Is the tide turning on the idea of austerity? Philip Pilkington takes issue with this week's New York Times feature story on how well the Latvians are enduring austerity. The IMF thinks Latvia has gone too far. Last week, IMF Director Christine Legarde warned Germany to go slower in making cuts. And, yesterday, it (the IMF) acknowledged in a new paper that "“Forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline...
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The Least Stressful Job of 2013: University Professor
That's what Forbes claims in an article that's generating much mirth in academic social-media circles. University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the...
The Right to Mindlessly Look at You-Tube Videos
Happy New Year! I hope you are still enjoying a wonderful break. The holidays for me always mean one thing: a lack of Internet access. As a duck-ling who is from Deliverance/mayonnaise/4-H country, I’m particularly attuned to the argument UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur, Frank La Rue, made a couple of summers ago about the human right to Internet access. Of course I need unrestricted access to my favorite websites – how else am I...
Afternoon Miscellany: Latour, Podcasts, and Big Data
This post would be much more interesting if it concerned the nexus of its three subjects. Sadly, it does not. I'm working on a forum piece with Vincent Pouliot on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) -- one written from the explicit perspective of outsiders. We've been puzzled by the apparent lack of theorization of "the body" in Latour. For example, if social relations must be 'fixed' by physical objects, why isn't the human body one such object? If any...
Trotskyite Reactionaries
Partisanship Blogging Warning. This post contains no academic content. What follows is a series of block quotes designed to illustrate the title of the post. This is simply remarkable.... First, Erick Erickson at RedState: The McConnell Tax Hike raises taxes on people making over $400,000.00, but it also raises taxes on the middle class. “More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes.”* Not...
Sex is Better on Thursday Linkage
Some sex, gender, and women highlights and lowlights for the week: In the post "2012: The year in sexism" Laura Bates lists the sexist 'lowlights' of each month (from Rush Limbaugh's slut comment to Todd Akin's 'legit' rape gaff). The Huffington Post has some high and low gender moments of its own- the high point is Carey Purcell's "Fifty Shades of Feminism: a response to E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey." Parcell summarizes many of the...
Academic New Year’s Resolutions You Won’t Keep
Sure we know we don't stick to New Year resolutions (apparently only 8% of resolutions are fulfilled) but they're fun to make, right? In addition to the top 5 New Year's resolutions that most people don't keep (losing weight, quitting smoking, going on a diet, stopping a bad habit, and getting more exercise) some of us make professional resolutions. So what do you think are the top 5 Academic New Year's resolutions you're likely to break? Here...
ISO: American Grand Strategy
The first decade of the 21st century was a heady time for foreign-policy wonks. Why? Because their world was awash with Great Debates about Grand StrategyTM. Now things seem much less exciting. Perhaps that's because, despite the best efforts of the usual suspects, the partisan debate no longer maps well onto big ideas about grand strategy. Remember how vacuous the Romney-Obama debates were on foreign policy issues? Yeah, that. The groundwork...
Blog Archeology: No Decision Letter, No Peer Reviewing
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. Peer reviewing: a call to arms (updated) From: 22 April 2009 I just turned down a request that I review for a journal because, in part, they failed to send me an anonymized copy of the decision letter the last time...
“Final List” of Award Nominees and Additional ISA Reception Details
This constitutes our promised post containing the "final list" of OAIS Award Nominees. This is also your last chance to let us know if we've left off an eligible nomination. We will send out a ballot soon. The current plan is to use a Borda-count process to create a list of finalists and to proceed to a second round to determine the winners in each category. We welcome feedback on that procedure. A reminder: we will announce winners at the...
Wednesday Morning Linkage
Saudia Arabia seeks water in Ethiopia with violent consequences. Via Laleh Khalili. "Morsi and the Deep State." The case for the US continuing a hard line against Cuba. First-image explanations for US strategic failure. Walt's "Top 5 parties in World History" should include instead the celebration of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis rather than "The Fields of the Cloth of Gold." On SFF books that authors "didn't love." Classicists and reception...
The Reading (Half)Year
I read. Really, I do. In fact, I read alot. But most of the reading I do, I've figured out, is for one of two particular purposes. First, I read to review. The International Feminist Journal of Politics gets about 100 manuscripts a year, and I read about 30 books between the Oxford Series on Gender and IR and the New York University Press series on Gender and Political Violence. I do about 50 reviews per year for other journals and book...