Actual blogging soon.

I think I did a reasonable job restraining myself while suffering through Breaking Dawn this past weekend with my daughter and her friend. I didn't vomit once!And fortunately I didn't have to. The pathetically destructive and sexist representations of romantic love, family, marriage and motherhood in the Twilight series were all the girls talked about on the way home. And they didn't even need the HP/SW allegories to notice it. The same night we saw the film my daughter sat me down unprompted to hear her guffaw loudly at this series of satirical YouTube videos making fun of all things...

Kathleen R. McNamara lays out the reasons to be skeptical that the euro can survive in anything like it's current form. McNamara's brand of political economics begins from the right presumption: that in political economy, politics comes first. Models that fail to account for the role of institutions, of beliefs, or of power will fail to capture any of features that matter most when systems begin to fail. Politics is an autonomous part of social life. It has its own logic and its own explanations. Although political science is a discipline of magpies forever borrowing from other fields'...

Finally after a busy teaching term I've got a chance to add some thoughts to the great post and articles by Jon Western and Joshua Goldstein on humanitarian intervention. Bottom line: I think Jon and Joshua make a robust case that not only can intervention work, but that the international community is learning effectively how to go about it. As they argue, it is a technique of statecraft that is being refined and better understood. It might not necessarily transform societies on every metric of human well being, but prompt military action combined with due attention to the rule of law,...

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...