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In this week’s The New Republic (subscription only), James Cobb takes a stab at explaining “the steadfast refusal of people in Southern coastal communities to evacuate even in the face of the direst warnings that both hell and high water are headed their way.” A few weeks ago on this blog, Cobb wrote on remembering […]
Ted Steinberg author of Acts of God: An Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America has been commenting in recent press stories on the root causes of Katrina. In a story in the Wall Street Journal exploring how our efforts to control and populate the coastline has exacerbated the suffering, Steinberg says: “This is an […]
This is the third of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK In the post-Roman West, almost all this material sophistication disappeared. Specialized production and all but the most local distribution became rare, unless for luxury goods; and the impressive […]
Katharine A. Phillips, MD, will discuss body dismorphic disorder (BDD) tonight, November 8, on CNN with Paula Zahn.with Oprah Winfrey today. Body dysmorphic disorder (or BDD) is a relatively common, often severe, and underrecognized body image disorder. It consists of distressing or impairing preoccupations with perceived flaws in one’s appearance. People with BDD are obsessed […]
In her “Storm Warnings” piece for The New Yorker this week, Elizabeth Kolbert writes that “in Nature just a few weeks before Katrina struck, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that wind-speed measurements made by planes flying through tropical storms showed that the “potential destructiveness” of such storms had “increased markedly” since […]
If Sept. 11 showed us how terrifying it is to deal with alien ideologues who are prepared to lose everything for what they believe, the debacle in New Orleans offered what should be an equally unsettling portrait of alienated Americans who believe that they have nothing to lose. For years, both liberals and conservatives have […]
There have been some very interesting reviews of The Fall of Rome zipping about the ether lately. Some of it spurred by our excerpt series which began HERE From across the pond, Alun reacts to our post… Troels, a graduate student in the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, gives his […]
The NYT Sunday Book Review featured two OUP books on their “Editors’ Choice” page The Pope’s Daughter by Caroline P. Murphy In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger LINK to review of The Pope’s Daughter. LINKto review of In Search of the […]
This is the second of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK “Monte Testaccio” When considering quantities, we would ideally like to have some estimates for overall production from particular potteries, and for overall consumption at specific settlements. Unfortunately, it […]
What does it really mean to be happy? What does your brain really want? Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, will be on “Science Friday” with Ira Flatow this afternoon. LINK This is actually the second week in a row an Oxford author has appeared on “Science Friday.” Last week, Kerry […]
Welcome to the OUP blog! Those of you looking for that “original content” we’ve promised can reference: Nancy Sherman’s post on America’s treatment of our Iraq War veterans… Harm de Blij’s post on why geography education really does matter… Jill Quadagno and Jerome Kassirer commenting on the problems in our health care system… And Donald […]
The thirty-sixth edition of Tangled Bank, the bi-weekly round-up of science blogs, is up at B and B. There is some fascinating reading in there, including a link to last week’s post on the Fall of Rome.
Kerry Emanuel, author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, appeared on NPR’s “Living on Earth.” From the transcript: Emanuel: It’s quite possible that it isn’t one-way. It may very well be two ways: that the hurricane activity feed back on the climate system. And one of the ways that that can happen […]
The Disappearance of Comfort It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially […]
Fifty years ago this past Sunday, the brutal slaying of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, laid bare the raw savagery and blatant disregard for decency and law that permeated the Jim Crow South. When Till’s mother insisted on an open casket funeral and Jet magazine published photos of his […]
Glowing coverage of Simon Blackburn’s Truth continues apace! This week, a review in Salon.com! A choice paragraph from Andrew O’Hehir’s review: By now you may be nodding sagely, or you may be flinging your half-decaf latte across the room in a white-hot rage. But whichever side you’re on, and even if your impulse is to […]