OUPblog

This old house and these old houses

By Edwin L. Battistella
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Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’s fight for affordable housing [timeline]

By Betty Boyd Caroli
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Labor and luck in etymology

By Anatoly Liberman
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Public pensions, private equity, and the mythical 8% return

By Edward Zelinsky
Public pension plans should not invest in private equity deals. These deals lack both transparency and the discipline of market forces. Private equity investments allow elected officials to assume unrealistically high rates of return for public pension plans and to make correspondingly low contributions to such plans. This is a recipe for inadequately funded pensions, an outcome good for neither public employees nor taxpayers.

Memo From Manhattan: Town vs. Gown in Gotham

By Sharon Zukin
On a recent Saturday afternoon, along with 200 other two-legged residents of Greenwich Village and an equal number of their four-legged friends, I attended a protest meeting against New York University’s Plan 2031, a 20-year strategy to increase the size of NYU’s physical presence in New York City by 6 million square feet, 2 million of those to be newly built in the heart of our neighborhood.

The difficulties of shaping a stable world

By Julian Richards
As the world wrings its hands at the slaughter in Syria and ponders what, if anything, it can do, the precedent of intervention in Libya constantly raises its head. Why was it right and proper for us to intervene in Libya to prevent humanitarian catastrophe, but we are choosing not to do so now in Syria?

Questions about the evolution of music criticism

In February 2012, Grove Music’s Editor in Chief Deane Root talked to contemporary music scholar Paul Griffiths about his multi-faceted career and his involvement with Grove in print and online. Grove Music Online has been the leading online resource for music research since its inception in 2001, a compendium of music scholarship offering full texts with numerous subsequent updates and emendations, more than 50,000 signed articles, and 30,000 biographies contributed by over 6,000 scholars from around the world.

Alexander II Becomes Czar of Russia

This Day in World History
When his father, Nicholas I, died of pneumonia, Alexander Nikolayevich Romanov succeeded to the throne of emperor of Russia, becoming Czar Alexander II. While his 36-year rule was marked by substantial reforms, it was also dogged by unrest and several assassination attempts.

New books, old story?

By Natalia Nowakowska
As the Catholic Church embarks this month upon its observance of Lent, many congregations will be holding in their hands brand new, bright red liturgical books — copies of the new English translation of the Roman Missal (the service book for Catholic Mass), introduced throughout the English-speaking world at the end of 2011 on the instructions of the Vatican.

“Davy” Jones, actor and musician

By Gordon Thompson
As the Beatles made their historic debut on American television in February 1964, the cast of Oliver!, the actor playing the role of the Artful Dodger, and other acts on the show watched from the wings as the hysteria unfolded. Davy Jones had started his acting career on British television, making his debut appearance in the venerable Coronation Street followed by the gritty Liverpool police drama, Z-Cars.

Retirement plans and the sexes

By Rosemary Wright
In 2011, the oldest Baby Boom workers reached the age of 65 — an age that more than 60 million Baby Boomers will reach by 2030. The issue of retirement weighs particularly on women, who are likely to outlive men and therefore have a longer period of retirement to finance.

A history of the book

By Michael Suarez and Henry Woudhuysen
‘And yet the books’ by Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz’s great poem (1986) brilliantly captures the relationship ‎between the book as a universal, world-wide object, a thing that exists by the millions and yet is so ‎individual, and the single, solitary writer or reader. How can such a ubiquitous, material phenomenon ‎be at the same time so personal and so transcendent?

“Music in your blood and poetry in your soul”: the beauty of Welsh English

By Bethan Tovey
To be born Welsh requires the genes of a chameleon. You must be a geographer (how many maps have I drawn to explain to anyone not from our little island the difference between “Britain” and “England”?), a musician (try singing “Bread of Heaven” in a Welsh pub: I give you two bars before you’re accompanied by full four-part harmony), a diplomat (not punching the hundred-and-first person to make a sheep joke takes some restraint), and above all, a linguist. The Welsh have a way with words.

Monthly Gleanings for February 2012, Part 1

By Anatoly Liberman
There has been a good deal to glean this month because the comments and responses have been numerous and also because, although February is a short month even in a leap year, in 2012 it had five Wednesdays. Among the questions was one about the profession and qualifications of an etymologist. It is a recurring question from young correspondents, and I have answered it briefly more than once, but always in the “gleanings.” It occurred to me that perhaps I should write a short essay on this subject and, if someone else asks me about such things in the future, I will be able to refer to this post. The rest will be discussed next week.

David Gascoyne and the missing portrait

By Robert Fraser
I am often asked to name my favourite poem by the British writer David Gascoyne (1916-2001), my biography of whom appears with OUP this month. Bearing in mind Gascoyne was in his time an interpreter of Surrealism, an existentialist of a religious variety and a proponent of ecology, you might expect me to go for a poem along these lines. Instead, I usually choose a poem of the early 1940s entitled “Odeur de Pensée.”

What is a leap year?

Today, 29 February 2012, is a ‘leap day’. To understand more about the leap phenomenon, and the significance of 29 February in history, we turn to The Oxford Companion to the Year: an exploration of calendar customs and time-reckoning.

A brokered Republican Convention?

By Elvin Lim
The Republican nomination race is still Mitt Romney’s to lose, but he is in trouble yet again, and his cloak of inevitability is fast disappearing.

Final episode of TV series MAS*H airs

This Day in World History
On February 28, 1983, at the end of its eleventh season, M*A*S*H said goodbye to television. More than 105 million Americans in about 51 million homes watched the series finale, a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie directed by star Alan Alda that featured the show’s characteristic blend of comedy and drama.

Alejandrina Cabrera should be on the San Luis city council ballot

By Dennis Barron
For perhaps the first time ever, a candidate was struck from an Arizona ballot for poor English. Judge John Nelson, of the Yuma County Superior Court, ruled that Alejandrina Cabrera cannot run for city council in the border town of San Luis because she doesn’t know enough English to fulfill her duties.