As first impressions go, Oxford does a bang-up job.The most impressive bit? The breadth and depth of conversation. Topics from the week:
- Transitional justice and Brazil’s Truth Commission, investigating crimes committed during the military dictatorship of the 60s-80s
- Twitter’s efforts to establish a European sales office and their struggle to build a functional search tool
- Water policy and conflict between India and Bangladesh
- The formality of US v Italian email correspondence
- Government policy toward the blind in India and sub-Saharan Africa
- Indian regulation of foreign direct investment
- The taxonomy of the study of math (er, “maths”) and the use of prime numbers in cyber-security
- Why some western Norwegians are brunette instead of blonde
- The continuing effects of the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine on neighboring Belarus
- Which coalition partners in Afghanistan are willing to get their boots dirty
- Networked, fragmented, mercenary, and communal organizations
- The efforts of Unilever, Safaricom, and other corporations to alter their strategy to include environmental and social considerations
- The rebranding of social psychology as behavioral economics
- The checklist method of decreasing medical inefficiency and error
- Venture capital funds’ struggle to raise funds as pension funds pull back from high-risk investments
- Amazon’s selling of as-you-need-it storage space and
- The British military unit that scouts out wobbly countries to prepare to evacuate large numbers of citizens
- Binomial and normal distributions
- One architecture firm’s sneaky designing of a second potential use into its structures
- The disappearance of housing reconstruction money in New Orleans
- American conversational enthusiasm and overuse of superlatives
… in addition to 11 new swear words in Hindi, Arabic, French, Czech, and Bengali.
Mark Clayton Hand, Ph.D. 
I bet “American conversational enthusiasm and overuse of superlatives” was the awesomest one!
“Why some western Norwegians are brunette instead of blonde?” Have you found the clubs w/ free champagne yet? And, why is this a topic of conversation? (PS: I noticed a serious lack of blondes at Yale SOM.)
I don’t understand most of what you just said. Come to Jordan where at school we talk about things like “Letters aren’t as fast as emails” and “Hmm, it smells delicious!”