University Press Roundup

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

At Beacon Broadside, Dr. Jay Michaelson has a guest post in which he takes Justice Antonin Scalia to task for Scalia’s recent dissent in the U.S. v. Windsor Supreme Court case.

Historian Edmund S. Morgan passed away earlier this week, and the Chicago Blog has posted an excerpt from the foreword to Morgan’s The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 to honor his impressive career.

There’s been a lot of recent buzz around people who become “real-life mermaids” lately, and, at the Florida Bookshelf, Bonnie Georgiadis describes Weeki Wachee Springs, “the world’s only city of live mermaids.”

The Egyptian army has recently seized power from Mohamed Morsi’s government, so the term “coup d’etat” has been in the public discourse quite a bit over the past few days. This week, the Harvard University Press Blog used Edward Luttwak’s work to give a detailed introduction to the concept of the coup.

At Island Press Field Notes, Sarah LeRoy looks at rising temperatures across the US, and discusses how higher average temperatures could damage the current energy infrastructure.

Is the hyphen a helpful punctuation mark? At the JHU Press Blog, manuscript editor Michele Callaghan argues that it is, but that one should be judicious in deploying it.

The fifth round of the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue is currently on-going, and at the MIT Press blog, Barry Naughton argues that this dialogue “is an opportunity for us to clarify our interests and explore improved cooperation.”

At the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Shiloh R. Krupar claims that “hot spots” of toxicity and hazardous waste are more common that one might suppose, and that we need to come up with creative strategies in order to appropriately deal with them.

“Why should religion alone, of all the main areas of human life, be regarded as incapable of evolving, and in a manner leading to improvements?” At the OUPblog, J. L. Schellenberg looks at the idea of religious evolution.

Finally, at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, Jane Juffer asks, “Is it necessary to link legalization to border security?”

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!