Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
James T. Patterson will be touring through New York, Chicago and DC in September for his upcoming book Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. Restless Giant is the 11th volume in the Oxford History of the United States series which includes Pulitzer Prize winners Battle Cry of Freedom and Freedom […]
Simon Blackburn appeared on WBUR’s “On Point” program last week along with Stanley Fish, Michael Massing and Michael Lynch. Truth has always been under attack from liars. But now two philosophers argue that the notion of truth itself is being threatened by more sinister opposition. It began with a cloistered, academic “relativism,” they say. But […]
Origins of Value author William Goetzman, Professor of Finance at Yale University, was interviewed on Marketplace earlier this month. Goetzman describes his work as “financial archaeology” and tells the story of his favorite find: a bond issued in 1648 for the reconstruction of a canal near Utrecht. Purchased by Goetzman’s co-author, K. Geert Rouwenhorst for […]
In the comments section of Jill Quadagno’s 08.04.05 post, Gordon Brown wrote: “Over half of the acclaimed 40,000,000 uninsured are that way by choice. Financial choice that is. The same people that say they can’t afford health insurance because of family rates between $300 and $700/mo per family….have between over $1000/mo in auto expenses, the […]
America Henry Dumas If an eagle be imprisoned On the back of a coin And the coin is tossed into the sky, That coin will spin, That coin will flutter, But the eagle will never fly. – From The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, coming in September. Learn more about Henry Dumas at the Modern […]
On a much lighter note than Tuesday’s post on Korea’s “Dear Leader,” today we direct you to Tim Harford’s weekly “Dear Economist” column in the Financial Times. In today’s column, Harford analyses the ‘parable of the talents’ from a modern-day economist’s perspective. We can’t wait til he brings his wry sense of humor to our […]
The revelation in recent articles in the Seattle Times and follow-up articles and editorials in the New York Times about clinical investigators who were being paid $200 – $1000 for giving advice and opinions to investment firms is just another example of how blind some physicians are, either consciously or subconsciously, to how their financial […]
A big week for Oxford books in The New Yorker! Truth: A Guide by Simon Blackburn was one of three books featured in Jim Holt’s A Critic At Large piece, “Say Anything.” After a long discussion of the various forms of bullshit – from car salesmen to Martin Heidegger to Louis Althusser) – Holt turns […]
Jasper Becker’s Rogue Regime is given a long review in this week’s New Yorker. It is actually a double review, but the author, Ian Buruma, calls Becker’s work the “more intelligent” and “more incisive” of the two. Here are two of the more disturbing sections of Buruma’s article: After the Korean War ended in the […]
Jasper Becker, author of Rogue Regime, was on The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC today to discuss the drastic environmental problems faced by China. Learn more about Becker by visiting his website, www.jasperbecker.com.
by Harm de Blij As a professional geographer living in Washington, DC in the 1990s, teaching at a major university, serving as geography editor on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ and working for the National Geographic Society, I dreaded the intermittent appearance of media reports on international surveys that ranked American high-school students near the bottom […]
This President expects the nation to be unwaveringly stoic in war—for parents and loved ones
of soldiers and marines to hold tight as they watch their children kill and be killed, and for soldiers to tough it out as they return home maimed and riddled with guilt that they are among the survivors.
Stoicism is critical in wartime, but it has its limits. A soldier fights in the most
honorable and brave way when he believes in the cause and conducts himself justly with
the best tactics and weaponry available. But many on the ground are wondering just what
war they are fighting, and whether they have they have the right armor and weaponry to
face this brand of insurgency.
Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist, due out in November, just finished a guest-blogging stint at Marginal Revolution. As he is wont to do, Harford treated a raft of subjects ranging from devaluing airline miles to the history of randomized medical trials. You can also find Harford posting almost daily at this blog, or […]
By about 8,000 years ago the Arctic environments of North America were as extensive as they are today, and animal populations had moved northwards to establish themselves on lands and in sea-channels recently freed from glacial ice. Although ancestral Indian groups made summer excursions northwards across the tundra, probably following the caribou as Dene and […]
Rogue Regime by Jasper Becker was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section. A few key paragraphs from the review: After his father’s death in 1994, Kim Jong II transformed North Korea from an odious totalitarian regime into something actually worse, “a Marxist Sun King” state that was ready to oversee an unparalleled […]
If relativism, then, is often just a distraction, is it a valuable one or a dangerous one? I think it all depends. Sometimes we need reminding of alternative ways of thinking, alternative practices and ways of life, from which we can learn and which we have no reason to condemn. We need to appreciate our […]