Every year I make my third year Bachelor students read Carol Cohn’s article “Sex and Death in the rational world of defense intellectuals” and they are genuinely surprised by the number of penile metaphors one can use to describe a missile. Except this year: current...
The Hayseed Scholar podcast has come to a close. In this farewell episode, Brent's brother Kyle hosts it and they chat about the podcast and why Brent is closing it down. Two friends of the...
Probably not, but the problem isn't impartiality it's the politics of impartiality On November 9th, the director general of The BBC, Tim Davie, along with the head of news, Deborah...
The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is confusing the MAGA faithful. With rumors swirling of an imminent operation to topple Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the president’s supporters are asking...
World Refugee Day was last week (June 20). Ideally I would have written this then, but I haven't been as good on real-time commenting since Twitter fell apart. I still found it important to say something here, though. I am not an expert on this issue. I wrote one article on religious repression...
If you spent the entire Friday night and Saturday glued to the news about Prigozhin's armed rebellion, you are either an IR-head, a Russia-watcher or the Ukrainian army running out of popcorn. The avalanche of hot-takes about the start of a civil war, theoretical debates about a coup or not a coup...
I just returned from a two month fellowship at Edinburgh University, accompanied by my family. The trip included talks in Germany, Italy and England. These side-trips required a lot of packing, and generated a lot of souvenirs, specifically snow globes to mark each place we visited. This led to a...
Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series.
There is an increasing focus in academic and policy circles on research-policy partnerships. These partnerships are often achieved through co-creation, or “the joint production of innovation between combinations of industry, research, government and civil society.” Co-creation is central to...
Dr. Oumar Ba of Cornell University visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Ba grew up in Senegal, attending his first school at an early age near the Senegal-Mauritania border. He developed an interest in politics in high school and at his first university (Cheik Anna Diop in Dakar) where he...
I replicated the go-to method for using ChatGPT to “cheat” on college essays. Here are my takeaways.
UPDATE: As a commenter helpfully pointed out, the person whose tweet I'm responding to was a political science Professor, not a historian. This kind of messes with the framing of this post but rather than stealth re-write it I'll leave it as is and let you interpret my Freudian slip as you like...
It’s our first “actual” installment of Whiskey & IR Theory in Space! We discuss Star Trek: Th…
Maybe the problem isn’t that scholars don’t know how to speak to U.S. foreign-policy makers, but rather that U.S foreign-policy makers don’t know how to engage with scholarship?
As a Turkey follower (I studied the country in grad school and wrote on it for my dissertation and first book) I've got thoughts on Turkey's elections. But as someone not interested in hot takes, I'm going to wait until the election is over to provide some analysis. Instead, I want to talk about...
The professional bureaucracies of both the US and Chinese national security states encourage mistrust, jingoistic attitudes, pessimistic assumptions, and hawkish policies. This is a growing source of war risk, and the only near-term fix is a security dilemma sensibility. Let me explain. The...