I was lucky enough to play a small part in a Radio 4 documentary that went to air yesterday on the 70th anniversary of the surprise attack by Imperial Japan on Pearl Harbor. Here it is on iplayer.

On this weekend, I thank HBO for this early Festivus present:Nice plug for the personal being political. Told you Game of Thrones was all about feminist theory...

Theory Talks interviewed PTJ. Go check out the results. A sample: I don’t have some kind of extraordinary experience fueling my interest… It’s an old insight about how the United States, if you’re a citizen of the US, you can kind of ignore the rest of the world—it’s the privilege of empire or hegemony. So international relations never really had a direct impact on me growing up; the rest of the world was simply out there some place, or it was the place that foreign exchange students and British sci-fi shows like Doctor Who came from. Living in the US, you don’t have to confront the world in...

David Bosco has a terrific post (and a promised series) on "Can Conservatives Learn to Love Multilateral Organizations?" (Short answer: no, especially not in an election year). It is a timely entry after the recent Republican debates on US foreign policy, during which the candidates did their very best to beat each other at the age-old game of beating up the principle of multilateralism. Much to my horror (but not surprise), Texas Governor Rick Perry took the cake when he promised that, if elected, he would "zero out foreign aid" and instead allocate aid based upon countries' "support for...

With approximately 1000 World War II veterans dying every day, and the absolute numbers from more recent wars increasing steadily, it's important to give some thought to what we offer those who have served or are serving... and to what they offer us. On the first score, a new report from Rand represents an example: this is a new effort to account for programs to treat traumatic brain injury due to armed service. (The report finds such programs are proliferating, but much more attention must be paid to which ones work.) I am interested if anyone knows of a similar report or dataset that...

When I was young (ca. 2001), I was very much in Matt Drudge's target demographic, and for various reasons (I like tabloids, I like celebrity gossip, and I like to keep up with the echo chamber without subscribing to Fox News), I've stayed a loyal Drudge reader for years.Drudge is a window into the right-wing's id. And so it's always amazing to me to see things like this:First, there was a time when being a Republican meant celebrating your loyalty to Nixon. Anyone can like Reagan, but only a real s.o.b. can like Nixon. Second, if there's any historical analogy that springs to mind for...

Twitter inspired a conversation today with Starbuck about Eliot Cohen, who wrote a very important book on civil-military relation, Supreme Command.  It features case studies where civilian leaders over-rode military officers, focusing on Lincoln, Churchill, Clemenceau and Ben-Gurion.  Clemenceau had said that war was too important to be left to the generals, and I agree.  I found Cohen's book very persuasive despite:the extreme selection bias: no cases of civilians making bad decisions and over-riding good military advice.  What would do the trick? Including an Iraq chapter where Rummy...

Over on the other side of the methods divide, Andrew Gelman shares a tip: Caffeine, a lightweight and free app for Macs that keeps them awake even when you haven't clicked on them for a while. But let me double down on Gelman with a tip that, if used improperly, could destroy your computer: Insomniax, which doesn't just keep your Mac awake but actually disables its sleep function. In other words, if you have to move from one place to another while you're running calculations, or if you just want iTunes to keep playing when you close the lid on your MacBook, then Insomniax is the solution....