by Dan Nexon | 13 Jan 2013 | Featured
I completely forgot to flog this at the Duck. I'm sure that disappointed, oh, about zero people. Nonetheless, I persevere. From the write up: I first learned about Felix Gilman‘s work from the influential academic blog Crooked Timber. I proceeded to read Thunderer, Gears of the City, and Half-Made World and found myself impressed by Gilman’s distinctive settings, themes, and voice. It should surprise no one, in my view, that Thunderer received...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Jan 2013 | Featured
Some prominent liberal commentators are upset that Treasury and the Fed have ruled out the "$1 trillion coin" option. The basic reasoning: the declaration weakens the President's bargaining position and forecloses a way that it could have ameliorated the consequences of a failure to extend the debt limit. I suspect that the reason for the declaration was sincere: key players believe that it is neither legal nor prudent. The second is Ezra...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Jan 2013 | Featured
We're still getting ballot requests. They tend to come in waves. Indeed, the last one all came from individuals at the same university. Hmmm. Anyway, if you've asked for a ballot and still haven't gotten an email with instructions, let us know. All the information that you need about the nominees and procedures is now centralized at the 2013 OAIS Awards page. Note that we ask voters to choose three (3) finalists for the Best Blog category, six...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Jan 2013 | Featured
Tom responds to Peter Henne's questions. 1. Is there an objective standard for “so what?” No, there is not. Yet, this doesn't make it fully subjective. Any good paper will explain why what it reports matters, and few papers under-sell their findings. A reviewer's job is to evaluate the degree to which those assertions are warranted. A good rule of thumb here might be, if you are struggling to decide whether a paper you are reviewing is...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Jan 2013 | Featured
French troops took on an active combat role in Mali yesterday. Mark Leon Goldberg provides a short overview. After long delays, western African troops are reported to be headed for the country as well. There are interesting resonances here with Barak Mendelsohn's Combating Jihadism. In Syria, a jihadist group overran a government airbase. David Collier on Iran's Kurdish population. Marc Lynch assesses the "battle over Egypt's constitution."...
by PM | 11 Jan 2013 | Featured
Reader Anjali Dayal sends along this image from Foreign Policy (since corrected): Presumably Mr. Putin has not yet overturned Roe v. Wade. (On the other hand, I am reminded of this Onion classic.)
by Dan Nexon | 11 Jan 2013 | Featured
Brad Delong calls this "hoisted from the archives," which is clearly a better term for what I'm doing. But, as that's taken and I'm not as smart as the great economics professor, I guess I'll just have to stick with this alternative. Guns and Genocide, version 96.12b From 11 June 2005 After the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy advocates in Tiananmen Square by the People’s Liberation Army, the NRA ran advertisements claiming that if the protesters...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Jan 2013 | Featured
About a year ago I introduced an ocasional series called "Quarter-Baked Ideas." The idea was to blog about semi-formed thoughts related to international affairs. The whole notion turned about to be quarter-baked: I haven't done another one until now. Do rising powers have an intrinsic advantage in "flexibility" when compared to dominant ones? The answer to this question matters a great deal, I submit, to debates over the persistence and decline...
by Amanda Murdie | 10 Jan 2013 | Featured
It’s that time of year again: the time when professors team up with their best buddies/colleagues/random-people-who-publish-in-the-same-area and endeavor to write a brilliant ISA/Midwest/APSA paper. At least, that’s what the spring semester always means for me. I like working by myself, don’t get me wrong, but I also enjoy working with others. And, I don’t think I’m alone here: coauthored work is quickly becoming the norm in political...
by Rodger Payne | 10 Jan 2013 | Featured
Yesterday, Dan Drezner's "one post about American gun violence" explicitly linked the post-Newtown debate about gun violence to Kevin Drum's interesting and provocative Mother Jones article on the disturbing relationship between lead (Pb) in the environment and criminal violence. "If the White House is smart, they will take, verbatim, Kevin Drum's suggested policy proposals for eliminating lead from our nation's homes and topsoil." Like many of...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Jan 2013 | Featured
Update: so the very first commentator revealed how much this was the product of a bad cold. Indeed, I've completely misnamed the post. It shouldn't be "standard stories" but "contextual assumptions." The most important rhetorical commonplace, in my experience, is exactly what the commentator said: "quality" of research and presentation. What I'm interested in is the broader issue of how we know what quality is and why we care about it--what are...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Jan 2013 | Featured
Via Ari Kohen, a visualization of the nearest 100,000 stars in Sol's neighborhood. Sometimes blogs should just share cool stuff, no? Can't leave all that stuff to other social-media platforms.