As part of my interest in electric vehicles, I have listened to 7 or 8 audiobooks on Elon Musk, EVs, and Tesla (Vance, Isaacson, Niedermayer, McKenzie, Slobodian, Higgins, Colias) including his takeover of Twitter (Schiffer) and time at DOGE (Enrich). I've not yet...
I was supposed to attend a conference for American academics to debrief on the recent Israeli elections. American Airlines did not cooperate and what was supposed to be a five or six hour trip to...
Patrimonialism has been making a comeback recently as a framework for interpreting Trumpian governance. Kopstein and Rauch set out masterful dissections of why Trump’s actions...
Big ideas often get watered down when tested empirically. Scott Appleby’s masterful Ambivalence of the Sacred—which includes deep, rich discussions of religious peacebuilding—is usually reduced to...
Pauline Sophie Heinrichs, Nina Krickel-Choi, Jennifer Mitzen, and Brent Steele join Dan and Patri…
Political scientists have a name for why only Nixon could open relations with Mao’s China, or why only a Likud hardliner like Begin could make peace with Egypt: they call it the Nixon-to-China effect. The standard account explains why the public finds these moves credible. It doesn’t explain why...
Even if you did have a LLM that could mirror human actions and decision-making processes in a wargame, it wouldn’t actually be sufficient to model how weird people are both as individual thinkers or thinking in groups
Constitutional orders rarely announce that they are becoming less constitutional. More often, the institutions remain in place while their functions begin to blur. A legislature still meets. Courts still issue opinions. An executive still claims to act under law. Yet the practical balance changes...
Amid US and Israeli strikes aimed at preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, sovereignty and security have become an urgent priority for Tehran. This has been reinforced with peace negotiations stuck in limbo while Tehran and Washington have just exchanged the biggest round of...
Or, who is the strawman here? This is my second post reflecting on the recent American Political Science Association annual meeting. The last one expressed concern about a new trend in the study of international politics. This one will focus on a long-standing issue that just doesn’t seem to go...
Are we reaching the limits of experimental approaches to international politics? I just returned from the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in Boston. I met up with some friends, connected with new people, provided some thoughts on academia to a grad student who reached...
Did the pandemic durably change our pedagogy in International Relations (IR), or were pandemic-induced changes only temporary measures with which we have since dispensed? This is an open question and not one I can conclusively answer here, but this is on my mind as I am writing a new preface and...
Potentially inflammatory rhetoric should be addressed with dialogue, not bans Recent antisemitic attacks have rightly led to concern among the US Jewish population. Over the weekend a man assaulted worshippers at a New York synagogue in an antisemitic attack. A man stabbed a Jewish man outside...
We keep hearing that we live in an unprecedented “age of sanctions.” Trade and globalization data tell a different story — the world got bigger, not meaner.
Editorial Note: this post contains spoilers. Christopher Nolan is one of the most important working American movie directors. He is one of the few directors in the Hollywood system who consistently delivers non-franchise blockbusters. Many of his films, including Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, are...
In January of 2025, the Republican party gained “the trifecta,” controlling the Presidency and the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Since then, congressional Republicans have done little to assert the prerogatives of the legislative branch. “The wrath of Donald Trump,” as one...