This week Dan Drezner hosted a guest post on the politics of Miss Universe and I responded by pointing out the lack of/and the need for a gender analysis in his post. In his response, Drezner asks an important question: "Why on God's green earth would I want to...
The first video ever played on MTV, back when MTV played music videos most of the time, was the one-hit wonder "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. A lament about how new technology ended...
The subfield of international relations seems to suffer from an inferiority complex. While most subfields of political science do their research and trust that the results are relevant to policy for...
After last week's diplomatic overtures on Syria, we've entered a period of relative calm and back to our mixed bag of stories of interest. NPR is running a fabulous series on Brazil in the lead up...
Phil Schrodt's very smart thoughts about the NSA and surveillance. [A Second Mouse] Anton Strezhnev analyzes the prospects for Snowden's extradition. Strezhnev's take is very smart, but I wonder if he overestimates the degree to which this will be a normal case in which Beijing would not choose to intervene. After all, Snowden fled to Hong Kong because of its reputation for freedom--which is something that Beijing might find convenient in underlining one country, two systems. [Causal Loop] Ben Schmidt has a more interesting and nuanced view on the "crisis in the humanities" than we normally...
Jeffrey Toobin's "Edward Snowden is no Hero" has generated some very sprited debate in my Facebook circles. Most of my online interlocutors fall into the left civil-libertarian camp, so readers might imagine their consensus view of Snowden's action. I'm much less sanguine. I take the ethical, moral, and legal obligations of holding a high-level security clearance very seriously. You better have a damn good reason for violating those obligations, and it isn't at all clear to me that disclosing a legal intelligence-gathering program subject to active congressional oversight crosses that...
Yesterday the world lost one of its great contemporary literary lights. Iain M. Banks, named "one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945" by The Times in 2008, died of gall bladder cancer that had only been diagnosed this February. He finished his last novel -- ironically, it's a story about the final weeks of a man dying of cancer -- very recently, and it's due to be published before the end of the month. From all reports, he passed peacefully, having spent as much of his last months as possible spending time with his wife and close friends. Banks was accomplished as an author of...
Good mornin' ducks... Here's some linkage you might want to read (on stuff other than the NSA)... The IMF admitted to violating its own rules to bailout Greece and that the austerity program which accompanied the bailout did not restore market confidence. The housing bubble in America is back with a vengeance as bidding wars are heating up in the major urban markets. I think we know where this story goes next... But wait, where is this cold hard cash coming from? At least some of it is from China. The US imprisons 430,000 people each year on immigration charges (with several hundred kept...
Comet vs. Sun. Letting go of Mandela (via). Putting the DoD civilian workforce in perspective. Chinese grand strategy. Music, social movements, the body, and emotions. Some NSA stuff: Drezner, Levinson-Waldman, Lemieux. And: How economists aren't physicians. Adversity and affinity in MMORPGs.
Well, sort of. I've been getting a surprising number of emails asking for new podcasts. This semester was a killer, and no one else on the team wants to spearhead the effort. I hope to do some more before all hades breaks loose next academic year. But for now, I should note that my series over at New Books in Science Fiction & Fantasy has reemerged from its own hiatus -- and with a cross-over podcast! In it, I interview USC's Patrick James about his and Abigail E. Ruane's book, The International Relations of Middle-Earth: Learning from the Lord of the Rings. Well, what are you waiting...
The Center for a New American Security released a report yesterday entitled “The Seven Deadly Sins of Defense Spending.”[1] In it, they lay out some very basic (but very fundamental) ways that the DoD can cut costs but “preserve a strong and highly capable U.S. military.” Many of the suggested cuts seem like something you would see Dunder Mifflin being advised to do: reduce redundancy in IT management, cut pay allowances, increase pharmaceutical cost sharing, etc. And, perhaps that’s the beauty of the plan: reduce normal day-to-day business expenses in such a way that it allows the DoD to...
In the vein of recent graduations everywhere and the exams students had to take to get there, and thinking there is now ample evidence out there to get closer to winding up a debate that has raged in both policy and academic circles, let's keep in succinct: "Fukuyama was right. Huntington was wrong. Discuss"I said it was succinct!