Mostly, I muddled through grad school, but with the support of my cohort and guidance from a few choice people, I was able to navigate my way through the uncertainty of graduate school.
I understand that there's been some recent blog-chatter on one of my favorite hobbyhorses, peer review in Political Science and International Relations. John Sides gets all 'ruh roh' because of an...
This article discusses the importance of doing counter-intuitive work in the social sciences: We love our counterintuitive findings. And for fields such as psychology, they’re almost a necessity.If...
Erik Voeten has a nice piece up about recent research on the benefits of nuclear superiority. Does nuclear superiority provide an advantage to states engaged in crisis bargaining? In the most recent...
A series of short posts will follow with targeted reflections on what I learned at panels and dinners this past week, and how it ties into my take on world events. For now however, let me share a few random things I learned while attending this year’s International Studies Association Annual Meeting in Manhattan:1) "Lead pencil shavings" is, according to some but not others, apparently a coveted flavor for modestly expensive Italian wine. Who would have thought. 2)...Edward James Olmos is licensed to perform marriages in the state of California; a triplicate chant of “so say we all” is...
Recently, I criticized Sarah Palin's pronunciation of "nuclear," and suggested that electing her would only make Americans look as if we (still) don't care how dumb our leaders appear on the global stage. At best, I expected a discussion about whether we should take such things into consideration in elections. More accurately, I expected that post to be ignored, and for most readers to latch on to the much more interesting food for thought to come in later posts that day. (Who would have thought English grammar would be more fascinating than the ethics of killer robots?)Imagine my surprise...
There's a well-known joke about a beautiful young student's attempt to trade... um... favors for grades.I suppose it's inevitable that the real-life variant would neither cast a positive light on the professor nor, in all likelihood, end at all happily. Scratch that; really unhappily.... Good hearsay and war stories about the general phenomenon over at LGM.... He's now considered a "missing person."... Back to the original suspected outcome: hiker finds body, presumed to be University of Iowa professor, in park.... And it was Arthur Miller.
After rejections from two other policy journals and ten days of wrangling with the editors, my first policy-article on the rules of war has just appeared in The National Interest. In a nutshell: "The arguments of the Bush administration when it comes to torture, prisoner-of-war status and extraordinary rendition have been met with outrage by the international community, constitutional scholars and human-rights organizations like Amnesty International, which has referred to Guantánamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times.' But the polarization of these two camps obscures the broad middle ground...