Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Lawrence E. Harrison directed the USAID missions in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti and Nicaragua between 1961 and 1985. He also co-edited, with Samuel Huntington, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. In this podcast, Harrison discusses his latest book The Central Liberal Truth. Click here to listen to the podcast (Lawrence_Harrison_podcast_MD1.mp3)
By Anatoly Liberman Unpronounceable and unprintable English words no longer exist, and only the spellchecker turns red when smut defiles our screens for academic purposes (dictionary makers and etymologists treat all words with equanimity and, if needed, include and discuss them). Now that everything is discourse, taboo has been abolished. Strangely, the more sensitive people […]
Mark Tushnet: In reading over your responses, Saul, I was struck by the proposition that the Second Amendment, properly interpreted, would encompass only long guns – the equivalent of muskets – but not handguns. I think this is a non-starter. I begin with the question, “Why long guns – a general category – rather than […]
Mark Tushnet: A couple of things occurred to me. The less important question is this: You say that the citizen-rights view you offer “would certainly mean much more rigorous gun regulation.” Do you think that, on the view you find in the founding era, such rigorous gun regulation was thought to be required, or simply […]
Mark Tushnet: Hi Saul – First, let me say that I look forward to debating the arguments in your new book on the Second Amendment, A Well-Regulated Militia. As I read it, you make two “large” arguments, backed up of course with a lot of detail and qualifications. I’m going to sketch those arguments here, […]
By Glenn LaFantasie Authors prepare themselves for negative reviews of their books, but when critics have bad things to say about one’s writing there is no girding of the loins that really seems to work. An unfavorable review hurts, no matter what authors say to the contrary. Some writers, though, dismiss critics and criticism more […]
By Charlayne Hunter-Gault The first time I went to Ethiopia was in 1990, and I was filled with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. My excitement was sparked by the prospect of visiting one of the oldest countries in the world, and as I entered the hotel where I was to stay, I was greeted […]
For some reason, interest in the etymology of copasetic never abates. This adjective, a synonym of the equally infantile hunky-dory, is hardly ever used today unless the speaker wants to sound funny, but I cannot remember a single talk on words without someone’s asking me about its derivation and thinking that the question is of a most imaginative kind.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
We too often forget that the generation that fought the Civil War lived in a world very different from our own. In our attempt to personalize the past, which all too often leads us into a romanticization of that past, we see the elements of human experience that unite us with the Civil War generation—how they, as individuals, loved and lost, laughed and cried, lived and died—but we tend, in the process, to overlook how these same people spent their lifetimes in a world that, upon closer inspection, seems like an alien planet.
By Anatoly Liberman The Old Germanic word for “army” sounded approximately like harjaz. Its Modern German continuation is Heer, and nearly the same word is used in Icelandic, Norwegian, and Danish (army is a borrowing from French; the idea of this word is “armed force”). English has lost harjaz, but it is astounding how many […]
Coordinates: 36° 40′ N | 4° 55′ E Number of provinces included: 8 As a descriptive category, world music succeeds in being a particularly vague label for such a wide range of sound. The musical styles and traditions rooted in specific places usually have more meaningful names. Kabylia for example, a small region along Algeria’s […]
David McGowan, blogging at Legal Ethics Forum yesterday, posted a very thorough review of Steven Lubet’s latest book, Lawyers’ Poker: 52 Lessons That Lawyers Can Learn from Cardplayers. Of course, we should expect thoroughness from any writer who declares his intent “to integrate legal ethics, rational choice theory, and cognitive decision theory.” Like most people […]
By Anatoly Liberman Language is unbelievably redundant. For example, vowels are called vowels because voice (Latin vox; compare Engl. voc-al) is an inalienable part of their production. Yet a word said in a whisper, that is, without the participation of voice, will not be lost. In a language in which the gender, number, and case of […]
Coordinates: 43° 12′ N | 41° 5′ E Deepest point reached: 6,824 feet (2,080 m) With the onset of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and average temperatures worldwide on the rise, the question on the minds of many is: how to beat the heat? For cavers willing to travel to Abkhazia on the eastern coast […]
Eviatar Zerubavel, author of The Elephant in the Room, will be on The Diane Rehm Show this morning. He goes on live at 11AM ET. You can listen online by clicking HERE