by Dan Nexon | 13 Apr 2012 | Featured
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth. On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Apr 2012 |
Guest Post by Deborah AvantAnyone remember that 1980s Terry Gilliam film Brazil - a futuristic dystopia where overreliance on bizarre and mostly broken machines led to equally bizarre social maladies? Well, I’m having a Brazil moment. According to Google Scholar, I am no longer the author of my 2005 book. If you search my name, it has disappeared. If you search the title a (very well done) review article comes up but no book. The book – and my...
by Robert Kelly | 12 Apr 2012 | Featured
<img src="https://lh3.ggpht.com/-lXf905vas9I/T4Zfu5yVCwI/AAAAAAAAAJg/Cgr7ZRk41Cg/videoefa933ead93d%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('6321b8cf-9761-4208-8fea-48b2a79cce22'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Dancing for Votes in Dongnae! Because I work for a public university, I am a national...
by Steve Saideman | 11 Apr 2012 |
Check out this post where Brett Keller uses sophisticated social science statistical methods to ascertain how badly fixed the Hunger Games depicted in the novel/movie are. All I can say is that we live in a wonderful time where folks can radically over-think some pop culture and then disseminate widely and quickly via Al Gore's internet. Indeed, all Alan Sepinwall has to do is ask the internet, and it provides him with the rules for True...
by Charli Carpenter | 11 Apr 2012 |
In between ultimate frisbee and lying around in bed sick, I managed to attend a workshop on network theory at the International Studies Asssociation. I spent some time there thinking about different things scholars mean when they say they are doing network theory, and what is the value added to IR of this basket of approaches. Here are some tripartite thoughts on the matter, and you can probably guess which approach I'll be taking in my new...
by Brian Rathbun | 11 Apr 2012 |
I am headed out to Coachella this Thursday for three days of music in the desert. Well, two days. I am too old to make it all the way through, and I have to teach on Monday. In any case, I thought I would offer this Friday anti-nerd blogging column a little early in the week. For those of you teaching or taking classes on the semester system, it is that time of year that you are very, very tired. You need the break a bit in advance. The MLB...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Apr 2012 |
After Charli's video mashup this feels pretty lame, but I did promise the slides from my talk. Thanks again to all those who responded to the bleg. If it isn't obvious, I should note that everything I said is influenced by PTJ and his course.The basic takeaways?1. Science Fiction (SF) has close ties with social-scientific inquiry and, in general, has lots of political and international-relations content. It is therefore well-suited for these...
by Rodger Payne | 10 Apr 2012 |
Photo credit = Dirk Hansen. Last Friday, April 6, Time magazine published controversial excerpts from an interview with Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen: "I love Fidel Castro," Blurts Ozzie Guillen, the new manager of the Miami Marlins, in his Jupiter, Fla., spring-training office before an early-March team workout....After a second of reflection, the most unfiltered figure in baseball, if not sports, wants a do-over. "I respect Fidel...
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Apr 2012 |
Dan Drezner was kind enough to link to my YouTube ISA Presentation. However Foreign Policy has headlined it "Is This the Future of Teaching?" Given that a number of colleagues have written to me this morning along the lines of "if that's the future of teaching, I might as well give up, it looks too hard," and "how long did that take you, anyway?!!" I feel compelled to provide some caveats. 1) If the medium is the message here, it's a message...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Apr 2012 |
Christian conservative crusaders have targeted Electronic Arts for its inclusion of LGBT relationships in its games, including Bioware's Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Old Republic series. A notable feature of all three series is that they allow players to make "evil" choices: killing innocents, betraying comrades, profitting from illicit ventures, and even contributing to genocide.So, in short, this is apparently worthy of protest: But this is...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 9 Apr 2012 |
[Note: This post is almost entirely "inside baseball" for IR academics.]For this year's ISA conference I was supposed to write a paper called "The Constructivism That Wasn't: On the Non-Inevitability of Sociological Liberalism." The idea was that I would go back and carefully reconstruct those moments of historical contingency in which an alternative IR constructivism -- one which did not so neatly track with sociological liberalism, roughly...
by Robert Kelly | 8 Apr 2012 | Featured
Here is part one, where I argued that Kim’s rise scrambles our conventional wisdom on NK, opening a lot of unexpected room, at least early in his tenure, to try to deal. The cold war stand-off in Korea is now so bad, that there is little to lose in trying to talk with him, and it would seem like a huge missed opportunity to simply blow him off as identically awful to his father. For my regular argument that negotiating with Kim Jong Il was...