An academic librarian without a library

By Michael Levine-Clark
I’m sitting in a dorm room—complete with the uncontrollable blast heat I remember from college — the space that has been my office since June, when the library shut down for a major renovation. Besides having to get used to a somewhat uncomfortable and isolated space, my colleagues and I have had to learn to be librarians without a library building, and our students and faculty have had to learn to use physical collections that are entirely offsite. And the campus community has had to think about the question of what a library is and should be, particularly the question of how to find and use our physical monographs.

The real lessons of the Cuban Cold War crisis

By John Gittings
This year we shall recall, with a very nervous shudder, the 50th anniversary of the greatest crisis in the Cold  War – and with the knowledge that but for good fortune none of us would be here to recall it at all.

The Road To Super Tuesday

By Elvin Lim
The Republican party has traditionally been the more conservative party not only in terms of values but also in terms of organization reform. Leaders tend to be slower than their Democratic counterparts in reforming the nomination process, and voters tend to be more deferential to the last cycle’s runner-up to the winner.

Turning Data into Dates

By Sydney Beveridge
Cupid scours a trove of demographic data to guide his arrows. This Valentine’s Day, let Social Explorer help you map your way to love.

ENIAC unveiled to public

This Day in World History
On February 14, 1946, officials from the army and the University of Pennsylvania assembled at that institution’s Moore School of Engineering to reveal the results of a secret government project. They unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the world’s first general function, programmable electronic computer.

London Fashion Week is fast approaching

By Emily Ardizzone and Anna Wright
2012 will be a momentous year for the UK capital, and the new collections presented in London in this week will no doubt add to the growing feeling of excitement in the run up to the Olympic Games. London’s Fashion Royalty will all be present, from established design houses such as Aquascutum and Paul Smith, to new and emerging talent in the form of the Central St Martins’ Graduate show.

Brian Epstein and the quest for a contract

By Gordon Thompson
On a cold winter’s day in early 1962, Brian Epstein and the Beatles huddled together contemplating their failed bid for a Decca recording contract and the bitter aftertaste of rejection that left emptiness in their stomachs. But hunger can feed ambition. Disappointments would ensue, but almost immediately Epstein would be the proverbial right man in the right place at the right time and meet a string of people who were looking for something not quite exactly unlike the Beatles.

Galileo arrives in Rome for trial before Inquisition

This Day in World History
Sixty-nine years old, wracked by sciatica, weary of controversy, Galileo Galilei entered Rome on February 13, 1633. He had been summoned by Pope Urban VIII to an Inquisition investigating his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The charge was heresy. The cause was Galileo’s support of the Copernican theory that the planets, including Earth, revolved around the sun.

(Homo)sexuality in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

By Stanley Wells

The great actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is also well-known as a gay activist, was recently quoted in the press as saying that Shakespeare himself was probably gay. Invited to comment on this, I pointed out that there was nothing new in the idea, which for a long time has been frequently expressed especially because some of his sonnets are clearly addressed to a male.

Remembering Anti-Lynching Day

On the evening of February 12, 1937, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) commemorated its twenty-eighth anniversary at Mother AME Zion Church in Harlem. The grand, grey, neo-Gothic structure was recent to 137th Street—it had been completed in 1925—but Mother AME Zion was one of the nation’s oldest black churches, dating to the late 18th century and a reputed stop along the Underground Railroad.

Understanding evolution on Darwin Day

By Karl S. Rosengren, Sarah K. Brem, E. Margaret Evans and Gale M. Sinatra
Today is Darwin’s birthday. It’s doubtful that any scientist would deny Darwin’s importance, that his work provides the field of biology with its core structure, by providing a beautiful, powerful mechanism to explain the diversity of form and function that we see all around us in the living world. But being of importance to one’s field is only one way we judge a scientist’s contributions.

Emperor Meiji issues new constitution of Japan

This Day in World History
On February 11, 1889, Japan’s Emperor Meiji furthered his plan to modernize and westernize his nation by promulgating a new constitution. The new plan of government created a western-style two-house parliament, called the Diet, and a constitutional monarchy — though one with a Japanese character.

Nelson Mandela, 22 years after his release from prison

By Kenneth S. Broun
Twenty-two years ago, on the 11th of February 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison, a free man for the first time in twenty-seven years. He immediately assumed the leadership role that would move South Africa from a system of apartheid to a struggling but viable democracy. No one person, not even Nelson Mandela, was solely responsible for this miracle.

Strategic implications of a “nuclear weapons free world”

By Louis René Beres
Barack Obama still favors the creation of a “nuclear weapons free world.” This high-minded preference is more than infeasible; it is also undesirable. For Israel, in particular, a beleaguered microstate that could ultimately suffer the full fury of this American president’s misplaced idealism, a denuclearization “solution” in any form could not be tolerated.

Homophobic bullying

Recently I learned of yet another suicide of a young gay may which has been attributed to sustained bullying at school. Phillip Parker was 14 years old when he took his own life on Friday January 20th, 2012. Surely it has to be wrong for any young person to feel so helpless that the only way to be freed from the torment of the bullies is to commit suicide.

Charles Dickens and garbage

By Talia Schaffer
Charles Dickens was born 200 years ago this week, but he is very much alive in our culture, having become associated with two ways of seeing the world: “Dickensian” is now shorthand for filthy urban misery, but it is also linked to domestic bliss, the cozy armchair with the rubicund host, the plump goose and the fragrant, steaming punch. The man whose attack on the workhouses has resonated for two centuries is the same man who popularized the modern Christmas.