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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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 […]
An excerpt from The Pope’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice della Rovere by Caroline P. Murphy. Read last week’s exceprt HERE. Unlike his predecessor, the new Pope had no ties to Felice and no interest in developing any. For Hadrian, Felice was no treasured memento of Rome’s golden age. She was, rather, a symbol […]
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section included a review of The Pope’s Daughter by Caroline Murphy. Here’s the final graph of the review by Bruce Boucher: Caroline Murphy has recreated Felice della Rovere’s life with agility and tact. She successfully fleshes out the customs and historical background of her Machiavellian princess, even though there […]
From The Pope’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice della Rovere by Caroline P. Murphy. Felice della Rovere (1483? – 1536) was the illegitimate daughter of Pope Julius II, a close ally of Pope Leo X, and one of the most influential women of Renaissance Italy. Napoleone When Felice della Rovere entered the house of […]
“The Source of the Singing” Marilyn Nelson Waniek Under everything, everything a movement, slow as hair growth, as the subtle click of cells turning into other cells, the life in us that grows as mountains grow. Under everything this movement, stars and wind circle around the smaller circles of the grass, and the birds caged […]
The most recent edition of Tangled Bank, the bi-weekly round-up of the blogosphere’s best science posts, is now up at Cognitive Daily. This edition includes posts on global climate change, monkey lizards of the Triassic and a link to OUPblog’s own “The Tuniit” post (Thanks guys!). LINK LINK to Tangled Bank home.
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 […]