Does anyone actually enjoy grading? I admit that I get something of a kick out of reading a smart, elegant essay or exam. I particularly enjoy essays that show a flash of brilliance, even if their mechanics leave a bit to be desired. I also recognize the importance of grading: I really do try to give each student's work the attention it deserves, and to provide constructive feedback that will help them improve in their writing and...

Cross posted on my blog. Most of the world's major media are reporting that the 7/7 London bombers were suicide terrorists, willing to give up their life for their cause.I've watched CNN and MSNBC enough the past week to know that this "fact" is now part of the conventional wisdom. Suicide is repeatedly used as an adjective to describe the bombers. Say it over and over and over...and it becomes truth. Right?What if it is wrong? Apparently,...

This afternoon I was interviewed by ARD German television for a news spot of some kind. Like most news organizations and savvy observers, they expect the CDU to win the German elections in the fall, which will make Angela Merkel the new German chancellor. The folks from ARD wanted to know whether I thought that Merkel's election would change things in US-German relations; I told them no, because the issues that have cropped up in US-German...

Last weekend my wife and son and I went to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. It was Old Timers' Day, so the actual game between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians was preceded by a couple of innings featuring a set of retired players who had formerly played for the Yankees. There was a lot of pomp and fanfare as these old-timers were introduced, and it was a great thrill to watch Mel Stottlemeyer, the current Yankees pitching coach, take...

When my wife dragged me to a performance of St. John's Passion at Lincoln Center a few years back, I could feel myself turning gay. A quick exit, however, saved my marriage and kept me on the straight and narrow. Seriously, either these guys are just completely ignorant or it's the start of the secret agenda of the Christian conservative movement: first the Catholics, next the Lutherans....Filed as: stupidity

Leon de Winter in the New York Times (via Marc Schulman):FOR centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.The murder last year of the filmmaker Theo...

I've been reading through R.J. Rummel's blog which, as one of his regular commentators puts it, is kind of a "public seminar" on the virtues of democracy in terms of inter-state and intra-state violence. Rummel's blog is, indeed, not just a really excellent academic advocacy website but a nice "public seminar."Rummel was one of the first contemporary advocates of the Democratic Peace. The basic idea is that if two states are democracies then...

Jonathan J. Monten, a graduate student at Georgetown, has just published a piece called "The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy" in International Security. Jon is one of what I hope will be a growing wave of scholars seeking to combine (in a coherent manner) structural realism with arguments about the role of ideology and identity in world politics. This is a research program Stacie Goddard...

I wasn't in my office on Wednesday, and thus didn't post a maxim. Given Dan Drezner's recent post on prospect theory and terrorism, I thought it would be interesting to post Guicciardini's views, in effect, on the rational-choice controversy in International Relations:What I said earlier about princes also applies to people with whom you must deal: always keep an eye not so much on what reason dictates they ought to do, as on what you believe...

I've pulled my post entitled "Tim Burke Wows Me." I want to write a more substantive reflection - and call for discussion - on what, if anything, the online debate about Theory's Empire tells us about "post-prefixed" approaches to IR, and that post will get in the way. Apologies to people with an RSS feed.

Robert Farley doesn't think much of Wretchard's (of the Belmont Club) take on the Battle of Guadalcanal. Here's what Rob has to say:So much is wrong with this; Wolcott does an effective job of demolishing the hyper-masculinity of Wretchard's argument. Let's be frank, if Al Qaeda were given the option of fighting Americans by Marquess of Queensbury rules on an open field in the middle of Afghanistan, they'd leap at it. Winning a war, in spite of...

A number of weblogs have linked to Elliot Cohen's Sunday Op-Ed in the Washington Post, "A Hawk Questions Himself." Cohen defends the basic rationale for the war, but slams the administration for its poor implementation of the Iraq occupation. Key quotation:But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian...