Oxford

Gender no longer applies

A controversial student at the famed university is ordered to pay damages to a Canadian abused in Tehran

Anyone who has read an interview with children’s author/grumpy village atheist Philip Pullman will surely have sensed that he was a bit of an a-hole. He proved the hypothesis, with the cataclysmic decisiveness of a Shaq slam-dunk, in a January 20 address concerning austerity-driven public-library closures in the UK. It is the speech of someone who believes every jot and tittle ever put to paper about his infallible genius; since the chief evidence of this genius is the success of his books in a degraded, semiliterate global publishing marketplace, Pullman naturally spends a lot of time blaming his nation’s library crisis on (a) modern publishing and (b) the market economy. Given such confusion, or perversity, it comes as no surprise that the supreme hero of his plea for untrammelled intellectual freedom turns out to be Karl Marx, who foresaw our sorry state oh so long ago.

Study claiming ethnic, gender inequality is out-of-date, says Oxford

A very rough—and not entirely chronological—sketch of Michael Ignatieff’s time abroad.

British university seeks to build up a multi-billion dollar endowment, just like the Yanks