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...
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Friday Anti-Nerd Blogging: The Appeal of Downton Abbey
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...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Hey, don't say Lord Eddard didn't warn us...
Part II on the AIDS Crisis and Learning from History: Lessons from South Africa
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...
New Georgetown Blog
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."
Creeping Illiberal Democracy
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...
Iran Attack: National Journal #Fail
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...
Romney: A Charmed Life
The McCain opposition-research file circulating on the internet (if genuine) is just devastating in its picture of a man without any convictions whatsoever. It makes one thing crystal clear: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, and quite possibly our next President, because he faced a GOP field made up of incompetent, unserious, and underfunded rivals. A serious contender would have eviscerated him.Many of the positions that should have...
Colin Kahl responds to Matt Kroenig
Foreign Affairs has gone live with Colin Kahl's explanation of why we shouldn't commence bombing in five minutes. A sample:In arguing for a six-month horizon, Kroenig also misleadingly conflates hypothetical timelines to produce weapons-grade uranium with the time actually required to construct a bomb. According to 2010 Senate testimony by James Cartwright, then vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and recent statements by the...
Strategic narratives: An uncertain science
Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring this field. National-level policymakers still try to tell stories about where their state and the international system are heading and should head. To the extent these narratives create expectations, shore up identities, create buy-in from partners, or...
Learning from Histories of the AIDS Crisis
What can we learn from histories of the AIDS crisis? Jacques Pépin's The Origins of AIDS and Nathan Geffen's Debunking Delusions: The Inside Story of the Treatment Action Campaign are two important contributions to our understanding of a disease that has now claimed nearly thirty million lives.In different ways, both books raise interesting questions about what we can learn from history about causal mechanisms and wider sets of issues. In this...
Visas and scholarship
Sarah Duff (who has contributed to this blog before) had a very interesting piece in the UK Guardian this week on the hurdles scholars in developing countries have to face in order to engage with scholars in the developed world. Rather than focusing on whether or not the visa system is fair, she describes exactly what she must do in order to present a paper in “the West” how this impacts on the development of her research:I describe the...