I remember well the first time I ever encountered the concept of "fair trade": it was on a poster in the cafeteria of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, where I spent time during the summer of 2002 doing research in the "Archives of Social Democracy" for my first book. The poster proudly proclaimed that the coffee served in the cafeteria was fair trade coffee, and explained the basic principle -- growers were paid a decent wage for their...

A few of us in the Politics/IR Department at Reading were asked to summarise the major results and effects of the war in Afghanistan for its tenth anniversary today. I should have talked more about the overall economic crisis that the war on terror has accelerated, but anyway:Today is the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. But it is not the anniversary of the start of the war between the United States, the Al Qaeda network,...

In an effort to change the conversation from the Duck's current all-Jobs all the time format, let me simply commend Jorge Cham, the creator of Ph.D. Comics, and the rest of his crew for the Ph.D. Comics movie, which manages to be everything that a satisfying break from writing code should be: Funny, heartwarming, and short. Graduate students, see it soon. Faculty members can see it too, but not at the same screening as your grad students; after...

Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in American business and culture; no other billionaire in my life has commanded genuine affection from the general public, and nobody deserved it more. The Financial Times reports that Jobs's passing has elicited similar responses in P.R. China. One Chinese academic wrote of Jobs:It is said Chinese people hate the rich. But all the Chinese are mourning for Jobs after he died. They don’t hate the rich. They...

Forget protest movements and populist politics, to say nothing of academic blogging and scholarship -- if you want to change the world in your lifetime, this is the guy you ought to emulate. RIP Steve Jobs, one of the greatest practical visionaries of our time. PS note that Jobs' inspiration for the typography on the Mac was a college course ... a perfect testimony to the indirect but important influence that we academics can have on the world....

 Earlier today, I tweeted and blogged and even (dare I say it) facebooked to get some help.  The challenge: to come up with a good analogy to capture the incredibly strange idea that cutting foreign aid might be a way to address the US fiscal crisis.My starting point: Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an alcoholic cutting back on apertifs.The responses thus far:  Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an...