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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The “need for public servants who can negotiate . . . moral minefields with wisdom and integrity is more urgent than ever,” says Mary Ann Glendon, author of the new book The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. “It is hard to resist,” she continues, “the conclusion of the classical philosophers that no polity can afford to neglect the nurture and education of future citizens and statespersons.”
By Michael Kitson, Ron Martin, and Peter Tyler
Europe has a Greek tragedy; the US is grappling with a Tea Party; and in the UK we have the economic consequences of austerity. The focus is budget deficits, public expenditure cuts and being ‘all in it together’. But, of course, we are not all in it together. The impact of austerity is very unequal: the whole mess was started by the financial sector driven by avarice and hiding behind the convenient veil of ‘free markets’; but the burden is being felt by the poor, the unemployed and the destitute. And the inequality is being felt in different parts of the UK, Europe and the USA.
By Colin McGinn
This fall OUP will publish three books by me. They are substantial new works of academic philosophy, on unrelated subjects. How did I manage to produce three books in such a short time when one is usually regarded as quite enough by itself?
By Jeff Lockwood
If people have told you that daddy-longlegs are deadly, then those people are dead wrong. This tale is debunked on the website of the University of California Riverside, and I trust my colleagues at UCR. I know a several of the entomologists there, and they’re a really smart bunch of scientists (a claim that one might question, given that they chose to live in Riverside, but my concern is for their entomological acumen, not their geographic aesthetics). So, I’m going to use what they say about daddy-longlegs and if you end up dying from a bite, then it’s on them.
This Day in World History
On November 20, 1977, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat made an historic speech before Israel’s Knesset, or Parliament, becoming the first leader of an Arab nation to speak there. He was also the first of Israel’s Arab neighbors to publicly say anything like these words: “Today I tell you, and I declare it to the whole world, that we accept to live with you in permanent peace based on justice.”
By Mark Peters
With the arrival of the new Muppet movie, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Beaker, and our other felt friends are everywhere. There’s no escaping Jim Henson’s creations, and few of us would want to (unless the movie happens to suck, which is doubtful, given the stewardship of Jason Segel, who showed major Muppet mojo in the heartbreaking and spit-taking Forgetting Sarah Marshall). It’s a good time to look at the history of the word Muppet, which has some meanings that would make the Swedish Chef bork with outrage.
This Day in World History
The twenty-five-year-old princess was seated beneath an oak tree on the lawn of her home, Hatfield House. Suddenly, several courtiers hurried across the lawn until they reached her location, stopped, and bowed. The queen has died, they told her. You are now queen of England. Young Elizabeth, it is said, fell to her knees and quoted a line from Psalm 118: “It is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”
By Christian Meier
Hesiod and Homer brought order to the world of the gods for the Greeks, describing their genealogical connections, allocating honours, powers, and areas of responsibility among them, and giving them distinct appearances. This is how Herodotus put it.
By Sharon Zukin
Until the early morning of November 15, a few hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters spent the chilly nights of a glorious autumn camping out in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s disapproval with their politics and under the New York City Police Department’s anxious eye, the occupiers captured public attention in a remarkably peaceful way. Regrouping for the winter, they will take stock of what they have achieved so far and the work that remains.
By Anatoly Liberman
The spelling of those two words does not bother us only because both are so common and learned early in life. Yet why not shure and shugar? There is a parallel case, and it too leaves us indifferent, though for a different reason.
By Barbara Oakley
Pathological altruism is, in a great sense, the study of the onramps to the well-intentioned road to hell. That is, it is the study of truly well-meaning behavior that worsens instead of improves a situation, or creates more problems than it solves. Does the concept of pathological altruism then provide a license to steal—as long as it was done for a good cause? Not so fast.
The American Catholic Church of today is a product of many dramatic transformations, especially those that took place in the 1960s. Here is an excerpt from The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever where Mark S. Massa recounts some of the practices Archbishop James Francis McIntyre instituted in Los Angeles.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an often misunderstood anxiety disorder. It’s treatment of choice, a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy known as Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), is likewise difficult to grasp and properly use in therapy for both consumers and their therapists. This is in part because of the counter-intuitive nature of ERP, as well as the subtle twists and turns that OCD can take during the course of treatment.
By Elvin Lim
Mitt Romney must be the happiest Republican in the world. His political rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Herman Cain and Rick Perry, seem to be trying to out-do the other in terms of whose campaign can implode faster.
Our world is filled with conflicts. They often cause us grave problems. However, conflicts themselves are not the real problem. Conflicts are often positive and a given conflict can have meritorious purposes. Problems arise principally from the means by which conflicts are often waged: through violence.
This Day in World History
At 9:40:30 in the morning of November 14, 1889, an American woman began a trip abroad. It was not just any trip, though: journalist Nellie Bly was out to best the legendary journey of Phileas Fogg, the British gentleman who was the hero of Victor Hugo’s bestselling novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly’s whirlwind world trip was heavily promoted by Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World.