by Charli Carpenter | 23 Jan 2012 | Featured
I apologize to Duck readers for being such a slacker this past semester. Some things on the home/work front have had me tied down a bit, and the truth is I won't be fully back in the saddle until after this manuscript is done. But. In the words of George R. R. Martin, fire cannot kill a dragon, and my Chinese New Years' Resolution is to start posting again (at least semi-regularly) despite all. So what have I missed the chance to gripe about...
by Vikash Yadav | 23 Jan 2012 | Featured
Like many of my nerdy friends, I am eagerly awaiting the return of the second half of this season's "House MD." But let's be honest, the show basically substitutes a flow chart for a plot. No one with half a brain actually watches the show for the "medical mystery"; after all the show is premised on a suspension of disbelief. It's entertaining and a guilty pleasure because of the wit and antics of the ever gruff Hugh Laurie.But the show can be...
by Robert Kelly | 23 Jan 2012 | Featured
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('e6403e01-e0de-49ce-a231-02a0ef2f117a'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh5.ggpht.com/--9rqXXXWaCY/TxzqyXkDwmI/AAAAAAAAACw/Nly5J93m9N8/videob4f2a8e66e2f%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s pretty hystericalI’d like to thank Duck contributors/editor, especially Vikash, for...
by Vikash Yadav | 23 Jan 2012 | Featured
We are pleased to announce roster changes at the Duck. Patrick Porter and Brian Rathbun have agreed to become permanent contributors. Quacktacular!And today we want to introduce a new guest blogger - Robert Kelly. Bob teaches IR at Pusan National University in Korea and writes a lot on East Asian IR now. He went to Ohio State; his areas are security and IO. He has own site, which we recommend: Asian Security Blog. His favorite work to date is...
by Dan Nexon | 22 Jan 2012 | Featured
Wow. South Carolina took a cane to the "Mormon Massachusetts Moderate" last night. This moves Nate Silver to write a longish post comparing the conventional wisdom (now embodied by my colleague, Hans Noel, and his co-authors) with the "This time it's different" crowd, in which Silver makes not a single, tiny, one-off mention of Citizens United. I'm not saying that it's certain that Newt's rich friends dumping millions of dollars through...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 21 Jan 2012 | Featured
I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."Many if not most of the terms we use to differentiate styles and traditions of scholarly inquiry are tools for positioning ourselves relative to other scholars. Names of schools of thought, incontrovertible assumptions that have to be agreed to in order to belong to a...
by Brian Rathbun | 20 Jan 2012 | Featured
People are going mad about Downton Abbey. The Rolling Stone calls it "crack for Anglophiles." The demand was enough to create a second "season," and is even giving PBS the notion that it might begin to draw in some of the types who watch Showtime and HBO series, maybe even Game of Thrones fans. I doubt it, if for no other reason that there are a lot more gratuitous boobs and f-bombs on the cable networks.I have watched it. I like it. I will...
by Charli Carpenter | 20 Jan 2012 | Featured
Hey, don't say Lord Eddard didn't warn us...
by Josh Busby | 20 Jan 2012 | Featured
In my last post, I profiled the Origins of AIDS, Jacques Pépin's masterful study of how the virus that causes AIDS in humans originated in chimps and then jumped to humans and later took off as a result of a complex series of events involving local populations uprooted from traditional practices, the spread of prostitution, and widespread use of injections to fight infectious diseases, among other factors (see Donald McNeil's compact summary...
by Dan Nexon | 20 Jan 2012 | Featured
SFS undergrad Anton Strezhnev has a new blog called Causal Loop. Highly recommended. Via Jay Ulfelder who, naturally enough, critiques Anton's "first substantive post."
by Cliff Bob | 18 Jan 2012 | Featured
The Washington Post had a fine op-ed this weekend by law professor Jonathan Turley asking the provocative question, Is the U.S. still the “land of the free?” He gave 10 compelling reasons that it is not. Turley’s op ed has the legal issues well-covered. He also draws telling comparisons between U.S. laws and practices—and similar ones by countries that the State Dept annually condemns as human rights violators. True, in the U.S., most of...
by Dan Nexon | 18 Jan 2012 | Featured
UPDATE: Deazen has made significant corrections to the article. It still implies, I think, more than is warranted, but the egregious misrepresentations in his article are gone.SECOND UPDATE: In case anybody thought that this was anything other than a National Journal fail, it it turns out that Matt himself was instrumental in getting Deazen to correct the story.Yochi J. Deazen of the National Journal details a high-level fight in the...