It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
Our syllabi should be full of surprises
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Recent Posts
Even More Assholery: Is Seeking Payment for Protection New?
This is a guest post from Paul Poast, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Earlier this spring, Poast wrote a post about the Asshole...
Can researchers be both scholars and activists?
This is a call for a new series that grows out of a panel held at ISA earlier this spring. We have a few posts in process that come from participants on that panel, but we want to open it up to...
The Decision Letter, Part II
The basic principles that should guide letters and their RFDs hold across every kind of decisions. However, we need to recognize important differences between, say, a rejection and an R&R. In...
More Recent Posts
Lunch-Time Linkage
Japan's "looming singularity." Xavier Marquez has lots of infographics about the "normativeness of democracy." The nuke content in Obama SOTU address. I'm skeptical of both the feasibility and utility of further nuclear arms control with the Russian Federation, but I'm down with...
Current Political Scientist to Congress: Please Ignore Greg Ferenstein
Another day, another op-ed or blog post saying that the social sciences contribute nothing and that we must be more policy-centric or policy-relevant or policy-synergistic or policy-policy-policy-policy. You know, it's funny. I've just finished reading a history of Bell labs (these journalistic...
Tuesday Morning Linkage Club
Tim Burke suggests ways to fix the dissertation, but I'm skeptical that the way to reduce the overproduction of Ph.D.s is to lower the costs of earning a Ph.D. [Easily Distracted] Will Moore wonders what the standard for presenting results as a consensus is; a response to Voeten and Nexon. Via...
What Patterns of Trade Might Tell us About the Democratic Peace
Stop me if you've heard this one: it appears that wars between pairs of democracies are relatively rare compared to wars between other pairs of states. Some people even think this relationship might be causal. In the decades since this empirical regularity first got everyone's attention, a number...
The Politics of “Political Science”: Mushroom Cloud Edition
Erik Voeten has a nice piece up about recent research on the benefits of nuclear superiority. Does nuclear superiority provide an advantage to states engaged in crisis bargaining? In the most recent issue of International Organization (ungated version) my colleague Matthew Kroenig argues that in a...
Podcast No. 20 – Interview with Phil Schrodt
The twentieth Duck of Minerva podcast features Phil Schrodt of Pennsylvania State University. The interview includes Professor Schrodt's views on a number of interesting topics, including the history of quantitative and computational conflict studies, his "seven deadly...
“Other scientists agree, at least when quoted selectively.”
Ouch. This hurts. Satire by Alan Dove (via): In a groundbreaking new study, scientists at Some University have discovered that a single molecule may drive people to perform that complex behavior we’ve all observed. Though other researchers consider the results of the small, poorly structured...
What Political Science Says About Papal Elections
Given the news that Pope Benedict XVI will resign at the end of this month, the first bishop of Rome to do so since the middle of the last millennium, the college of cardinals will soon convene to elect his successor. Political scientists Forrest Maltzman, Melissa Schwartzberg, and Lee Sigelman...
Monday Morning Linkage
Good Morning, here's your linkages... Let's start the week in South Asia: Afghanistan General Allen, the 15th of 16 commanders of ISAF in a dozen years, is delusional if he really thinks ISAF is on the road to victory in Afghanistan as he exits to become the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO....
Weekend Omnibus
Slow weekend at the Duck, eh? Some of our bloggers are snowed in. Not sure how to explain the rest of us. I've been playing lots of FTL and working on a manuscript review. And the kid's been sick. So here's some stuff resembling content: More trade networks from Thomas Oatley. Did Steve Walt...
Friday Morning Linkage
Winter Storm Nemo is bearing down on us and everything is shut down up here in the Northeast. No classes and no office hours! Here's the quick snow edition: Why are we now naming winter storms? Canadians dissing on Toronto. Moscow has received its heaviest snow in a century. With pictures. I used...
The New Structuralism in International Relations and its Discontents: Prefatory Remarks
Some years back I participated in a series of workshops that culminated in a book on New Systems Theories of World Politics (value priced at $115). PM and I have been working, somewhat haphazardly, on a review essay dealing with contemporary imperial formations that deals with what I've called the...