Classical allusions in Owen and Rosenberg’s war poems Wilfred Owen is one of the most studied of the war poets, and his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is undoubtedly the best-known example of classical reception in First World War poetry. The poem ends with seven Latin words from Horace Odes 3.2: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. Owen bitterly denounces these words as ‘the old Lie’. Modern readers are now more likely to identify the words dulce et decorum est pro patria mori with Owen rather than with Horace, but Owen himself was never fully ..read more

Are academic researchers embracing or resisting generative AI? And how should publishers respond? The most interesting thing about any technology is how it affects humans: how it makes us more or less collaborative, how it accelerates discovery and communication, or how it distracts and frustrates us. We saw this in the 1990s. As the internet became more ubiquitous, researchers began experimenting with collaborative writing tools that allowed multiple authors to work on a single document simultaneously, regardless of their physical locations. Some of the earliest examples were the Collaborato ..read more

The importance of sun safety: Sun Awareness Week 2024 Sun Awareness Week (6-12 May) kicks off the British Association of Dermatologists’ (BAD) summer-long campaign dedicated to raising awareness of non-melanoma skin cancer, a very common type of cancer. The week also aims to teach the public about the importance of good sun protection habits, including ways you can check for signs of skin cancer.   What is non-melanoma skin cancer, and how does it differ from melanoma? Non-melanoma skin cancer is a group of cancers that develop in the outer layer of the skin, unlike melanoma which s ..read more

My word of the year: hostages I have never been able to guess the so-called word of the year, because the criteria are so vague: neither an especially frequent word nor an especially popular one, we are told, but the one that characterizes the past twelvemonth in a particularly striking way. To increase my puzzlement, every major dictionary has its own favorite, to be named and speedily forgotten. The fateful 2024 has not reached even its middle, but since December is a long way off, I’ll volunteer to offer my own word of the year and say something about its murky origins. The word is hostage ..read more

Messy, messy masculinity: The politics of eccentric men in the early United States For every weirdo one finds while researching the past’s forgotten personalities, there are probably two or three more just a stone’s throw away whom time did not preserve. At least that is the realization I had while researching and writing Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States, a monograph which looks at the cultural detritus that never cohered into more stable or now canonical figures. When creatives have set their work in the early United States, they’ve turned to Ron Chernow to im ..read more

The art of the bee In June 1799, Alexander von Humboldt departed Spain on a five-year expedition that traversed what was known in the New World as New Granada and New Spain. Along the way, he made extensive collections and observations of geography, geology, climate, atmospheric science, astronomy, magnetic flux, botany, zoology, biogeography, ecology, and anthropology. He converted his 4,000 pages of notes into a collection of volumes called the Cosmos. His most popular work, however, was a book called Ansichten der Natur (Views of Nature), a condensed version of the Cosmos. In this book, vo ..read more

A chronology of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China [timeline] In Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China’s emergency response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government’s handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. This timeline, adapted from the book, walks through the day by day chronology of the initial outbreak and explores how both the virus and information spread. This detailed approach gives visibility on some of the themes that came to define the ..read more

Mental disorder or something magical? Each generation finds their own way of understanding mental distress. The ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers of World War I were understood at the time to be of weak character, although now we might diagnose them with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Victorian women were subject to ‘hysteria’ and fainting fits, something we might now understand as non-epileptic seizures. The way that we understand distress is deeply rooted in our culture and time, but it doesn’t feel like that to us. We tend to think that the way we understand things now is the right way, sup ..read more

Dab-dab and a learned idiom My thanks are to Peter Warne and Stephen Goranson for their comments on the idioms I mentioned last week. I own a cornucopia of idioms not included in my recent book and will dole them out whenever space permits it. Today, I am returning to one of my traditional topics, namely, the history of intractable monosyllabic words. Their origin looks deceptively obvious, but their spread all over the world poses problems. Dab is a case in point. Dictionaries list several homonyms: dab “to strike” (either with a sharp blow as in dialects or with soft pressure), dab “a small ..read more

Has Christian philosophy been having it too easy? Over the last 50 years, Christian philosophy has ballooned into by far the largest interest area in the philosophy of religion. The Society of Christian Philosophers boasts more than a thousand members in the United States, and similar groups are dotted around the world. Following advice to Christian philosophers offered by Alvin Plantinga in 1984, most philosophers of religion today are taking belief in God for granted in their work, clarifying and defending classical Christian doctrine and developing its implications for a wide range of phil ..read more