ess than a year after the appearance of "The False Promise of International Institutions," the journal International Security published replies from Robert Keohane and Lisa Martin, John Ruggie, Clifford and Charles Kupchan, and Alexander Wendt....
British elites have been wondering for decades whether the UK still had clout on the global stage, and now they know: indeed, the country has an outsized influence on world affairs. But what a way...
We will have much, much time to ponder and study what happened yesterday... whether it was the weather that made the difference in London, why Cameron was such an idiot, and on and on. I have a few...
The common understanding in military circles is that the more data one has, the more information one possess. More information leads to better intelligence, and better intelligence produces greater...
I left academia because I wanted to make a difference. I went to graduate school for the normal reasons: I’d done well in school, I didn’t really want to get a job, and I needed to learn how to free my mother from the eternal torments of the demon Mephisto. For a while, everything was great. I slept in, worked late, and made excellent ramen. I loved being a part of the laboratory: running experiments, writing up results, and especially making charts. (Someone lent me a copy of Tufte’s book on data visualization--it changed my life!) I even liked teaching, unlike a lot of researchers. Part of...
In the northern city of Harbin, China, air quality was so bad ten days ago that concentrations of particulate matter reportedly reached 1000 micrograms per cubic meter at their peak, exceeding the World Health Organization's daily safe levels by a factor of 40 and shrouding the city in a fog so dense that commuters had trouble finding their way and a numbers of schools were forced to close. As China's pollution has reached intolerable levels, the air quality problem may pose an opportunity for China to address not only its dirty air but also its greenhouse gas emissions, as actions to reduce...
Policies and practices set up to avoid discrimination in the past have a tendency to expire. Remember, 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' was originally set up to protect gay service-members within the US forces. Similarly, the often unofficial rule of having one woman on hiring committees has reached its expiry date. Primarily as a result of effective equality and diversity campaigns in the 1980s and early 1990s, many departments instituted either an explicit or informal policy to include 'at least' one woman on each hiring committee- usually after finding that most hiring committees included no women,...
The world is buzzing with news that Germany has introduced a 'third sex'- or, the option to leave a child's gender as indeterminate. This raises a slough of questions and long-overdue discussion. Speaking of gender, Californians are debating a new law in California (AB 1266) that would allow trans-gender students to choose their preferred gender pronoun and identity. Critics worry that it would result in a violation of privacy (most of the concerns seem to be about boys using female bathrooms). Obama is pushing Congress to pass a bill that would prevent employers from discriminating on the...
OK, so it's not exactly Ali vs. Frazier, but NSA and the State Department are not happy with each other. From this morning's Cable at Foreign Policy, Yochi Dreazen reports: Secretary of State John Kerry touched off the furor when he said some of the NSA's overseas surveillance efforts -- which also included tapping into tens of millions of calls in France and Spain -- had been carried out without the Obama administration's knowledge or explicit approval. The remarks highlighted what appears to the White House's emerging strategy for dealing with widespread public fury over the programs:...
Happy Day After Halloween, folks. Resist the urge to steal your kid's candy. Once again, the internet is a magical place:
Aside from major sporting events, there have been a few items of import in the news. Health A new polio outbreak in Syria is endangering the drive for global eradication Climate Change A 2012 story that I missed, a drive to replace dirty cook stoves in India using experimental methods failed India not keen on addressing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) -- a short-lived greenhouse gas -- through the Montreal Protocol Washington, Oregon, California, and British Columbia join forces on regional greenhouse gas reduction scheme and coordinated carbon prices Africa A drone strike kills an al Shabaab...
Drones are on the international agenda this week, with Pakistan excoriating the US at the General Assembly and with human rights heavyweights Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch launching a new and scathing joint report. OpenGlobalRights, OpenDemocracy's global-south-oriented human rights wing, is having a number of interesting articles on the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine: here, here and views on the subject from India here. New York Times Magazine's online coverage of the South China Sea territorial dispute breaks ground in mainstream multi-media journalism. Seriously, check...