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Stuart Vyse is Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College, in New London. In his new book, Going Broke: Why Americans Can’t Hold On To Their Money, he offers a unique psychological perspective on the financial behavior of the many Americans today who find they cannot make ends meet, illuminating the causes of our wildly self-destructive spending habits. In the article below he offers some quick tips to manage your finances. Hear a podcast with Vyse here.

Ways to save more:

1. Use your tax rebate to pay down debt or create or add to a savings account.

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Last week we posted an article by Gillian Riley, author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, which advised on how to have an Italian Christmas. This week we have a great treat for you, a discussion between Riley and OUP editor Ben Keene (also a regular OUPblog blogger.) Listen to the podcast below. The transcript is after the jump.

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Controversial enough to be jailed, bawdy, talented, end endlessly quoted, Mae West is the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. In her book, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, Jill Watts looks at the ways West borrowed from African-American culture and helps us understand this endlessly complicated woman. In the telling excerpt below we learn about how West’s first Broadway play SEX came to fruition.

One day, Mae West and some friends sat stuck in New York City traffic. In a rush, she ordered her driver to take a shortcut past the waterfront, and as her car rolled past the docks she spied a young woman with a sailor on each arm. West described her as attractive but with “blonde hair, over bleached and all frizzy . . . a lot of make-up on and a tight black satin coat that was all wrinkled and soiled. . . .She had runs in her stockings and she had this little turban on and a big beautiful bird of paradise.” Mae remarked to her companions, “You wonder this dame wouldn’t put half a bird of paradise on her head and the rest of the money into a coat and stockings.” But as her friends speculated that the bird of paradise was probably a seafaring John’s recompense and that this woman of the streets at best made only fifty cents to two dollars a trick, Mae grew enraged. Certainly she was worldly enough to know about prostitution, yet she recalled, “I was really upset about that.” She insisted it disturbed her to witness such exploitation of a woman—and also to realize that a woman could be so ignorant of her potential for exploiting her exploitation. (more…)

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The OUPblog and Link Love are taking the day off to recover from Thanksgiving. Enjoy your leftovers and be sure to come back Monday, we know you will need distraction after the holiday weekend!

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By Evan Schnittman

You have heard rumors of it for nearly a year now – Amazon has an ebook reader that will run on a new ebook platform powered by Mobipocket. Well, after many stops and starts, today Amazon released Kindle, or, what I call the “readers’ iPod.” This device, coupled with the awesome power of the Amazon web sales machine, represents perhaps the most significant moment in the history of eBooks.

I have always maintained that the iPod coupled with iTunes model is the key to a compelling ebook business. The iPod, perhaps the most fantastic device any of us own, would have been just another cool device sitting in our junk drawer if Apple hadn’t been prescient about the duality in digital content; Device + Network = Adoption. (more…)

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Laura Pappano is a former education columnist for the Boston Globe and co-author of Playing With The Boys: Why Separate is not Equal in Sports. In the op-ed below she brings her love of football to play with her love of competition.

If I hadn’t committed to baking a quiche (half ham, half broccoli and tomato) I would have watched the fourth quarter (okay second half) of the New England Patriots-Washington Redskins game. Or maybe I would have folded the laundry or lined up the paper bags of recyclables that have to go out on the curb every Sunday night.
I love football. Actually, I crave it. Like most obsessed fans I have an Abu Ghraib-like sensibility when it comes to watching the other team trip, fumble, throw interceptions and generally humiliate themselves. Was there anything the Pats couldn’t do to make the other guys look silly? Defensive lineman Mike Vrabel catches a TD with no one around. Tom Brady slides into the end zone. Randy Moss comes down with the ball even with multiple defenders hanging on him like raucous kids on a favorite uncle. Wes Welker, Laurence Maroney break tackles, spin and chew up yards. (There’s more -strip sacks, punt returns — but I’ll stop because this stuff is super-annoying to non-fans). (more…)

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By Kirsty OUP-UK

I am an avid Radio Four fan. If I don’t start my day listening to Today then, quite frankly, I feel that something is amiss. And weekend mornings without Saturday Live with Fi Glover and their resident poet, or the Archers omnibus edition on a Sunday, makes for the perfect soundtrack to eat breakfast too. This month the station celebrates its 40th birthday, and to celebrate we are publishing Life on Air: A History of Radio Four by David Hendy, Reader in Media and Communication at the University of Westminster, and former producer of current affairs programmes on Radio Four. Here, he takes a brief look at what he regards the milestone moments in the station’s history. (more…)

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By Kirsty OUP-UK

Now perhaps more than ever our society is conscious about offending religious viewpoints. In Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History, a new and timely book, David Nash traces the history of blasphemy from the Middle Ages up to the present day. Today I am thrilled to be able to bring you a piece written by Dr Nash especially for the OUP blog, focussing on Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, which was accused of blasphemy and caused a huge outcry upon its release almost 30 years ago.

One of the most frequently asked questions about blasphemy is why do people do it, since it sometimes seems such a victimless crime. The Roman Emperor Tiberius suggested that if God was offended by an individual’s behaviour he was capable of exacting his own retribution, so why should man concern himself with such issues. Since medieval times, however, we have tended to automatically think that states and individuals have been progressing away from policing the opinions of others substituting religious tolerance for persecution.

The motives of blasphemers became the subject of some debate in the medieval world. Whether people were misled by the actions of devils or demons, or had spoken blasphemy when scared, or whilst drunk, it was deemed clear that an incidence of blasphemous speech had occurred as some form of accident. In the modern world things have become more complex and the motives of those who blaspheme become linked to issues of personal rights. Our modern western world has empowered freedom of expression but has equally begun in recent years to consider the rights and feelings of those who might be offended by the ideas and words of others. Thus in our modern world artists and writers have been those who have caused most lasting and high profile offence. If these people can cause offence we perhaps should ask why they are prepared to do so.

Perhaps it is most pertinent to ask this question of the film ‘Monty Python’s ‘ Life of Brian.’ This film is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, was recently voted Britain’s best comedy film of all time by a BBC Radio Times poll, and remains the best known attempt to lampoon the history of religion in Britain and America. More importantly it could never claim that its motives were ‘serious’ in the manner that Mel Gibson could with ‘Passion of the Christ’ or Martin Scorsese could with ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’. So what did the Python team think they were doing? Did they set out to undermine and topple the leading religious ideology of the Western World?

Certainly it looked like it; the nativity scene was reworked with fiercely comic content, the Sermon on the Mount focussed upon the stupidity of those at the back who couldn’t hear properly, the crucifixion, moreover was turned into a sing-along comment on the potential miseries afflicting this life rather than paradise in the next. Taken as a whole the film seems unashamedly intent upon offending people – so were these the motives that persuaded the Monty Python team to make ‘Life of Brian’ and stir up the biggest controversy around blasphemy in the Christian World during the twentieth century? We know much about its development through television documentaries, newspaper clippings, and not least through Michael Palin’s recently published diaries. These suggest that ‘Brian’ emerged in the same way that other Python material did. Members of the team wrote separately and sometimes in teams in pursuit of situations that they primarily found funny. The initial idea was to show the life of an individual, ‘St Brian’, who was too late on the scene for all of Christ’s miracles, a situation that was clearly funny without being blasphemous. When the material was eventually put together its sum was greater than the parts and resembled the life story of an inadequate prophet, made inadequate through the shortcomings of the religion and religious people of his day. Thus the Python team began to focus upon the fact that they had produced a send–up of organised religion.

Once again their judgement of what was funny, worked well on celluloid, or adequately expressed their intentions made them cut material from the film. For example, the character of Otto, a Jewish fascist, never made the final version of the film because his presence diluted the power of other scenes. The Pythons could also censor themselves when it was required and this character would have made distribution in America potentially more difficult than it need have been.

So Monty Python wanted to make money, be funny and please its audience, and it succeeded in all of these. It was Python’s opponents who turned ‘Life of Brian’ into a threat to Christianity. It was these attitudes that made the Monty Python team, if only for a moment, become serious about what their film had done and made them strident proponents of freedom of expression. The Bishop of Southwark may have said to them that ‘Life of Brian’ would not have been made if the character of Christ had not existed. John Cleese and Michael Palin might equally have replied that ‘Brian’ would not have been made if the pretensions of people like the Bishop of Southwark had not existed.

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By Kirsty OUP-UK

The Scouting movement is celebrating its centenary this year. This week there are over 300 Scouts from 160 countries renewing their promises at a huge camp in Brownsea Island, Dorset, where Robert Baden-Powell held the first camp for boys in 1907. We at OUP are proud to publish the original 1908 edition of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, the original blueprint for the movement. To celebrate the Scouting Centernary, I’ve chosen an excerpt from the text that supplies useful suggestions for games to be played “in the club or in camp”. Our American friends may especially enjoy Baden-Powell’s description of “Basket Ball”!

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Rebecca OUP-US

Perhaps it is a NYC phenomenon but in the spring and early summer office softball teams are all the rage. Not being athletically inclined I asked Dan Ozzi to give us a little insight about the OUP team, The Oxford Blues.

The Oxford Blues softball team plays a dozen games each season. Not every game is on the nicest fields in New York. Sometimes we play on blacktop courts with kids playing basketball around us in left field. Last week, we played directly underneath the Queensboro Bridge on a clay field which greatly resembled a prison yard. I am pretty sure I saw a finger sticking out of the ground in left field.

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Each month we feature a person included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography who was either born in the United States, and made their name in the UK, or came to the US from the British Isles. This month we feature the actor and director Sam Wanamaker, born in Chicago on 14 June 1919 and best known in Britain as the inspiration behind London’s Globe Theatre.

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By Kirsty OUP-UK

Yesterday you read an extract from Virginia Smith’s new book Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. For today’s post she has kindly agreed to answer a few questions about her work.

OUP: How did you come to write a book on personal hygiene? (more…)

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I’m happy to confess here and now that I’m a girl who likes her mascara, and it’s a rare day that I appear in public without it. So, imagine my delight when our new book Clean came along. In it the author, Virginia Smith, explores the development of our obsession with personal hygiene, cosmetics, grooming, and purity. In the first of three posts, I’m happy to present the below short extract from the first chapter of the book.

Dirt is only matter out-of-place and is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. Nature does not care what we think, or how we respond, to matter in all its forms. But as a species we do care, very deeply, about our own survival. A dense mass of human history clusters around the belief that dirt is ‘bad’, and that dirt-removal (cleansing) is always ‘good’. The old Anglo-Saxon word ‘clean’ was used in a wide variety of situations: it was often blatantly human-centred or self-serving in a way we might call ‘moral’; but it was also used more objectively as a technical term, to measure or judge material things relative to other things. It was thoroughly comprehensive, and unquestioned.

Preceding all human cultural history however – certainly before any human history of personal hygiene – were billions of years of wholly a-moral species development. The exact date one enters this endless time-line is almost irrelevant; what we are really looking for are the time-spans or periods when things speed up, which in the case of homo sapiens was somewhere between c.100,000-25,0000 BCE, followed by another burst of development after c.5000 BCE. Throughout this long period of animal species development, all of our persistent, over-riding, and highly demanding bio-physical needs were evolving and adapting, and providing the basic infrastructure for the later, very human-centred, psychology, technology and sociology of cleanliness.

It is difficult not to use ancient language when describing the egotistical processes of human physiology – routinely described as the ‘fight’ for life – and in particular, our endless battle against poisonous dirt. Much of this battle is carried out below the level of consciousness. Most of the time our old animal bodies are in a constant state of defence and renewal, but we feel or know nothing about it; and the processes are virtually unstoppable. We can no more stop evacuating than we can stop eating or breathing – stale breath, of course, is also an expellation of waste matter. Ancient scientists were strongly focussed on the detailed technology of these supposedly poisonous bodily ‘evacuations’; and modern science also uses similarly careful technical terminology when describing bodily ‘variation’, ‘elimination’, ‘toxicity’ or ‘waste products’. In either language, old or new, inner (and outer) bodily ‘cleansing’ is ultimately connected to the more profound principle of ‘wholesomeness’ within the general system of homeostasis that balances and sustains all bodily functions.

Further extracts from other chapters of Clean can be found on Virginia Smith’s website.

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Break out your walking shoes NYC, it is time for the biggest (and in my opinion) best party of the year, Museum Mile. Head up to 5th avenue and 82nd street for free admission to nine museums, including the Metropolitian Museum of Art. In honor of this summer ritual we have excerpted a piece about the MET from Grove Art Online, written by Eric Myles Zafran. Get some history on this NYC landmark before you hit the jam-packed subways.

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I’m a nature girl. Few things make me happier than spending a spring day climbing a mountain, or exploring a lake in a kayak, or walking the shoreline at the ocean… So when summer arrives, (especially on Fridays) I yearn to be away from my computer outside in the sun. Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet, but amidst all the voices online you can sometimes lose your own. In fact I once spend three WHOLE days away from the internet, away from phones and books and toilets, on a three day solo in Maine. Just me, a lake, my sleeping bag and a journal. It is a truly refreshing experience, learning to spend time with yourself. So, it may seem natural that Thoreau is one of my favorite authors.

Recently I found an Oxford book titled Walden Pond: A History by W. Barksdale Maynard, and I thought it might be nice to share an excerpt from it with you. Perhaps you will find time this summer to visit Thoreau’s refuge, or to spend time thinking in your own personal Walden Pond.

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So yesterday was the anniversary of one of the most amazing musical moments of all time, the release of St. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album kicked off the Summer of Love (we can only hope this summer is 1/10 as exciting) and everything changed. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the American National Biography celebrated the event with an interactive album cover. To trip just click.

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note: This article first appeared at The Women’s Media Center.

by Joyce Antler

Jewish mothers have gotten a bad rap—for being overprotective, overfeeding, intrusive, manipulative, guilt inducing. The list is easily extended. It is almost impossible to remember that the Jewish mother idea, like other stereotypes attached to ethnicity and gender, is a creation of the media–celebrated, or rather, denigrated, in films, television, radio, fiction, drama, and on the nightclub stage. She is not real at all. (more…)

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Last week we asked you to comment on the quintessential culinary icon that never lived. This week, Andrew Smith, editor of The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink , has identified real American Culinary Icons. Who do you think is number 1? Julia Child, James Beard, Emeril Lagasse, Alice Waters or someone we didn’t mention? Be sure to let us know in the comments what you think! Check back on Thursdays throughout May for more great posts by Andrew Smith who teaches culinary history and professional food writing at The New School University, serves as Chair of the Culinary Trust and as a consultant to several food television productions.

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Geoffrey E. Hill author of Ivorybill Hunters: The Search for Proof in a Flooded Wilderness is the Scharnagel Professor of Biology at Auburn University. Hill spent a year in the swamps of northern Florida looking for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and his adventures are relayed in his new book. Below Hill takes the time to answer some of our questions.

OUP: Has finding Ivory-billed Woodpeckers been a goal of yours for a long time? (more…)

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Okay, I know Christmas is quite far away but I couldn’t resist sharing this great video of Gene Autry on the The Statler Brothers show in 1985. To learn more about Gene Autry check out yesterday’s post with Holly George-Warren author of Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry. (more…)

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I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade and inevitably, when I meet someone new, they end up asking me questions. How and why did I stop eating meat? Do I miss it? Do I cheat? Long ago I stopped telling them the real story (which is dreadfully boring) and started recounting the scene below from The Simpsons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJqx-AvUjCg

I imagine I’m not the only one out there that uses The Simpsons to prove a point. Well, our friends over at the DNB have created a very special happy birthday treat for The Simpsons fans. Keep reading!

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