Gender Justice in these times

I have long admired the example of the late Paul Farmer, MD and anthropologist. He founded Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health), a global network of community health providers in areas of the world ravaged by social and natural disasters such as poverty, racial, class, gender-based inequality, underdeveloped or war-destroyed public infrastructure, and political violence. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder titled his 2003 biography of Farmer Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (NY: Random House). The phrase “mountains beyond mountains” comes, according to Kidder, from a Haitian proverb, “dèyè mòn gen mòn“, translated as “beyond mountains there are mountains”. As a hiker during my graduate school days on the Central Coast of California, I know the feeling well of gutting out a long uphill switchback, hoping that this was the last leg of the climb, only to see before me another long uphill track—a mountain beyond the mountain I thought I had ascended.

Teaching, researching, and writing about gender—about what gender relations could be in a just world if we put the work into imagining that just world into existence—feels a lot like scrabbling uphill over dangerous terrain only to find mountains beyond the mountains we have already scaled. Especially now, in the current political climate featuring anti “gender ideology” sentiment—willful misunderstandings of what should by now, in the 21st century, be noncontroversial assertions of basic human dignity for women and gender-nonconforming persons of all races, classes, faiths, sexualities, and ethnicities—the paths upward seem strewn with careening boulders.

A decade ago, I wrote an essay comparing queer feminist scholarly endeavors to the task encountered by a feminine counterpart of Sisyphus, using the feminine ending Sisyphe to set her apart from her more famous brother. Sisyphe, unlike Camus’ stoic existentialist Sisyphus, is not happy. She is understandably angry about having to continually roll a rock, made up of the sediment of ages of conscious and unconscious injustices and indignities, up a hill while attending to the already difficult everyday tasks of living. The upshot of this effort, nevertheless, is that Sisyphe has very strong arms. She handles the rock with one hand while doing the bulk of the often-unacknowledged care work of generations with the other.

Ten years after writing about Sisyphe’s strong arms, I realize that my original analogy is underdeveloped. For starters, Sisyphe is not singular. She has many siblings of many genders who move those boulders with strength, resilience, and collective ingenuity. And the boulder of the Greek myth is too contained and controlled to fit the moment. The image of an all-powerful and punitive god manifesting a daily boulder to torture Sisyphus/Sisyphe is too staid, too dignified for what we are experiencing now. In place of the figure of Zeus, modern day Sisyphes must contend with dozens of chaotic, vengeful, and comically incompetent Wile E. Coyotes hurling rocks off cliffs scattershot. It doesn’t help that we can laugh at the bathetic antics of the ranting figure behind the rock. The boulders still do damage to those in their path.

That’s what researching, writing, and teaching about gender often feels like today. Consider the self-satirizing example of a professor in the U.S. being told that he can’t teach a canonical work by Plato in a philosophy class because to read Aristophanes’ speech from circa 400 BCE is to promote “gender ideology” in 2026 CE. The rocks are falling every which way, and it is going to take a large, global community to keep them from crushing the communities, institutions, and principles we cultivate in order to make a better, if not perfect world for ourselves and our global siblings.

Gender Justice, a new topic featured in Oxford Intersections, is one such gathering of Sisyphes—a community of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners who continue the work of rigorous inquiry and analysis of systems of power that derail the quest for livable lives, with dignity and purpose, for all persons across the globe regardless of gender, sexuality, nation, race, disability, social class, faith, and other social markers that are leveraged to produce inequality rather than just relations. Divided into twelve sections like the hours of (an analogue) clock or the months in a year, Gender Justice draws together experts and community-based knowledge workers to provide reasoned and researched work on gender from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplines: from philosophy, technology studies, politics, law, environmental studies, economics, creative arts, health and mental health, family studies, comparative religion, and intersectional queer and feminist studies. The module is ambitious in its aims but curated carefully to provide readers, researchers, and scholars access to reliable, ethical, and intellectually rigorous insights into the complex and dynamic field of gender studies. We are not hubristic enough to believe that Gender Justice will change the world by mere fact of its publication in June 2026, but we do have hope—a virtue much needed in these times—that the resources it provides will prove useful to the multifaceted conglomeration of thinkers and dreamers who continue to do the work of striving for a world that is more livable, more humane, and more just for all. We’ve got the next mountain, together.

^{Featured image by hdbernd via Unsplash.}

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And what of Eurovision’s future? The Eurovision Song Contest celebrates its 70th anniversary, Vienna

The neutrality and integrity of the Eurovision Song Contest is of paramount importance to the EBU, its Members, and all our audiences. It is essential that the fairness of the Contest is always protected. We are taking clear and decisive steps to ensure the Contest remains a celebration of music and unity.

—Martin Green, Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, November 21, 2025

Where better to affirm the Eurovision Song Contest’s commitment to political neutrality and musical integrity than Vienna, with its 2026 motto, “United by Music—In the Heart of Europe?” Throughout the Cold War and the contingent history of the Eurovision, Austria had pledged itself to neutrality. If any nation were to host the annual Grand Prix, it would surely be Austria: the year before, its entry JJ (Johannes Pietsch), an operatic countertenor, had placed first, singing in a vocal style cultivated for the Baroque and Classical opera stage. The myriad public musical events of Eurovision Week (May 10–16), fringe and public alike, bore witness to Austria as the most musical of nations, unifying Europe with both song and the Eurovision Song Contest for its seventieth anniversary.

The past was so very perfect! How could Eurovision 2026 fail to unify Europe by song? Fail it did, indeed, with the abandonment and violation of the core principles upon which the Eurovision prided itself since its founding at the height of the Cold War. Rather than affirming apolitical neutrality, in recent years the parent organization of the Eurovision, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), had increasingly blurred the rules whereby political conflicts were kept away from the competition. Russia and Belarus were banned after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but calls by EBU member states to mete out sanctions to Israel because of its war in Gaza were greeted by pronouncements such as that in the epigraph above. Unconvinced by such gestures, five nations—Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain—withdrew from Eurovision 2026.

The assault on neutrality also extended to integrity, that of the song competition itself, and again, Israel had unleashed the main controversy. Voting at the Eurovision Grand Finale is two-tiered, one set of votes from national juries, the other from the general public. It was the latter that Israel—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—employed during recent years through various campaigns to manipulate the public voting. One week after the Grand Finale in Vienna, more national broadcasting agencies were discussing the possibility of stepping out of the Eurovision Song Contest. We are left asking, “And what of Eurovision’s future?”

Yes, only yes for these days
And a thousand more to come.
A simple yes.
Eternity is inside a single word.
It will be you and me forever.

                       —Sal da Vinci, “Per sempre sì” / “Forever Yes” (Italy’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Many entries in Eurovision 2026 turned to the past seventy years in search of model Eurosongs. Power ballads were in abundance; an indebtedness to the ever-present French chanson remained true; the mixture of high camp and comic took full advantage of digital stage effects; pyrotechnics consumed all in its path. Taken together as a single show, the evening performance felt like a hodgepodge of breathless song and dance. I don’t mean to throw cold water on the fiery and frenetic acts; quite the opposite, because there was much to enjoy, onstage antics and nostalgia notwithstanding. Take Italy’s entry, Sal da Vinci crooning “Per sempre sì” (Forever Yes) against a backdrop of a high-energy mock wedding ceremony. One had to believe in da Vinci’s longing for a love that would last forever, borrowed from the Sanremo Song Festival, which annually sends the Italian winner to the Eurovision. Past or perfect, both or neither, the exuberance of “Per sempre sì” well deserved its fifth-place finish.

It would be wiser to get away from here,
But I’m still playing with fire.
How could I freeze the feelings?

                 —Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, “Liekinheitin”/”Flamethrower” (Finland’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Among the most unexpected results of the Grand Finale on May 16 was the failure of many favorites to meet the expectations of their fans. No entry bore witness to that failure more than the overwhelming favorite going into Eurovision Week, the Finnish duo, Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, whose performance of “Liekinheitin” (Flamethrower) was taken dutifully from the Eurovision playbook for winning songs. After Parkkonen’s longing intro, “Liekinheitin” turned up the heat, musically to power-ballad temperatures and choreographically as Lampenius approached the burning cage that had paralyzed the singer-lover. The impact of these playbook elements seemed so well placed that EBU officials made an exception to the performance rules, allowing Lampenius to play the violin live on stage, adding a new dimension to Eurosong vocality. That new dimension had lost its luster by the time of the Grand Finale, dropping the pre-contest favorite to sixth place.

Lead me to the stars, to the shattered nests,
There where, amid screams, they send off soldiers.
Lead me to the stars far from all the gazes.

                                                            —Lelek, “Andromeda” (Croatia’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

If the geopolitics of war in Europe and beyond and a broader sense of moral responsibility for global crisis were largely absent from Eurovision 2026, the few exceptions were notable as a bridge between the Eurovision of the past and that of a future yet realized. The most striking of these exceptions was the Croatian entry, “Andromeda,” sung by the five-woman choral ensemble, Lelek. There was power in the paradox of a song that employed traditional Croatian folk-song style to speak to ethical issues stretching across national and musical borders. Singing together with an intimacy translated musically by melodic recitative and tight harmonic intervals, Lelek drew upon ecofeminism to address the horrors of war. The Croatian lyrics were rich in metaphor, and the listener recognized “Andromeda” as heir to the long tradition of women keening for the loss of humanity. The question I ask every year is whether a deeply moving and prescient ensemble like Lelek enters the Eurovision to place first. Each year, I take comfort in knowing that there are more important questions to ask of a song like “Andromeda.”

I’m a rebel, I’m a danger,
I’m a mover for freedom.
Let me light you, light you up, let me light you up….
I’m the bangarang—

                                                            —DARA, “Bangaranga” (Bulgaria’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Were I to range across many of this year’s Eurovision entries to identify songs with potential to do well in the final voting, I would have little trouble making a case for at least half of the twenty-five nations competing in the Grand Finale. Over seventy years, there have been many winning formulae, and Eurovision songwriters have learned their lessons well. If 2026 is a measure of those lessons, nonetheless, they may have learned their lessons too well, producing a corpus of songs in Vienna unsurprising in its overall sameness. The song that would eventually win would need to distinguish itself by liberating itself from the sameness. The unsurprising would undergo translation to the surprising, a song that came from nowhere only to claim victory with the largest point margin in Eurovision’s seventy-year history (173 points). That is precisely what Bulgaria’s DARA did with “Bangaranga.” There was nothing profound about the lyrics of “Bangaranga,” though the Bulgarian team constantly teased questioners about the title’s apparently meaningful meaninglessness. The performance itself was brilliant because of its tight choreography and precise use of limited rather than limitless space. For the three minutes of fame on the stage of the Vienna Stadthalle, Bulgaria and “Bangaranga” provided one answer—one affirmative answer—to the questions seventy years had raised about the future of the Eurovision Song Contest.

_{Featured image by Julia Engel via Wikipedia Commons.}

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What does environmental change ask of societies?

Environmental change is no longer an abstract concern. It is encountered in daily life, in regional disruptions, and in global debates. Heat and cold, drought and flood, the loss of species, food insecurity, and widening inequality are not isolated phenomena; together they mark a shift in the conditions under which human societies operate. The paradox of the present moment is clear: crises are extensively diagnosed, risks are well communicated, and policy frameworks are proliferating—yet societies remain strikingly unready.

Not all change is equally visible. Some changes unfold rapidly, within days, seasons, or years; some accumulate slowly, almost without notice until thresholds are crossed. Understanding these different temporalities requires more than measuring physical processes. It demands attention to culture, institutions, economies, and systems of meaning. Environmental change and human resilience draw on all domains of knowledge—not only to establish what has happened, but to understand how it has been interpreted and how societies have responded, in the past, in the present, and for the future.

It is in this context that we introduce Environmental Change and Human Experience, a new topic in Oxford Intersections. As general editors, we conceived the topic as a deliberately interdisciplinary space, bringing together historians, geographers, literary scholars, anthropologists, and others to examine how human societies have interacted with changing environments over time.

The core questions are longstanding. They range from long-term environmental transformations to episodes of acute disruption, and they examine how societies—under different political, economic, and cultural conditions—have understood and managed change. What is new is the intensity of collaboration across disciplines. The expansion of the environmental humanities, advances in data and modelling, and the pressures associated with climate change are reshaping how scholars work—and the range of evidence that can be brought to bear to help us understand the changes, how they affect societies and how we might be better prepared for future change.

A central premise runs through the topic. Environmental change, whether gradual or sudden, has always tested the resilience and resourcefulness of human societies. The historical record is therefore not simply descriptive; it is analytical. It offers a series of grounded cases—real-world experiments in adaptation, failure, and innovation that allow us to identify patterns, constraints, and possibilities in how societies respond to environmental stress.

This perspective is particularly relevant today. Many challenges now framed as unprecedented—climate variability, food insecurity, water management, disease, inequality, ecological degradation—have deeper histories. Examining those histories does not provide simple solutions, but it does clarify the range of responses available and the conditions under which they succeed or fail. It expands the repertoire of adaptive strategies while sharpening our understanding of their limits.

The topic is structured in nine sections: Approaches, Climate, Construction, Disasters, Land, Water, Food, Animals, and New Frontiers. Together, these sections provide a framework for analysing how humans have shaped their environments, and how those environments, in turn, have shaped human experience.

Contributors approach environmental change from multiple angles: historical, geographical, literary, religious, social, cultural, political, ecological, and anthropological. The aim is not an encyclopaedic overview, but structured analysis based on new research. Environmental Change and Human Experience will be a resource for researchers, teachers, and students around the world who seek fresh perspectives and challenging comparisons.

^{Featured image ‘Forestry activities in Tasmania, Australia’ by Matt Palmer via Unsplash.}

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Binomial expressions

The term “binomial expression” sounds very math-like, and it is. It refers to a mathematical expression with two terms connected by an operator. So 3a + b is a binomial, as is 2x³ + 6x. In algebra, binomials are used to solve equations, often by converting more complex polynomial expressions to a binomial. For example, x² − 7x + 10 = 0 can be expressed as the binomial (x − 2)(x − 5) = 0, leading to the conclusion that either x = 5 or x = 2.

But enough math. Binomials also occur in language, and where they refer to expressions like chicken and egg, by and large, in and out, cut and dried, or peace and quiet. Often, and perhaps usually, such expressions occur in a fixed A and B order: we don’t hear egg and chicken, large and by, out and in, dried and cut, or quiet and peace. Those word orders should make your head hurt worse than the math did.

English has hundreds of such expressions, and the scholarly literature on them numbers dozens of articles. Modern interest in binomials goes back to the mid-twentieth-century work of linguists like Yakov Malkiel (in a 1959 article called “Studies in Irreversible Binomials”) and Dwight Bolinger (whose 1962 article, “Binomials and Pitch Accent,” looked at the metrical structure of binomials). Later work by William Cooper and John Robert Ross (in a 1975 paper called “Word Order”) proposed that the terms which occurred first tended to be those closer to a speaker’s experience (an idea they called the Me First Principle). They also stressed the relevance of phonological and semantic properties of words. Other scholars have proposed that word frequency plays a role, with more frequent words tending to be in the first position. For an excellent overview, consult Sarah Bunin Benor and Roger Levy’s 2006 article, “The Chicken or the Egg.”

Some fixed phrases may have idiosyncratic explanations: black and white, as in “it’s right there in black and white,” gets its order from the foregrounding of lettering on the backgrounded page. Come and go suggests a temporal precedence: you have to come before you can go, but what about stop and go?

In addition, many binomials can be reversed: beer and wine seems as likely as wine and beer, and peppers and onions as likely as onions and peppers. To me, left and right, on and off, and night and day seem fine in either order. But cheese and crackers does not work nearly as well as crackers and cheese, and a cheese and ham sandwich sounds downright odd. Tables and chairs seem natural if you are shopping for furniture, as in “We were looking at new tables and chairs” rather than “new chairs and tables.” But if you are writing a novel and describing a brawl, you might have a character step carefully among the overturned “chairs and tables.” And as Benor and Levy noted, even fixed binomials can be reversed, when necessary, as in the Billy Joel song “Piano Man,” with its barfly “making love to his tonic and gin.” The reversal of the libation completes the rhymes with “the regular crowd shuffles in.”

Reversal of a fixed binomial can also be a forensic tell. When the terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, wrote his anti-technology manifesto in the 1990s, he used the outdated binomial expression “eat your cake and have it too” rather than the more common “have your cake and eat it too.” That idiosyncratic reversal was one of the clues that led to his identification and capture.

Some frozen binomials are best left alone.

_{Featured image by Ling App on Unsplash.}

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How to create visual (graphical) and video abstracts

Although the concept of visual abstracts began even before the widespread use of the internet, with journals like Angewandte Chemie and Tetrahedron Letters featuring graphical abstracts in the late 20^th century, it wasn’t widely used across all journals until the surge in scholarly papers and information overload. Given that almost 3 million scientific papers were indexed by Scopus and Web of Science alone in 2022, it isn’t surprising that it takes 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice. Therefore, for research to influence clinical practice, it must be effectively communicated to key audiences such as policymakers, healthcare professionals, and patients.

Since 2016, Dr Andrew Ibrahim has helped popularize the use of visual abstracts on social media. His studies have shown that presenting research findings in a visual way promises to improve audience reach and drive change, as visual abstracts make use of our ability to rapidly process and retain visual over textual information.

Planning your visual abstract

Paediatrics & Child Health encourages authors to submit visual or video abstracts with their manuscripts. While visual (or graphical) abstracts provide a succinct, pictorial summary of the paper, video abstracts are short, engaging audio-visual recordings. These abstracts give readers a quick, visual overview of an article’s main findings and information briefly. The purpose of visual abstract isn’t to divulge all the details of a study or to replace the full text, but to provide busy readers with an efficient way to find articles of interest. However, as the addition of visual abstracts on social media is relatively new (since 2016), there is a need for more quantitative studies to fully understand how effective visual abstracts are in communicating research. Preliminary data suggest that visual abstracts do increase text abstract views and enhance Altmetric attention scores of papers.

Follow these tips to create effective visual or video abstracts.

1. First, wrap up your paper: Develop your abstract after fully writing your manuscript. This will help you to fully understand your research story and highlight the key aspects of your paper. Ask yourself these questions:
   • Why did I decide to do this research?
   • What is the problem/knowledge gap my work addresses?
   • How do my key findings compare with what has been done previously?
   • And how does it matter to my peers and the public?
     
2. Create a plan: Plan out your ideas and organize your abstract in a logical way, so that readers can take a quick glance and easily follow. You can use SmartArt Graphics on Microsoft PowerPoint (process, cycle, list, matrix etc.) or search for similar elements on Canva.
   
3. Learn about your audience: It is important to understand your audience’s level of expertise when choosing the visual elements for your graphical abstract.
   
4. Less is more: Select key points from each section of your paper. This will keep your abstract succinct. Adding too many details can overwhelm the readers. The purpose of a visual or a video abstract isn’t to replace full-text articles but to pique the interest of the reader.
   
5. What to keep in mind: Learn what sizes and formats are allowed. For Paediatrics & Child Health, for example, graphical abstracts should be one panel, 1200 pixels (width) x 900 pixels (height) at 300 ppi (which corresponds to 4 inches/10 cm x 3 inches/7.5 cm at 300 ppi). You can submit your graphical abstract as TIFF, PDF or JPG file and video abstracts as AVI or MP4 files. Other journals or societies may have different requirements.
   
6. Get feedback before you submit: Send your visual or video abstracts to folks not only within your profession but also outside it, to see if they understand your paper just by looking at your visual or video abstract.
   

Technical tips for creating your visual abstract

There are technical elements to creating a visual abstract. Here are some tips for how to approach the process. For graphical abstracts:

• Choose a design program you are comfortable with such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, etc.
• Select a colour palette (≤5 colours) and a font size (12- to 16-point UNICODE) to ensure legibility.
• Use simple and clear visual elements/icons to communicate your research. For general graphical elements, you can use PowerPoint, Canva, Draw.io, and Adobe Illustrator. However, for more specific visual elements, you can use software such as:
  
  1. BioRender for creating professional, scientific figures. It is best for life sciences, medicine, and biology papers.
  2. Mind the Graph for creating compelling infographics from scratch. This tool is best for health professionals, scientists, and academicians.
  3. ChemDraw to draw out chemical reactions or biomolecules e.g., drawing out the structures of essential amino acid or adenosine diphosphate in your manuscript.
  4. If pictograms/images won’t help communicate your research work, you can always include data or charts. For information on different chart types and their uses, try The Data Visualisation Catalogue.

Once you have created your graphical abstract, proofread and revise if necessary.

If a video abstract best suits your paper:

• It is good practice to begin your video with a hook to catch the attention of your viewers. Start the video with an interesting question or revealing key findings of your study.
• To make your video, create a storyboard to identify potential issues using free software like Canva storyboards or Wonder Unit Storyboarder.
• Select your mode of delivery:
  1. Talking head: You can record yourself talking about your study, creating a human connection between you and your audience.
  2. Presentation style: If you are looking for a free, beginner-friendly way to record your video abstract, you can create simple visuals on Microsoft PowerPoint or Canva and record the presentation.
  3. Whiteboard animation: You can make a video abstract by drawing out the key findings of your paper on an actual whiteboard (or using a whiteboard tool online). This method is effective but might need some prior sketching practice. To make it more creative and add motion to your drawing, you can create animated videos using Canva, Powtoon, Microsoft PowerPoint or other paid software.
• Record your audio-visual: If you opt to create a talking head video, you can use a mobile phone or a digital camera using the highest quality to record your video. For recording the script, select a quiet room and, if possible, use a plug-in microphone. Ensure your voice is audible and clear, and your tone resonates with your intended audience. You can also add free music to your video (check license and copyrights).
• End your video with a call to action e.g., you can say something like “now that you’ve watched this video, don’t forget to read and share this paper” to the audience to increase the chances of a viewer taking action.
• Lastly, use any editing software (e.g., Canva Pro, PowerPoint, iMovie, descript) to put together your final video abstract.

Conclusion

Visual and video abstracts are effective ways to increase visibility, reach, and engagement of your research work. For example, the papers published in Paediatrics & Child Health accompanied by visual abstracts, some of which were recently shared on the journal’s LinkedIn page, received higher engagement and article views on both platforms.

For more information about submitting your manuscript to Paediatrics & Child Health, please visit our website or email us at journal@cps.ca.

^{Featured image by Luke Miller via Unsplash.}

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VSI 800: A history in eleven titles

Short. Sharp. Inspiring.

These are the words that have guided the Very Short Introduction series for over thirty years. With over ten million copies sold worldwide, it’s become a universally accessible way to gain new knowledge (ChatGPT, eat your heart out).

To celebrate the publication of our 800^thVery Short Introduction, we’ve put together a timeline featuring our series milestones, from our first Introduction co-authored by famed classicist Mary Beard, all the way to our upcoming introduction to rock ‘n’ roll.

Check out our interactive timeline below!

^{Featured image: Oxford University Press.}

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Clinical Legal Education, Theory and Practice

Legal education, at least in the Anglosphere, has been undergoing a quiet but very recognisable transformation. The case study method, developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, is steadily giving way to ‘authentic’, ‘real life’ or ‘experiential’ learning, wherein theory and practice are intermeshed. Law is now often studied ‘in context’ (consequences, remedies, and enforcement are discussed); the gap between ‘law in theory’ and ‘law in action’ is investigated; and the ‘theory of the practice’ is incorporated into the curriculum.

Clinical legal education (CLE) takes this pedagogical approach to its logical conclusion. In CLE, law students learn through the practical application of law by providing legal services to the public and by reflecting on this experience to develop their understanding of law and legal theory. In light of the above, it is unsurprising that CLE has seen a rapid growth in the UK in the past decade. In addition to the aforementioned pedagogical shift, another driving force for this growth has been the hollowing out of public services by years of austerity politics, manifested in significant cuts in the provision of free legal services, both from the voluntary sector and from private law firms with legal contracts. These two factors combined to create a growing demand from the general public for free legal services and a growing demand from law students for some practical experience to form part of their law studies. This expansion in university law clinics has also seen a gradual move away from the law clinic inhabiting a small extra-curricular space populated by a handful of keen volunteers to larger, permanently staffed spaces where the clinic is incorporated into the curriculum, forming an assessed and credit bearing part of both undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes.

Clinical legal education is now very much a part of the twenty-first century legal education landscape, with an estimated 80% of law schools in the UK offering some form of provision. Against this background, it is somewhat surprising that there are very few textbooks available for students. It seems likely that one reason for this is that each university law clinic is unique in its offering and there is no common substantive law uniting them. A law clinic may provide advice services in one or more of the following: family law, housing, employment, criminal law, welfare benefits, special educational needs, small businesses, immigration and asylum, small claims disputes. Those services may be supervised by law school staff or by external agencies working in partnership. When you come to consider the incredible variety of models of delivery along with the range of legal topics needed, the lack of standard core textbooks becomes less surprising, as it is hard to imagine how one book might serve quite so many needs.

In addition to the incredible range of substantive law that can be found in university law clinics, the rationale for and underpinning values of law clinics are highly contested. Is the university law clinic a vehicle for developing deep critical thinking about values, power and justice in an unjust world, a vehicle for developing employability skills for budding lawyers, a way for law schools to help meet the legal needs of local communities, or can it be all of the above?

Undaunted by this landscape, we decided to rise to the challenge of creating a text that unites the theory and the practice of clinical legal education—and in doing so set out our own vision of what clinical legal education is and can be. We seek to champion a vision of clinical legal education that is radical and transformative for students and the communities they serve whilst also positioning ourselves on the side of promoting social justice through legal practice.

We explore the ways in which experiential learning can enrich the student experience, not only by developing key employability skills but also by creating a space in which theory can be applied and become meaningful.

Our proposition is that there are 6 features to clinical legal education:

1. Active participation: this is the defining feature, and thus the foundation of clinical legal education. There is no room in a clinic for students to passively absorb knowledge handed to them by a lecturer. They are active participants in their own learning experience.
   
2. Interaction in role: students play an active part in interviewing, advising, or otherwise working for a client by adopting a professional role.[CA3]  By taking on such a role, students learn how to interact with others as they would in legal practice.
   
3. The dynamic nature of the problem: in legal education, we often design neatly packaged problems for students that will draw out their knowledge and understanding of a particular point of law or practice. In clinical legal education, the problem cannot be packaged, and the solution may not be clear, which pushes the students to think creatively to apply their skills and knowledge.
   
4. Part of a planned curriculum: this does not necessarily mean that the clinic needs to form part of an assessed programme, but to move from beyond experience to education, a clear learning goal needs to be identified for students and educators. Education requires theorising, extrapolating experiences, conceptualising and framing them, understanding them as part of a general structure, and trying again on the basis of that understanding.
   
5. Reflection: learning how to reflect allows students to make sense of their experience and learn from that experience.
   
6. Access to justice: this feature is present in many, but not all, clinics. Teaching students about access to justice is central to our own approaches to clinical education and is therefore also central to the book.

We live in very uncertain times, and our students come to us anxious about jobs and their futures. Many of our universities in the UK are located in cities and regions where poverty, inequality, and injustice are part of the everyday landscape. Law students are hoping to enter a world of work that is changing so fast that neither practicing lawyers nor legal academics have a clear picture of what that world will look like. It is tempting, therefore, for the legal academy to collectively put our heads down and carry on with what we have always done: give lectures, teach the black letter law, expect students to read books and judgments and sit exams at the end of the year. We hope that this book and our vision of law as a site of injustice as well as justice, clinics as a site of theory and practice, and legal practice as a form of communication and connection between people will serve to inspire and support new generations of law students and their teachers.

^{Featured image by Sasun Bughdaryan via Unsplash.}

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Unbuttoned: an interactive history of the suit

To the modern eye, this man in his dark suit probably looks perfectly normal—perhaps even boring. But what if this ubiquitous uniform is actually one of the most powerful and heavily engineered political institutions in Western history?

Before the nineteenth century, elite men across the Western world dressed in vibrant silks, rich velvets, and sparkling embroidery, using fashion to display their social rank just as much as women did. However, in the wake of the American Revolution, a massive cultural shift occurred—the “Sartorial Revolution.” Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, men renounced decorative fashion in favor of plain, dark, woolen suits.

The Founding Fathers used clothing to enact a new political reality. Men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson purposefully adopted sober, unadorned suits to visually reject aristocratic luxury and the tyranny of European monarchies. Their new uniform was designed to reflect republican ideals of democracy, equality, and industry. But this equality was an illusion. The suit functioned as a visual boundary that granted civic authority and political power exclusively to white men, while using the language of fashion to cast women, Indigenous men, and Black men as feminine, primitive, or uncivilized, and therefore unfit for political power.

Click on the different elements of the suit below to uncover the hidden histories woven into its fabric. From the exploitation of land and labor required to produce its dark dyes and crisp white linens, to the mathematical tailoring that secretly sculpted an idealized male body, you will see how these seemingly mundane garments served as tools of social control. The history of the suit is the history of power, democracy, and the fashioning of modern men.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the modern suit is how boring it seems. That is exactly its power. By the mid-19th century, the suit became so plain, uniform, and ubiquitous that it practically turned invisible. It functioned as a “civic uniform” that united white men in a visual brotherhood of democratic equality. But this uniformity was exclusive. By defining serious, rational masculinity through the dark suit, society simultaneously codified anyone who didn’t wear it—women, Indigenous men, and Black men—as frivolous, savage, or unfit for political power. The suit didn’t just reflect social hierarchies; it actively enforced them.

_{Featured image: Thomas Sully, Joseph Dugan, 1810 (detail). National Gallery of Art, Washington.} 

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Interdisciplinary horizons in human–animal studies

Over the last few decades, scholarship in the arts has undergone a significant shift towards questions and topics related to animals and our relationships with them. Referred to as ‘the animal turn’, this movement has involved various disciplines working together to critically analyse the conceptual construction and material treatment of non-human animals (and ‘nature’ more generally) in human cultures, histories, discourses, and practices. These studies focusing on human-animal relations have been interdisciplinary from the outset, since they have required communication amongst theories and methods derived from the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences—and increasingly the biological and environmental sciences as well. Accordingly, the range of approaches that has come to be called human-animal studies (or sometimes just animal studies) has tended, even before the development of explicitly ‘intersectional’ theory, to focus on fundamentally intersectional topics, seeking to analyse, measure, and account for the inter-implicated fates and interests of specific human societies as they relate to particular animal species, populations, and individuals. These dynamics are, in turn, shaped by relevant cultural and political structures and practices.

In the context of the more politicised fields of human-animal studies (HAS), such as feminist animal studies or critical animal studies (CAS), intersectional theory often explicitly underpins interrogations of power and control in human relationships with non-human species. Importantly, in these overtly political strands of HAS, intersectional theory is extended from its original anthropocentric form to now include an examination of marginalisation, discrimination, and oppression affecting all living beings, not only humans. Speciesism refers to the ideology that prioritises humans over other animals (otherwise called human exceptionalism or human supremacy) and also favours certain animal species—such as dogs—over others, such as rats (this latter aspect of speciesism is obviously affected by cultural differences). The deliberately anti-speciesist form of intersectional theory is associated with ecofeminism, which emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, alongside other counter-cultural political movements of this era, including second-wave animal rights, environmentalism, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous, civil, and disability rights.

Specifically, feminist and critical animal studies approaches interrogate the ways in which speciesism manifests in ideological discourses as well as cultural constructions and practices. Anti-speciesist intersectional theory is also concerned with analysing and disrupting the various ways in which forms of human-to-human oppression (such as colonisation) map onto, shape, and are in turn shaped by forms of human-to-animal oppression (e.g., processes of species translocation and ecological transformation). Thus, while more human-centric forms of intersectional research have concentrated on the compounded experiences of marginalisation felt by people affected by racism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, it is only when we embed speciesism in intersectional understandings of oppression that we get a clearer picture of how all oppressions—of humans, animals, and environments—are intricately linked, and how humancentric constructions of ‘animality’ (or animal difference) have been used in the dehumanisation of certain peoples and in the exploitation of and cruelty towards certain animals. Intersectional feminist and critical animal studies approaches are also more likely to pair with activist or advocacy outcomes with the aim of improving the lives of animals—both human and non-human ones.

In the field of CAS, the use of multiple disciplinary perspectives and approaches in combination with anti-speciesist theory has resulted in timely and potentially transformative new knowledge of human-animal relations and human-animal-environment connections. Ongoing areas of research include:

• The employment of novel historiographies to account for the role of animal agency in historical change;
• Feminist, critical race, disability studies, and CAS theories coming together to examine the constitutive links between discourses of animal agriculture and animal breeding and human experiences of disability, exploitation, and incarceration;
• Marxist and other political theories explicating the connections between capitalism, industrialised farming, and slaughter, and the exploitation of human and animal labour;
• Indigenous critiques of environmental colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous human–animal knowledge systems;
• CAS and ecofeminist theories scrutinising the gendered components of dairy, meat, and egg farming and the ways that carnism, meat culture, and advertising of animal products rely on certain constructions of gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity;
• CAS and environmental theories examining the interrelationship between animal agriculture, environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and species extinctions;
• CAS and queer ecologies subverting mainstream environmental discourse, binary configurations of culture/nature, masculine/feminine and human/animal, and the dominance of evolutionary theory;
• Critical race and Indigenous theorists decolonising western food practices and historicising plant-based Indigenous foods;
• Various disciplines and scholar-activists are developing intersectional veganism in theory and practice.

Many of the articles in the forthcoming “Animals” section of Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience employ interdisciplinary, anti-speciesist, intersectional theories in their explorations of human-animal-environment entanglements, thereby offering nuanced, in-depth critical analysis of various domains of privilege, power, and control. Contributions range from theoretical, textual, thematic, and visual analyses through to empirical interviews and digital algorithm statistics. Authors utilise diverse approaches influenced by critical race, Indigenous and decolonial, queer, posthumanist, ecofeminist, ethological, social justice, cultural history, animalist, disability rights, Marxist, trans-species intersectional, and environmental justice perspectives. Those writing from Indigenous or decolonial perspectives prioritise deep relational connections with environments and non-human species.

Several exciting emerging trends in interdisciplinary HAS and CAS research are represented in articles appearing in the “Animals” section. One important trend is represented by scholars here who offer cutting-edge contemporary critiques of the animal—industrial complex, drawing on both the vast scientific evidence connecting animal agriculture to environmental degradation, diversity loss, and species extinction, and the ubiquity of cruel practices associated with breeding and farming animals for consumption. A second trend involves the scrutiny of anthropocentric environmental theories and mainstream conservation practices, demonstrating the ways in which they construct disrespect or deliberate disregard for the sentience and suffering of animals constructed as “unwanted”, such as so-called “pests,” as well as introduced and feral animals. For the most part, the authors in “Animals” are critiquing western cultural constructions and practices since these are closely connected to global animal and environmental exploitation, and because of their links to western capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism.

If you’re interested in getting involved in Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, let us know.

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Music therapy musicianship: a call for change

The following is offered as a manifesto: a bold assertion of our unique musicianship. We – music therapists – are different from performers and educators. If you are a music therapy student or clinician, consider this an affirmation of who you are. Your musicianship matters much more than you know.

How are we different?

A focus on people

First and foremost, we are musicians of the people. When we engage with participants, we are employing musics that diverse people listen to in their everyday lives. We also use the instruments common to these musics.

An example: I (Bill) am a percussionist who sings and plays thousands of diverse songs, emulating the qualities of different genres. I change these qualities to sound like the original, or to convey a different feel. I improvise using a range of musical frames (e.g., rhythms, progressions, modes). I compose lyrics to songs on the spot while accompanying through an improvised structure. This is only a surface understanding of my unique musicianship, and only one example.

Interactive engagement

Performance is NOT our focus. We focus on musical interaction that can lead to growth or change. We develop shared intentions with participants based on strengths, needs, backgrounds, interests, access to music, and their musicality/musicianship. We navigate with our clients a dynamic balance between structure/safety and creativity/autonomy. Our music-making is not tied to a “score,” but rather to in-the-moment modifications. We are musically vigilant (Ruud, 2020) and musically responsive.

Aesthetic sensitivity

We center our aesthetic sensitivity on people. We listen for more than what is in a song or piece, more so to the qualities of the music that participants and the environment give us: in the sound of a voice faintly singing, in a drum profusely struck, in a breath, in the sound of an ICU machine. We listen as witnesses, and integrate and respond in kind.

We see the values of music in their diverse and connected presentations: as a human right (Clements-Cortės et al., 2024), as a human technology (Patel, 2007), as a tool (Thaut, 2005) or resource (Rolvsjord, 2005) for promoting health, and as a medium for experience (Aigen, 2005; Dewey, 1934).

Why is this difference important?

While affirmation is an imperative of this research, systemic change is our overarching goal. The musics and processes that we employ in our work as music therapists are often peripheral in academic training outside of music therapy-specific courses. Common curricula are greatly informed by classical training and performance, and do not provide our musicianship the amount of space it needs to be truly developed and reinforced.

In many schools of music, music therapy students provide a major portion of student credit hours and funding. Students should not be subsidizing a system that focuses on areas outside of their needs. They should be paying for engaging experiences that clearly prepare them for where they are headed. Students should be taking courses with faculty who create an engaging environment within which these students’ unique music knowledge, music skills, and aesthetic sensitivity are valued.

First steps toward change

We invite you to dig deeper into our two articles (Matney et al., 2024; Meadows et al., 2025) and their supporting analyses. For those of you who are music therapists, students, and educators, we think that you will see parts of yourself and your work authentically represented.

Moving forward, we believe the following offers us the beginning steps toward change:

1. Affirmation: Understand and affirm this uniqueness with those around you (and within you!). Small acts change cultures. For our colleagues in various music and health fields, we hope you may affirm those you work with.
2. Advocacy: Assert the difference, with both objectivity and with pride, in informal and formal conversations.
3. Instigation: Even if shifts begin small, we collectively can find ways to move the curriculum toward greater relevance for music therapy musicianship. We can discuss what content exists in what courses, and how that content does or does not meet the needs of music therapy students. We can instigate change, moving toward classes, content, and timelines that benefit each student’s effort and investment.

The 21^st Century Commission on Music Therapy (2024) has provided concrete and practical recommendations for restructuring curricula. Drafts of new AMTA musicianship competencies seek to provide greater detail, but do not yet go far enough in discussing the nuances of our musicianship: the processes of shared music making and musical responsiveness.

Affirm, advocate, and instigate. Together, we can shift the current culture to foster the future of music therapy as ‘musicians of the people.’

^{Feature image by Andrew K via Unsplash.}

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Five surprising facts about baseball [map]

As a game, baseball has multiple antecedents and ancestors, most notably an English children’s game called rounders. But as an organized spectator sport, baseball is native to the United States. Still, the sport spread quickly beyond U.S. borders, and took hold in many other parts of the world. It became the national sport of both Cuba and Japan, and migrated from there to many of the lands where fans pay to watch live games and also follow professional leagues abroad. Here are five sites that illuminate baseball’s complex geography.

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Trailblazing paths: iconic women through time [reading list]

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. This reading list features five biographies that highlight women who resisted systemic barriers, confronted entrenched hierarchies, and fought for the dignity and safety of others. From activists and reformers to scientists and cultural leaders, these stories reveal how women—often overlooked or silenced—have pushed boundaries, protected the vulnerable, and inspired movements for justice. Together, they remind us that progress toward gender equality has always been driven by those who refused to accept the limits imposed on them.

1. A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing by Betty Boyd Caroli

In this biography, Mary K. Simkhovitch emerges as a pioneering force in the settlement house movement and a central architect of American public housing reform. Betty Boyd Caroli traces Simkhovitch’s founding of Greenwich House in 1902 and her influential role in shaping early 20th‑century urban policy, including her leadership in New Deal housing initiatives, the creation of the National Housing Conference, and co‑authoring the landmark 1937 National Housing Act. Balancing an unconventional marriage, family life, and a relentless public mission, Simkhovitch became widely admired—once even depicted as a “Wonder Woman of History”—for her ability to confront urban poverty while advocating fiercely for immigrant communities and affordable housing. This biography, rich with historical insight, positions her as an enduringly relevant figure whose work helped define the federal government’s responsibility to support low‑income families.

Read more.

2. American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism by Steven K. Green

American Infidelity traces the dramatic late‑19th‑century clash between a dominant evangelical culture and a rising coalition of freethinkers, feminists, and sexual reformers who sought greater personal liberty and challenged religious authority. Historian Steven K. Green follows this struggle through the activists who fought for birth control, divorce reform, and women’s autonomy, as well as the moral crusaders—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who worked to suppress them. Revealing how these “infidels” pushed for a more open, rational, and egalitarian society, Green shows how their movements were ultimately stifled but left a powerful legacy that continues to shape today’s debates over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.

Read more.

3. COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History

This book recounts the often‑overlooked story of Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee River Raid, a daring Civil War operation in which she led Union spies, scouts, and two Black regiments up South Carolina’s river to destroy major rice plantations and liberate 730 enslaved people. Drawing on newly examined documents—including Tubman’s pension file and plantation records—historian Edda L. Fields‑Black, a descendant of one of the raiders, brings to life the enslaved families and communities who escaped to freedom that night and later helped shape the Gullah Geechee culture. Through this vivid reconstruction, the book reveals one of Tubman’s most extraordinary military achievements and the enduring legacy of those who fought for liberation.

Read more.

4. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America by Kathleen B. Casey

The Things She Carried reveals how purses, bags, and sacks have long been critical tools for women asserting privacy, autonomy, and political power in America. Kathleen Casey shows how these objects—from 19th‑century reticules to the handbags carried by immigrant workers, civil rights activists, and Rosa Parks herself—became symbolic extensions of women’s rights struggles, allowing them to navigate male‑dominated spaces, protect personal dignity, and challenge discriminatory systems. Drawing on sources ranging from vintage purses to photographs, advertisements, and legal archives, Casey uncovers how women of all backgrounds used the bags they carried to assert agency, cross restrictive social boundaries, and shape pivotal moments in the fight for gender and racial equality.

Read more.

5. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh

This biography tells the remarkable story of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA medical officer who, in the early 1960s, prevented the dangerous drug thalidomide from being approved in the United States, sparing countless Americans from catastrophic birth defects. A pioneering scientist who earned advanced degrees in an era with few female researchers, Kelsey resisted intense pressure from Merrell Pharmaceutical and spent nineteen months demanding solid evidence of the drug’s safety. Her unwavering stance not only kept thalidomide off the U.S. market but also spurred sweeping reforms in drug regulation through the 1962 Drug Amendment, which established modern clinical trials, informed consent, and stronger FDA oversight. Drawing on archival records and family papers, the book reveals her lifelong commitment to ethical science, her battles against industry hostility and institutional barriers, and her enduring legacy as a vigilant protector of public health.

Read more.

Explore our extended list of titles on Bookshop (UK | US) and Amazon (UK | US).

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The “Freest Writer” in Stalin’s Russia

Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.

What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing.

In mid-1920s Leningrad, an undergraduate student Edvarda Kucherova wrote to a friend: “You cannot imagine how much I adore Sterne. In a very personal way and with such gratitude, for he helps me live. Thanks to him, it is so clear that everything that is closest and most desirable is always so far away from us. Sterne taught me to understand and endure this.”

One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom.

The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture.

Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937.

The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature.

In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s.

Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous.

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How to write an interdisciplinary abstract

The purpose of any abstract is to summarise your article’s content in a way that will help potential readers decide if they want to read your work. An abstract usually runs between 150 and 300 words and will likely be your readers’ first interaction with your research article, so you must write it with that in mind. It should be intelligible on its own, without someone needing to have read your whole article or have in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand to follow the abstract’s meaning.

Interdisciplinary abstracts are more complex than abstracts aimed at a single discipline, since they must appeal to a wider range of readers with radically varying knowledge bases. What follows is a list of eight key strategies for writing clear, compelling abstracts for interdisciplinary research. It’s not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive, but I hope it will help if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the amount of ground you’re expected to cover in such a small number of words.

1. Start with the hook
   A stand-up comic once told me that the golden rule of comedy is to always start with your best joke. This advice can be applied to writing abstracts: start with the hook. The ‘hook’ is the most exciting and impactful feature of your work. It answers the perennial questions of ‘So what?’ and ‘Why should anyone care?’ If you can convincingly answer these questions in the first sentence of your abstract, readers are much more likely to want to read the full article.
   
   Often, the hook is placed at the end of the abstract as an enticement to read more, but increasingly I think it can be more effective when placed in the very first sentence of an interdisciplinary abstract. When writing up interdisciplinary research, you are appealing to a wider readership that goes beyond the confines of one discipline, so you must capture their attention right from the off with a statement of impact that makes it abundantly clear why researchers in multiple disciplines need to read your work. Then, you can move onto specifics like background and methods.
   
2. State your purpose
   Every abstract should state the central research question or aim of the article, in the clearest possible terms, and justify why it must be answered. It is possible for an article to answer more than one research question, but juggling multiple research questions often leads to an unfocused argument and an overly long article. An article of six-to-ten thousand words gives you enough time to answer one central research question very convincingly, and it is better to do this than to answer multiple research questions less convincingly. Before moving on, you must clarify why it is important to answer that research question. Why is this research necessary and how does the article address that need?
   
3. Summarise disciplinary contexts
   Your interdisciplinary article likely builds upon recent developments in more than one discipline, so you should not assume that readers will be conversant in all the disciplines with which your work engages. Use a couple of sentences to explain key developments in each relevant discipline that directly impact your research. Focus only on what’s essential for understanding your argument. Keep this concise, though, as abstracts should not be overloaded with contextual information.
   
4. Explain your methods
   Interdisciplinary methods are complex but enriching. They usually pull together and combine research techniques from multiple disciplines. Due to this complexity, interdisciplinary abstracts are sometimes overloaded with technical terminology that seem impenetrable to many readers. Take care to explain your methods or theoretical framework and why they help you answer your research question, keeping jargon to a minimum and defining key technical terms with which readers may not be familiar.
   
5. Defend your interdisciplinarity
   Interdisciplinary research is often called upon to justify its existence as interdisciplinary research. There are large numbers of scholars who are sceptical about the very idea of interdisciplinarity. If you are to retain these scholars as readers, you must explain in your abstract why an interdisciplinary approach to your research question is not only possible but essential. Some problems demand interdisciplinary approaches, others do not. You need to convince readers that your work fits into the former category and explain why you have assembled your unique interdisciplinary methodology or theoretical framework to respond to this research question.
   
6. Forecast your results
   Some abstracts won’t do this because the authors prefer to keep the revelation of their findings back for the conclusion of their article. I prefer abstracts to at least forecast the results of the research, simply because this might convince more prospective readers to engage with and cite your article if they know from reading the abstract that its results have direct implications for their own research.
   
7. Use an economy of words
   All your sentences should have a purpose. Meandering trains of thought that take a while to get to the point do not have a place in an abstract, so remove anything that is even slightly tangential. Bear in mind that an abstract is also a discovery aid, since the text of an abstract is often part of the metadata that is pulled across to bibliographic indexes such as SCOPUS and Google Scholar. Consequently, an abstract should include the kind of words you imagine potential readers might type into a library catalogue or online search tool. You will often be asked to provide a list of keywords alongside your abstract, and it is a good idea to work them into the text of the abstract itself to boost your article’s discoverability further.
   
8. Write assertively
   Abstracts are not the place to be modest about your achievements. Use assertive verbs and write in the present tense: say ‘this article does X’ rather than ‘this article aims to do X’ or ‘this article will do X’. Avoid hedging your bets, with words like ‘arguably’ and ‘potentially’ or an overly liberal use of the conditional. And above all: back yourself! It is expected for a research article to contain detailed discussion of other researchers’ work. That is not the case for an abstract, which should foreground your own original interpretation.

Further resources:

• Download our Interdisciplinary Research Abstract Checklist
• Watch the recording of Crafting Strong Abstracts: A Virtual Workshop for Interdisciplinary Researchers

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Humour as a higher form of justice

Walter Benjamin, the intellectual hero of the 1968 generation and one of the most influential figures in German cultural and media studies, is still regarded as the quintessential melancholic. Yet his work is interwoven with reflections on humour and the political opportunities it offers.

Despite the evident interest in Benjamin today, his views on humour have received little attention so far. One reason for that may be that, unlike his explorations of melancholy, mourning, and allegory, his thoughts on this matter do not exactly leap out at the reader. In Benjamin’s oeuvre, humour plays a role similar to how he described the relationship between comedy and tragedy. He observed that while comedy is ‘the essential inner side of mourning,’ its presence is subtle—much like ‘the lining of a dress’, which may occasionally flash into view at the hem or lapel. In this manner, humour is neither a counterpart to the much-discussed interweaving of melancholy and the allegorical form of perception in Benjamin’s work, nor an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is an integral part of a complex, often ambivalent structure of tension, consistently entangled with elements of melancholy, seriousness, and darkness.

The fashion metaphor of inner linings reveals a theoretical contraband that appears from time to time at significant points in Benjamin’s writings, spanning from his early linguistic-philosophical works to his media-aesthetic theses on cinema and his late materialistic concept of history. But rather than being the subject of a comprehensive study, his insights on humour are scattered across a wide range of texts. Most of these are small forms—critiques, fragments, satirical pieces—that engage with contemporary debates and bear witness to striking intellectual constellations. These include the engagement with authors such as Paul Scheerbart, Salomo Friedlaender, Karl Kraus, Jean Paul, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Sigmund Freud, Charles Fourier, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and others. Moreover, laughter plays a crucial role in Benjamin’s writings on childlike modes of perception and expression, the reception of technology via popular culture, and his experimentation with hashish. Benjamin often expresses his ideas on humour only in passing, making it all the more surprising how much importance he attaches to this phenomenon. In this vein, The Author as Producer claims: ‘It may be noted, incidentally, that there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter. In particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul.’ If, however, laughter is the best way to stimulate thinking, where does it lead in Benjamin’s thought?

To begin with, Benjamin is not concerned with fundamental anthropological patterns of a universal human condition (unlike his contemporary Helmuth Plessner, for example). Instead, his focus is on concrete historical constellations, which possess specific expressive forms for capturing the experience of contemporary history. Whether looking at the literature of Gottfried Keller or Disney’s Mickey Mouse, the central question is always how humour, cheerfulness, laughter, and wit provide opportunities for dealing with one’s own time in a productive way—both aesthetically and politically; regardless of whether the time is marked by the massive upheavals of bourgeois society in the canton of Zurich around 1848, or by the overwhelming technological advancements of the period between the world wars. Productivity in this context means, first and foremost, critical thinking.

From very early on, Benjamin believed that humour serves as a mode of genuine criticism. In his letters, he compares it to rays of light that illuminate and dissect whatever they touch. At the same time, since laughter testifies to ‘shattered articulation’, humour has a tension-filled connection to language, pointing to a fundamental conflict between what is or can be expressed and what remains inexpressible. This disruption of human words is vital, as it also means the disruption of one of their fundamental operations: the distinction between good and evil, which is a basic condition of human judgment. In a fragment from around 1917 and 1918, now translated in our Forum Special Issue into English for the first time, Benjamin presents humour as an act that can bypass or even subvert judgment, thereby allowing for a different, higher form of justice beyond conventional moral norms. Benjamin greatly admired Johann Peter Hebel’s calendar stories, as he saw ‘applied justice’ in their humour. Rather than relying on judgment and punishment, he perceived this applied justice in Hebel’s stories as emerging from vivid narration, composition, and a scenic dramaturgy, animated by small rogues and swindlers and enriched by an abundance of details and props. What becomes apparent is a penchant for microscopic humour that avoids grand gestures and operates at the level of concretion.

These early thoughts stayed with Benjamin throughout his career, right up to his later work, where he emphasized the utopian qualities of laughter. Humour emerges in Benjamin’s work as a site of thought where his early writings intersect and resonate with his later materialist reflections. Notably, even in the Arcades Project, he draws inspiration from his initial ideas on humour. Of particular note here is the enormous relevance of early science fiction writer Paul Scheerbart. In his astral novels, Benjamin perceived not a description of reality at work, but the radical attempt to change it. In fact, Scheerbart’s visions of glass and lightweight architecture had a decisive role in shaping modern and even post-war architecture in Germany and elsewhere. Benjamin appreciated this offbeat author for two reasons. First, he valued Scheerbart’s understanding of technology as a medium of interacting with nature rather than dominating it. Second, he admired the humour in Scheerbart’s literature, which he felt could facilitate a profound metamorphosis of both human beings and society. It is precisely this metamorphosis that encapsulates the political potential of humor as higher justice. Ultimately, through the lens of laughter, there is still a great deal to discover in Benjamin’s aesthetic and political thought.

_{Feature image: Margot von Brentano, Valentina Kurella, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Glück, Bianca Minotti, Bernard von Brentano, Elisabeth Hauptmann (from left), Berlin (1931) © Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Elisabeth-Hauptmann-Archiv 758. Used with permission.}

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Reintroducing Justice Robert Jackson

In 1952, Justice Robert Jackson issued a concurring opinion in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which a majority of the Supreme Court held that President Harry Truman could not invoke executive power to seize several of the major U.S. steel manufacturing companies in order to prevent a nation-wide steel strike that the Truman administration claimed would disrupt the participation of the United States in the Korean war.

Jackson’s opinion in Youngstown sketched a framework for executive power under the Constitution, identifying three examples of executive decisions against the backdrop of congressional authority. He set forth a continuum of executive power, ranging from instances in which executive decisions were “conclusive and preclusive” of the authority of other branches, to ones in which Congress and the executive shared powers and the branches operated in a “twilight zone” of concurrent authority, to ones in which an executive decision was in contradiction to a congressional effort to restrain it. When Jackson’s opinion appeared it garnered some appreciative commentary in academic circles but did not otherwise attract much attention.

Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence was revived, however, in two memorable opinions in American constitutional law and politics. The first was United States v. Nixon, in which Chief Justice Burger quoted a statement by Jackson that the dispersion of powers among the branches of government by the Constitution was designed to ensure a “workable government.” Burger concluded that allowing President Nixon to assert executive privilege against a subpoena in a criminal proceeding merely on the basis of a “general interest in confidentiality” would gravely interfere with the function of the courts and render the government “unworkable.” The second was Trump v. United States, in which Jackson’s statement in Youngstown that in some instances the president’s power to make executive decisions was “conclusive and preclusive” was used by Chief Justice Roberts to show that granting presidents absolute immunity for their official acts was necessary to enable them to execute their duties fearlessly and fairly.

More than seventy years after Jackson issued it, his Youngstown concurrence remains the most authoritative statement of the scope of executive power under the Constitution. But what of the justice who issued that opinion? Robert Jackson was arguably one of the most influential persons in the mid twentieth-century legal profession and a unique figure in American legal history. Yet today he is not widely known and has in some respects been misunderstood. Despite his having one of the largest collections of private papers in the Library of Congress, there has been comparatively little scholarship or popular writing devoted to Jackson. It is time to reintroduce him.

Jackson was the last Supreme Court justice to have entered the legal profession by “reading for the law,” a process where people apprenticed themselves to law offices prior to taking a bar examination. He would eventually study law for one year at Albany Law School and receive a degree, but he never attended college. His family were dairy farmers in western Pennsylvania and New York, and he was the first in his family to pursue a legal career. By 1934 he had become one of the more successful lawyers and wealthy residents in Jamestown, New York.

That year Jackson was approached by members of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and recruited to join the Bureau of Internal Revenue, even though his practice had not included tax law. From that position he progressed rapidly through New Deal agencies, becoming Solicitor General of the United States in 1938 and Attorney General in 1940. By that year he was on the short list for Supreme Court appointments, and was nominated to the Court by Roosevelt in 1941.

Jackson seemingly had every quality necessary to be an influential Supreme Court justice, possessing exceptional analytical and forensic skills and being a gifted writer. But he ended up somewhat unfulfilled on the Court, chafing about its isolation from foreign affairs during World War II and having fractious relationships with some of his fellow justices, notably Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. In the spring of 1945, he was offered the position of chief counsel at the forthcoming Nuremberg trials and took leave from the Court, uncertain about whether he would return. Jackson was largely responsible for the format of the trials, and although he had numerous difficulties with representatives of the other allied powers prosecuting Nazi war criminals, especially those from the Soviet Union, he said in his memoirs that he regarded his time at Nuremberg as the high point of his experience.

Jackson’s two years at Nuremberg were also a time in which he began an amorous relationship with his secretary, Elsie Douglas, to whom he would eventually leave his extensive private papers in his will. Douglas continued as his secretary when Jackson returned to the Court after Nuremberg, and when Jackson suddenly died of a heart attack in October 1954, it was in Elsie Douglas’ apartment. After Jackson’s return to the Court in 1946 his relations with colleagues improved, and his last major participation in a Court case came with Brown v. Board of Education in the 1952 and 1953 terms, in which Jackson, through writing successive memos to himself, eventually joined the Court’s unanimous opinion invalidating racial segregation in the public schools. Jackson had a heart attack in March 1954 and only returned to the Court on the day the Brown case was handed down. He then sought to recover over the summer of 1954, only to succumb that October.

All in all, a memorable life and career and a fascinating, complicated personality, whose remarkable talents somehow did not quite suit him for the role of a Supreme Court justice.

_{Featured image by Abdullah Guc via Unsplash.}

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The sound of suspense: Hitchcock and Herrmann [playlist]

Listen to Bernard Herrmann’s eight scores for the films of Alfred Hitchcock. You’ll hear, in music, a mirror of how the duo’s personal relationship evolved, from its joyous start in late 1954 to its bitter end in 1966.

At the recording session for their first collaboration, The Trouble with Harry (1955), Hitchcock chuckled with delight. Herrmann had translated Harry’s darkly comic tone into music. His new friend “Benny” also captured in the score the director himself—his anxieties, his wit, his romantic fantasies. So much so that in 1968, when Herrmann crafted a concert suite from Harry, he titled it “A Portrait of Hitch.”

Their second pairing shows how quickly Herrmann joined Hitchcock’s inner circle. In 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Benny didn’t just write the score. He appears onscreen as himself, conducting the London Symphony in the film’s most famous set-piece: an attempted assassination in the Albert Hall. Herrmann’s main title “Prelude” is barely two minutes long; but it contains the seeds of all the main themes he’ll develop in the score. The “Prelude” also foreshadows the Albert Hall sequence with its concert-hall grandeur.

The Wrong Man (1956) may be their most surprising collaboration. To tell the true story of a jazz musician’s wrongful arrest, and the tragic impact it has on his family, Hitchcock used a more realistic visual style, and filmed in the story’s actual locations. For its “Prelude,” Herrmann delivers a surprise of his own: a lively samba tune that seems far removed from his usual style. But its sunny first measures are repeatedly answered—arrested?—by an ominous phrase for woodwinds that hints at the darkness to come.

Director and composer were at their best when depicting romantic obsession, and 1958’s Vertigo may be the summit of both artists’ careers. The psychological disorientation felt by James Stewart’s protagonist is conveyed by Herrmann’s famous “Prelude,” with its relentlessly repeating figures and orchestral swells. Hitchcock tailored the movie’s edit and its sound design to accommodate the music, most famously in Vertigo’s emotional climax. As Robert Burks’s camera glides 360 degrees around Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) and Judy Barton (Kim Novak), there is no dialogue—only Herrmann’s passionate “Scene d’amour.” As Hitchcock told his composer, “We’ll just have the camera and you.”

1959’s North by Northwest gave Herrmann his best opportunity to blend thrills with humor (he regretted that he was never asked to score comedies). Like Vertigo, the main titles of North by Northwest are a miniature movie in themselves, as designer Saul Bass’ perpendicular lines streak across Manhattan skyscrapers and bustling commuters.

Someone at MGM suggested that since the movie begins in New York City, the main title music should be “Gershwinesque.” What Herrmann did instead reflects his lifelong gift for thinking outside the box. His “Prelude” is based on the rhythm of a Spanish fandango—because, as the composer observed, the movie isn’t about New York: it’s about the “crazy dance that was going to happen now between Cary Grant and the world.”

When Grant’s man-on-the run meets a sexy blonde (Eva Marie Saint) on a train, the actors have just a few minutes to establish that this relationship is more than a casual one-night stand. Herrmann’s shimmering “Conversation Piece” is among his finest love themes, and convinces us in seconds that this couple is destined to share train berths for years to come.

If not for Herrmann, Psycho might survive today only in massively shortened form. After viewing a rough cut without music, Hitchcock decided that he had failed in his biggest gamble: a self-financed, low-budget shocker, targeted at young moviegoers hungry for edgy content. Hitch mused about cutting it down and putting it on his TV series. Herrmann watched the cut and saw what the director didn’t. He transformed the film with his all-strings score, “a black-and-white sound” to complement the black-and-white photography. His nerve-shredding “Prelude” was composed with one goal in mind—to tell moviegoers that, despite Psycho’s leisurely first scenes, “something terrible is going to happen.”

Hitchcock made only one request of his composer: no music for the murder scenes. Herrmann felt differently, leading to the ultimate validation of his film career. When Hitchcock heard the shrieking strings his composer unleashed for Marion and Arbogast’s killings, he admitted he had been wrong.

By the time Herrmann completed Marnie (1964), the onscreen tension was matched by a growing division between director and composer. Herrmann’s abrasiveness, and movie studios’ appetite for pop/rock soundtracks, were two of the factors that drove a wedge in what had been the closest of partnerships. Finally, on Torn Curtain (1966), Herrmann dared to write what he thought was best for the film—a brutal, dissonant score—even though it was the opposite of what Hitchcock had asked for. (Hitch wanted music that was “light” and with a “beat.”) Minutes after hearing Herrmann’s “Prelude,” their partnership and friendship came to an ugly end. The composer was fired, his score rejected.

Some of that music reached movie screens in 2019, when Quentin Tarantino featured two Torn Curtain cues in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Nearly all of the scores represented here have surfaced in other media, re-used in Best Picture winners (The Artist), music videos (Lady Gaga’s Born This Way), TV (The Simpsons, Wednesday), plus commercials, pop songs and ringtones.

It’s easy to understand why. Herrmann remains unmatched in writing music that evokes timeless emotions—fear, love, hate, dread. And just as the gorgeous nightmares of Hitchcock’s cinema remain universal, the music of Bernard Herrmann is the fitting soundtrack of our own, anxious times.

^{Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash.}

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Turn off AI. Pick up a crayon.

Google Gemini offers “a new way to bring your imagination to life.” Adobe Firefly promises “The ultimate creative AI solution.” And Craiyon invites you to “Create AI Art.”

Don’t believe the tech hype. Close the generative AI window. And turn to the book that has sparked creativity for decades: Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. Published 70 years ago this fall, it is a manifesto for human creativity disguised as a children’s picture book—a message that’s even more relevant today than it was in 1955.

The opening pages of Harold and the Purple Crayon illustrate why throwing prompts into AI does not create art. Art begins by facing an empty canvas. Maybe you scribble a bit—as Harold does. Only after four pages of zig-zagging experiments does Harold pause and decide to take his line for a walk in the moonlight. Traveling along the line of your imagination requires your full attention. Resist the algorithm’s allure and become an active dreamer.

For Harold, as for most artists, drawing is a form of thinking. After drawing the moon for his walk in the moonlight, Harold makes “a long straight path so he wouldn’t get lost,” but he doesn’t “seem to be getting anywhere on the long straight path.” So, he leaves the path. But he had to create the straight path in order to realize that straight paths lead nowhere interesting. Making art is a process of discovery. Getting lost and making mistakes are part of the process.

A mistake might inspire a new direction or generate the art itself. Harold’s mistakes do both. Frightened by the dragon he has drawn to guard the apple tree, “His hand holding the purple crayon shook.” At this moment, the shaky crayon’s line oscillates between these different possibilities: a wavy scribble, or a series of conjoined cursive w’s, or the surface of an ocean in the visual language of the cartoon. So, as artists do, Harold grapples with uncertainty, and then has a realization: this line must be an ocean. When he recognizes that, the story can continue; Harold draws a boat and launches a several-page nautical voyage.

But AI’s risk-free, frictionless “creativity” launches nothing because friction generates the surprises that create art—the unpredictable results of an imagination in conversation with itself. For young people who may be dazzled by or even encouraged to use AI, let them also be encouraged to take the long road of doing things the “old fashioned” way because in doing these things ourselves, we learn, we grow, and we find our own voice.

It’s true that AI images can surprise us: that sixth finger or phantom arm in a photorealistic portrait of smiling people does make us look again. But art’s surprises emerge from a larger vision. Harold’s triangle-fingered, goggle-eyed policeman is Crockett Johnson gesturing towards the untutored abstractions of children’s art. It’s an intentional shift in the visual style. In contrast, AI’s extra fingers or limbs steer us into the uncanny valley—apt if the image illustrates horror fiction, but not if it’s supposed to represent, say, cheerful coworkers.

Drawing on decades of experience in the visual arts, Johnson’s aesthetic choices suit the story he is telling. Drawing from millions of works that feed its algorithm, AI can only imitate aesthetic choices. It cannot make them. And a statistically probable sentence or image can only gesture broadly towards the subtleties of human perception.

Because AI doesn’t understand why humans make art. Nor do the high-tech hucksters who are promising art without effort.

If you want to resist AI’s lure of frictionless creativity (and trust me, you do), open Harold and the Purple Crayon to experience the excitement of the creative mind at work. Johnson’s tale positions us as witnesses to the moment of artistic creation, watching Harold invent the story that we are reading while we are reading it. Although that’s not literally true, it feels true because the crayon—the embodiment of Harold’s apparent improvisation—is the engine of narrative. The story emerges from the path of a crayon which simultaneously generates and is inspired by the unfolding story.

The book’s ability to dramatize what creativity feels like is one reason it has inspired so many artists. Prince’s favorite childhood book, Harold is why Prince played purple guitars, favored purple fashion, and strongly identified with the color purple. Harold inspired Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Richard Powers to become a writer, and the name of Yale’s improvisational theatre group the Purple Crayon. Upon receiving the Caldecott Medal for Jumanji (1981), the classic picture book that would launch a film franchise, Chris Van Allsburg thanked “Jan Vermeer, for the way he used light; …Federico Fellini, for making films that look the way they do; …and Harold, for his purple crayon.”

Harold and the Purple Crayon has inspired so many because Harold’s journey is a story about what it means to be human—facing our challenges by thinking creatively, transforming problems into solutions, drawing new paths forward. When the scribble becomes an ocean, draw a boat. When it gets dark, draw a moon. To live is to improvise, and artists are our most gifted improvisers.

But developing our creative muscles requires the friction of crayon against paper, of imagination against impediment. If we delegate our dreaming to subcommittees of robots, humans’ unique strength—our capacity to imagine—will wither. If we outsource our creativity, we outsource our humanity.

And that is dangerous. Harold is in greatest peril when he slips from his unfinished mountaintop, stops drawing, and begins falling through space. These three pages mark the longest time that his crayon leaves the page. Put another way: he comes closest to his demise when, mid-adventure, he relinquishes the symbol of his creative mind. He stops thinking.

Then: “But luckily, he kept his wits and his purple crayon.” Harold presses crayon to page, draws a circle, which becomes a hot-air balloon that carries him to safety.

Johnson wrote the book while his own safety was at risk—under FBI surveillance and at risk of losing his livelihood due to McCarthyism. In daring to dream, he temporarily escaped surveillance and created a template for resilient, liberatory imaginations.

In these dangerous times, we might look to Harold’s crayon—or whatever that represents for each of us—and recognize the power of our imaginations. Rather than outsourcing our dreaming to machines, we can instead cultivate our capacity to imagine better futures.

And, come what may, remember what Harold would do: Always keep your wits and your purple crayon.

^{Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash.}

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What’s your literary classic Halloween costume? [quiz]

This Halloween, why not let literature dress you? The Oxford World’s Classics series has brought together the greatest works of fiction, drama, and poetry, from Gothic horrors to timeless romances. Take this quiz to discover which titles you should use as inspiration for your costume this spooky season!

Explore more titles in with our curated Halloween reading list on Bookshop (US, UK) and Amazon (US, UK).

^{Header: image by Pexels via Pixabay.}

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Quatremère de Quincy: the founding father of museophobia?

Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) was celebrated during his lifetime as the greatest European writer on the arts. The architect Sir John Soane admired his essay on Egyptian architecture while Hegel considered his research on ancient Greek polychromatic sculpture a masterpiece.

Despite the breadth of Quatremère’s writings, today he is famous for inventing an idea that he never embraced: namely, that art should remain in its original context because displacing it in museums changed its meaning and neutered its power.

While researching my biography of Quatremère, I discovered that his attitude towards museums was surprisingly positive.

The years that he spent in Italy during his twenties shaped his outlook. The sight of antiquities excavated from Herculaneum in the nearby royal palace at Portici led him to propose site museums ‘like those in Italy’ once he returned home. Why not reuse the ancient baths in Paris and the amphitheatre in Nîmes as museums of Gallo-Roman antiquities, he asked?

In Italy, Quatremère also studied in large museums. He found that the papacy’s ‘sumptuous galleries’ in Rome revalorized pagan artefacts as objects of beauty and knowledge. Indeed, the city itself, he later remarked, was a museal microcosm of world geography and history. Far from opposing the displacement of artworks from their original contexts, he remarked how artefacts imported from afar during antiquity had been resurrected in Rome when they took on new meanings and roles. For instance, he found that the Egyptian figures (now believed to be Roman telamons) greeting visitors to the Museo Pio-Clementino had a purpose no less authentic than their original one: ‘by making them support the corniche that decorated the magnificent entrance’, Pius VI had ‘returned them to their first destination’.

Quatremère returned from Italy convinced that it was necessary to centralize artworks in capital museums. He therefore joined the chorus of support for a national museum in the Louvre. Despite his antipathy towards the Revolution, in 1791 he proposed transforming the palace into a ‘temple of knowledge’. After the museum finally opened in August 1793, its administrators relied upon his expertise. For instance, in 1797, he examined thousands of paintings to determine what to share with the Special Museum of the French School in Versailles. Despite previously opposing the spoliation of Italy to enrich the Louvre, in 1807 he applauded Napoleon for amassing ‘treasures of genius from all centuries’.

During the Bourbon Restoration, he defended the Louvre with greater zeal because its fortunes aligned with his royalist politics. He criticized but failed to prevent ‘dishonourable’ demands to return seized artworks to their original countries. He penned a memorandum about rehanging what remained and recommended acquiring replacement antiquities such as a Parthenon metope from Choiseul-Gouffier’s collection. In 1821, he boasted that the newly imported Venus de Milo was ‘the rarest and most valuable item in our Museum’.

Quatremère’s pride in the Louvre did not prevent him supporting capital museums elsewhere. He was delighted, for example, to inspect the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. Lord Elgin saved these antiquities from the ‘barbarian’ Ottomans, he opined, and their ‘handsome arrangement’ in London was ‘even better than on the Parthenon itself’.

During his youthful Italian travels, Quatremère also admired energetic and enlightened private collectors such as Stefano Borgia and Ignazio Biscari. Their example taught him that private collecting benefited everyone, even if some avaricious collectors ‘amassed for the sake of amassing’. In France, he therefore praised Grivaud de la Vincelle, whose ‘patriotic’ efforts helped mitigate the absence of a national museum of antiquities, and Léon Dufourny, whose well-ordered and accessible collection served ‘public utility’. During the second half of Quatremère’s life, he created a sizable collection of his own in his mansion on the Rue de Condé, Paris: at his death, he owned around 3,000 printed volumes, numerous modern artworks, ancient Greek vases, Egyptian figurines, ex-votos seized from the temples of Asclepius and Hygeia, and small figures excavated in Italy.

Far from being a museophobe, then, Quatremère enthused about site museums, capital museums, and private collections alike. His published writings provide direct and indirect explanations for why he considered museums indispensable.

For Quatremère, the future of art depended upon museums because artists must study the ‘corpus of lessons and models’ from antiquity and the modern revival. If ancient Greek artists had perfected art without collections, he theorized that the moderns could never recover the causes of ancient greatness and must therefore turn to museums: ‘In the current state of things, God forbid that artists should be deprived of their assistance!’ Artists could only improve, moreover, if their judges understood beauty, which required a mental ‘ladder of comparison’ that one must calibrate carefully through studying many artworks.

Museums were also integral to the advancement of knowledge. During the eighteenth century, he reflected, the enrichment of museums enabled the ‘spirit of observation’ to triumph over the ‘spirit of system’. Since the consolidation of scattered artefacts into major collections finally enabled objects to ‘illuminate and explain one another’, he predicted that future scholars would discern new connections, decode patterns, improve taxonomies, and identify fakes.

In Quatremère’s mind,good museums therefore facilitated scholarly efforts to preserve and interpret authentic vestiges of the past whereas bad museums undermined this endeavour. He railed at the Museum of French Monuments precisely because he believed that its director, Alexandre Lenoir, presided over a ‘workshop of demolition’ that creatively restored medieval sculptures to illustrate period rooms. Lenoir’s superficial decorative needs and anachronistic assumptions discoloured the past and offended Quatremère’s sense of art and politics. For Quatremère, respect for past mentalities via authentic reminders of the past was the ultimate antidote to presentist dogmatism: ‘only the history of peoples, monuments, and the arts of antiquity’, he observed, ‘can expand the philosopher’s horizon and transform into a complete theory the fleeting observations that the brevity of human life otherwise condemns us to make.’

^{Featured image by Edoardo Bortoli on Unsplash.}

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How I used the <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em> as a student

‘They court the notice of a future age/ Those twinkling tiny lustres of the land’.

Today’s users of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are members of the ‘future age’ that William Cowper talks of in his poem ‘On Observing Some Names Of Little Note Recorded In The Biographia Britannica’. For students, this makes the ODNB a treasure trove. On any given topic, movement or episode of history—be it the Crusades, the first women lawyers, or the Romantic poets—we can find in the ODNB elegant and informative entries about the people behind it. These people might be kings and queens, but they are often ‘tiny lustres’: individuals who lived in quieter ways, but who nonetheless shaped the course of British history.

I started using the ODNB when I was a student of English Literature in 2018-2022. Undergraduate and postgraduate student life is, as many will attest, busy, and this made the ODNB an invaluable resource: a long-form biography might take too much time to read during term, but an ODNB entry is both detailed and short. I used the dictionary to locate in-depth research in an accessible, engaging, concise format, but also as a reading list of sorts: it pointed me towards further material about people I was researching (in my case, these were mostly authors). A given entry might contain both primary sources (diaries, manuscripts, books by the subject, podcasts and film) and further secondary material (full-length biographies, books of criticism) that can form a starting point when researching biographical information about a given person.

But what did this look like in practice? Here’s one example. In my second year, one of our set texts was Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. I didn’t know much about Defoe’s background when I began this module, so I went to the ODNB for a concise overview of his life. I was also able to do a keyword search within the entry to immediately identify specific information about Moll Flanders, which came in handy when writing my tutorial essay. The entry contained quotations from seminal works of criticism (such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel) as well as responses to the work from other authors, both in Defoe’s lifetime and later (like James Joyce, who called Defoe the ‘father of the English novel’). What’s more, the list of sources at the end of the entry provided an accessible and manageable means of navigating criticism around Defoe when I returned to the topic when revising for Finals.

From then on, the ODNB became an essential tool in my undergraduate and postgraduate research. I used it as a starting point to devise my own reading list in preparation for my BA dissertation on Virginia Woolf: indeed, reading the entry on her convinced me to choose this subject for my thesis. The ODNB helped me to discover Woolf’s circle, too: it contains entries about other members of the Bloomsbury group, from her sister Vanessa Bell to the painter and curator Roger Fry.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography allows each user to embark on their own path of discovery. A friend, when writing her history dissertation about Members of Parliament in the eighteenth-century, used the dictionary’s ‘group entries’ to gather sources and discover additional figures related to her project. The ODNB’s coverage stretches all the way back to Roman officers and their wives stationed at the fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall in first century AD, and to the associates of William the Conqueror, who planned the invasion of England in 1066. History is made by ‘tiny lustres’, and this resource equips us to roam across the vast range of individual contributions to national life. Next time you come across a name you don’t recognize in your research, I encourage you to try looking them up in the ODNB: it might just spark a new idea.

^{Featured image by Zoshua Colah via Unsplash.}

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Nine reasons I love John Williams [playlist]

I wrote a biography of John Williams, essentially, because I have loved his music since I was nine years old. A lot of children fall in love with Williams’ music, because it’s an irresistible and very tuneful pillar of the movies we all grew up with, whether it was the original Star Wars or Indiana Jones trilogy, E.T., Jurassic Park, or Harry Potter. His scores sang these stories in perfect harmony with the visuals and often provided their deepest emotions, and his themes were as integral to the characters as the actors who portrayed them. But Williams’ music is not childish or simple, and I loved it more powerfully as I got older and learned to appreciate the stunning level of craft and art in his popular family movie music and expanding my tastes to his darker, more complex scores for grown-up films. His music continues to break my heart, and I love that feeling.

My book is, in part, a covert love letter to Williams and a sermon to the unconverted or the half-aware about why you, too, should love his music. I’ve created this playlist as a companion, a bit of church music to go along with my 640-page homily. Here are nine (among hundreds) musical reasons why I love John Williams.

1. “Summon the Heroes”

We’ll start with a non-film piece. Among his many staggering cultural contributions, Williams has composed themes for four separate Olympic Games, beginning with his all-timer “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. “Summon the Heroes” was commissioned for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and it’s a fabulous demonstration of how Williams can write catchy, punchy music for a celebration or pageant like no one else. He is an heir to the likes of John Philip Sousa, and between his Olympics music and his perch at the Boston Pops for many years, he justly earned the appraisal of director Oliver Stone as having come “to stand for the American culture.”

2. “The Asteroid Field” (from The Empire Strikes Back)

One of the reasons I fell for Williams’ music as a kid was because his scores were a perfect marriage of classical music—all the grandeur and scale and tradition of the classical orchestra—and pop music, with their catchy earworm themes and often a verse-chorus-verse structure. This action cue from The Empire Strikes Back—a score that many consider his very best—is a perfect example of this hybrid quality. It’s also a miraculous example of how Williams could accompany an action scene, hitting lots of visual cues in perfect synchronization, while simultaneously composing a piece of tuneful music that makes perfect sense as pure music. In that skill, to my mind, he has no equals.

3. Theme from Born on the Fourth of July

Williams is definitely most famous for scoring Star Wars and the films of Steven Spielberg, but in the late 1980s and early ’90s he scored an informal trilogy of movies for director Oliver Stone that interrogated and lamented the years of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and the Richard Nixon presidency. All of these films are worth watching (Nixon is my personal favorite), and the scores are an exquisite tapestry of Americana tinged with melancholy and tragedy. The first was Born on the Fourth of July, the 1989 drama starring Tom Cruise as a real-life figure whose body and patriotism were shattered in Vietnam. Williams wrote an anguished string elegy as well as a solo trumpet theme that together tell the story of a profound, romantic love of country that is severely wounded, but not killed.

4. “Mom Returns and Finale” (from Home Alone)

One of Williams’ great gifts is ennobling even the lowest and silliest of material, and maybe the greatest example of this is Home Alone. On its face it is a juvenile, slapstick, live-action cartoon about a little boy torturing two idiot adults. But when Williams screened it, he saw the potential for a great Dickensian Christmas story, and he not only composed two indelible new Christmas carols, but also enhanced (and perhaps supplied) the emotional depth of its character relationships. The apotheosis of the film, and score, is the scene where Kevin McCallister’s mom finally comes home, they hug, and Kevin sees old man Marley embracing his own family in the falling snow. There’s a reason this movie has become a yuletide staple, and most of that reason is because John Williams treated it with literary respect and gave it an enormous heart.

5. “Remembering Emilie, and Finale” (War Horse)

Steven Spielberg’s unfairly overlooked movie about a horse in World War I—which is really about the tragedies as well as the humanity that war brings about—inspired Williams to write a romantic and very English pastoral score. There’s an homage to Old Hollywood in several scenes and images in the film, most of all in its emotionally cathartic finale, staged against a Technicolor MGM sunset. Williams reprises several of his intimate character themes, then strips away the whole orchestra for a solo piano rendition of an elegiac melody brimming with sadness and weary relief—and then concludes the whole thing with English nobility and heaving sentiment. This, for me, is ambrosia.

6. “Among the Clouds” (from Always)

Another overlooked and (in my opinion) unjustly dismissed Spielberg film, Always was his only “romantic comedy,” but really it’s a story about death and letting go of the person you love. It’s also a film with a lot of flight, a Williams specialty, and he wrote this cue for a scene where Dorinda (Holly Hunter) is flying her plane and the ghost of her paramour (Richard Dreyfuss) is saying goodbye. There’s a shimmering, levitational quality to this tone poem, a complicated mixture of quiet heartbreak and amorous love—with some gorgeous solo French horn playing by studio musician James Thatcher—that I find irresistible.

7. “E.T. is Alive” (from E.T. The Extra Terrestrial)

Most people know the famous “Flying Theme” from E.T., a score that, for my money, is probably Williams’ magnum opus. But most of my favorite moments in his scores (as evidenced throughout this playlist) are the sadder and more intimate ones—and the scene after E.T. dies and Elliott talks quietly to his alien friend, crying, is just so beautiful. Williams scored it with a tender reprise of his friendship theme for E.T. and Elliott on a celeste, an instrument with childlike sparkle that Williams loves, and then on a keening clarinet with empathetic string accompaniment. The cue rallies when E.T.’s heart begins to glow again, and the flying theme blooms like the flowers psychically linked to the character’s health. Williams has such a gift for taking potentially silly scenes and turning them into earnest holy moments.

8. “Cadillac of the Skies” (from Empire of the Sun)

Another “holy moment,” this is one of the all-time greatest standalone pieces of Williams music, for another overlooked Spielberg masterpiece. A young boy named Jim (played by Christian Bale) has been living in a Japanese internment camp for years; he has always been obsessed with airplanes, and when American bombers fly through to liberate the camp, he runs up to a rooftop in a state of euphoria. Williams scored this with choir, turning it into a quasi-liturgical drama; he has strings and brass join in, rising and rising, and then the music suddenly turns queasy and quiet as Jim collapses into his physician friend’s arms and says, “I can’t remember what my parents look like.” The score’s heart breaks from ecstasy to anguish in an instant, with the choir continuing hauntingly as the doctor carries Jim down from the roof like a toddler, the camp exploding behind them. This is definitely one of my “desert island” Williams tracks.

9. “The Search for the Blue Fairy” (from A.I. Artificial Intelligence)

In the summer of 2001, I saw A.I. three times in the theater. I was 16. After the first screening I was confused; by the third watch, I decided it was my favorite movie of all time, and it has remained so. It’s also my personal favorite John Williams score—full of gorgeous character melodies and emotional orchestral passion, but also layers of complex darkness and minimalism. David, an extremely lifelike android programmed to love his “parents,” has spent most of the film searching for the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio in the belief that she can turn him into a real boy and his mother will finally love him back. Williams scored the scene where he finally does find her (or at least a statue of her, in a drowned Coney Island) with his Blue Fairy theme sung by solo soprano. David pleads over and over—almost as if he is praying to the Virgin Mary—and Williams’ music is itself a prayer. A.I. is as beautiful and sad and sacred as any score he ever composed, and this track encapsulates everything that I love about his music.

_{Featured image by Jake Hills on Unsplash.}

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Prague: a playlist from the heart of Europe

Prague is a city steeped in history, where music has long been intertwined with its cultural identity. This playlist captures that spirit, featuring compositions that reflect the grandeur of its imperial courts, the struggles of its people, and the resilience of its artists. From Mozart’s Don Giovanni, composed specifically for Prague, to Smetana’s Má vlast, evoking the flowing Vltava, these works embody the city’s layered character. Jazz and rock music, too, played a key role in its modern history, fueling movements of resistance and unity.

Beyond its stunning architecture and historic squares, Prague’s music tells a deeper story of triumph and tragedy. This collection of ten pieces allows listeners to experience the essence of the city—not just as a visual marvel but as a place where melodies carry the weight of centuries. Whether through medieval chants, romantic symphonies, or revolutionary anthems, Prague’s soundscape is as enchanting as the city itself, ensuring that, as Franz Kafka wrote, “Prague does not let go; this little mother has claws.”

1. “Overture” from Don Giovanni, W. A. Mozart

Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote, “It is not easy to convey…the enthusiasm of the Bohemians for [Mozart’s] music.” Indeed, Mozart achieved some of his greatest successes in Prague, including the premieres of his Symphony no. 38 in D (Prague Symphony), the Clarinet Concerto in A, and the opera La Clemenza di Tito. The pinnacle of Mozart’s career, though, was the world premiere of Don Giovanni at Nostitz’s National Theater in the Old Town. On October 29, 1787, Mozart conducted the opera in front of a cross section of Prague society. Aristocrats sat sipping lemonade in the lower galleries, while the lower classes stood while downing sausages and beers. The singer Joseph Meissner wrote that when Mozart stepped onto the stage, a hush descended, and “one thousand hands lifted up to greet him.” At the end of the opera, the audience burst into “boundless applause,” and Mozart supposedly uttered the now-famous phrase, “My Praguers understand me.”

2. “Vltava” from Má Vlast,Bedřich Smetana

Bedřich Smetana wrote his magnum opus Má vlast (My Country) between 1874 and 1880. The piece comprised six symphonic poems, each celebrating a historical or natural site in Bohemia. The stirring second movement, “The Vltava” (Der Moldau), conveys the river’s journey through Bohemia. The composer explained that his most famous melody mimicked the region’s geography: “The Vltava swirls into the St. John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe River.” Smetana wrote Má vlast while becoming deaf and ill from the effects of syphilis. He remarked that only his fervent patriotism enabled him to complete the work. The man known as the “Father of Czech Music” died in 1884.

3. “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák’s popular opera Rusalka premiered in 1901 at the Czech National Theater in Prague. In this era of national rivalry, the city’s Czech and German speakers maintained their own theaters. Rusalka’s librettist Jaroslav Kvapil based Rusalka on fairy tales gathered by Czech ethnographers Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová. While Rusalka has similarities to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, this opera has decidedly Czech elements, including Bohemian folk melodies and characters like Vodník (water goblin) and the witch Ježí Baba. In this beloved aria, the water sprite Rusalka asks the moon to reveal her love to a human prince.

4. “Ranní mlha” (Morning Fog), Jaroslav Ježek

During the 1920s, Prague became a center of avant-garde culture. Prague’s Liberated Theater was made famous by the comic duo Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, as well as Jaroslav Ježek, who composed music for the duo and conducted the theater’s orchestra. Ježek combined contemporary genres, including classical, jazz, dada, and incidental film music. He died in 1942, an exile in New York, having escaped the Nazi occupation of Prague. This moody orchestral piece was recorded sometime between 1929 and 1938 at the Liberated Theater.

5. “Motliba pro Marta” (Prayer for Marta), Marta Kubišová

In 1968, the Communist Party secretary Alexander Dubček implemented “Socialism with a Human Face,” restoring the freedoms of expression and movement. In August 1968, Warsaw Pact troops, led by the Soviet Union, crushed the reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Marta Kubišová’s heartfelt balladbecame an anthem during the invasion. The lyrics are by Jan Comenius, the exiled seventeenth-century Protestant theologian: “Let peace still remain with this country! Let hatred, envy, spite, fear, and strife cease!” Kubišová’s music was censored, and in 1977, she became a spokesperson for the Charter 77 movement.

6. “Magické Noci” (Magical Nights), Plastic People of the Universe

Influenced by the Prog Rock movement, this Prague rock band was not overtly political. Yet, artistic director Ivan Jirous and several band members were arrested in 1976 for “hooliganism” and performing illegally. The “Trial of the Plastic People,” inspired dissidents to issue Charter 77, calling for the end of censorship. This song was first recorded at Václav Havel’s country home in the early 1980s. Its lyrics capture the mystical associations many have with Prague:

The time of magic
Night has come…
Delirium
We live in Prague
That’s where the spirit itself will
One day appear
We live in Prague
That is where.

7. “Start Me Up,” The Rolling Stones

In 1990, signs throughout Prague announced: “The tanks are rolling out. The Stones are rolling in.” That August, the Rolling Stones played to an audience of over 100,000 fans in Strahov Stadium, which, only months earlier, had been the site of the largest demonstration against Communist rule. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were so impressed with the enthusiasm of their Czech fans, many of whom had grown up listening to illegal bootleg versions of Stones hits, that they decided to waive their fees and donate all proceedings to a charity for disabled Czechoslovak children. Their choice to open the concert with “Start Me Up” signified to the crowd that a new era had indeed begun.

8. “Paš o Paňori,” Věra Bílá and Kale

The Romani singer from Rokyčany, a town an hour southwest from Prague, became a phenomenon of World Music in the 1990s. Her rich alto voice and charisma led critics to dub her the “Ella Fitzgerald of Romani Music.” Bílá, who performed and recorded with the Roma band Kale, hailed from the Giňa family of Romani musicians. Their songs mixed pop harmonies with traditional Romani instrumentation.

9. “Nad Vltavou,” Lucie Vondráčková

Lucie Vondráčková is a popular stage, television, and film actress and singer. Her aunt Helena was a pop phenomenon who got her start singing with Marta Kubišová in the 1960s. In this wistful song from 2018, Lucie Vondráčková recalls her favorite places in Prague: whispering cathedral arcades, small theaters, and lofty halls. The nostalgic refrain recalls the rhythm of the Vltava River that Smetana captured in his masterpiece: “Over the Vltava River, Prague dances with a swaying gait. No matter where the clouds go, my dreams will remain with her forever.”

10. “Perfect Day,” Lou Reed

 In 1990, Rolling Stone magazine asked President Václav Havel for an interview, and he replied that he would do it only if Lou Reed asked the questions. Havel first heard Reed’s music in 1968, while in New York, and he smuggled the Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat into Czechoslovakia. Havel frequently cited Perfect Day as his favorite song. In 2009, in a concert marking the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, Reed performed the hit in an unlikely duet with opera star Renée Fleming accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic.

There are also a number of additional songs after these ten in the playlist for your enjoyment!

_{Featured image by William Zhang via Unsplash.}

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John Williams and the two notes that changed cinema

Two notes. Probably the most famous two-note unit of music in modern history.

When a composer has a hit song or an instantly iconic tune, it can be a blessing and a curse. That tune becomes eternally attached to you—and sometimes it can eclipse the rest of your work.

John Williams is no one-hit wonder, and he is culturally affiliated with more than a dozen melodies—the many themes in the Star Wars series, the “Raiders March” from the Indiana Jones movies, the flying theme from E.T., the anthem from Jurassic Park, “Hedwig’s Theme” from the Harry Potter films, and so many more. An embarrassment of earworms.

And it all started with his theme from Jaws, his first “hit” and arguably the two notes of his that almost everybody around the world recognizes, even fifty years later. Jaws itself was a phenomenon: society, en masse, was scared out of its wits and out of the water—and so much of their terror was owed to Williams’ obsessive, predatory score. That film and its score took Williams, who had been toiling as a mostly anonymous film and TV composer for nearly twenty years, into the stratosphere of success and pop culture omnipresence. It cemented his partnership with Steven Spielberg and led directly to Williams scoring Star Wars.

The long, fruitful phenomenon of his career—more Oscar nominations than any individual in history, acclaim from world leaders and cultural icons and audiences around the globe—can be traced back to those ominous, oscillating E and F bass notes that signaled the first appearance of the famous great white shark.

But the Jaws score is so much more than the famous “two-note” signature; it’s an entire symphony of primal tension, tender character notes, and adventurous sea shanties. Those “two notes”—the motif actually includes a third note, D—are undeniably the score’s almost literal heartbeat, its unforgettable signature. This thematic motor is not only memorable, it’s also a powerful and clever narrative device; Williams’ concept was to have the theme stand in for the shark, which is often unseen, to speed it up and slow it down as a way of conveying its proximity to the human protagonists. Without ever feeling cartoonish, it is scoring as storytelling, music as both narrative and mind control—a gift at which Williams would prove to be a wizard.

However, to only remember the two notes is to reduce a masterpiece—a veritable symphony—to its simplest denominator. We do something similar with the opening notes in Beethoven’s fifth symphony, but both compositions are large-scale works that develop a central, hummable theme into an epic musical drama. Williams would never claim that his film scores are symphonies. Technically they are not: they don’t follow strict sonata form, and they are necessarily constructed around the architecture of movie scenes, their durations and interruptions and moods at the mercy of the filmmaker’s blueprint.

But Williams, for several years leading up to 1975, had been on an unspoken stealth mission to elevate his film scores above the perfunctory gebrauchsmusik that Hollywood film music so often was, and to approach each scoring assignment like a symphonist. He adopted the leitmotif tradition from opera—assigning a melody or motif to individual characters and story elements—and he honed a way of serving a film’s needs and all its synchronizations while simultaneously developing themes across the length of an entire score, giving each score its own compositional arc and having individual cues inherently connected to one another. Where movie music had so often been disjointed and reactionary, he labored at giving his scores internal logic and developmental integrity.

The turning point for Williams was a 1968 TV movie, Heidi, and he matured this art even further in two films for director Mark Rydell: The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972). These were the same two scores that alerted a young, soundtrack-collecting Spielberg to Williams, and that made him want to hire Williams the moment he started directing features. (Their first collaboration was The Sugarland Express, in 1974.)

It was an incredible lightning strike. Spielberg, 29, going against the grain of his peers, wanted old-fashioned, symphonic, explicitly narrative scoring in his big throwback movies—which were already like visual music and primed for big, romantic accompaniment. Williams, 43, was a veteran, trained in the old ways of orchestral scoring, and chomping at the bit to run free with his newfound self-directive. It was a match made in cinematic heaven, and Jaws was the moment when these two artists alchemized and became luminous.

Listen again to the Jaws score—the whole score. It begins with fear and, yes, those two notes—aptly swimming, churning with a brainless, relentless appetite for flesh. The theme proper, which expands from that seesaw motor into a rising-falling melody on solo tuba, a ghostly string line, watery harp arpeggios, and a lot of orchestral angst, evokes the paganistic dance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Williams goes primal with it in the many scenes of violent dismemberment.

He also introduces, in just one scene, a short passage of humanistic poetry. When Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is sitting at his dinner table one evening, gloomy after being slapped in the face by a mother who blames him for the grisly death of her child, Brody’s own son lifts his spirits when he begins to imitate his father’s hand gestures and facial expressions. Williams scored this poignant grace note with a low pedal tone on double bass and halting, gossamer figures played by piano, harp, and vibraphone. It’s one of the earliest examples of Spielberg and Williams creating a sacred moment in the midst of popcorn action and adventure, and it’s one of the elements that makes Jaws so much more than just a “scary shark movie.”

When Brody, Quint (Robert Shaw), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) go out to sea for the film’s second half, Williams scored their adventure like a swashbuckling, seafaring ballet—using the language of singalong sea shanties and Old Hollywood pirate movies. All the while the main Jaws theme remains an active participant, and none of this feels incongruous or out of place. Williams deftly mapped a musical story to the needs of the film’s narrative, but one that listeners can also follow as its own exquisitely satisfying journey.

It wasn’t the first time he had done this, but Jaws was by far the best film he had ever scored—and it signaled a new era not just in his career, but in film music as an art form. Working with two young directors with old-school tastes (Spielberg, and soon George Lucas), Williams revived an ancient way of composing and perfected the art of film scoring. His music ennobled and transcended the films themselves, and with Jaws he began his reign as arguably the finest composer for cinema who has ever lived.

And it all started with two notes—but really, it was a whole damn symphony.

^{Feature image: Photo by Noah Negishi on Unsplash.}

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Sabotage of the Normandie? [excerpt]

In the 1940s, the Normandie was the epitome of elegance and engineering—a French ocean liner renowned for its Art Deco splendor and unmatched luxury. When war loomed over Europe, the ship sought refuge in New York Harbor. In this excerpt from Gotham At War, Mike Wallace shows how its transformation from glamourous ocean liner to utilitarian troopship mirrored the world’s descent into conflict.

On February 9, 1942, the Normandie—the world’s most glamorous ocean liner—had been the site of feverish activity, as 1,750 workers from the Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company, and 675 other laborers from sixty assorted subcontractors, worked to convert the rakish, Art Deco, red-and-black vessel—whose elegant staterooms had hosted the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Cole Porter, and Ernest Hemingway—into a drabbed-down, bunk-laden troopship.

The Normandie had been tied up at Pier 88 (at the foot of West 48th Street) since arriving from Le Havre on August 28, 1939, four days before Germany invaded Poland. Rather than have its crown jewel brave torpedoes at sea, or bombs back in France, the French Line, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT), laid up its vessel indefinitely on September 6, leaving on board only a skeleton crew of 113 (out of 1,227) to keep it shipshape. There it stayed, through the fall of France, while other sea queens came and went (at one point, in March 1940, the gray-camouflaged sisters Elizabeth and Mary were berthed in adjacent piers).

On May 15, 1941, the US government took the Normandie into protective custody, leaving French ownership intact but housing a contingent of armed Coast Guardsmen on board to forestall possible sabotage by crew members loyal to the Vichy government. (The Pétain regime was getting increasingly cozy with Germany: Vice Premier Admiral François Darlan had just visited Hitler on May 11.) American thoughts turned to possible uses of the giant ship, in the event of an actual confiscation, and proposals were floated to use it as a dockside super- barracks, or to move it to Brooklyn, where it could serve as a backup power supply for the entire city, capable as it was of generating 150,000 kilowatts. When the Normandie was seized, on December 12, the day after war with Germany broke out, the troopship option won out. The vessel was transferred to the Navy, renamed the USS Lafayette, and turned over to contractors who began carting off the legendary artwork and sumptuous furniture to the Chelsea Warehouse and converting the staterooms, which had housed 1,972 First, Tourist, and Third-Class passengers, into bunkrooms that would carry 14,800 soldiers to war.

With nearly 2,500 workmen (plus Coast Guardsmen and crew) constantly coming and going, the noise, confusion and disorder on the ship attracted the attention of Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM. Security seemed dangerously casual to him, so Ingersoll assigned reporter Edmund Scott to find out how easily a potential saboteur might penetrate the Normandie’s defenses. It proved to be a snap. Scott joined Local 284 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and got a job lugging furniture aboard. Once on deck, it proved easy to wander about as he pleased, and he was struck by how simple it would be to set a fire. On January 3, 1942, he filed his story, which Ingersoll decided not to run—it being, in effect, a blueprint for sabotage—and instead got in touch with the authorities, who seemed uninterested.

When a fire broke out at 2:34 on the afternoon of February 9, crewmen discovered to their horror that the fire hoses could not connect to the standpipes, as the latter had been converted to American fittings, while the former still spoke French. Efforts to sound the fire alarm also failed—it had been disconnected a few days earlier, along with the ship’s link to the city’s fire department, by a subcontractor who had forgotten to tell anyone. In the meantime—it was a blustery winter day—the wind whipped through the corridors, spreading the blaze until it was beyond control, with great sheets of flame leaping skyward. Most of the nearly 3,000 on board dashed down the gangplanks and joined the thirty thousand New Yorkers who choked Twelfth Avenue. Fire trucks now combined forces with fire boats to inundate the upper decks: over the next four hours, they poured on 3,000 tons of water. The ship began to list. The French officers who had rushed to the pier realized the danger; their calls to refill the ballast tanks to ground the ship on the slip bottom were rejected, as were their urgings to close the portholes.

The inundation continued, as La Guardia, who had rushed to the pier, said it was out of the question to let a fire rage unchecked in midtown Manhattan. Even after the inferno seemed contained, around 8:00 p.m., the fireboats—ordered by Commissioner Walsh to stop pumping—didn’t get his radioed message; and having gotten dark, his semaphore signals went similarly unheeded. By the time a cutoff was accomplished, the Normandie had taken on 16,000 tons of water, most trapped on the port side, a burden no ship could have borne. At 12:30 a.m., Admiral Andrews gave the order to evacuate. At 2:32 a.m., it rolled over in the gray Hudson ice and came to rest, its funnels just barely above the waterline, slumped ignominiously in the mud.

Rumors of sabotage flew, starting at the top. FDR asked Navy Secretary Knox the next morning if any enemy aliens had been permitted to work at the site. The truth flew almost as quickly yet had difficulty catching up. The first press reports carried District Attorney Frank Hogan’s statement—“There is no evidence of sabotage”—and Admiral Andrews’s concurrence, along with the facts they had ferreted out. The fire, they said, had been an accident, caused by carelessness. One worker had been using an acetylene torch to cut down a metal stanchion in the Grand Salon, the resulting sparks contained by an asbestos board held up by another laborer. When the second man put down his board for a minute to help a colleague, a spark leapt toward a pile of 1,140 life jackets, each filled with flammable kapok, each wrapped in even more flammable burlap. Up they went, in turn igniting a nearby mass of bunk-bound mattresses. On February 12, the FBI staged a re- creation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; followed up with a full-dress investigation in which they interviewed 760 people, and came to the same conclusion. So did two congressional committees. No sabotage.

Nonetheless, doubts continued. Many refused to buy the verdict, especially after PM published Scott’s original story. The notion that Nazi saboteurs had done the deed was further nurtured by Alfred Hitchcock, then shooting and editing Saboteur (1942). The director inserted a sequence that showed his weaselly Nazi villain (played by Norman Lloyd) being taxied down the West Side past the capsized Normandie (shown in actual newsreel footage). As he surveyed the wreckage, Lloyd gave a perfectly calibrated, wickedly knowing half smile, as if to say: “Ah, our handiwork.” The Navy tried hard to muscle Hitchcock into excising the bit; it failed, and the ranks of doubters grew.

There was one person who did more than doubt—he was utterly certain the Normandie was the victim of foul play, because he himself had ordered the hit. No Nazi, he was the nation’s most celebrated jailbird, languishing up in Dannemora Prison (known as “New York’s Siberia”), doing a thirty-to-fifty-year stretch.

_{Featured image: SS Normandie at sea, colorized by Vick the Viking. Derivative work of Altair78. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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