Two CBS sitcoms have references Indiana Jones in the past couple of weeks: How I Met Your Mother invoked Last Crusade as Barney imagined that Ted and he entered the room where the grail and the fake grails were stored at the end of Last Crusade. The ghostly knight...
Sorry for the lack of Wednesday linkage posts recently. Bizarrely, on a day when I undertake an intercontinental move, I finally have time to catch up on linking. To commemorate the end of summer...
Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium" packs a punch for an action sci-fi film even if its punches don't land. So yeah ... Jodie Foster doesn't give her best performance and the other roles for women in the...
I am on vacation so I am a bit late with the FNB. This 2014 film looks like a heap of fun--when superhero impersonators stop impersonating and start hero-ing:
In the wide world: Taylor Fravel lets us know about China's surveillance fleet's op tempo (learn more about the China Marine Surveillance) and the role of cell phone service in territorial disputes Thane Gustafson talks about Russia's oil infrastructure Handy capsule history of the international oil market  Closer to home: From A Quantitative Peace, an examination of bipartisan appointments to the cabinet and sub cabinet (Would the idea of a "bipartisan" appointment to a cabinet ministry ever occur to someone in a Westminster government, aside from "national unity" movements?) Congress more...
LATE UPDATE: PTJ blogs about undergrad education
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have written a piece that is critical of the supposed move to hypothesis testing and the failure of IR folks to do grand theory. Â I have many reactions to this development that I thought I would engage in a bit of listicle: My first reaction was: Next title: why too much research is bad for IR.... As folks pointed out on twitter and on facebook discussions, it seems ironic at the least that someone who made a variety of testable predictions that did not come true (the rise of Germany after the end of the cold war, conventional deterrence, the irrelevance of...
Promotional and Disciplinary Peter Henne's guest post -- in which he asks questions about peer reviewing from the perspective of a junior scholar -- has been getting a lot of traffic. But it's a pretty big tell that no one has attempted to answer his questions. Iver Neumann's not the first scholar to be interviewed for both the Duck Podcast and Theory Talks, but he may be the first to have the latter interview released the day after he conducted the former. I've been enjoying Namesake, a webcomic involving characters travelling into classic stories. Check it out. Also take a look at Alex...
My colleague, Javier Corrales, has an excellent summary of the internal political dynamics in Venezuela on the news yesterday of President Hugo Chavez's deteriorating health condition. Corrales reports that the "Venezuelan government is busy preparing for the re-inauguration of the country's beloved president, Hugo Chávez, and also for his funeral." The timing of all of this makes for significant confusion: Venezuela's constitution offers some guidance on what to do. If the president dies, the vice president (in this case, Nicolás Maduro, an avowed communist) will take office. He will call a...
The seventeenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Iver Neumann, then of the London School of Economics.
As promised, this is my post announcing that we've sent an email out with the ballot for the 2013 OAIS awards.We believe that we sent one to everyone that requested one before the deadline, as well as to a list of people that we generated internally. If you did not receive one and requested one, my apologies. Please email us about getting one (but check your spam filter first). As the voting period lasts until January 31, we can also accomodate late requests for ballots. But the window is closing, so do let us know if you want one. Some information about the ballot: We have some brief survey...
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious conflict; he has also written on the role of faith in US foreign policy. During 2012-2013 he will be a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. So I’ve reviewed several manuscripts for journals in the past year, probably the result of always saying yes. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to do it, and actually enjoy it—at least for now. But I’ve had some concerns about the...