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Parody and copyright: Laughing out loud?

What is a parody? Does a parody have to be actually funny or is it sufficient that its author intended it to be funny? Are there any limits to one’s own right to parody? These are all questions that will have most surely crossed your mind at some point, perhaps while watching something like the Chatroulette version of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” video.

What you might have also wondered is why a parody potentially raises legal issues in the first place. The reason is that a parody involves the re-use of someone else’s work. More often than not, the latter is a work protected by copyright. Among other things, copyright grants authors the exclusive right to reproduce – in whole or in part – their works, and do so by any means and in any form. The author has also the exclusive rights to communicate/make their works available to the public, and distribute them.

There are of course exceptions to copyright protection that allow third parties to use one’s work without having to ask for permission first. An example is indeed Article 5(3)(k) of the main EU directive in the area of copyright (Directive 2001/29, also known as the InfoSoc Directive). This provision allows the Member States of the European Union (EU) to introduce into their own copyright laws an exception to copyright “for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche”. Incidentally, this is the same provision that allowed the United Kingdom to introduce – amongst others – a new exception for parody, caricature and pastiche into its own copyright law earlier this year.

“It would be unduly restrictive if only actually funny people were able to enjoy the right to parody as part of their freedom of expression”

Defining the notion and requirements of a parody from a copyright perspective might look like a daunting task. Yet, this is what the Brussels Court of Appeal asked the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to do a few months ago. This Belgian court made a reference for a preliminary ruling to the highest EU court in the context of proceedings between the estate of the late Willy Vandersteen and the members of Flemish nationalist political party Vlaams Belang.

During a public event in early 2011, the Vlaams Belang distributed a calendar whose cover reproduced a modified version of the cover to a comic book of the popular Suske en Wiske series by Willy Vandersteen. The drawing at issue resembled that appearing on the cover of the Suske en Wiske comic book entitled The Compulsive Benefactor (De Wilde Weldoener). The original drawing by Mr Vandersteen represented one of the comic book’s main characters wearing a white tunic and throwing coins to people who are trying to pick them up. In the drawing used by the Vlaams Belang, that character was replaced by the Mayor of the City of Ghent and the people picking up the coins were replaced by people wearing veils and people of colour.

The Vandersteen estate and the holders of the rights to De Wilde Weldoener brought proceedings against the representatives of the Vlaams Belang before the Brussels Court of First Instance, arguing successfully that the drawing that the latter had used as the cover to its calendar amounted to an infringement of copyright in the original drawing by Willy Vandersteen. This decision was appealed to the Brussels Court of Appeal on grounds that – among other things – the calendar cover fell within the scope of Belgian exception for parody, caricature and pastiche.The Court of Appeal decided to stay the proceedings and seek guidance from the CJEU as regards both the understanding of the concept of ‘parody’ and the characteristics that a work must possess to be considered a parody.

In its decision in September 2014, the CJEU held that a parody must be understood according to its usual meaning in everyday language, and has just two essential characteristics: first, to evoke an existing work while being noticeably different from it and, secondly, to constitute an expression of humour or mockery.

With particular regard to the latter, it is worth highlighting that the Court did not clarify whether it is sufficient that a parody pursues a humorous intent, or is also required that it achieves a humorous effect. However it would appear fair to assume that a humorous intent suffices. This is also because the right to parody is protected within freedom of expression. Requiring just intent appears more compliant with the need to safeguard parody as “the right to mock the high and mighty”, as well as the fact that freedom of expression is granted to “everyone” (see Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). It would be unduly restrictive if only actually funny people were able to enjoy the right to parody as part of their freedom of expression, with those unable to achieve a humorous effect being ineligible for protection.

While acknowledging that the right to parody is protected within freedom of expression, the Court also held that such freedom in not unlimited. A parody that conveys a message that is discriminatory or racist may in fact be ineligible for protection under Article 5(3)(k) of the InfoSoc Directive. According to the CJEU, to state otherwise would contradict the requirement for a fair balance between the rights and interests of the author of the parodied work and the rights of the parodist. It follows that in such instances the person who holds the rights to a work has a legitimate interest in ensuring that the work protected by copyright is not associated with the message conveyed by its parody. It will be interesting to see if the Brussels Court of Appeal finds that in the Vandersteen/Vlaams Belang litigation the parody at hand has gone too far and, if so, on what grounds it motivates its decision.

Featured image credit: Day 249: The Man Who Laughed. Photo by Tim. tjdewey. CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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A holiday food tour

With the holiday season upon us, many of us are busy in our kitchens cooking secret family recipes and the season’s favorite delicacies. Looking at the delicious options in The Oxford Companion to Food, we compiled a list of various holiday specialties and treats from around the world that you may want to incorporate in your next holiday feast.

Speculaas, otherwise known as Christmas biscuits were traditionally baked for St Nicholas’s Eve on 5 December. They are made of wheat flour, butter, sugar, and a mixture of spices in which cinnamon is predominant. The dough is baked in decorative molds. The biscuits are crisp and flattish and may have cut almonds pressed into the underside.

Sufganiyah are a type of doughnut made in Israel for Hanukkah celebrations. Using a yeast-leavened dough they are enriched with milk, eggs, and sugar. After being deep-fried they are filled with jam, often apricot, and rolled in caster sugar.

Oatcakes are made from oats (in the form of oatmeal), salt, water, and sometimes have a little fat added into them. Oatcakes are made for the Scottish celebration, Hogmanay, traditionally the most important holiday of the year in Scotland, celebrating New Year’s Eve.

Oatcakes. Photo by Jon Thomson. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Spiced beef, a type of preserved beef, is an important part of traditional Christmas fare in Ireland. The beef is soaked in brine, brown sugar, juniper berries, and spices which can include black peppercorns, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mace, nutmeg, and pimento for any time between three weeks and three months.

Vasilopitta is a traditional Greek New Year bread, also known as St Basil’s bread. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are celebrated more elaborately than Christmas in Greece. The Greek equivalent to Father Christmas is Aghios Vasilis—St Basil—and he arrives on New Year’s Eve when the children receive presents. The vasilopitta occupies a prominent position on the table for the arrival of the New Year.

Vanillekipferl (vanilla crescent), made from a rich pastry type of dough containing almonds and flavored with vanilla or lemon peel is popular in Germany and Central Europe, especially as a Christmas specialty.

Bakewell Pudding, a rich custard of egg yolks, butter, sugar, and flavouring—ratafia (almond) is suggested—poured over a layer of mixed jams an inch thick and baked wasis famous not only in Derbyshire, but in several of northern counties of England, where it is usually served on all holiday occasions. In this form, it bears some resemblance to various cheesecake recipes.

Choerek (or choereg, choereq, churekg etc.—the name has seemingly innumerable transcriptions) means ‘holiday bread’. This is an enriched bread (using sour cream, butter, egg), oven baked, made in a variety of shapes and sizes and flavours in the Caucasus. The most common shape is ‘knotted’ or braided bread, but it also is made in snail shapes in Georgia. Flavourings include aniseed, mahlab (a spice derived from black cherry kernels), vanilla, cinnamon, and grated lemon or orange rind

Dried soba noodles. Photo by FotoosVanRobin. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Chinese practice of eating noodles on special occasions as a symbol of longevity is also found in Japan. A typical example is the custom of eating soba on New Year’s Eve. Soba are thin, buckwheat noodles, light brown in colour. Though it is possible to make soba purely of buckwheat flour (kisoba, or ‘pure soba’), it is common to add some wheat flour to the buckwheat in order to make the dough less crumbly.

Featured image credit: Dinner Table for Christmas by Cam-Fu (camknows). CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Black Israelites and the meaning of Chanukah

The story that most Jewish children learn about the holiday of Chanukah is that it commemorates the Jews’ victory over foreign invaders and their sullying cultural influences. Around 200 B.C.E., Judea was the rope in a tug of war between two stronger powers: the Ptolemic dynasty of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of Syria. The Seleucids, led by the kings Antiochus III & IV, won when Antiochus invaded Judea in 175 B.C.E. But in 170 B.C.E. the Jews who favored Egypt took control from the camp that favored Syria. According to the Roman historian Flavius Josephus, Antiochus IV invaded Judea a second time, and not only slaughtered many Jews but also defiled the Temple in Jerusalem, offering swine as sacrifice to pagan gods on its altar.

Cue the heroes: the Maccabees (whose name means “Hammer”), the original Mattisyahu, and his seven sons, including Judah. Together they defeated the forces of King Antiochus and cleansed the Temple in Jerusalem of all of its Seleucid-introduced impurities. A small amount of oil that was enough to last for a single day lasted for eight instead, and with this somewhat pedestrian miracle the festival of Chanukah was born.

It was a miracle whose veracity has been questioned since the Middle Ages, and contemporary scholars have complicated the story quite a bit. The real struggle, they tell us, was not so much between Jews and foreign invaders, but a civil war between the Jews who followed Greek ways and those Maccabean Jews who opposed them.

In other words, the story of Chanukah at its heart is a story of a struggle of a small people torn between stronger nations with powerful cultures. We focus on the symbolic act of purification and cleansing, but we tend to obfuscate the larger cultural terrain. Ancient Jews were fighting not just against foreigners but amongst themselves over whose culture to adapt and to what degree. Cultural adaptations came from within, not just from without.

There may have been a military victory over Syria’s army and the Hellenizing Jews, but the Jews of ancient Palestine were already deeply and inextricably linked to the nations and the cultures of their region. That is, they were not just multicultural (of many discrete cultures) or transcultural (crossing cultural borders); they were polycultural. Their cultural diversity already was internalized and they patched their cultures together based on overlapping similarities, not just warring differences.

Barbardian-born Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford, musician, leader of the UNIA choir, rabbi of Beth B’Nai Abraham, and Ethiopian pioneer, from the cover of the UNIA hymnal. Public domain via The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

So too with today’s Black Israelites, people who believe that the ancient Israelites were Black and that contemporary Black people are their descendants. People of many different faiths have been Black Israelites. In the 1890s there was a wave of Black Israelite churches that came out of the Holiness movement. At the turn of the twentieth century, Anglo-Israelite beliefs helped inspire the Pentecostal movement, the most numerous new religious movement of the twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance, Black Israelite beliefs became popular among some who practiced forms of rabbinic Judaism, and the following decade the belief took root in Black Islam and in Jamaican Rastafarianism. During the organizing and militancy of the long 1960s the ideology found supporters among patriarchal and macho advocates of Hebrew Israelite faiths. A tiny fragment of the Hebrew Israelites will yell at passersby on New York street corners to this day, and yell at each other in attempts to purify their practice from any of the contamination of rabbinic Judaism.

But what goes unnoticed is that each of these religions continue to this day. Moreover, each of them change, just as the individuals within them change in their religious practice, growing more or less observant, or moving from one group to the other. It helps to think of these religious waves not as groups or sects but as movements — constantly in the process of becoming. Religious changes also happen inter-generationally, not just within the life of individuals. Many of the children of Black Jews have become more, not less religious. Gradually, over time, Black Jews have become more, not less halachic. The followers of the biggest portion of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, one of the original Holiness groups, now believe that their founding prophet only used the word “Christ” as a necessary expedient, and practice their own unique form of Judaism. Their music has been passed down “mouth to ear” for over a  century, and is some of the most beautiful choral music not just among American Jews, but in American music, period.

Black Israelites teach us that cultures are really polycultural. They are formed not by heated battles between warring binaries, but by acts of collage that emphasize overlapping similarities between dozens of inputs, many of which are already internalized within. This is a more helpful view than picturing cultural formation as the resolution of antagonism between holistic and hostile camps coming from without.

Returning to the story of Chanukah, we can understand history better by focusing not on the moment of conquest and purification but on all the cultures that Jews of Josephus’ day shared with their neighbors, just as we can understand American culture today and in the past by understanding how continuous cultural flows have created polycultures and defied efforts to categorize, rank, or purify. I like it that way.

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An enigma: the codes, the machine, the man

Prometheus, a Titan god, was exiled from Mount Olympus by Zeus because he stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. He was condemned, punished, and chained to a rock while eagles ate at his liver. His name, in ancient Greek, means “forethinker “and literary history lauds him as a prophetic hero who rebels against his society to help man progress. The stolen fire is symbolic of creative powers and scientific knowledge. His theft encompasses risk, unintended consequences, and tragedy. Centuries later, modern times has another Promethean hero, Alan Turing. Like the Greek Titan before him, Turing suffers for his foresight and audacity to rebel.

The riveting film, The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum and staring Benedict Cumberbatch, offers us a portrait of Alan Turing that few of us knew before. After this peak into his extraordinary life, we wonder, how is it possible that within our lifetime, society could condemn to eternal punishment such a special person? Turing accepts his tragic fate and blames himself.

“I am not normal,” he confesses to his ex-fiancée, Joan Clarke.

“Normal?” she responds, angrily. “Could a normal man have shortened World War ll by two years and have saved 16 million people?”

The Turing machine, the precursor to the computer, is the result of his “not normal” mind. His obsession was to solve the greatest enigma of his time – to decode Nazi war messages.

In the film, as the leader of a team of cryptologists at Bletchley Park in 1940, Turing’s Bombe deciphered coded messages where German U-boats would decimate British ships. In 1943, the Colossus machine, built by engineer Tommy Flowers of the group, was able to decode messages directly from Hitler.

The movie, The Imitation Game, while depicting the life of an extraordinary person, also raises philosophical questions, not only about artificial intelligence, but what it is to be human. Cumberbatch’s Turing recognizes the danger of his invention. He feared what would happen if a thinking machine is programmed to replace a man; if a robot is processed by artificial intelligence and not by a human being who has a conscience, a soul, a heart.

The Imitation Game. © 2014 The Weinstein Company

Einstein experienced a similar dilemma. His theory of relativity created great advances in physics and scientific achievement, but also had tragic consequences – the development of the atomic bomb.

The Imitation Game will open Pandora’s box. Viewers will ponder on what the film passed over quickly. Who was a Russian spy? Why did Churchill not trust Stalin? What was the role of the Americans during this period of decrypting military codes? How did Israel get involved?

And viewers will want to know more about Alan Turing. Did Turing really commit suicide by biting into an apple laced with cyanide? Or does statistical probability tell us that Turing knew too much about too many things and perhaps too many people wanted him silent? This will be an enigma to decode.

The greatest crime from a sociological perspective, is the one committed by humanity against a unique individual because he is different. The Imitation Game will make us all ashamed of society’s crime of being prejudiced. Alan Turing stole fire from the gods to give to man power and knowledge. While doing so, he showed he was very human. And society condemned him for being so.

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Physics Project Lab: How to make your own drinking bird

Over the next few weeks, Paul Gluck, co-author of Physics Project Lab, will be describing how to conduct various different Physics experiments. In his second post, Paul explains how to build your own drinking bird and study its behaviour in varying ways:

You may have seen the drinking bird toy in action. It dips its beak into a full glass of water in front of it, after which it swings to and fro for a while, returns to drink some more, and so on, seemingly forever. You can buy one on the internet for a few dollars, and perform with it a fascinating physics project.

But how does it work?

A dyed volatile liquid partially fills a tube fitted with glass bulbs at both ends. The lower end of the tube dips into the liquid in the bottom bulb, the body. The upper bulb, the head, holds a beak which serves two functions. First, it shifts the center of mass forward. Secondly, when the bird is horizontal its head dips into a beaker of liquid (usually water), so that the felt covering soaks up some of the liquid. As the moisture in the felt evaporates it cools the top bulb, and some of the vapor within it condenses, thereby reducing the vapor pressure of the internal liquid below that in the bottom bulb. As a result, liquid is forced upward into the head, moving the center of mass forward. The top-heavy bird tips forward and the beak dips into the water. As the bird tips forward,  the bottom end of the tube rises above the liquid surface in the bulb; vapor can bubble up from the bottom end of the tube to the top, displacing some liquid in the head, making it flow back to the bottom. The weight of the liquid in the bulb will restore the device to the vertical position, and so on, repeating the cycle of motion. The liquid within is warmed and cooled in each cycle. The cycle is maintained as long as there is water to wet the beak.

‘A drinking bird’, image provided by Paul Gluck and used with permission

The rate of evaporation from the beak depends on the temperature and humidity of the surroundings. These parameters will influence the period of the motion. Forced convection will strongly enhance the evaporation and affect the period. Such enhancement will also be created by the air flow caused by the swinging motion of the bird.

Here are some suggestions for studying the behaviour of the swinging bird, at various degrees of sophistication.

Measure the period of motion of the bird and the evaporation rate, and relate the two to each other. You can do this also when water in the beaker is replaced by another liquid, say alcohol. To measure the evaporation rate the bird may be placed on a sensitive electronic balance, accurate to 0.001 g. A few drops of the external liquid may be applied to the felt of the head by a pipette. Measure the time variation of the mass of this liquid, and that of the period of motion, without replenishing the liquid when the bird bows into its horizontal position. Allow for the time spent in the horizontal position. Establish experimentally the time range for which the evaporation may be taken as constant.

Explore how forced convection, say from a small fan directed at the head, changes the rate of evaporation, and thereby the period of the motion.

The effects of humidity on the period may be observed as follows: build a transparent plexiglass container with a small opening. Place the bird inside. Vary the internal humidity by injecting controlled amounts of fine spray into the enclosed space. You can do this by using the atomizer of a perfume bottle.

By taking a video of the motion and analyzing it frame-by-frame using a frame grabber, measure the angle of inclination of the bird to the vertical as a function of time.

Do away altogether with the beaker of liquid in front of the bird and show that all it needs for oscillatory motion is the presence of a difference of temperature between the bottom and the top, a temperature gradient. To do this, paint the lower bulb and the tube black, and shine a flood lamp on them at controlled distances, while shielding the head, so as to create a temperature gradient between head and body. Such heating increases the vapor pressure within, causing liquid to be forced up into the head and making the toy dip, just as for the cooling of the head by evaporation. It will then be interesting to study how the time elapsed before the first swing and the period of motion are related to the effective surface being illuminated (how would you measure that?), and to the effective energy supplied to the bird which itself will depend on the lamp’s distance from the bird

There are many more topics that can be investigated. As one example, you could follow the time dependence of the head and stem temperatures in each cycle by means of tiny thermocouples, correlating these with the angular motion of the bird. Heat enters the tube and is transported to the head, and this will be reflected in a steady state temperature difference between the two. Both head and tube temperatures may vary during a cycle, and these variations can then be related to heat transfer from the surroundings and evaporation enhancement due to the convection generated by the swinging motion. But for this, and other more advanced topics, you would have to have access to a good physics laboratory, obtain guidance from a physicist, and be willing to learn some heat and thermodynamics as well as the mechanics of rotational motion, in addition to investing more time in the project.

Have you tried this experiment at home? Tell us how it went to get the chance to win a free copy of the Physics Project Lab book! We’ll pick our favourite descriptions on 9th January.

Featured image credit: ‘Drinking bird photo’ by Christopher Zurcher, CC-by-2.0, via Flickr

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The longest night of the year

The winter solstice settles on 21 December this year, which means it’s the day with the least amount of sunlight. It’s the official first day of winter, although people have been braving the cold for weeks, huddled in coats and scarves and probably wool socks. It’s easy to pass over the winter solstice because of the holidays; however, many traditions center around the solstices and equinoxes, and even Christmas has borrowed some ideas from the midwinter celebration. Below are a few facts about the winter solstice and the influence it has had on religion.

1.   The winter solstice occurs when the sun at noon is in its lowest position in the sky, which puts it over the Tropic of Capricorn (22-23 December).

2.   The astronomical solstice is 21 December, but midwinter or Yule covers a few weeks during the time of the solstice. During medieval times, this period would stretch from the feast of St. Nicholas (6 December) and Christmas Day, then from Christmas to Epiphany or Candlemas.

Winter. Public domain via Pixabay.

3.   It is most likely untrue that Christmas is the birth-date of Christ. However, it was likely set on 25 December to coincide with the already well-established Pagan holidays. In ancient times, the winter solstice was celebrated as the birthday of the two gods Sol Invictus (the invincible sun) and Mithras.

4.   In contemporary Paganism, Yule celebrates the rebirth of the sun with the winter solstice, as it is the darkest time of the year with the days get longer after the solstice.

5.   The Christmas traditions of gift-giving, candles, mistletoe, evergreens, holly, yule logs, Old Father Time, red and white colors, and others all come from Latin and Germanic yuletide celebrations. The word “yule” is thought to have originated from the Anglo-Saxon word for “yoke,” although it is possible it is connected to the words for sun in Cornish and Breton.

6.   “Calendar customs are cultural expressions of repetitive seasonal rhythms.” Generally, holidays and customs follow along the changing of the seasons. Midsummer and midwinter especially pair together as the longest day and longest night of the year.

Headline image credit: Winter forest. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Making light regulation work

A permanent problem of political and economic management – and one on which many people hold very strong opinions – is how to ensure commercial enterprises comply with society’s sense of fairness and justice without strangling them in red tape. There are many examples of economies whose productive potential appears to have been limited by over-regulation (most of Eastern Europe for much of the twentieth century, for example). On the other hand it was clearly a combination of inadequate regulation and enforcement that allowed the recent financial crisis to happen. What is more, our sense of fairness is outraged by the fact that many of those who had advocated self-regulation played a major part in creating the crisis, walked away with large bonuses and, almost without exception, have escaped criminal charges.

The response in most jurisdictions has been to develop new and stronger regulations, though it is likely to prove politically difficult to fund improved enforcement. Another approach might dispense with regulation altogether and still ensure that commercial malpractice is dealt with according to community values. Classical Athens managed that brilliantly.

There was no regulation, just a very strong belief that contracts should be enforced if they were reasonable, and that people who behave dishonestly should be punished. This was put into practice by a very powerful and democratic legal system, under which anyone could bring a case and have it heard by a jury of 500 of his peers, selected by lot. In making decisions, the jurymen would listen to the lawyers from both sides and any witnesses they produced but would not be guided by any detailed definition of what was right and wrong in particular circumstances. The lawyers might choose to cite precedents, but there was no need for that to affect the way jurors decided to vote. Jurors had to decide who was telling the truth and whether the punishment demanded (generally some form of restitution, sometimes with damages) was fair.

Athens had no need for any official machinery for checking on activities before they went wrong; there were no regulatory bodies, inspectors or auditors. But if you were going to cheat in your business dealings, you were highly likely to be charged by the other party and face the judgement of your fellow citizens. Nor would you bring a case with no merit. Being seen to be honest was important; if a handful of other citizens took a strong dislike to you, they could vote to “ostracise” you and you had to leave town.

This belief in the power of the law, democratically defined and enforced, also meant Athens only needed a small police force (a posse of Scythian archers used to keep public order). Whenever an incident occurred in the streets, we are told “a crowd came running”. Without a police force, the crowd came partly to sort out the problem, but also so they could bear witness in any trial that arose.

Similarly democratic principles applied to the use of wealth. Athens had no income tax system. It collected taxes on harbour movements, sold leases to work the local silver mines, and received a large tribute from allies for defence purposes. Much of this was spent on military campaigns, paying citizens to attend the assembly or serve on a jury, and on magnificent public buildings. There was no regular revenue to cover common needs Athenians considered important, ranging from maintaining ships to staging plays. It was also seen as reasonable that these things should be paid for by the rich. Instead of taxing them, the Athenians established a system of sponsorships or “liturgies” and the wealthy were expected to pick up the costs on a regular basis. If you were identified as being due for a liturgy (which could be very expensive – think a million dollars and more), you still had some legal options. You could demonstrate that you had funded a liturgy recently or more than your share over a short while. This was easy to determine. Or you could identify someone else who was not up for a liturgy and claim they were richer than you. This was not so easy; you had to offer to exchange all your assets for theirs! Athens’ public projects always found funding.

Could a society today operate without regulation and without taxation, depending instead on the power of judgement by peers? Athens had the benefit of its small scale. In its classical heyday, the male citizen population (only males voted in the assembly or served on juries) was never more than about 35,000. (The total population was about 250,000, mostly slaves.) Many citizens knew each other or knew someone who would know any other person they were interested in. Athens also had the benefit of limited technology. Living in the days before machinery provided overwhelming advantages to large companies and full-time operations, many Athenians could attend the assembly or serve on a jury or in the army or navy and still be able to supplement their income by making simple wooden, ceramic or textile objects when they had time at home. On the other hand it has never been so easy as today to tell stories to a large audience and to measure responses. Setting up and managing an effective litigation system that enables anyone to bring a case and has a random group decide on fairness and justice would not be easy, but it worked wonderfully for Athens. Do we take the opportunity seriously enough to try?

Headline image: Bazar of Athens, Edward Dodwell: Views in Greece, London 1821, public domain via Wikimedia

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Reflections on the 2014 Scottish independence referendum

Scotland was selected as the Oxford Atlas Place of the Year 2014. We invited several experts to comment on the decision and Scotland’s phenomenal year.

Scotland has remained in the media spotlight throughout 2014 for one reason: the referendum on independence from the United Kingdom. This was the most significant event to have taken place in Scotland since the creation of the Union in 1707. But it hardly presented an edifying spectacle to the outside world. Nationalists constantly complained about England, describing every utterance by a Unionist politician as “cack-handed” or “an insult to the people of Scotland”. Celebrities such as Sir Paul McCartney, David Bowie, and J.K. Rowling who publicly backed the Union were subjected to appalling online abuse. Financial projections were produced which might politely be described as misleading. The proposals for an independent Scotland, in preparation since the foundation of the SNP in 1934, were marked by an astonishing lack of detail — voters were not even told what currency the new state was to have. The official Unionist campaign showed a crippling lack of passion; politicians argued for the status quo while pretending not to. Most Westminster MPs, aware of their unpopularity in Scotland, opted to say as little as possible. Three Scottish MPs from the Unionist camp stepped in to fill the vacuum: Jim Murphy, George Galloway, and, very much at the eleventh hour, Gordon Brown. Brown’s passionate speech, the finest of his career, delivered on the day before the vote, left everyone wondering why he had not become involved in the Unionist campaign sooner.

The campaign, indeed, had dragged on for three years. The SNP might have been expected to hold the referendum soon after their election to government in 2011. But the year 2014 appeared propitious: it was the year of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, which could be expected to give a boost to nationalist sentiment, and of the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, at which the Scots had destroyed an English army of invasion, leaving the way clear for retaliatory Scottish raids on England. In the event, the Games were hailed as a triumph for Scotland, but had no effect on nationalism, while the Bannockburn anniversary was greeted with widespread indifference, with thousands of tickets at the commemorative event remaining unsold. The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, in which Scots and English had fought and died side by side, carried a more meaningful resonance.

When the referendum was finally held, independence was decisively rejected. 1,617,989 Scottish residents voted for independence, out of a voting age population of 4,436,428: that is, 36.47%. The leader of the independence campaign, Alex Salmond, had declared immediately before the vote that the result would settle the matter for a generation; immediately after it, he challenged the result and called for a second referendum to be held as soon as possible. His colleagues in the SNP, meanwhile, floated the idea of a unilateral declaration of independence: the support of a majority of the people of Scotland, not having been forthcoming, was no longer deemed necessary. In the days which followed, the losers formed themselves into a group called “the 45” (44.65 per cent of those who voted had voted for independence). The name “the 45” recalls, of course, the doomed Jacobite rebellion of 1745, in which ordinary Scots were driven by their highland lords into an ill-advised invasion of England, and were roundly defeated, with catastrophic consequences for Scotland.

Sign in Greinetobht in North Uist supporting Scottish independence by John Allan. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph.org.uk.

How does Scotland emerge from all this? The referendum exposed Scotland’s politicians to public view, caused old resentments to be stirred up, and led to the airing of attitudes that would have been better hidden. On the other hand, there was no serious violence and no bloodshed. It is enormously to the credit of the UK government that it permitted such a referendum to be held at all. The UK is now much stronger for having given the nationalists the opportunity to demonstrate that their supporters account for barely more than one in three of the Scottish voting age population.

But what of overseas visitors who may be contemplating a trip to Scotland next year? Do come. Scotland remains a country of unsurpassed natural beauty with a rich and visible history and a warm and welcoming people. By virtue of its membership of the UK, Scotland punches far above its weight in world affairs. Its language is English and its currency remains the pound sterling. The visitor to Scotland will find that there is one particular subject on which its people are united in not wanting to talk about: the 2014 independence referendum.

Headline image: The debating chamber of the Scottish Parliament Building by Colin. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Preparing for APA Eastern Meeting 2014

Look out Philadelphia! Oxford University Press has been attending the American Philosophical Association (APA) Eastern Division Meeting for decades. The conference has been held in various cities including Baltimore, MD, Newark, DE, New York, NY, and Boston, MA. This year, we’re gearing up to travel to Philadelphia on Saturday 27th December, and we’ve asked staff across various divisions to see what they are most looking forward to.

Clare Cashen, Higher Education Marketing:


I’m really looking forward to the APA this year. We, in the Higher Education division, publish the majority of our new books in the fall, and the Eastern meeting is the first time we get to display them all at once. It’s always fun to connect with instructors and share what we’ve been working on. I’m also looking forward to a good Philly cheesesteak and maybe a jog up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum!

Joy Mizan, Marketing:


This will be my first time attending a conference for Oxford University Press. I’m very excited to be representing the company! I’ll be managing the booth from set up to tear down, and it’ll be a very big job. I’m looking forward to putting faces to the names of authors that I’ve been working with. I’m also excited to see what other products the various exhibitors will have. On a personal note, I’m a big fan of Philly and can’t wait to visit it again. I love the historical sites and delicious (albeit, greasy) foods!

Image Credit: Love in Philadelphia by Liana Jackson. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

Peter Ohlin, Editorial:


I look forward to Eastern to see a lot of familiar faces – authors and friends in philosophy, as well as colleagues at other publishers. It’s also a great time to take stock of what we’ve published over the last year and get feedback from readers about those books at the book display. Lastly, it’s good to hear about interesting projects that will hopefully turn into OUP books by the time future APA’s roll around.

Emily Sacaharin, Editorial:


I’m excited to be attending my first APA this year! It will be great to meet so many of our authors in person, especially those I’ve already gotten to know via phone and email.

We hope to see you at the Oxford University Press booth! We’ll be offering the chance to browse and buy our new titles on display at a 20% conference discount, and free trial access to online products, including Electronic Enlightenment. Electronic Enlightenment is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. You can access correspondence sent between important figures in this period, such as David Hume and Adam Smith for instance. Pop by and say hello and you can also pick up sample copies of our latest philosophy journals and browse free articles from British Journal of Aesthetics, Mind, and The Philosophical Quarterly.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Featured image credit: Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Philadelphia, by Khush. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr

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Almost paradise: heaven in imaginative literature

Paradise, a 1982 knock-off of the movie Blue Lagoon, stars Phoebe Cates and Willie Aames as teenagers who find themselves alone in a place of natural beauty and experiencing the ultimate joy together. Ann Wilson of Heart and Mike Reno of Loverboy can see forever in each other’s eyes in “Almost Paradise,” their Top Ten hit from the Footloose soundtrack (“Almost paradise / We’re knocking on Heaven’s door”).  Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) references the Elysian Fields, a paradise beyond this one where the blessed go when they die. And the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has more than once run a story – or titled an entire issue — “Paradise Found.” Literature and popular culture are awash with references to or appropriations of Heaven.

The Baylor Survey of Religion determined in 2011 that the vast majority of Americans (two thirds of us, and over ninety per cent of Americans who identify as “very religious”) believe that Heaven exists. Something about the idea of a heavenly realm — call it Zion, call it Paradise, call it Elysium, call it Shangri-La, call it Nirvana — meets a deep-seated need of human beings to hope for something more after this life. Whether because it fits our sense of justice that the good should be rewarded, or because it appeals to our ingrained hope that this sometimes difficult existence isn’t all that we will ever experience, the idea of Heaven has helped to dry the tears of the suffering and offered the possibility of some greater meaning in many earthly lives.

But Heaven is as much a concept as an actual place, even for those who believe in the actual place. The human imagination has served a vital role in helping us to imagine what Heaven might be. Dante and Milton, for example, crucially shaped our conceptions of a paradisiacal realm beyond human speech and reckoning. In Canto XXX of the Paradiso, Dante offers us a vision of light and joy, describing the saints in Heaven arranged as a rose with the Virgin Mary at its center even as he speaks at length about his inability to speak of what he has seen.

Heaven, photo by Martin Andersson CC-by-2.0 via Flickr

John Milton shows us God enthroned, and in glorious language supplies the dignity and beauty most human descriptions of Heaven would necessarily leave lacking:

Now had the Almighty Father from above,

From the pure Empyrean where he sits

High Thron’d above all highth, bent down his eye,

His own works and their works at once to view:

About him all the Sanctities of Heaven

Stood thick as Stars, and from his sight receiv’d

Beatitude past utterance; on his right

The radiant image of his Glory sat,

His onely Son; (Paradise Lost, Book IV, 56-64)

We require this sort of imaginative view of Heaven partly because the Bible (whether in the Hebrew or Christian testaments) contains very little teaching about Heaven as a place for the faithful departed. N. T. Wright notes in the book Surprised by Hope that most Christians assume that when the Bible speaks of something called heaven it is talking about the place where Christians go after death. Because they start with that belief, they misread Jesus’ teachings about the Kingdom of God or, in the Gospel of Matthew, the Kingdom of Heaven. Assuming that Jesus “is indeed talking about how to go to heaven when you die” may make us feel secure about the afterlife, but, says Wright, it “is certainly not what Jesus or Matthew had in mind.” (18) So, barring those mentions of Heaven in Jesus’ cryptic kingdom teachings, we are left with some references to a heavenly realm in apocalyptic writings like Daniel and Revelation, and some few sayings of Jesus. (The Paradise of Islam is mentioned considerably more often in the Qur’an and in the hadiths and other teachings).

“How we live now may be shaped by what we believe is happening to us in a next life”

Many Christians formed their understanding of Heaven from one of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospel of John: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:2-3, NRSV) This teaching has entered into our thinking from the King James Version, where “dwelling place” is translated as “mansions,” and prompted many to think of Heaven as a place where believers will have their own mansions (although the Greek monai« has no such denotative or connotative meaning; it simply means “a place where one may remain or live”).

But don’t tell those believers who have taken those expected mansions, shaken them with the Book of Revelation’s streets of gold, and served themselves a heavenly gated community where every occupant has a holy-water Jacuzzi with diamond handles. For many who have suffered in this life, it seems only just and right that they spend eternity in luxury. What is Paradise if it isn’t better than the world we know?

And if, like them, your image of Heaven is of a place where you will walk streets of gold and pluck a harp while holding forth with the saints, then you are certainly not in the minority. Jon Meacham notes in a recent TIME magazine cover story that this version of Heaven appears across Christian history, and is tied up in “culture, politics, economics, class, and psychology.” How we live now may be shaped by what we believe is happening to us in a next life, and can affect everything from how we vote to how we give. But more importantly, our stories about Heaven offer us consolation; they assure us that a just God will surely reward the faithful and punish the faithless, no matter what happens to us in this life. For that reason, those stories are vital to our peace of mind.

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