I have been largely absent from the blogosphere over the last week or so, and will remain so for the next week or so, as my energy is split evenly between moving hassles and getting lost on campus at my new institutional home ... but I couldn't resist this one.I was just reading the Google News...

The Bush era is officially ancient history. I saw this commercial today:

The International Studies Compendium is a field-defining project of somewhat epic proportions. According to its architects, it "will be the most comprehensive reference work of its kind for the field of international studies" - a group of literally hundreds of 10,000 word, article-length,...

This is just a quick observation for anyone who ever wondered about the value-added of IR theory -- "IR theory" being defined in the broad sense of "tools for systematically reflecting on world politics." The observation consists of four items, and deals with yesterday's non-debate between Cheney...

I finally managed to see the new Star Trek film yesterday. Unlike the terrible travesty that was the Watchmen film -- to which I had such an adverse reaction that I still can't manage to grind out a coherent blog post about it, despite having tried on multiple occasions to do so -- this...

Amongst the headlines on the economic crisis, torture memos and the Obamas’ new dog was an almost-missed article that may prove more interesting. As the Washington Post reported on Thursday, “Turkey and Armenia announced yesterday that they had agreed in principle to normalize relations.” This is...

The other night, before the inauguration, I found myself involved in yet another discussion about the relationship between theory and decision-making. Old, familiar territory for us, but slightly altered in this iteration by two factors: the fact that I'm finally teaching an undergraduate course...

Apparently journalists in Iraq. See Rodger, below.I couldn't resist!

I will freely admit to being a FiveThirtyEight junkie over the past few months. The excellent analysis and projection that they do over there is more than a little reminiscent of my favorite baseball site, Baseball Prospectus, in that we have a very self-conscious quantitative methodology in which...

[Updated: Thanks to commentator Aldous for pointing out an error in my original predictions--I had Montana for Obama and neglected to include Nevada]I am not, by any stretch, and expert at polling--presidential or otherwise. By that doesn't stop most of the talking heads from bloviating and...