Friday is here. SEMESTER IS OVER. Fresh snow on the Vermont slopes. Three very good things. I'm surprising my wife with this news -- I've already lined up the kids for summer camp. More fodder on Nixon and Kissinger's support for a corrupt Shah. Kind of where we are...
Via reader JW, an exceptional experiment from Yale: In a field experiment conducted during trick-or-treating at Halloween, we find that a visual cue of Michelle Obama prompts almost twice as many...
As readers might have surmised, a number of  the bloggers at the Duck are into the philosophy and history of science. PTJ has written an exceptional book on the philosophy of science in the context...
If you ever thought that emotion, mythology, and the uterus didn’t matter in foreign policy, reading debates about women in the military should change your mind. I expected some debate to ensue when...
 One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous robotics leading to fully autonomous armies: that is, eliminating the human presence from battle-spaces altogether. The general consensus is that this is unlikely, with which I am not claiming to disagree. But what fascinated me was a particular argument to this effect: that lethal robots would never be able to replace human beings as sacrifices in the name of the nation. Two constitutive...
More politics of Batman, this time with special Schmitt sauce. Well, yeah, superheroes are kind of about who gets to decide the exception.... and their answers are often fascist. Wasn't that a major point of Watchmen?Thomas Wright: the Republican Rejection of UNCLOS was a Very Bad Thing. Alexander Cooley: what Central Asia tells us about a post-hegemonic world. Against adverb police. Two sides of the same COIN?Joseph Young discusses extremely extreme extremists. Well, not really. More like what makes someone an extremist. But the post-pic is of Doritos. So score!Chinese urban geography via...
I spent last week doing "field research" - that is, participant-observation in one of the several communities of practice whose work I'm following as part of my new book project on global norm development. In this case, the norm in question is governance over developments in lethal autonomous robotics, and the community of practice is individuals loosely associated with the Consortium on Emerging Technologies, Military Operations and National Security. CETMONS is an epistemic network comprised of six ethics centers whose Autonomous Weapons Thrust Group collaboratively published an important...
 Too good to wait (spoilers for Dark Knight Rises):
I've put together a collection, albeit not a comprehensive one, of posts at the Duck of Minerva that focus on what might be called "the profession." The link is now a tab (Academia and Graduate School) below our banner.The rationale? Many of our most consistently popular pieces -- including ones that still get significant hits years after their publication -- fall into this category, so I think it might be a good service to try to consolidate links to them.In theory, post labels should do that, but after seven years of myriad bloggers our "labels" are a disaster. We have over a thousand;...
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I am now chief interviewer for the New Books Network's SF and Fantasy channel. I've got some exciting authors lined up for launch, and a few more who have agreed to record in September. But my response rate has dropped off dramatically in the last two weeks.In retrospect, August might not have been the best time to start interviewing.Anyway, I'm hoping that many of the outstanding requests will come through. But I also need a longer list of authors to pester contact, especially if I'm going to bank enough interviews to start the channel at two podcasts per...
The battle for Aleppo continues.Are China and Russia providing the US with an excuse for not acting in Syria? James Vreeland, quoted in the article, thinks so. Did the USSR win the solar-system race?Joshua Foust slams Alex Cooley for the content of his interview in Harpers.Sarah Wanenchank on digital dualism in augmented-warfare discourse (via Adam Elkus).Brad DeLong discusses the tragedy and farce of US inaction on climate change. Kindred Winecoff can't believe that he's defending Waltz in light of Patrick Porter's critique.A disturbing illustration of how Barbie screws up female body...