OUPblog - "Why there can be no increase in all brain cancers tied with cell phone use" plus more...

Several widely circulated opinion pieces assert that because there is no detectable increase in all types of brain cancers in Australia in the past three decades, cell phones do not have any impact on the disease. There are three basic reasons why this conclusion is wrong.

First of all, the type of brain cancer increased by cell phones is glioblastomas. Glioblastomas are in fact increasing, as exemplified in those age 35-39 in the United States, in precisely those parts of the brain that...

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Over the past several years I’ve been writing a biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the first professional African American writer born after slavery to become an international phenomenon. I’ve touched on his birth and rearing in Dayton, Ohio; his quest to be a strong reader and a skillful creative writer; his friendship with the famous Wright brothers; the women he loved in his early years of manhood; his difficulties in breaking into the heartless literary marketplace; his...

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The security of individual nations and the wider world is protected through many means, force or diplomacy, culture or environment. Law is increasingly deployed as an alternative to military force, although its use dates back as far as international law itself. Even private sector and other non-governmental attorneys play a leading role in lawfare. So how did it develop? How are different countries taking advantage of it? And which groups are using it to achieve their goals? We explore these...

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Few people have influenced contemporary philosophy of mind as profoundly as the late Hilary Putnam. One of his best known contributions was the formulation of functionalism. As he understood it, functionalism claims that mental states are functional states—postulates of abstract descriptions, like those employed in computer science, which ignore a system’s physical details and focus instead on the ways it correlates inputs with outputs. Psychological descriptions in particular focus on the...

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