Americans tend to have a very simplistic view of the world. For example: we are opposed to Evil Dictatorship. You are opposed to Evil Dictatorship. We are Liberal Democrats. Therefore you must be Liberal Democrats, too. I suspect that we are not alone in this...
For members of generation X like myself, Star Wars is one of the constitutive myths of our childhoods. The Force, lightsaber duels, the Millennium Falcon, "I am your father," "he's my brother,"...
I was going to reply to Peter's comment on my last post about Harry Potter in the comments section, but it started to get too long and I thought I'd better make an actual post out of it. I am also...
Apparently, I wasn't the only person who thought that this might be when it happened...
Today's IHT has possibly one of the most idiotic commentaries about US-Russian relations that I've read in a long time. In this column, [sorry, it's behind the pay wall] John Vinocur essentially places all the blame for the current deterioration in US-Russian relations squarely on Russia's shoulders.He writes:Does anybody out there remember Dick Cheney's harangue in Lithuania last year, the growlingly bellicose one that the Russians regard as heralding a new Cold War?Here's how that dreadful man, who is 800 percent responsible for the Russians suspending the treaty on Conventional Forces in...
Donald Douglas points me at Robert Kagan's new piece in Policy Review, "End of Dreams, Return of History." (Read Douglas' own commentary on the piece at his blog, Burkean Reflections.) Kagan's piece nicely summarizes a number of important trends that academics and policy-makers have started to recognize over the last few years--ones that have formed the backdrop of some of my past (PDF)--also available here (PDF)--and future research projects:• We're seen a rise of deliberate counter-hegemonic activity by a number of autocratic and quasi-autocratic states, most notably Russia, China, and...
I've been meaning to write something about the tit-for-tat between the UK and Russia and the strange and unfolding saga of Boris Berezovsky, but things keep changing before I get anything coherent written. So, let's take a quick look to Russia's neighbor to the west: Belarus.Belarus gets little attention in the western media. They haven't had an exciting people's revolution to cover. The president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, keeps a pretty tight handle on the media and on the opposition, which tends to be disorganized and ineffective, fighting amongst themselves instead of uniting in the common...
That highbrow publication, USA Weekend Magazine:Scores of absurdtie-ins include "If Harry Potter Ran General Electric," "Looking for God in Harry Potter" and our personal favorite, "Harry Potter and International Relations," in which the boy wizard is linked to real-life globalization and geopolitical issues.The bizarre thing here is actually not the criticism-based-on-title of our book (for redux, see Scott McLemee writing at Inside Higher Ed), but the accusation that Looking for God in Harry Potter is nothing more than an attempt to cash in on Potter's success.It seems that Jeffrey Resner...
Welp, we know that a new Harry Potter book is about to come out, because the Washington Post has featured the obligatory piece on Christian reactions to Harry Potter, along with a side-helping of wonderment at the rise of explicitly Christian publishing.Too bad this is so not new.The article points out that some Christians are uncomfortable with the depiction of magic in the series, and notes that literature marketed as Christian in content (as opposed to the previous thousand years or so of Christian literature which was, well, just literature) is becoming a large and important market...
It's always fascinating to me to see certain traditional arguments, arguments that I would have liked to think were long dead and buried, resurface in slightly altered form. Highbrow intellectual critics whom I would like to think have been suitably disarmed as a result of their prior encounters with their opponents seem to reincorporate and revivify as if by magic when a target at all similar to the prior object of their criticism emerges; out they spring, wand in hand, ready to cast a hex or three and ruin everyone else's fun.That's what Ron Charles seems to have in mind with his...
On Thursday, ICE agents raided El Pollo Rico, a very, very popular Wheaton area pollo a la brasa restaurant, charging the owners with money laundering and hiring illegal immigrants.Now, as it happens, I live really close to this place, and I often (used to) go there for chicken. It is perhaps the best chicken one can get anywhere--in the DC area Zagat guide, they usually had a top 10 finish for food, up there with all the fancy restaurants, and they were a decidedly cheap eats venue. For $13.50, I could feed my whole family on a whole chicken, cooked to perfection, with a side of fries, cole...
Today, I read an interesting article linking baseball and political science -- "The Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule," (warning: pdf) by Christopher Zorn and Jeff Gill, published in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Despite the jargon, the piece is quite readable.Zorn and Gill report evidence that baseball fans are far more likely to embrace the designated hitter (DH) if they are Democrats:Most important, and consistent with our expectations, we find that self-identified Democratic Party members are more likely to support the DH rule than are either...