"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Â So spoke Winston Churchill, after the Allied victory in the Second Battle of El Alamein. Â We could say much the same of his defeat in the 1945 general...
AJ Hartley: "why books are better than movies." I'm not sure that's always true -- surely some films surpass their source material, but I'm hard pressed to think of an example off the top of my...
I'm presenting PTJ's and my "End of IR Theory" paper at Berkeley next week. Here's a sneak peak at some of the lecture slides.Unfortunately, my LOLspeak is rusty.Â
Fellow Duck Brian Rathbun has a new piece in International Studies Quarterly comparing international relations scholars' paradigmatic preferences to their political preferences, based on TRIP survey...
As regular readers know, I assigned The Hunger Games in the last iteration of my SciFi class. Ever since then, I've been thinking about doing a short book with, one hopes, a less boring title than "The Politics of the Hunger Games." Indeed, I just finished talking to an editor about it. Unlike the Harry Potter and International Relations volume that I co-edited, or the Battlestar Galactica volume that I co-wrote the conclusion for, this would be a short monograph intended for a non-academic audience.So far I've sketched out chapters with titles like "Capitol Rules: Panem as Empire," "Capitol...
As I gathered content today for my upcoming ISA presentation on social media, I was delighted to discover that my "Blog Wars" video from few years back (a response to a theory-policy debate stirred up by Joseph Nye and Dan Drezner) is cited in an academic paper as an actual contribution to the debate! The paper itself is quite good: Bradley Parks and Alena Stern conduct one of the few empirical studies I'm aware of how scholars actually interface with the world of policy. They use as a hook the debate over policy relevance sparked off by Joseph Nye's "Scholars on the Sidelines?" op-ed back...
A twitter discussion got me thinking about this. We end up reading tons of CVs, developing opinions and pondering what people are thinking. First, there are no real rules for writing a CV except these:Read other people's cv's to get a sense of what looks normal (don't be strange).Take care so that it is not messy, has no typos (twitterfightclub pressure has killed my typing skills), and so on.Unless your audience is just a bunch of dim-witted bureaucrats, do not pad the CV. Most profs have been there, done that, so they can see stuff that is just crap used to make the CV longer. It has...
Over the last few weeks it has been hard not to get overwhelmed by all the headlines related to the Republican primaries and women. There has been theRush Limbaugh fiasco, with Rush outdoing his usual dink-guisting self by calling law student Sarah Fluke a slut. This has been followed by outrageous comments from almost all the Republican candidates: Romney just declared that he would get rid of planned parenthood, Newt has had a consistent 'woman problem' (and I don't mean his two ex-wives), and Santorum has had a string of great one-liners, including the recent declaration that sex should...
With Putin’s ‘return’ to the presidency, Russia is now officially a joke as a serious great power state. True, Putin has been ridiculous for awhile, what with those shirtless photo-ops that came across like desperate, bizarre geopolitical ‘ads’ that Russia is still a superpower. But this is different. Not even Chinese elites play the sorts of merry-go-round games at the top that Putin has engineered in the last 6 months. To their great credit, Chinese presidents and premiers serve and go. Russia is now the only one of the BRICS in which power does not rotate. Instead, Putin is starting to...
 A monologue from Julian Comstock, Robert Charles Wilson's fascinating novel of post-scarcity America:You might want to consider your tone of voice, Private Commongold. May I offer you a lesson in Civics? There are three centers of power in the modern Union, and only three. One is the Executive Branch, with its supporting host of Owners and Senators. One is the Military. And the last is the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth. They're like the tripod feet of a stool: each supports the other, and they work best when they're equal in reach. But you're not a propertied person, Mr. Commongold, as...
Yesterday, long-time Duck of Minerva contributor Bill Petti taped an on-field segment for "Clubhouse Confidential" on the MLB Network! For the non-baseball nerds, MLB = major league baseball.Your browser does not support iframes.It's great to see Bill using his methodological and analytical skills in this way. This is not his first appearance on the program to provide sabermetrical analysis.Most of the time, Bill uses his talents in his "work with senior executives at various pharmaceutical, financial, and consumer packaged goods companies to help them align their human capital and processes...
So Kony 2012 has been labeled the fastest-growing viral video of all time. While it's not clear how many of those "views" included actually watching the whole video, Invisible Children has certainly made an impact. The film has been criticized and satirized for inaccuracy, narcissism and counter-productivity... though not by everyone. After a week of observing the debate, I have three thoughts. 1) The message is about the power of social media, not about Kony. I went for almost 72 hours following the Kony2012 coverage before actually finding 20 minutes to watch the film. When I did, I was...