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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Harm and Power in the Information Economy

The Information Economy At Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg shared a motto: “Move fast and break things.” Later abandoned by Facebook, the catchphrase prevails as a...

Ignacio Cofone | 12 Nov 2024

Orbital motions as tools to test post-Newtonian and alternative models of gravity

The General Theory of Relativity (GTR), enunciated just over a hundred years ago by Albert Einstein, remains to this day the best available description of gravitation, the feeblest out of the four fundamental...

Lorenzo Iorio | 8 Nov 2024

When Leaders Fail on Peace: The Roots of Political Sabotage and How We Can Stop It

Politicians frequently derail peace efforts by prioritizing short-term political gains over long-term stability. Take the example of Nicaragua, where during the Cold War the United States propped up the...

Dominic Rohner | 7 Nov 2024

Contesting the World: Norm Research in Theory and Practice

What are norms, and why do they matter for international relations? How do they help to guide and constitute state behaviour at the international level, as well as behaviour by other actors like international...

Phil Orchard, Antje Wiener | 31 Oct 2024

WEIMAR: LESSONS ABOUT LESSONS

The German Weimar Republic lasted a mere fifteen years, from the end of the First World War to Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933. It nevertheless became the paradigmatic historical event shaping political...

Richard Ned Lebow, Ludvig Norman | 30 Oct 2024

Good Governing

The constitutions of the fifty states in the United States create by their authority as fundamental law the structure of government and the means and mechanisms of governance for state, local, and special...

Daniel B. Rodriguez | 30 Oct 2024

The Art of Working with the Mathieu group M24

1  Background In 1873 the French mathematician Emil Mathieu published a paper in which he ’glued’ together copies of the projective special linear group L2(23) acting on the 24-point projective...

Robert T. Curtis | 29 Oct 2024

Amputation Nation: Loss, Memory, and Reconstructing the Racial Order

Starting in 2015, in the wake of the shooting of ten members of the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC by white supremacist Dylann Roof, a movement grew to dismantle the icons of the Confederacy throughout...

Sarah E. Chinn | 24 Oct 2024

What Does it Mean for Human Behavior to be Heritable?

The headline shouts, “Genetics is a big reason divorce runs in families.” It is common nowadays to hear that some surprising aspect of human behavior is “heritable.” Often it is said about intelligence,...

Eric Turkheimer | 23 Oct 2024

Nobel prize in physics 2024

This year’s Nobel prize in physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for `foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks´(press...

Bernhard Mehlig | 23 Oct 2024

The Ongoing Vitality of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most widely read and influential texts in medieval Europe. Its influence can be clearly seen in philosophical works as diverse as Thomas Aquinas’...

Michael Wiitala | 18 Oct 2024

‘The spoiled child of our literature’: Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield

‘Read as one of the masterpieces by a person not acquainted with our literature, it might easily give an impression that this literature is not immense’. Henry James’s words in his introduction...

Aileen Douglas, Ian Campbell Ross | 15 Oct 2024