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Should I get a Ph.D.?
Matt Groening's Life in Hell comic strip is requiredby federal law to be posted in all grad studentlounges. There's a reason for that.By now, acceptance and rejection letters (or emails) have begun to filter back to graduate school applicants.I want to offer some advice for people who want to be graduate students. I begin by making it clear: I'm loving graduate school; it's been on balance the best time of my life; and nevertheless there have...
Anger in America
Rush Limbaugh, the teaparty, OWS, all the way to the seven sisters -- a deeply misguided Smith College alumna, an open feud between Barnard and Columbia... and so it goes... Bobcat Goldthwait's new dark satire, God Bless America is supposed to be an hysterical look at the mixing of stupidity and anger. I just hope its funny....
International Women’s Day: Cupcakes and Hateraid
I did not make these to destroy feminism.Duck readers, I have a confession. I bake cupcakes. Thousands of them. I love doing it, I love icing them, I love decorating them and I really like eating them.This is not something that I would typically share with a blog on international politics. Normally I write about things that blow up or try to calmly argue that twitter is not going to stop a war lord. But you see I am compelled. I am compelled to...
How Dare the Federal Government Set Minimal Standards for a Consumer Product!
When elements of the Republican noise machine decided to call Sandra Fluke a slutty naughty sex fiend for suggesting--in public, no less--that all health-insurance plans ought to cover hormonal birth control... so that women wouldn't suffer from ovarian cysts, here's what I thought: "this is such a bunch of obviously crazystupidinsanemisogynistselfimmolating craziness that it has got to go away soon."But left-ish groups smell a fundraising...
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (1): We don’t really Want to
I found this image here. So the US pivot toward Asia is all the rage in foreign policy now. Obama and Secretary Clinton genuinely seem to believe in this, and there good reasons for it. Briefly put, Asia has the money, people, and guns to dramatically impact world politics in a way that no other region can now. But I think the US Asian pivot won’t happen much nonetheless, because: 1) Americans, especially Republicans, don’t care about Asia,...
Invisible Children – Pretty Dang Visible
KONY, WE GON' FIND YOU - as soon as I buy my bracelet!Anyone who has been on Facebook and Twitter over the past 24 hours has probably seen impassioned pleas to watch a high-production video by Invisible Children, an American NGO (whose Board of Directors just happens to be entirely white American males). And anyone who is following many of the IR tweeters out there, you have also probably began to see the backlash.For those of you who do not...
Primary Politics and Foreign Policy: Super Tuesday Edition
This is cross-posted from the University of Texas website.As the March 6 Super Tuesday Republican primary looms, foreign policy issues understandably are likely to play a marginal role in the decisions of most voters. Since the middle of 2008, Gallup pollshave found that more than 60 percent of voters identified economic issues as the most important problem facing the country. In their February 2012 poll, for example, less than a half a percent...
Here is something you can’t understand….
...How I could just kill a man!Obama said today, or at least I think it was today, that "we have Israel's back." So have we replaced the cowboy swagger bullshit with some urban swagger bullshit? Fo shizzle.In general, I object to any dumbing down of foreign policy, even in the public discourse, and I don't really think Presidents did this before. This seems to be a modern phenomenon. But now, apparently even Obama feels the need to talk in this...
The unconquerable village
I'm very much looking forward to attending this year's International Studies Association conference in lovely San Diego. This is partly because I can fight a losing struggle against its declared theme for this year:'Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” and coined the term “global village.” McLuhan died in 1980, but his insights are even more relevant today. The information environment is...
Cat in the Tub
This is our cat in the bath. He doesn't really do anything funny. He just stands in the bathtub. Then he leaves. That was then (or, to be more precise but still vague, a few months ago). He now usually joins our daughter for her bath time. He also makes sure to come into the shower for a minute or two. And he has started imitating us by testing the temperature of the shower with his paw.So, here's the question: do we own a cat idiot, or is...
Reading Schelling in Iran
The CFR public-relations office certainly thinks they've got a winner in the "attack Iran debate." Here's a video of the recent "live" debate between Colin and Matt on the subject.