This is a guest post by Sean Kay. Professor Kay is chair of the International Studies program and professor of politics at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is also Mershon Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. ...
Georgetown University's debate coach comments (video) on the first presidential debate of 2012. PM's not the only one to respond to John Quiggin's post on the US Navy; Robert Farley also has a lot...
Political scientists like to complain about how little they are paid, which tends to be irritating to any number of other groups, most notably anyone who has a job other than that of a political...
Acting was a big part of Battleship. At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes a post that seeks to sink a thousand ships: The trillions of dollars that have been spent on building, maintaining and...
Yes. Your students have less observable brain activity duringlecture than when they're asleep.Updated for the humorless. See postscript below.A new paper in IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering suggests so:Long-term assessment of EDA [a measure of nervous system activity] revealed interesting trends in the participant’s sympathetic modulation over a week-long period. Intervals of elevated EDA frequently corresponded to times when the participant was studying, doing homework, or taking an exam. This is possibly due to the increased cognitive stress associated with these activities. The...
In lieu of friday nerd blogging last week (which I saw Vikash had covered) Rob Farley and I blogged heads about gender in Foreign Policy, gender and race in Game of Thrones, and popular culture in foreign affairs. [Warning: There are some mild and at least one not-so-mild TV and book spoilers in our GoT discussion. However we do let you know when these are coming.]On the subject of FP's Swimsuit Issue, Rob asked me a great question: "What did Foreign Policy do right?" I provided a facetious answer in my earlier post, and a rambling one in the video , so here's the concise, honest version:1)...
For awhile I was collecting links and such to make an argument about Korea and Japan working together on big issues like China and NK, or finally clinching the much-discussed but little worked-on FTA. Both the realist and the liberal in me wanted to see two liberal democracies working together in a tough environment with similar structural threats. Initially I had written: “This may be the biggest news of the year if it actualizes: Japan is apparently considering real defense cooperation with SK. If you follow East Asian security, this is a revolution. Try here, here and here.” But this is...
Charli, Dan and Patrick at ISA 2013? The academics/educators who write this blog often locate their research and teaching interests in texts from popular culture. Dan has co-edited a book on Harry Potter and IR. Patrick teaches a course on science fiction and social science. Dan offers a course on science fiction and politics. Charli blogs frequently about science fiction and has a working paper on "Security or Human Security? Civil-Military Relations in Battlestar Galactica." I've frequently taught a class on "Global Politics Through Film" and am working on a project about "the comedy of...
This post started off as a reply to a comment under Robert Kelly's post on historical institutionalism, but it got so long I thought it deserved its own post.There is a great deal of ambiguity in how we use the term "decision" in contemporary IR, an ambiguity that also infects the closely related concept of "choice." Briefly, we use these terms to refer both to objects of explanation and to means of explanation -- and the ambiguity of our usage leads the the misleading conclusion that to explain decisions or choices necessarily involves a micro-reductionist account of interests, beliefs, and...
The assassination of Osama bin Laden by US special forces certainly has created a political problem for the Republican party. They spent years demagoguing the war on terror, but now the symbol of that struggle is dead. The man who green-lighted the operation wasn't George W. Bush or John McCain, but Barack Obama. And you can bet that the Democrats are going to beat that drum from now until November. For example (via): My own view is kind of "meh." The death of Osama bin Laden resulted from years of intelligence and military activities; the President's approval of the operation marked a...
After reading the FP special 'sex' issue this week I had the strangest feeling. It was like I woke up and it was 1991 and I was 13 again reading teen magazines. After reading Charli's excellent post on the issue I couldn't help but chime in. You see, I know that one of the obvious retorts to some of the criticism that has been waged about the issue will be 'Hey, it was meant to raise a few issues and have some fun while we're at it. We're riffing off the Cosmo style 'sex' issue and just mixing it up. Lighten up." Ok, fair play FP. But keeping with that theme let me start by saying that most...
Drogo as angry brown man.Source: dothraki.orgGraddakh! We the brown people of Vaes Dothrak collectively curse the producers of HBO and the slanderous "creator" of our world, which you call the Game of Thrones. We know that your people have a long standing tradition of questionable and objectionable racial imaginings in your "fantasy fiction" genre. So we are not surprised by your ifaki ignorance of our civilization. Anyway, we have also come to understand that much of your television programming broadcasts an unreflective and unapologetic world of whiteness, so maybe you can't help but...