Yearly Archives: 2023

Rethinking the Human Body: Human-Machinic Intersections in the Greco-Roman World

How modern is the concept of a posthuman, mechanical body which extends beyond its flesh and skin and interacts with inorganic material to the extent of blurring the boundaries between its deep nature and that of the inanimate objects and technological artefacts that surround it? Can the function of a human body be fully explained […]

Balancing Justice and Autonomy in Democratic Design

As democracy across the globe faces new stresses and dramatic challenges, the power of the judiciary to reshape electoral procedure is increasingly important. Yet underlying any judicial intervention – for good or for ill – in how people rule themselves is a threshold question: why does the judiciary have authority over the essence of democracy […]

The Graphic Novel, Old and New

Since the first uses of the term in the 1970s, the graphic novel has been a concept in constant debate and evolution, capturing the new developments and mutations of comics across the last decades, alongside the concerns and enthusiasms such changes generate. At times blindly embraced, at other times vehemently rejected, the term has now […]

Theory of liquids, the hard problem

I had a memorable library day trying to find an answer to a question that is simple to formulate: what is a theoretical value of energy and heat capacity of a classical liquid? I looked through all textbooks dedicated to liquids as well as statistical physics and condensed matter textbooks in the Rayleigh Library at […]

Religious Dissimulation and Early Modern Drama

Religious liberty has long been considered as a foundational human right in modern liberal democracies. Article 18 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies that everybody has the ‘freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance’.[1] But […]

Computational physics gets a revamp

When (Local) Government Restrains Radicals

Populist radical right parties and their threat to European democracies continue to develop at the local level of politics. A recent episode highlighted the importance of events in this often ignored arena: the unprecedented electoral victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the East German district of Sonneberg in June 2023. Securing 53% of […]

Men, Masculinity, & Psychology

Blog #3 in the, Psychology and its Antecedents, series Earlier this summer, several articles appeared in the New York Times about masculinity and how the concept and its expectations are evolving in our social interactions. Some of this interest was prompted by a book (Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, Regnery Publishing, 2023) by a […]