It's a nostalgia episode for our two hosts, Patrick and Dan. They tackle Mustafa Emirbayer's 1997 article in the American Journal of Sociology, "Manifesto for a Relational Sociology." According to Emirbayer, "Sociologists today are faced with a...
This is a guest post from Ben Bellows, PhD (UC Berkeley, epidemiology), currently a researcher at the Population Council in Washington DC and a co-founder and the Chief Business Officer at Nivi...
Steve Saideman’s recent Duck piece on international relations scholars’ relative silence on issues of pandemics, and public health more generally, has ruffled feathers[1]and generated a lot of...
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to many useful discussions about public health, social responsibility, and tips for online learning. See the many great posts that have gone up here. One thing that...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The PRISM slides: two nice touches you may have missed (Someone put some real thought into presentation -- this is not your grandparents' NSC-68): Top secret, code word, art work. There's a special seal for "Special Source Operations" that has an eagle lifting a bundled globe -- very impressive;...
Do not click if one has not read the third book of Game of Thrones or did not see the most recent episode, as spoilers dwell within: Ah, any deployment of Princess Bride is, well, magical, but, in this case, given the over-reactions on the internet Sunday night and Monday morning, this is just...
Having been newly promoted to permanent contributor, I'm delighted to join the esteemed Duck blogging crew (pictured above) on a more long-term basis. I'm looking forward to more lengthy substantive blog posts beyond the Thursday updates. I feel like I've been trapped in reviewer hell for weeks,...
This is just a short note to explain the appearance of the phrase "temporarily un-gated PDF" in Peter Henne's guest post about contagion and the Syrian civil war. We've been linking to academic articles for quite some time, but usually to the abstracts or random versions available on the web. But...