I'm now on my sixth day of the sick, so in lieu of a post that requires much thought: Yay for USB-powered microphones and pop filers. The first will make it much easier to record podcasts at conferences. The second will make it much easier to record podcasts. Lyra heartily endorses the following: Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales: One Dead Spy and The Squire's Tale. Lyra and I are having a great time playing Tales of Monkey Island. A new wireless...
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Happy Merry from the Duck of Minerva
Thanks so very much for your continued support, interest, and engagement with the Duck of Minerva. This has been an exciting year for the blog thanks to all of you. At the same time, 2012 has, like every other year, been a difficult 12 months for many. Our hearts go out to all those who have suffered pain and loss. May the close of 2012 treat you well, and 2013 prove a terrific year.
A Different Take on the URI Statement 2.0
Kindred Winecoff disagrees that this was a modest victory: I must completely disagree with his ("modest") level of satisfaction. This represents no victory at all because this new statement from URI officials, like the first one, completely misses the point. This is not about First Amendment rights. Nobody was saying that Loomis should be thrown into the deepest darkest dungeon never to be heard from again. They were saying that he should be...
‘I Find your Lack of Cheer Disturbing’ – Merry Christmas
This is awesome.
A Modest Victory in the Struggle Against Academic Fecklessness
The URI administration has issued a new statement: What to make of this? On the one hand, I don't think anybody will buy the claim that (1) Erik is at fault for "not making clear that he was speaking solely as an individual" and (2) that this failure provided the "rationale for our original statement." The URI administration doesn't go far enough in terms of redressing the most offensive part of the earlier, rushed response: its implicit...
Monday Morning Linkage – Xmas Eve 2012 Edition
Now that your holiday shopping is (hopefully) all done, relax, and enjoy these thoughts on our global capitalist society... Development/capitalism and its discontents... Ever the drum-major for capitalism, the World Bank's End Poverty in South Asia blog tells us the miraculous story of how Japanese consumers helped bring elephants back to an Indian forest. The Private Sector Development blog discusses the role of angel investors in the...
Hydrogen Sonata Forum wrap-up
This post exists to collect all the links from our Forum on Iain M. Banks' The Hydrogen Sonata into one coherent place: Chris Brown: A Triumphant Return to Form | Gerard van der Ree: Learning from Utopia | Iver B. Neumann: Religion and the Sublime | Patrick Thaddeus Jackson: Actors on the Sci-Fi Stage | Dan Nexon: To Sim, Perchance to Dream | and Iain M. Banks' reply Let me also admit just...
The Hydrogen Sonata Forum: Iain M. Banks Replies
Iain M. Banks reacts to the symposium on his book, The Hydrogen Sonata.
The Academic-Policy Nexus (Or Lack Thereof)
In my first post after signing on with "Team Duck" I thought, before jumping into a series of weighty topics--rise of the east, end of the west, cratering of the middle east--it might be worth reflecting a little on my sojourn as a policymaker after beginning my career as a Political Scientist. As an IR scholar I started out specializing in the politics of international economics before gradually shifting over to the security studies side of...
(Another) Ugly Underside of the Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Today, the Human Rights Campaign celebrated the two-year anniversary of President Obama signing the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," a move that officially allowed lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to serve openly in the United States military. Soon after, I wrote a blog post suggesting that, while the policy was definitely an improvement on a military that forced people to hide their sexual identities, it obscured both the continued dominance of...
Saturday Afternoon Linkage
Let's start with some more Erik Loomis blogging. Doktor Zoom at Wonkette provides a snarky take on head-on-a-stick gate, while Crooked Timber provides a forum for an interesting debate over the various issues at stake. Both point to an underlying dynamic at work: that this is fairly boilerplate "Professor Punching" as carried out by elements of the Right. Collecting academic heads has been a preferred sport for those elements at least since...
Dan Nexon on The Hydrogen Sonata: To Sim, Perchance to Dream
The Culture novels have long been concerned with the interplay of simulation, simulacrum, religion, and materialism.