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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Introducing A first course in Magnetohydrodynamics

Summary: A First Course in Magnetohydrodynamics offers a much-needed resource for undergraduate physics education.  Despite the fact that magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD) can be used to describe more than...

David Alan Clarke | 8 Jul 2025

Handbook of Compassion in Healthcare: A Practical Approach

We are medical doctors, psychiatrists, working in a world of infinite need, finite resources, and – increasingly – ‘evidence-based medicine’. We are trained to ask questions such as: What is the...

Caragh Behan, Brendan Kelly | 7 Jul 2025

Plan? What plan?

Sometimes plans work best when they don’t really bear the hallmarks of a plan. Less design and more muddling through can achieve unforeseen good. This might be said for a well-known, but less well-understood,...

David Lowe | 2 Jul 2025

Exit from International Organizations: Costly Negotiation for Institutional Change

Exiting from international organizations (IOs) seems to be the strategy du jour in international relations. This is underscored by recent high-profile events: the implementation of Brexit in 2020, Russia’s...

Inken von Borzyskowski, Felicity Vabulas | 1 Jul 2025

How Literary Genius Changed the Meaning of Nature and Created an Environmental Movement

Why do people so often approach nature with the same kinds of rapt aesthetic and spiritual attention that they bring to works of art?  Why do they seek in nature both their most unique (or “true”)...

Scott Hess | 30 Jun 2025

What Economists Can (and Should) Learn from Disability Justice Activists

In 2016, the Harriet Tubman Collective—a group of Black disabled activists and community organizers—released a statement titled “Disability Solidarity: Completing the Vision for Black Lives.”...

Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Adam Hollowell | 30 Jun 2025

The Guitar in Victorian England

During the nineteenth century Western art music advanced towards a peak of sonorous magnificence, perhaps reached in 1848 at Paris when Hector Berlioz conducted an ensemble of 1,022 performers. The guitar,...

Christopher Page | 25 Jun 2025

Naples: Capital of Culture and Dance

The mythical siren song of Naples, which drew travelers to the shores, manifested itself centuries later in the reality of the Grand Tour. Generations came, lured by the urban expanse and broad culture...

Anthony R. DelDonna | 25 Jun 2025

Platforms for Knowledge: Architectural Images and the Rise of Empirical Science

What modes of scientific knowledge can images of architecture embody? An etching that Strasbourg artist Wendel Dietterlin the Elder released in the second, 1594 instalment of his serially published Architectura...

Elizabeth J. Petcu | 24 Jun 2025

A radically different method for solving problems

The animation running below shows a new kind of algorithm solving a nonogram puzzle. The task is to arrange purple squares in a grid according to some constraints listed on the sides. For example,...

Veit Elser | 20 Jun 2025

Singing in the Reign: Lyric Poetry and Greek Culture under Rome

When we think about lyric poetry and song traditions in the Roman Empire, the association is hardly new. Horace’s refined lyric experiments are well known, and Nero’s dramatic (and infamous) performance...

Francesca Modini | 20 Jun 2025

Many Homers, One Epic Tradition: Rethinking the Origins of the Iliad and the Odyssey

For over two millennia, readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey have imagined a single, blind poet called Homer singing the deeds of the great heroes of the Trojan War. Captivating as this image may be,...

Michael B. Cosmopoulos | 20 Jun 2025