreme Court’s decision in Mayo Collaborative Services (Mayo Clinic) v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., 132 S.Ct. 1289 (March 20, 2012), cited Creation Without Restraint to reject a patent on a process for determining the proper dosage of drugs used to treat autoimmune diseases.
By Michael Biggs
Since March 2011, over thirty Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest against repression in China. This is the latest manifestation of a resurgence in suicide protest — where someone kills him or herself for a political cause, without harming anyone else. The most famous recent case is Mohammad Bouazizi in Tunisia, whose self-immolation sparked the Arab spring in 2011, and whose example was followed by many others in North Africa. Less familiar in the West, the campaign for a separate state of Telangana within India (to be carved out of Andhra Pradesh) was accompanied by a wave of self-immolation in 2010-2011.
By Phillip Johnson
This summer the Olympics is coming to town. It will be a sporting spectacular – the best sportsmen and women on Earth competing for the ultimate sporting accolade. Yet the Olympics is no longer simply a festival of sport. National governments and brand owners alike have long wanted to be associated with excellence and sporting excellence in particular. The Olympic Games represents the pinnacle of that excellence and so makes it the most desirable sporting “property” in the World.
This Day in World History
On April 8, 1953, Jomo Kenyatta and five associates were sentenced by a British judge to seven years hard labor for allegedly directing the Mau Mau rebellion, a bloody, ongoing violent protest against European domination of what is now Kenya.
By Reverend John Piderit, S.J.
In an age of video, TV, camcorders, and iPhones, adept users can capture important events in a digital medium that can be transmitted quickly to people around the world. What would a resurrection appearance of Jesus have looked like if an alert apostle had an iPhone and, assuming the apostle was not immediately told by Jesus to “put that iPhone away”, the apostle captured a minute of Jesus’s appearance with the iPhone video running? Of course, this is a hypothetical and no answer could possibly be definitive. But the question raises interesting issues.
By Marc Brettler
Passover, as it is now celebrated, is a creation of the rabbis, and many of its rituals are a reaction to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. It has a long and complex history, and even in the biblical period, was celebrated in a variety of ways.
It’s Good Friday and a good time to discuss the reflection and renewal that many Christians seek on Easter Sunday. The day commemorating Jesus’s resurrection, Easter marks the end of Lent, a forty-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance. In the early church, baptism and Easter were strongly linked. We sat down with Garry Wills, author of the new book Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism, to discuss the role of baptism in the lives of two early Christian saints: Augustine and Ambrose.
This Day in World History
An estimated 60,000 spectators witnessed the opening ceremonies of the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens, Greece, on April 6, 1896. The ceremonies took place in the Panathinaiko Stadium, originally built in 330 B.C. and rebuilt in gleaming marble for the occasion.
By David Blockley
Engineering is everywhere. We rely on it totally and yet, most of us tend to take it for granted. Do you ever stop to wonder how the water gets to your taps or the electricity to your home? From the water we drink, the food we eat, the electricity we use, the tools we work with, the gadgets that entertain us, to the cars, trains and aeroplane we travel in, we all too often fail to think about the engineers who make it happen, the skills they need and the challenges they face.