My eureka moment: Dispositions to lawlessness
Stephen Mumford describes two intellectual breakthroughs that breathed life into a moribund field and challenged the Newtonian world view
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The matrix recoded
Computing courses must address the fact that most IT failures are due to human error and management problems, says Darrell Ince
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Book of the week: The Marketplace of Ideas
Are US universities as good as they seem? Simon Baatz lauds an insightful analysis of their pros and cons
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Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment
Gerald Pillay applauds an argument against the increasing commercialisation of higher education
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Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
Like the cops who chase the gangsters across New York in the 1948 film noir Naked City, Sharon Zukin travels from district to district, describing "How Brooklyn became cool", "Why Harlem is not a...
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The Canon: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. By Elinor Ostrom
It is more than 20 years since the United Nations' Brundtland Commission made the optimistic claim that "humanity has the ability to make development sustainable", and it has to be said that, at the...
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Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism, and Social Change in an Irish Village
Jeremy MacClancy is impressed by a study of the way performance can unite disparate groups
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From Faith to Fun: The Secularisation of Humour
Faith and fun would not seem to share much. Faith suggests seriousness, fun lightheartedness. Faith seems to fit the tragic more than the comic. The exemplar of the opposition between faith and fun...
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The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England
In this timely, well-written study, Sarah Gwyneth Ross charts the rise of secular, learned women in intellectual society in Italy and England from 1400 to 1680. She considers commonalities in "the...
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How to Find a Habitable Planet
Could there be life on another heavenly body? A study of the possibilities fascinates Lewis Dartnell
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Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance
It is claimed that the first form of popular literature in the West was the "plague tract", a vernacular genre arising out of the Black Death of 1348, and remaining, so historians have assumed,...
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The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected
This doorstopper is a magnificent study that is as timely as it is magisterial. Its author, Jonathan R. Cole, has worked with some of the best and brightest, including Robert K. Merton and Paul...
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The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science
Reactions to 'evil' primate behaviour cast light on the politicisation of science, says Phyllis C. Lee
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Wrinkled Deep in Time: Aging in Shakespeare
An overheard conversation in the corridor last week between two (young - aged about 19?) female undergraduates: "But how could you go out with him? I mean, he's so old!" "Yes, but he's sweet and very...
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Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880-1914
The decades surrounding 1900 were pivotal both for the relationship between abstract mathematics and practical science and changes in Victorian ideas of a gendered intellect. Claire Jones makes a...