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Robert Burns, digital whistle-blowing, and Scottish independence

By Robert Crawford

On 25 January (Burns Night) Scots, friends of Scotland and lovers of poetry all round the world will toast the “immortal memory” of Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns. Then, as many did on New Year’s eve, they will join in singing his most famous song, “Auld Lang Syne”. This year, though, something’s different.

For the first time since 1707 (more than half a century before Burns was born), the population of Scotland is being given the chance to vote in a referendum that asks the question, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” The referendum won’t be held until 18 September, but already people are arguing about which side Robert Burns would have been on. To secure his posthumous vote would be the ultimate celebrity endorsement. Several Scottish lords have argued that the poet who hymned “The man of independent mind” would have voted against his country becoming independent.

Robert Burns By William Hole R.S.A. (The Poetry of Burns, Centenary Edition), Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This seems unlikely. Burns was a huge fan of William Wallace, the medieval Scottish freedomfighter best known today as the hero of Braveheart, but celebrated in poetry and song in Scotland for many centuries. “Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled, / Scots wham Bruce has aften led,” begins Burns’s celebration of the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn, where the Scots defeated a much larger English army, and so maintained their independence. Things changed with the political Union between Scotland and England in 1707, but another famous Burns song presents the Scots who voted for Union as “a parcel of rogues in a nation.”

I’m certain that the weight of evidence suggests that Burns (who had no vote in his lifetime) would have voted “Yes” to Scottish independence today. Though Unionist politicians in the British Parliament at Westminster such as Lord Forsyth and Ms Eleanor Laing, an English Conservative MP, like to quote Burns’s song “The Dumfries Volunteers,” with its lines “Be Britain still to Britain true, / Amang oursels united,” that poem was written while Burns was under suspicion because of his political radicalism and feared for his job as an Exciseman – a British civil servant. Excisemen were meant to toe the line. They were definitely not meant to write, as Burns did in his April 1790 letter to Frances Dunlop, “Alas! Have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my Country reaps from a certain Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her Independence…”

Certainly you can find protestations of loyalty to the British constitution in Burns’s letters, especially in letters to people in authority. He was obliged to say this sort of thing. To understand why, try a thought experiment: imagine that Burns was alive today, was working for a very well known internet company — for fear of litigation, let’s not mention any names. Now imagine Burns had said lots of nice things about that company he worked for; but then a scholarly whistle-blower discovered among Burns’s emails nasty remarks about his employer, and it transpired that Burns had even published work praising his employer’s most celebrated rival. Would you then conclude that all those nice things Burns had said about his employer represented his true beliefs?

It’s no accident that “The Dumfries Volunteers” is a little regarded poem, whereas Burns’s poems favouring Scottish independence including “Scots, wha hae” and “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” are regarded as among his greatest political songs. Still invoked by today’s politicians such as Scotland’s pro-independence First Minister Alex Salmond in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, Burns’s views are much closer to an array of twenty-first-century Scottish writers than they are to those of British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Poet, biographer, and critic Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews. He is author of Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and the Literary Imagination, 1314-2014 from Edinburgh University Press.

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Rebecca Lane on publishing

By Rebecca Lane

As an English graduate, publishing seemed a natural choice when I started my job hunt. However, I little thought I would one day be commissioning Oxford Companions and Oxford Paperback Reference books — two series that helped me immensely during my studies. When I first met the author of The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, I effusively thanked him for a writing book that I had relied on from AS-level through to my master’s degree, and I only just stopped short of asking him to sign my (somewhat dog-eared) copy.

I started as a summer intern at Oxford University Press (OUP) and quickly knew that I wanted to stay beyond the two month internship. Academic publishing is about ensuring students, academics, and anyone interested in a particular subject have quality and reliable resources available. That’s something I felt strongly about — and still do. After temping at the Press whilst waiting for the right role to come up, I started in the Reference Department as an Assistant Editor and I have remained in that department ever since. Studying English was useful for my job in editorial as it had given me a relatively solid grasp of the language and an eye for detail, but I found that the role substantially depended on other skills learnt through previous office jobs, e.g. working as part of a department, dealing with customer queries, and — crucially — being organized!

I am now a Commissioning Editor and my role is to find authors to write A-Z content on a wide variety of subjects, from Wine to Physics, from Ecology to Place-Names. Our books are designed to be useful for students, academics, and anyone looking for authoritative information on a specific subject. I spend a lot of time developing proposals with authors and editors for new books and for new editions of current publications. I also work with new authors on how to write dictionary definitions, as for most people it’s a new style of writing. With proposals, we assess them to ensure that the scope of the new book or the new edition is realistic and that the book will be useful to the majority of students of that subject. When a proposal is ready, I take it through the OUP approvals process — one of the most rigorous of any academic publishers. It takes some time to move from idea stage through to signing a contract with an author, but the thorough process, which involves seeking expert reviews and gathering feedback from OUP’s sales and marketing teams, means that the final typescript will be well-considered, pitched at the right level, and published in the right format.

I have been at OUP for six years and it has been a fascinating period to be involved in publishing. With the shift from print to ‘e’ we have had to change processes and adapt quickly to new technology to ensure our readers can find the content they want and in the format in which they want it. There’s still some way to go, as technology continues to develop and people’s reading habits and studying methods are changing, but it’s an exciting time to act on the new publishing opportunities they bring. Lots of people are concerned about the decline of the print book, but in many cases because of the revenue now brought in through digital channels, we are able to support print editions of certain works for much longer than would previously have been possible. And developments have not been restricted to electronic publishing: it’s worth pointing out how quickly the machines and processes behind the concept of ‘print on demand’ have been refined. It is now possible to keep certain books available to customers (literally printing a single copy as soon as the book has been ordered) long after these books have ceased to be viable to reprint in large quantities and traditionally would have to be put out of print.

Technological developments, whether in print or digital publishing, are important for OUP as we have a chance to make our content available to more people than ever before in more formats than ever before. And whilst the the speed of change that affects our industry can sometimes be a little daunting, I deal with this by re-focussing on the main purpose of my job: to ensure that we have reliable, useful and expert reference content to publish. (And I keep my dog-eared Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms as a motivating reminder of how useful that content can be!)

Rebecca Lane is a Commissioning Editor in General Reference at Oxford University Press. She loves working with reference books, but wishes she had a better memory for the content so that she would be more useful in pub quizzes.

From Jacques Derridas différance to Henry James’s ficelle, the vocabulary of literary theory and criticism can seem difficult if not opaque. To help remedy the average readers bafflement, the Third Edition of Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms provides succinct and often witty explanations of almost twelve hundred terms, covering everything from the ancient dithyramb to the contemporary dub poetry, from the popular bodice-ripper to the aristocratic masque, and from the social realism of Stalins era to the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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Paul Sax, MD on infectious diseases and journal publishing

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) are launching a new peer-reviewed, open access journal, Open Forum Infectious Diseases (OFID), providing a global forum for the rapid publication of clinical, translational, and basic research findings. Oxford University Press will begin publishing OFID in early 2014, and Paul Sax, MD, has been named as the journal’s first editor-in-chief. We recently asked ‎Dr. Sax about launching an online only, open access journal, and about OFID specifically.

Why launch an online only, open access journal? Why now?

In all publishing – and not just for medical journals – there obviously has been a profound shift from print to online content. We see this in particular among younger readers, who are already getting virtually all their information from a screen (computer, tablet, phone); younger doctors expect studies not only to be online, but also to be free! In addition, some research funders prefer – or even mandate – that published studies supported by their grants be available without charge to readers, which is the core component of the open access model.

As for why launch an open access journal now, the number of high-quality papers submitted to the societies’ existing journals, The Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) and Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID), greatly exceeds what these two journals can publish. As a result, we believe that we can build on the established reputations of these two journals to build a third Infectious Diseases (ID) journal – Open Forum Infectious Diseases (OFID).

To give an example of how younger doctors view open access journals, I was recently discussing a paper published in one of the more established open access journals with an ID fellow. Because of my new position with OFID, I asked her if she thought the lack of a hard copy journal was a problem in any way. She actually said she preferred it! And of course she mentioned – probably for my sake – that one still has the option of printing out a hard copy of the paper.

What do you hope Open Forum Infectious Diseases will contribute to the field ‎of infectious diseases?

The goal is for OFID to offer rapid publication of clinical, translational, and basic research for all aspects of ID, with a focus on studies that have the potential to improve patient care. This is a very broad spectrum of content and could include clinical trials, observational and cohort studies, translational laboratory work, cost-effectiveness studies, and novel diagnostic and therapeutic algorithms, among others. In addition to research and standard review articles, we’d also like to publish educational pieces that might not have an obvious home in other peer-reviewed infectious diseases journals. These include:

ID Cases:  Did a reader see a particularly illustrative case or series of cases? We are especially interested in cases that underscore a key aspect of diagnosis and management. What can readers learn from these cases that can help improve patient care? Submission of notable images or videos will be strongly encouraged, along with a targeted review of relevant literature.
ID Perspectives:  Does someone have an opinion on some aspect of ID (research, clinical care, education, policy) – one strong enough that they are motivated to communicate to others in the field? Has there been a patient- or research-related situation that should be shared? We would love to hear about events in clinical practice that particularly move, amuse — or even annoy! — the ID doctor.
Top Questions in ID:  We would like experts in a specific area of ID to give us the top questions they get on their topic. (Plus the answers, of course.)
ID Learning Units:  Clinicians who are not ID-specialists (and in particular ID fellows) need to learn the “basics” on many aspects of ID diagnosis, evaluation, and therapy. We all have experience teaching non-ID doctors – OFID could be a place to share these strategies.
ID on the Web:  This is, after all, where we get most information today. What are the go-to sites for the best ID information, and why?

What are some recent developments in the field of infectious diseases, and how will Open Forum Infectious Diseases cover them?

One of the great things about the field is that it’s never boring – there are many “hot topics” (to quote the long-time ID guru John Bartlett) in ID. My own particular area of focus, HIV disease, of course will be included, and here’s just a partial list of other topics:

Antimicrobial resistance, in particular carbapenemase-producing gram negatives, MRSA, and pan-resistant gonorrhea
C difficile, in particular the increased utilization of fecal microbiota transplantation for refractory disease
Hepatitis C, and its explosive drug development
The ever increasing population of non-HIV immunocompromised hosts (transplant recipients, patients treated with biologics)
The shift of the diagnostic microbiology lab from culture-based to molecular-based testing
Hospital epidemiology, infection control, nosocomial infections, and quality assurance
Adult and childhood immunization
The rising number of tick-born infections
Tropical medicine, both treatment and prevention
Infections of prosthetic devices
“Emerging” and newly-discovered pathogens
Epidemiology, prevention, and treatment of influenza
Sexually transmitted infections

An online-publication model offers many opportunities to innovate and engage with an audience. What can readers and contributors, who are increasingly getting their information online, expect from Open Forum Infectious Diseases?

The online publication model offers almost limitless opportunities for innovation, with the goal of increasing engagement with contributors and readers. In their papers, contributors may include diverse images and multimedia files; for studies of potentially high importance, expert external commentary via video would enhance content. Moderated comments by readers, cross-linking, page-view counts, and reader ratings should all be strongly considered. In short, any strategy to engage readers would be fair game provided it is within accepted standards of online civil behavior and is not fraudulent.

A key goal will be differentiation of OFID from other journals, both online and traditional. One example of such content that we are planning – based on an idea from Diana Olson, IDSA’s Vice President of Communications – is to interview pioneers in the field regarding historical aspects or great advances in ID. What was it like to be involved in the development of the measles vaccine? How did the initial clinical trial of acyclovir for herpes encephalitis get started? How were cases of AIDS managed in the late 1970s, before the condition was “officially” discovered? The people who experienced firsthand these and other events will give us a five-minute summary, analogous to NPR’s StoryCorps oral history series.

Paul Edward Sax, MD is Clinical Director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He is the editor-in-chief of the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s new peer-reviewed, open access journal, Open Forum Infectious Diseases (OFID).

Open Forum Infectious Diseases provides a global forum for the rapid publication of clinical, translational, and basic research findings in a fully open access, online journal environment. The journal reflects the broad diversity of the field of infectious diseases, and focuses on the intersection of biomedical science and clinical practice, with a particular emphasis on knowledge that holds the potential to improve patient care in populations around the world.

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Image credit: Infectious virus closely. Concept of disease transmission and epidemic. © ktsimage via iStockphoto.

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It’s time to rethink unemployment policy

By Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg

Lifeline benefits for millions of jobless workers still hang in the balance. The current debate over whether to maintain benefits for long-term unemployment underscores limitations in unemployment insurance that have plagued this program throughout its history. A breakthrough program when it was enacted in 1935, Unemployment Insurance was an acknowledgement, after centuries of blaming the unemployed for being out of work, that joblessness was usually involuntary and, if so, should be compensated. But for how long?

Initially unemployment insurance benefits lasted only 16 weeks. President Franklin Roosevelt and his relief administrator Harry Hopkins worried that many of the unemployed would exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits before being re-hired. Consequently they envisioned a permanent program, a part of the Social Security Act that would provide jobs to workers still unemployed when their unemployment insurance benefits ran out. Instead, they opted for temporary job creation. The probable reason was political expediency: such a program would have been an admission that extended, mass unemployment was likely to be a permanent feature of the US economy. The temporary solution was the famous Works Progress Administration (WPA) that provided jobs for millions of unemployed men and women until 1941–when wartime employment rendered such domestic job creation unnecessary. However, in the mid-1940s, with demobilization proceeding and unemployment reappearing, New Deal Labor Secretary Frances Perkins pointed out that the problem of extended unemployment had not been solved: that short-term unemployment insurance “stands alone as the only protection for people out of work.”

Unemployed men outside a soup kitchen, Chicago, 1931. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The problem persisted, even with regular unemployment insurance benefits lasting 26 weeks, as they do now. Particularly during recessions, workers are often jobless for more than half a year. Currently, nearly four million people have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, down from over six million in 2010. Even in better days, substantial numbers are jobless longer than the half-year limit. Although there are fewer of them, they are no less needy than their counterparts whose extended unemployment occurs during recessions.

In 1970, with unemployment on the rise, Congress addressed long-term unemployment with a permanent Extended Benefit program providing compensation for an additional 13 weeks beyond the regular 26 in states with specified high levels of unemployment. In addition to this permanent program, Congress, from time to time, votes temporary unemployment insurance extensions–twice in 2008, in response to the Great Recession. As unemployment continued to rise in the 1970s, Congress also enacted a public service employment program resembling Depression-era work programs. This Comprehensive Employment and Training Program (CETA) was controversial although it benefited those who got jobs as well as the recipients of their services. It was terminated in 1982 under the Reagan administration, even though unemployment stood at a post-Depression high of nearly 10 percent.

Temporary fixes for long-term unemployment are poor public policies. Does it make sense for millions of Americans to be deprived of useful work and the dignity that goes with it for long periods of time –even if part of their wages is replaced by extended unemployment benefits? And what about the loss to the nation of the goods and services they could be producing?

US unemployment policy needs a permanent, active component. It’s time to revisit the New Deal model of putting the unemployed to work. These programs, as one New Deal historian expressed it, “literally changed the face of the nation.” Unemployed workers built millions of miles of roads and thousands of public facilities–courthouses, schools, playgrounds.. In addition to massive physical infrastructure improvements, they conserved depleted soil, forests and wild life; created works of art; performed in plays and concerts to audiences, many of whom had never experienced live productions; gave music and art lessons to children; established nursery schools; and captured forgotten parts of our history such as the narratives of ex-slaves. In short, unemployed workers both served the nation and earned a paycheck.

The list of the nation’s unmet needs grows longer. With failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, an economy desperately in need of greening how can we afford to continue to throw away the benefits that the unemployed could bestow? Government job creation, if well-planned and administered, could be an important, permanent component of benefits to the unemployed and to the nation. Legislation pending in the House of Representatives such as H.R. 1000, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act, introduced by Representative John Conyers (D-MI) would begin to address this problem. While such legislation is being considered, a just and compassionate nation should rescind the callous withdrawal of extended benefits tor unemployed workers and their families.

Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg is Professor Emerita of Social Policy and former director of the Ph.D. Program in Social Work at Adelphi University. She is co-author/editor with Sheila D. Collins of When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal . Other books include Washington’s New Poor Law: Welfare “Reform” and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present (2001), with Sheila D. Collins; Jobs for All: A Program for the Revitalization of America (1994) with Sheila D. Collins and Helen Lachs Ginsburg; and three comparative studies of social policy, the latest of which is Poor Women in Rich Countries: Feminization of Poverty over the Life Course (2010). Goldberg is the author of numerous articles on unemployment, job creation, economic inequality, and the welfare state. She is a co-founder and chair of the National Jobs for All Coalition.

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Anti-microbial resistance and changing the future

By Phil Ambery

It’s good to see the problem of anti-microbial resistance revisited by Professor Farrar — a timely reminder to us all of the potential dangers ahead. Memories are short, few will remember the days of the early 1990s, when anti-HIV therapies were limited, as were the lives of patients with AIDS. Others will assume that the days of death by “consumption” have long since passed.

Unfortunately the reality is somewhat different.

Treatment of HIV is an arms race, as viral load begins to rise in patients treated with multi-drug anti-retroviral regimes, treating physicians keep up, switching drugs to keep ahead of the virus. It’s clear that the treatment of HIV has been transformed for the better, although it’s inevitable that viral evolution will continue to drive resistance to new agents.

About 450,000 people developed multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) in the world in 2012. More than half of these cases were in India, China and the Russian Federation. Around 10% of these are thought to have even more resistant strains of TB, known as XDR-TB. Whilst these countries seem, quite rightly, almost on the other side of the world, they are only a few hours away by plane.

At home, cases of MRSA, PVL-MRSA, and Clostridium difficile are rarely out of the news. Flesh-eating bugs, dying of diarrhoea, reports of dirty hospitals all sell the papers we love to read.

There’s a clear need to plan for the future and change the way we facilitate the development of new anti-microbials. Professor Farrar is absolutely right that it needed to happen yesterday. With a lead time of 10 years or more from target identification (identifying a new chink in the armour of a bacterium or virus) to getting the drug on the market for patients, we’re already behind in the arms race

Thankfully, intervention is happening at multiple points in the development process: discovery of new targets, innovative clinical trial development, the regulatory process, and improved access to new medicines.

The UK government itself has developed a five-year anti-microbial resistance strategy, intended to deliver significant advancement by 2018. Measures include patient and professional education, optimising prescribing practice, and innovation in new drugs, treatments and diagnostics.

The EU commission is part way through a five-year action plan, commenced in 2011, against the rising threats from anti-microbial resistance. In partnership with the pharmaceutical industry, the commission has funded an innovative medicines initiative (IMI) entitled “New Drugs for Bad Bugs,” specifically targeted at anti-microbial resistance.

Regulatory agencies are playing a crucial role in facilitating the development of new antibiotics. The European regulatory agency is establishing a task force on antibiotic development in conjunction with the United States, and developing of new guidelines on the evaluation of medicinal products indicated for treatment of bacterial infections, and importantly, how use of antibiotics in animals may affect resistance patterns in humans.

Support for appropriate use of antibiotics in the developing world is also gathering pace. The Resources for the Future organisation, supported by the Gates foundation, is working with five emerging economies, China, India, South Africa, Kenya, and Vietnam to develop strategies to minimise the impact of antibiotic resistance.

Much like Charles Dickens’ ghost of Christmas future from A Christmas Carol, Professor Farrar’s vision may yet come to pass. But just like Scrooge, we have an opportunity to change. The potential seeds of change are already sown. With a more productive research environment in European Union and United States, support from governments and regulatory agencies, and ongoing initiatives to encourage appropriate use of antibiotics in the developing world, there is hope of changing the future.

Phil Ambery is a medical doctor working in the pharmaceutical industry and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Pharmaceutical Medicine, a textbook on all aspects of the drug development process. Views expressed in this blog are his own and do not necessarily represent those of any of the organisations which he is affiliated with.

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Image credit: Bacteria growing in a blood plate petri dish on white background. © hisartwork via iStockphoto.

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A crossroads for antisemitism?

By Steven Beller

In the conclusion to Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (2007) I saw antisemitism as an almost completely spent force. Events since then give one pause for thought. Israel appears no more accepted as a “good citizen” by much of the international community, and Jews continue to be attacked for their supposed support of the “Jewish state”. Moreover, nationalist parties that have links to an antisemitic political past are on the rise in Europe. It is thus not surprising that Jews around the world, and especially in Europe, increasingly fear a return of antisemitism. Yet antisemitism is still a spent force and will remain so—if the right measures are taken by reasonable actors, both non-Jewish and Jewish—in Israel and in the rest of the world.

The main difficulty in combating antisemitism is that the two main strategies for doing so are increasingly at cross purposes.

The first sees antisemitism from the perspective of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), for which the answer to antisemitism is Israel, as the political expression of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination. From this perspective attacks on Israel are against the national rights of the Jewish people and hence are antisemitic because anti-Zionist. This linking of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, conceptualized most recently in the theory of “the new antisemitism”, has garnered strong support in the world’s Jewish communities, and is also written into the European Union’s working definition of antisemitism. If we approach antisemitism as a Jewish problem alone, this has a certain sense. It makes little if any sense from the perspective of the second strategy, which sees antisemitism as the ultimate expression of the exclusionary logic of nationalism.

The Zionist perspective actually undermines the most powerful arguments of antisemitism’s main antidote: liberal pluralism. In this view, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously suggested, antisemitism is not a problem for Jews but rather for non-Jews, indeed for all of us. It is representative of a universal moral evil: the exclusion, fear and, ultimately, destruction of the other in society simply because of difference. “Never again” becomes a promise not about preventing Jewish genocide, but any genocide. It is the refusal or inability to accept and embrace difference within a society that is the root of the problem. The solution is to throw over the apparently modern, but actually primitive “either/or” logic of nationalism, and replace it with the more complex, but more supple, inclusionary “both/and” logic that underpins liberal pluralism, the ability “to agree to disagree”, to comprehend, and embrace difference.

These two perspectives often intertwine, but they can result in clashing responses to antisemitism. The “Zionist” response targets Israel’s “antisemitic” enemies, including many among the Muslim immigrant communities in the West and their pro-Palestinian Western sympathizers on the political Left. Meanwhile the “liberal pluralist” response concentrates on countering the resurgent forces of xenophobic nationalism. Even if radical nationalist parties deny being antisemitic, their logic is seen as “antisemitism in everything but name,” endangering all who are “not of the nation,” however defined. Jews used to be the main candidate for nationalism’s scapegoat, but for some decades now the role in Europe has been assigned to the Muslim immigrant community. Their main defenders have been on the Left, on the principle that universal human rights include the individual’s right to be different (Muslim or Jewish) and still accepted as part of the whole citizenry. Hence liberal pluralists see the groups labelled by Zionists as antisemitic as the main victims of the antisemitic mind-set.

A tragic dialectic (one might even call it a “trialectic”) between Jews, Muslims, and the national “compact majority” has developed in each national society. Zionists help feed the growing Islamophobia in the West. They bolster the xenophobes’ case that Muslims are just not to be trusted—based partly on their irrational hatred of Israel and its Jewish supporters. Then Israel’s ethnonationalist demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel explicitly as a “Jewish state” confirms to nationalist leaders that Israel and its Jewish supporters are on their side, ideologically. Hence, Geert Wilders, the leader of Dutch right-radicalism, can be both an Islamophobe and an enthusiastic Zionist. Meanwhile some of those on the pluralist/multicultural Left, opposed both to Islamophobic nationalists in Europe and expansionist Israeli government policies, gloss over the exclusionary, indeed antisemitic, logic that is present in many versions of Islamist ideology.

There are other positions. There are still antisemites, whatever your definition. Then there are still many in the middle, who want to continue the old Zionist-progressive Left coalition against antisemitism; they want Israel to reaffirm its liberal-democratic credentials, and still see diaspora Jewry as allies in the battle against nationalist exclusion of minorities, including Muslims. There are also truly strange, cross-cutting alliances: Marine Le Pen, new leader of the French Front National, has disowned her father’s dalliance with Holocaust denial. She has also said she is not against French Muslims, only against “Islamification”. In recent years an alliance of sorts has grown up between the FN and a prominent French-Cameroonian comedian, Dieudonné—yet this is the very Dieudonné who was banned for, according to French law, antisemitic speech.





It appears a threatening world.  The May 2014 elections for the European Parliament could bring a whole wave of radical-rightists into the assembly. In Israel the ethnonationalist wave still appears to advance. Yet most leaders of Diaspora Jewry appear intent on stifling any criticism of Israel as “antisemitic”. This will further strain the pluralist coalition, leaving the field ever more open to xenophobes, and heightening the threat in Europe of a truly new antisemitism. Something similar might happen in the United States. Israel might survive as a heavily defended, perhaps ethnically cleansed version of a new Masada, but would that really be what Jewish history was supposed to lead to?

I still think the recent upsurge in antisemitism will abate. The liberal pluralist centre still holds. Jews in the Diaspora and also Israel will recognize Israel cannot claim to be a proper liberal democracy when a large portion of the population under its control is denied its fundamental political rights. If Jews and non-Jews alike realize that their best interests lie in accommodation not conflict, then things will improve—if not, the future really is a dismal one.

Steven Beller is a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University and former Research Fellow in History at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He is the author of Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction. Steven has also taken part in this this Q & A for OUPblog.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to only Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: (1) Jean-Paul Sartre [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; (2) Marine Le Pen, by Marie-Lan Nguyen (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Were there armed conflicts in Mexico in 2012?

By Stuart Casey-Maslen

More than 9,500 people were killed in Mexico in 2012 as a result of armed violence, primarily as the result of conflict between the Sinaloa cartel, the Las Zetas gang, and the state. Tens of thousands of Mexican troops and police were involved in these conflicts, and more than 400 were killed during the year. In one battle in June, which lasted for many hours, the security forces were confronted by ammunition fired from rocket and grenade launchers as well as assault rifles, including from an armoured vehicle. This level of violence, of firepower, and of human cost looks exactly like an armed conflict.

How does one identify and classify armed conflicts in accordance with international humanitarian law (IHL) — determining whether a given situation amounts to an international armed conflict (including foreign military occupation) or a non-international armed conflict (NIAC)?

It is generally agreed that a non-international armed conflict exists when intense armed violence occurs either between the security forces and one or more organized armed groups or between two or more organized armed groups. This is clearly the case in Mexico. Nowhere does international humanitarian law stipulate that a group must have political or ideological motivations in order to be party to a conflict; purely lucrative incentives therefore suffice.

And why does qualifying a situation of armed violence as an armed conflict matter in practice? First, once an armed conflict exists under international law, there are significant implications for the use of force. Generally, parties to an armed conflict may resort to weapons and tactics — and the use of lethal force — that would be almost unthinkable (and invariably unlawful) in a situation of law enforcement. Second, when an armed conflict is in progress the commission of a war crime amounts to an international crime punishable not only by national courts but also by international tribunals.

Due to the potential consequences for the lawful use of force, a decision to classify a situation as an armed conflict should never be taken lightly. But when something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is disingenuous to pretend that it is actually a different kind of beast.

Dr Stuart Casey-Maslen is the editor of The War Report: 2012. He is Head of Research at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. His research concerns international weapons law, international law and armed groups, and the qualification of armed conflicts. He has consulted and published widely on the international law of armed conflict, including Commentaries on Arms Control Treaties (OUP, 2005) and The Convention on Cluster Munitions: A Commentary (OUP, 2010). The War Report: 2012 found 38 armed conflicts during the year, across 24 states and territories, 29 of which were non-international armed conflicts. Of these, perhaps the most controversial were the three non-international armed conflicts that the editors believe occurred in Mexico.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.

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Image credit: Mexico flag via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Banks O’ Doon

Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in Alloway, a small village near the river Doon just south of the town of Ayr, in the south-west of Scotland. As Scots and Scotophiles to world over prepare to celebrate Burns Night on the 25th, here’s a song from the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of his Selected Poems and Songs, dedicated to that river near which he grew up.

The Banks O’ Doon

Ye Banks and braes o’ bonie Doon,


How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair;


How can ye chant, ye little birds,


And I sae weary fu’ o’ care!


Thou’ll break my heart thou warbling bird,


That wantons thro’ the flowering thorn:


Thou minds me o’ departed joys,


Departed never to return.

Oft hae I rov’d by bonie Doon,


To see the rose and woodbine twine;


And ilka bird sang o’ its luve,


And fondly sae did I o’ mine.


Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose,


Fu’ sweet upon its thorny tree;


And my fause luver staw my rose,


But, ah! he left the thorn wi’ me.

Robert Burns was an eighteenth century Scottish poet and songwriter. Selected Poems and Songs offers Burns’s work as it was first encountered by contemporary readers, presenting the texts as they were originally published. It reproduces in its entirety the volume which made Burns famous–Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published at Kilmarnock in 1786–and it showcases a generous selection of songs from The Scots Musical Museum and A Select Collection of Scottish Airs, complete with their full scores.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credit: The Banks O’ Doon sheet music. Taken from Selected Poems and Songs by Robert Burns. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Damp paper and difficult conditions

By Simon Eliot

Oxford University was a large mass-producer of books by the 1820s. Despite this, it was still occupying a very elegant but modest-sized neo-classical building in the centre of Oxford designed for it in 1713 by Nicholas Hawksmoor. By the mid-1820s this building was bursting at the seams. 

The University processes in front of the Sheldonian Theatre and Clarendon Printing House, 1733 (William Williams, Oxonia depicta, plate 6)

This was made clear by an inventory of the Clarendon Bible Press undertaken by Richard Watts in January 1824. Watts had worked his way down the packed building starting at the three attics which together housed 4,067 feet of poling with bearers on which the dampened and printed sheets could be hung up to dry.

Below these were a warehouse in the south east corner which contained a large hydraulic paper press and 165 paper stages ‘of various dimensions’; there was a Waste Room warehouse in the north east corner ‘for remainders’; a packing room with ‘a stout book press’ and another 650 feet of poling; a warehouse in the south west with a small hydraulic press and a forcing pump; and a warehouse in the north west of the building.

Below these were the Upper Press Room (No. 1) to the north with 928 feet of poling and an eight-day clock; and Upper Press Room (No. 2) to the south east with 1,188 feet of poling. On the same level there appears to have been a ‘Reading Room’ (for reading proofs) with reading desks and leather chairs and scales ‘for weighing single sheets of paper’.

Below these were the Lower Press Room (No. 3) in the north with 1088 feet of poling and bearers, lead sinks and racks for type. Even the stair wells were used, for on them were double case racks of various sizes which held a large number of pairs of types cases. The Lower Press Room (No. 4) in the south east had 1,440 feet of poling and bearers. Between them the four press rooms seem to have accommodated seven large presses and eighteen smaller ones.

Below these was a ‘white paper warehouse’ and a ‘Wetting Cellar’ with a large lead cistern, forcing pump and a large quantity of lead pipe plus over a ton of cast-iron and stone weights ‘for pressing the paper.’ Added to this were the newly arrived-technologies of ‘gas light fittings and apparatus generally’ and a ‘Hot air dispenser, as kept in complete order’.

What is striking about this inventory is that there is so much material and so many processes (and therefore, by implication, many people) packed into a small site. However, the feature that might most surprise the modern reader is the frequent listing of considerable lengths of poling, which would be used for drying. In total there were some 13,055 feet — or two and a half miles — of drying racks distributed over many rooms. This reminds us that at this time paper was damped before printing and thus had to be dried after it. This explains why there were so many troughs and sinks and weights (for holding paper down) listed in the inventory. Any increase in number of titles produced, or print runs ordered, would have had a considerable effect on the number of printed sheets that had to be dried on one or more of the rooms in the Clarendon Building. The results of the printers’ efforts would have been obvious to all who worked at the Press, for acres of damp print would have been fluttering, or hanging limply, over their heads. In winter it would have taken longer, in summer a shorter, time to dry but, as soon as the dried sheets had been harvested, their place would have been taken by new sets of dank texts.

Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book in the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is general editor of The History of Oxford University Press, and editor of its Volume II 1780-1896.

With access to extensive archives, The History of Oxford University Press is the first complete scholarly history of the Press, detailing its organization, publications, trade, and international development. Read previous blog posts about the history of Oxford University Press.

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Image credit: From The History of Oxford University Press. Courtesy of OUP Archives.

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Be Book Smart on National Reading Day

By Anne Cunningham, PhD, and Jamie Zibulsky, PhD

If you want to help a child get ahead in school and in life, there is no better value you can impart to him or her than a love of reading. The skills that early and avid reading builds are the skills that older readers need in order to make sense of sophisticated and complex texts. National Reading Day targets pre-kindergartners through third graders for a reason — reading interventions are most effective with young children, and reading skills and engagement are much harder to change once a child enters mid-to-late elementary school. It is never too early to support an avid reader, but unfortunately, it is sometimes too late.

Research suggests that the amount one reads has a profound impact on our cognitive development, and that people who read more are likely to score higher on tests of verbal intelligence. The relationship between reading volume and intelligence is in fact reciprocal, meaning that regardless of initial cognitive abilities, the act of reading itself serves to develop intelligence. One way to think of this reciprocal relationship is that reading serves as a type of mental strength training; it’s not just the case that “smart” people read more, but rather the act of reading more can make people smarter.

Reading is fun by John Morgan, CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

So today, pick up a great book and read it with a child you love. Take a family trip to the library or bookstore and let the kids in your life pick out books, and then have them read those books to you. Ask lots of questions about what they are reading, and make lots of comments about what they are reading. Cuddle and drink hot chocolate while you do it, so that the child in your life realizes that reading time may sometimes be solitary, but can also be interactive and social, bringing us closer to the people we love as well as the characters who draw us into new worlds.

Here are some tips you can keep in mind that will help the children in your life become successful readers:

Revisit the books that you loved as a child. One way to create a mutual love of books is to share stories with your children from your own childhood or books that you relish yourself. This strategy is inherently motivating to you as the reader, and your enthusiasm will be contagious.

Read books that are interesting to your child. You can encourage a love of reading by providing a variety of books that center around a topic of interest, such as dinosaurs, cooking, construction vehicles, or insects.

Talk with your child about the books that you read together. Reading is a vehicle for building so many literacy and social skills, and talking with your child about the books you read together can help your child begin to rhyme words, identify letters, learn new vocabulary, make predictions, and puzzle about why a character acted a certain way.

Read electronic books, which often motivate children to read independently. Children can follow along visually while listening, expanding their vocabulary and knowledge about a topic. The same is true of magazines and comic books, so be open to giving your child a wide range of reading options.

Choose books and reading strategies that are age appropriate:

Babies love to explore with their fingers and mouths as well as their eyes. Sturdy board books, with their different textures and flaps, are an ideal way to introduce your baby to literacy. Don’t worry if he turns the pages incorrectly or gnaws on the corner of the book – getting cuddle time with you, and the chance to explore, is still a great introduction to the world of books!
Toddlers love to show off what they know. Instead of reading a picture book straight through, pause to ask your child questions about the story. See if she can predict what will happen next, and give her a chance to “read” the story to you.
Beginning readers, in kindergarten and first grade, often become interested in chapter books that are a bit more challenging than they can handle on their own. Ask your child to pick a book he would like to read and take turns reading paragraphs or pages out loud to one another, or read to him until he is more comfortable with the book. You’ll help introduce him to new vocabulary words he wouldn’t come across in easier books.

Anne E. Cunningham, Ph.D. and Jamie Zibulsky, Ph.D. are the authors of Book Smart: How to Develop and Support Successful, Motivated Readers. Anne Cunningham is Professor of Cognition and Development at University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Education and Jamie Zibulsky is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

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