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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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The Prompts You Need to Help You Write the Book You Want to Write

When we wrote our handbook for fiction writers (The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write, published by CUP in 2022) we excluded a component of our taught courses, the writing exercise...

Sarah Burton, Jem Poster | 6 Nov 2025

Insight-Driven Problem Solving: Analytics Science to Improve the World

Why Analytics Matters Now More Than Ever In today’s world, data and algorithms are everywhere, but real impact comes not from numbers alone—it comes from how we use them. That belief is at the...

Soroush Saghafian | 31 Oct 2025

Can Governments Trust Their Citizens? The Paradox of Voluntary Compliance

Every policymaker knows the dilemma: should governments trust people to do the right thing, or make sure they do it? The safer option has usually been enforcement. Write the rules, monitor behavior, punish...

Yuval Feldman | 20 Oct 2025

Imagination and Thinking Well

Section 1: What are Thought Experiments For? Thomas Kuhn famously asked how it was possible for thought experiments to lead to new scientific knowledge in the absence of new data. In philosophy,...

Eleanor Helms | 20 Oct 2025

Reassessing the Peloponnesian War

In the early summer of 431 BCE, villages and farms in Attica were abandoned as people moved into Athens. They were fleeing the advance of one of the largest armies ever assembled in ancient Greece. At...

Samuel Gartland, Robin Osborne | 17 Oct 2025

Rethinking the Lawyers’ Monopoly: Access to Justice and the Future of Legal Services

For more than a century, the legal profession in the United States has tightly controlled the delivery of legal services. Lawyers enjoy a monopoly: only licensed attorneys can provide legal advice, represent...

Nora Freeman Engstrom, David Freeman Engstrom | 17 Oct 2025

The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad

No text attracted as much critical attention in Greek antiquity as the Iliad. Homer’s monumental epic was the cornerstone of primary education in ancient Greece, and it remained at the forefront of...

Bill Beck | 15 Oct 2025

Armed Internationalists

In a 1954 poem called ‘Spain in America’ (España en América), the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara likened Castillo Armas’s coup in Guatemala to General Franco’s onslaught...

Carl-Henrik Bjerström, Enrico Acciai, Morten Heiberg | 13 Oct 2025

How to Read a Banana

Recent U.S. tariff policies have made mundane commodities remarkably visible, with almost every week bringing news about the logistics of importing or exporting essential items, from hamburgers to cement....

Sudesh Mishra, Caitlin Vandertop | 13 Oct 2025

The What, Why, and Whither of Faculty Tenure

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the New York Times documented over 145 instances of workers being disciplined or terminated for comments related to Kirk. Many of those workers were...

Deepa Das Acevedo | 9 Oct 2025

Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War (1937–1945)

As a historian of war, I’ve always been curious about how wars have been fought–not just on the impersonal levels of strategy and operations, but also in the much more intimate terms of the everyday....

Jennifer Yip | 8 Oct 2025

DEMOCRACY EXPANDED OR ERODED? ‘Publicity Politicians’ and the Transnational Media Politics of Empire

‘The powerful ruler is today unable to steer the press in his directions simply through his will. Words of command echo as empty calls in the empire of typesetting and rotation machines,’ observed...

Betto van Waarden | 8 Oct 2025