Login
For Slate, Stephen Lurie covers what’s known as Dawn to Dusk to Dawn, an ultramarathon in which participants run as many laps as they can around a 400 meter track in 24 hours. “D3,” as it’s known, takes place in Pennsylvania and is one of the oldest 24-hour races in the world. This past May, it attracted 36 participants aged 16-82.
Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.
This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
In this gorgeous essay for Vittles, the poet Seán Hewitt recalls weekend nature walks in England and his grandfather’s lessons on the wonders of foraged food. Inspired by the abundant hawthorns in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Hewitt writes about making his own hawthorn gin.
When the hawthorns were all done and the gin was in the jar, I put it into the cupboard, then checked on it every week, turning it, watching the colours darken. Now I’ve learned to leave it in peace, and I don’t turn it that often anymore. I just bide my time until December when, on some foggy, cold evening – when it feels like winter has begun – I take it out of the cupboard.
The main difference between sloe and hawthorn gin is that, where sloe gin is fruity and sweet and mixes well with tonic or soda, hawthorn gin is like a dark sherry, perfect for winter. It has a velvety texture, a rich smoothness. I also like that, unlike sloe gin, you can’t buy it anywhere, so hawthorn gin becomes a secret, shared thing between friends, a preservation of summer pulled into winter.
Fans of American football remember well the rise and fall of Adam “Pacman” Jones, but not many expected to see him bounce back. Zak Keefer delivers my favorite kind of redemption feature in this profile of Jones, who’s now mentoring the sons of his late friend and teammate Chris Henry. The story starts with Jones’ tears; it might end with yours.
“Y’all need to uproot and move up here with us,” he urged Loleini Tonga, the boys’ mother. “We’ll help you out.”
So that’s what they did. Pacman Jones, once the NFL’s cautionary tale for reckless behavior, made Chris Henry’s family part of his own. They moved in with him in Cincinnati, where he drives the boys to school and picks them up after practice, where he trains them in the offseason, where he pushes Slim’s two sons the same way he once pushed their father, passing on the lessons learned from the opportunity they both almost threw away.
“I’ll tell you this,” Jones says, getting a bit heated. “I’ll be damned if these kids make the same mistakes I did.”
No, it’s not the first time a national magazine has sent a writer thousands of miles to write a cover-the-waterfront story about the largest state in the U.S. But with California more of a symbol than a state, Joe Hagan manages to coax a few sharp edges out of the well-worn trope, combining marquee politicians with some surprising characters (comic Shang Yeng, Abbot Elementary writer Brittani Nichols, a firearm instructor to the stars) to help compensate for the most eye-roll-inducing dinner party ever committed to print. A commendable piece of macro reporting that’s sure to infuriate everyone.
Octavia E. Butler was asked, seven years after the publication of her uncannily predictive 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, whether her visions of an environmentally ravaged Los Angeles, circa 2024, where the elite barricade themselves in walled fortresses surrounded by poverty-stricken encampments of drug addicts and illiterate poor, was something she really believed would happen.
“I didn’t make up the problems,” replied the writer, who grew up in Pasadena. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:
RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.
The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.
The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”
UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.
But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.
I hope the healing is coming, too.
In a decrepit house in São Paulo lives a woman who many people call a bruxa (the witch). As a blockbuster Brazilian podcast recently revealed, Margarida Maria Vicente de Azevedo Bonetti is wanted by U.S. authorities for her treatment of a maid named Hilda Rosa dos Santos, whom Margarida and her husband more or less enslaved in the Washington, D.C. area:
In early 1998—19 years after moving to the United States—dos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor she’d befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.
When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998—shortly after dos Santos had moved—she was stunned. She’d handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renê Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)
Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat she’d scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.
“I couldn’t believe that would take place in the United States,” Kerr said.
During Kerr’s investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings she’d received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.
She’d also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.
She’d had “no voice” her whole life, Kerr concluded, “no rights.” Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was “extremely passive” and “fearful,” Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie.
What can Large Language Models offer to linguists?
It is fair to say that the field of linguistics is hardly ever in the news. That is not the case for language itself and all things to do with language—from word of the year announcements to countless discussions about grammar peeves, correct spelling, or writing style. This has changed somewhat recently with the proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs), and in particular since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the best-known language model. But does the recent, impressive performance of LLMs have any repercussions for the way in which linguists carry out their work? And what is a Language Model anyway?
At heart, all an LLM does is predict the next word given a string of words as a context —that is, it predicts the next, most likely word. This is of course not what a user experiences when dealing with language models such as ChatGPT. This is on account of the fact that ChatGPT is more properly described as a “dialogue management system”, an AI “assistant” or chatbot that translates a user’s questions (or “prompts”) into inputs that the underlying LLM can understand (the latest version of OpenAI’s LLM is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4).
“At heart, all an LLM does is predict the next word given a string of words as a context.”
An LLM, after all, is nothing more than a mathematical model in terms of a neural network with input layers, output layers, and many deep layers in between, plus a set of trained “parameters.” As the computer scientist Murray Shanahan has put it in a recent paper, when one asks a chatbot such as ChatGPT who was the first person to walk on the moon, what the LLM is fed is something along the lines of:
Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what word is most likely to follow the sequence “The first person to walk on the Moon was”?
That is, given an input such as the first person to walk on the Moon was, the LLM returns the most likely word to follow this string. How have LLMs learned to do this? As mentioned, LLMs calculate the probability of the next word given a string of words, and it does so by representing these words as vectors of values from which to calculate the probability of each word, and where sentences can also be represented as vectors of values. Since 2017, most LLMs have been using “transformers,” which allow the models to carry out matrix calculations over these vectors, and the more transformers are employed, the more accurate the predictions are—GPT-3 has some 96 layers of such transformers.
The illusion that one is having a conversation with a rational agent, for it is an illusion, after all, is the result of embedding an LLM in a larger computer system that includes background “prefixes” to coax the system into producing behaviour that feels like a conversation (the prefixes include templates of what a conversation looks like). But what the LLM itself does is generate sequences of words that are statistically likely to follow from a specific prompt.
It is through the use of prompt prefixes that LLMs can be coaxed into “performing” various tasks beyond dialoguing, such as reasoning or, according to some linguists and cognitive scientists, learn the hierarchical structures of a language (this literature is ever increasing). But the model itself remains a sequence predictor, as it does not manipulate the typical structured representations of a language directly, and it has no understanding of what a word or a sentence means—and meaning is a crucial property of language.
An LLM seems to produce sentences and text like a human does—it seems to have mastered the rules of the grammar of English—but at the same time it produces sentences based on probabilities rather on the meanings and thoughts to express, which is how a human person produces language. So, what is language so that an LLM could learn it?
“An LLM seems to produce sentences like a human does but it produces them based on probabilities rather than on meaning.”
A typical characterisation of language is as a system of communication (or, for some linguists, as a system for having thoughts), and such a system would include a vocabulary (the words of a language) and a grammar. By a “grammar,” most linguists have in mind various components, at the very least syntax, semantics, and phonetics/phonology. In fact, a classic way to describe a language in linguistics is as a system that connects sound (or in terms of other ways to produce language, such as hand gestures or signs) and meaning, the connection between sound and meaning mediated by syntax. As such, every sentence of a language is the result of all these components—phonology, semantics, and syntax—aligning with each other appropriately, and I do not know of any linguistic theory for which this is not true, regardless of differences in focus or else.
What this means for the question of what LLMs can offer linguistics, and linguists, revolves around the issue of what exactly LLMs have learned to begin with. They haven’t, as a matter of fact, learned a natural language at all, for they know nothing about phonology or meaning; what they have learned is the statistical distribution of the words of the large texts they have been fed during training, and this is a rather different matter.
As has been the case in the past with other approaches in computational linguistics and natural language processing, LLMs will certainly flourish within these subdisciplines of linguistics, but the daily work of a regular linguist is not going to change much any time soon. Some linguists do study the properties of texts, but this is not the most common undertaking in linguistics. Having said that, how about the opposite question: does a run-of-the-mill linguist have much to offer to LLMs and chatbots at all?
Featured image: Google Deepmind via Unsplash (public domain)
Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?
The recent crash of the largest-ever space rocket, Starship, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, has certainly somewhat disrupted optimism about the human mission to Mars that is being prepared for the next few years. It is worth raising the issue of the safety of future participants in long-term space missions, especially missions to Mars, on the background of this disaster. And it is not just about safety from disasters like the one that happened to Musk. Protection from the negative effects of prolonged flight in zero gravity, protection from cosmic radiation, as well as guaranteeing sufficiently high crew productivity over the course of a multi-year mission also play an important role.
Fortunately, no one was killed in the aforementioned crash, as it was a test rocket alone without a crew. However, past disasters in which astronauts died, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters, remind us that it is the seemingly very small details that determine life and death. So far, 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have died in space flights. 11 more have died during testing and training on Earth. It is worth mentioning that space flights are peacekeeping missions, not military operations. They are carried out relatively infrequently and by a relatively small number of people.
It is also worth noting the upcoming longer and more complex human missions in the near future, such as the mission to Mars. The flight itself, which is expected to last several months, is quite a challenge, and disaster can happen both during takeoff on Earth, landing on Mars, and then on the way back to Earth. And then there are further risks that await astronauts in space.
The first is exposure to galactic cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles events, especially during interplanetary flight, when the crew is no longer protected by both Earth’s magnetic field and a possible shelter on Mars. Protection from cosmic radiation for travel to Mars is a major challenge, and 100% effective protective measures are still lacking. Another challenge remains being in long-term zero-gravity conditions during the flight, followed by altered gravity on Mars. Bone loss and muscle atrophy are the main, but not only, negative effects of being in these states. Finally, it is impossible to ignore the importance of psychological factors related to stress, isolation, being in an enclosed small space, distance from Earth.
A human mission to Mars, which could take about three years, brings with it a new type of danger not known from the previous history of human space exploration. In addition to the aforementioned amplified impact of factors already known—namely microgravity, cosmic radiation, and isolation—entirely new risk factors are emerging. One of them is the impossibility of evacuating astronauts in need back to Earth, which is possible in missions carried out at the International Space Station. It seems that even the best-equipped and trained crew may not be able to guarantee adequate assistance to an injured or ill astronaut, which could lead to her death—assuming that care on Earth would guarantee her survival and recovery. Another problem is the delay in communication, which will reach tens of minutes between Earth and Mars. This situation will affect the degree of autonomy of the crew, but also their responsibility. Wrong decisions, made under conditions of uncertainty, can have not only negative consequences for health and life, but also for the entire mission.
“It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment.”
Thus, we can see that a future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment. The ethical assessment will depend both on the effectiveness of available countermeasures against harmful factors in space and also on the desirability and justification for the space missions themselves.
Military ethics and bioethics may provide some analogy here. In civilian ethics and bioethics, we do not accept a way of thinking and acting that would mandate the subordination of the welfare, rights, and health of the individual to the interests of the group. In military ethics, however, this way of thinking is accepted, formally in the name of the higher good. Thus, if the mission to Mars is a civilian mission, carried out on the basis of values inherent in civilian ethics and bioethics rather than military ethics, it may be difficult to justify exposing astronauts to serious risks of death, accident, and disease.
One alternative may be to significantly postpone the mission until breakthrough advances in space technology and medicine can eliminate or significantly reduce the aforementioned risk factors. Another alternative may be to try to improve astronauts through biomedical human enhancements. Just as in the army there are known methods of improving the performance of soldiers through pharmacological means, analogous methods could be applied to future participants in a mission to Mars. Perhaps more radical, and thus controversial, methods such as gene editing would be effective, assuming that gene editing of selected genes can enhance resistance to selected risk factors in space.
But the idea of genetically modifying astronauts, otherwise quite commonsensical, given also the cost of such a mission, as well as the fact that future astronauts sent to Mars would likely be considered representative of the great effort of all humanity, raises questions about the justification for such a mission. What do the organizers of a mission to Mars expect to achieve? Among the goals traditionally mentioned are the scientific merits of such a mission, followed by possible commercial applications for the future. Philosophers, as well as researchers of global and existential catastrophes, often discuss the concept of space refuge, in which the salvation of the human species in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth would be possible only by settling somewhere beyond Earth. However, it seems that the real goals in our non-ideal society will be political and military.
Founded in 2012, Political Violence @ a Glance is an award-winning, peer-reviewed online magazine that explores timely topics and scholarly research on political violence and its alternatives. PV@Glance has an international readership, with thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of annual page views. It is among the premier venues through which scholars of political violence communicate the relevance of their findings to a wider scholarly and public audience.
The current editors of PV@Glance, Erica Chenoweth, Barbara Walter, and Joseph K. Young, seek applications for a new editorial team. The new editorial team would assume editorial and management responsibilities for PV@Glance in September 2023, with the existing team providing transitional support during summer 2023.
Successful applicants will hold secure positions at one or more academic institutions and receive sufficient resources from their home institutions to support their editorial tasks.
Those interested in assuming editorship of PV@Glance should submit CVs of proposed editorial team members along with a brief letter that addresses the team’s qualifications and experience, institutional support, and aims and vision for PV@Glance going forward.
Proposals must be received by May 25, 2023, for full consideration. Applications (or questions about the role or application process) should be submitted to PVG Managing Editor Lindsay Morgan at [email protected].
Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]
Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.
On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?
Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.
Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023.
If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.
In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.
You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.
You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:
Other relevant book titles include:
You may also be interested in the following journal articles:
Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.
What is subject marketing? An interview with Hana Purslow, philosophy marketing manager
In this interview, our marketing manager for philosophy, Hana Purslow, outlines OUP’s approach to subject marketing. She provides examples of campaigns and channels that we use to promote our content and reveals what she enjoys most about her job and how she sees her role evolving in the coming years.
Subject marketing promotes a particular topic or subject to a research community by showcasing relevant content in that area, regardless of format. This can include book chapters, journal papers, or articles from our reference products. By marketing the subject, we showcase key content for academics to use in their teaching or research. Through the dissemination of OUP’s scholarly research in this targeted way, we can have a direct and positive impact within the subject community.
Our focus in subject marketing is building our brand and OUP’s profile in a particular discipline. We concentrate our efforts on building a strong subject community around our content; it is only through researchers reading, sharing, and citing our content that we can be sure of the real-world impact our publishing has. Our job in marketing is to ensure that the academic community is aware of OUP’s high-quality, cutting-edge, and impactful research.
I am responsible for leading our philosophy subject marketing. I take huge enjoyment in working with OUP philosophy content and learning from the greatest minds across all areas of philosophy. I find working with OUP Philosophy Editors Peter Momtchiloff, Peter Ohlin, and Lucy Randall extremely rewarding—their knowledge of philosophy is second to none, and with so many interesting areas within the subject to cover, it’s a marketer’s dream when choosing which topics to highlight!
A good example is the “Philosophy in Focus” campaign I run each month. This is our most successful thematic campaign, where we host a selection of thought-provoking free content around a particular theme. We market each collection through a range of channels including social media, advertising, email, and a dedicated collection web page—always evaluating our results to hone our strategies for increased reach, awareness, and engagement with our OUP philosophy content.
Our first topic was “race,” which we launched during Black History Month in October 2021. Other topics, which often coincide with observance months, include emotions, disability, feminism, technology and AI, and democracy.
“Through subject marketing, academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens.”
Choosing content around important events or areas in philosophy is a team effort between myself in marketing and my colleagues in editorial, ensuring we share key research within the subject and shine a light on topics that matter. This means that academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens beyond individual titles. Sharing content in a way that engages our audience and showcases the OUP Philosophy brand in the best possible light is something I take great pride in. I am grateful to have so many brilliant authors to work with and feel privileged to share their influential work in campaigns like Philosophy in Focus.
The OUPblog—this really helps to increase the discoverability of our content, which is how our books are found on search engines like Google. As we publish across such a broad range of topics, we can get creative when working with authors on blog posts. For instance, in our most read philosophy blog of 2022, Kristin Gjesdal brings a unique viewpoint to the relationship between philosophy and theatre by focusing on the work of playwright Henrik Isben.
Our philosophy blog posts aim to be accessible to non-specialist academics so have a wider reach than our published content itself. We share OUPblog posts widely on social media, particularly through our dedicated philosophy Twitter channel, @OUPPhilosophy.
“We choose channels for promoting our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve.”
It’s worth noting that we choose channels for our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve, so while not all our campaigns will feature a blog post, this doesn’t make them any less valuable—we align the strategy or channel with the campaign objective.
I have always been passionate about marketing, which led to numerous paths in the events, public, and private sectors before joining the publishing industry, which I soon realized was the place for me! Working in marketing for an academic publisher means that I can give back to the world by helping to advance knowledge and learning.
At OUP, we use digital marketing to share high-quality academic content from thought-leading authors around the world. This is something that really drives me; being a lover of all things digital, targeted marketing allows me to build creative strategies that showcase the breadth of publishing we have to offer at OUP, alongside our vision to grow and maximize the impact of our content.
A large part of my role involves working with authors, which is a real highlight for me. I help authors learn how to promote their books by providing guidance and explaining how they can build their profile to increase long-term engagement with their work. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!
Creating campaigns for conferences—such as American Philosophical Association, Philosophy of Science Association, or The Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association—is another highlight. Whether we’re attending in person or promoting our content digitally, it’s exciting to showcase our cutting-edge publishing with conference delegates and researchers from around the world.
“I help authors learn how to promote their books and build their profile. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!”
Overall, I’m motivated by seeing the impact that marketing can make, from campaign planning right through to the end results. It’s exciting to see how marketing can influence online usage and more, depending on what we’re trying to achieve for that campaign.
Everything evolves, and so does my role and offering as a marketer. This will be based on the challenges and opportunities we face in the market—from open access growth to the way people find research, and the ever-changing digital landscape. There is always more to learn, and I am excited to see what’s coming next.
During the pandemic, the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit famously sparked a huge increase in chess interest — but one online play engine turned what would have been a spike into a groundswell that eclipses even esports. Jessica Lucas traces how the royal game became a digital juggernaut.
By January 2023, Chess.com reported hitting over 10 million active players in a single day—more than the daily average of World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, and Among Us combined—leading the site’s servers to crash. Its online schedule now features a who’s who of chess grand masters who provide content for users almost 24 hours a day. A new class of chess celebrities, like sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez, who recently surpassed 1 million Twitch subscribers on their joint account, and international master Levy Rozman, who has over 3 million YouTube subscribers, regularly appear on Chess.com.
I started composting a couple of years ago using two bins in my yard. Ever since then, I’ve dutifully collected fruit and veggie scraps, egg shells, and coffee grounds, alternating these “greens” with layers of “browns” — dead leaves from the oak trees in our yard. This spring I will harvest my first batch of compost and I don’t know if it’s possible to be more excited about moist mulch. That’s why Clio Chang’s Curbed story caught my eye. I’ve always wondered what happens in the industrial composting process and Chang’s piece does a terrific job going behind the scenes of a compost collection service that begins under the cover of darkness in Queens, New York.
This is the sorting phase of the process, and no fewer than six Waste Management employees have been assembled to take me around. First, we watch as the trucks line up to be weighed, since customers pay by weight to dump. “Is it priced by pound?” I ask. “Tons,” everyone responds in unison, and we all laugh at my inability to grasp orders of magnitude. One-third of the residential trash — some 4,000 tons daily — that New Yorkers throw away is food or yard waste that could be diverted from methane-emitting landfills. The heap of food scraps we are looking at, which has cartoon-like steam rising off the top, is massive, but only constitutes a tiny fraction of what it could be. There are pigeons resting and scavenging on its peak. Darryll Persad, the site manager, tells me that they have an air-filtration system and a deodorizer that puts out a scent to help control the odor. There are multiple scents to choose from, but Persad says, with a decisiveness that I can only dream of, that he “just orders cinnamon.” (Since all I smell is trash, I’ll just have to take his word for it.)
You see it everywhere. On the Kardashian sisters, supermodels Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, influencers, and celebrities. It’s the “perfect” face of an ethnically ambiguous woman, composed of a chiseled nose, filled lips, a Botoxed forehead, and other cosmetic work. For Tablet, Grazie Sophia Christie examines our culture’s obsession with Instagram Face; the path toward “doomed, globalized sameness” in which women are just copies of one another; and how wealthy women can easily reverse what they’ve done to their face, discarding enhancements like just another fashion trend.
Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.
But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.
How does a parent answer a child’s questions about school shootings? For instance: Why does this keep happening? Will it happen to me? If it does, will I be OK? Writer Meg Conley, a mother of three, describes the agony of not having all the answers:
After the second shooting at East High School, we started talking about homeschooling. It’s not the first time we’ve had the conversation. But my kids love lunchtime, talking in the halls, learning new things from new teachers, school plays and after-school clubs. Being separated from those things during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic affected them in ways I still find frightening to contemplate. Forming community with people who are not part of their household is a vital part of their lives. There are just some things that can’t be replicated in the home.
One night in New York City, I sat in between my two oldest daughters as they watched their first Broadway play, Funny Girl. The play opened with Fanny Brice, played by Julie Benko, sitting in front of a mirror, looking at herself before she says, “Hello, gorgeous.” When she said those words, most of the audience knew what was coming, so they cheered. But my girls didn’t, so they politely clapped. I watched them watch the play, with wide eyes. By the end of the show, they loved Brice. They loved Benko. When she started to sing the reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” the girls understood what had been and what was coming. They cheered with everyone else. They became part of the community in that room.
We were wandering through the Met museum when my daughter got a text from another friend. It was just a link to a news story. Her middle school principal had gone to the media. There is a child at her school that was recently charged with attempted first-degree murder and illegal discharge of a firearm. That child doesn’t need incarceration; the child needs help. But teachers are not trained to give that help. The district rejected the school’s request that the student be moved to online schooling. Instead, the child goes to school every day and receives a daily pat down from untrained school staff before going to class. This student is on the same safety plan as the student who shot two deans before spring break. My daughter showed me the text and asked again, “What are we going to do?”
My two oldest girls went to see a preview of the new musical New York, New York with their dad that night. I stayed behind with their youngest sister. She’s too young for Broadway, but nearly old enough to be killed at school.
Today in the recurring series “America is Broken” — meaning, the news — three reporters at Pro Publica reveal that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted lavish gifts from Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor. Thomas has flown on Crow’s private jet many times, gone on vacations to Indonesia and New Zealand on Crow’s yacht, and spent time at Crow’s compound in the Adirondacks. In doing so, Thomas has violated norms pertaining to judges’ conduct and possibly broken federal law:
Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lavishing the justice with gifts, including a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass, which Thomas disclosed. Recently, Crow gave Thomas a portrait of the justice and his wife, according to Tarabay, who painted it. Crow’s foundation also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.
Crow said that he and his wife have funded a number of projects that celebrate Thomas. “We believe it is important to make sure as many people as possible learn about him, remember him and understand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.
To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s superyacht, ProPublica spoke to more than 15 former yacht workers and tour guides and obtained records documenting the ship’s travels.
On the Indonesia trip in the summer of 2019, Thomas flew to the country on Crow’s jet, according to another passenger on the plane. Clarence and Ginni Thomas were traveling with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motorboats and a giant inflatable rubber duck, met the travelers at a fishing town on the island of Flores.
Ben Goldfarb questions the responsibilities of dog owners in an essay focusing on the impact of unleashed dogs on shorebirds. Goldfarb brings this somewhat niche topic to life with a mixture of reporting and personal experience.
We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. She looked happy; she looked free; she looked right.
If you have zero interest in the blues — the very foundation of American music — I can’t promise you a gripping tale. But if you have even a passing awareness of Robert Johnson, or the impossibly rich tradition that descended from his scant recordings, then you won’t be able to tear yourself away. Discovery, dispute, and deceit: from those three chords Michael Hall composes an unforgettable tune.
On April 4, Mack’s manuscript, Biography of a Phantom, was finally published, more than five decades after he started it. But it’s very different from the pages I held in my hands back in 2016. In parts of the book, Mack’s presence outweighs Johnson’s—and not to Mack’s benefit. By the last page, Mack has become the villain of his own life’s work.
Mack’s favorite Dickinson poem begins, “This is my letter to the World that never wrote to me.” If you’re familiar with the poem, you know that it ends, “Judge tenderly—of Me.” As Mack’s friend, I’m going to try to do that for him. Though he made it really hard, because a lot of what I thought I knew about Mack was all wrong.
If you didn’t grow up with a kooky, kitschy cookie jar in your kitchen, you likely know someone who did. “Each kitchen should have a cookie jar to reflect the person’s personality,” advises (Mercedes DiRenzo) Bolduc. “It makes them happy.”
The joy of cookie jars, for many, is finding a jar that feels perfectly suited to one’s own personal taste or identity. In this hunt, the world of vintage cookie jars offers near infinite options. In Chicago, pastry chef Mindy Segal remains smitten with a vintage 1940s ceramic cookie jar that she’s had for decades. “I call him Chef,” says Segal, coauthor of the cookbook Cookie Love. “I’ve had him since I was in my 20s and it was my first major purchase into the vintage world. I love him and will never get rid of him. He’s like my guy.” Chef dons a stiff white chef’s hat and he has been dubbed guardian of dog treats. Recently, Segal bought a second cookie jar, which lives in her popular Mindy’s Bakery. “I put pretzels in it and sometimes I put candy in it. I don’t put cookies in it,” she says.
FreshRSS 