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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Asian North American literature and culture before 1930

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a surge in anti-Asian sentiment, with nearly 3800 incidents of harassment, discrimination, and violence toward Asian and Asian Americans reported this past...

Josephine Lee, Julia H. Lee | 16 Apr 2021

The Adriatic, sea of stories

My mother’s family comes from Dugi Otok, the outermost island in the Zadar archipelago, off the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. I was often told as a child that from the island’s western cliffs you could...

Magdalena Skoblar | 16 Apr 2021

Talking to Machines

Talking to machines is becoming commonplace. We routinely tell our smart speakers what to play next, we tell our satnavs where we want to go, we ask our phones general knowledge questions, we dictate...

Steve Young | 16 Apr 2021

India and the World

How to view the history of India in a global perspective ? One answer is to frame it within a project of ‘provincialisation’ of Europe as advocated by Dipesh Chakrabarty. But there is an alternative...

Claude Markovits | 15 Apr 2021

Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions

How to transition to a zero carbon economy in a timely and fair fashion is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. Bill Gates spelt out his vision of how to do it in his recent book How to Avoid...

Peter Newell | 15 Apr 2021

Bounded gaps between primes: the epic breakthroughs of the early 21st century

Why did I write this book? Certainly there are quite a few mathematicians who could write a better book on bounded gaps. I thought that the series of wonderful breakthroughs deserved to be celebrated...

Kevin Broughan | 14 Apr 2021

Scholarship: A ‘Hidden’ Influence on International Judges

International judges regularly decide important cases, on matters ranging from entrenched border disputes, costly trade wars, the most fundamental of our human rights and violent armed conflicts. Their...

Sondre Torp Helmersen | 9 Apr 2021

100 Years of Aircraft Aerodynamic Design: from guesswork to optimal mathematical precision

The figure above presents a thumbnail history of the airplane’s aerodynamic development over the twentieth century, including some of the significant contributors who helped to bring it about. This...

Arthur Rizzi, Jesper Oppelstrup | 8 Apr 2021

Martian helicopter, Martian atmosphere, Martian life?

Wallace Arthur, author of The Biological Universe, examines the link between the flight of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity and the possible existence of past life on the red planet.

Wallace Arthur | 8 Apr 2021

Opinion: Moving beyond prescriptive physics laboratory instruction

Lower level undergraduate physics labs are typically designed to demonstrate theory and often use a prescriptive, recipe-driven, approach. Upper level labs use more advanced methods and are supposed to...

Andri M. Gretarsson | 8 Apr 2021

Practical Psychopharmacology

“Nobody reads books anymore” is the secondhand testimony I hear from colleagues about how current medical students and residents prefer to learn.  “They want soundbytes.”  Short, succinct...

Joseph Goldberg, Stephen M. Stahl | 8 Apr 2021

Good Europeans?

What are the most distinctive achievements of European civilization? According to the Bulgarian-born thinker Tzvetan Todorov, they are rationality, justice, democracy, individual freedom, secularism,...

Shane Weller | 2 Apr 2021