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...communist era, private giving had to be done in conjunction with the authorities. "Those who acted outside the state, as the Rockefellers did [in the U.S.], could have been seen as potentially dangerous, undermining the power of the government," says Vivienne Shue, a professor of Chinese studies at Oxford University. But the situation is changing. In January, Beijing explicitly appealed to the country's growing class of multimillionaires for help in addressing China's myriad social ills. "They're beginning to encourage charity, but they're not quite certain of the direction," says Rupert Hoogewerf, a Shanghai-based journalist...
...involved in a plot to blow airliners traveling from Britain to the U.S. out of the sky. The British last week arrested 24 suspects, one of whom was later released. Most of them were from London, although six were arrested in High Wycombe, a market town between London and Oxford, and two in the city of Birmingham, in the British Midlands. A British official says the group had been monitored for more than a year and intended to use ostensibly innocuous liquids to construct bombs that would then be detonated in flight by disguised iPods and other devices. The British...
...hard to be a wine aficionado in college. Whenever I stare into a plastic cup full of God-knows-what at a Harvard party, I always think of that scene from Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” where an intoxicated Oxford student vomits on another, and one of the drunkard’s friends explains to the vomitee: “The wines were too various….It was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was mixture...
...other sticky material is used to trap a person." The term itself was popularized by the 19th-century Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, in which the character Br'er Fox makes a doll out of tar to ensnare his nemesis Br'er Rabbit. The Oxford American Dictionary defines tar baby much like Romney used it, "a difficult problem, that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it." But the term also has had racial implications. In his book Coup, John Updike says of a white woman who prefers the company of black men, "some questing chromosome within holds...
...dictionary writers point out that a word's origins and its popular perception can be divergent. Current examples include the detoxification of the words suck and slut, both of which have slipped into mainstream usage. "All words have life cycles," says Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of the Oxford American Dictionary "What's really important is not etymologically what it means, but the effect it has." And that is a constantly evolving standard. Witness the debate over who can and can't use the N-word. McKean says that the next print version of the Oxford American Dictionary will note...