While we're all digesting the barbaric bombings in London, and waiting for more information on which to base analysis, I thought I'd share one of the stranger spam emails I've received lately.dhn2，您好！ Honorable American friends,How do you do?I am a Chinese students of Moslem people university .I have a new idea on psychology ,concerning Hitler.I hope you can pass the important points of the theories on to the experts who study domestic psychology and sociology.I think it is better to offer these ideas to the expertsstudying Hitler.In Hitler there exists two 'I's,one is himself,which can be...

Patrick Jackson and Peter Mandaville co-authored a terrific chapter for Iver Neumann's and my edited book on "Harry Potter and International Relations."Okay, you can stop laughing at us now. We all had fun writing the volume and it does, actually, have some academic merit.Anyway, the point I was going to make is this:Patrick and Peter have some very interesting things to say about the politics of translation involved in the Harry Potter books, both in the literal sense - how one translates, for example, an English-language book into Arabic - and in the cultural sense- how one localizes a...

I've already made myself look stupid once today, so I figure: why not have another go?When I was a PhD student at Columbia, I taught in the Contemporary Civilization program. Teaching in CC was, without a doubt, the best experience of my educational career. Not only was it just generally a good time - getting to know students, getting to watch them develop over an entire year, teaching the "classics" - but it gave me an excuse to reread important works in social and political theory every year. Now I mostly teach "intro to IR" and the occasional IR theory class, so it is extremely rare that...

From Political Wire:Many Democratic fans of the Washington Nationals are buying baseball capswith an alternate "DC" logo instead of the more common cursive "W" because it reminds them of the current occupant of the White House, according to the Washington Post."During the design process, a baseball spokeswoman said, nobody made the connection to a certain political figure, for whom the same 23rd letter of the alphabet is a down-home nickname."I own a red "W" Nationals cap; I find this whole thing pretty silly. Nevertheless, the spokewsoman's comments confirm my basic sense of MLB's...

Brad DeLong has an interesting post on "Wilhelmine China". In a recent Wall Street Journal Greg Ip editorial Ip and Neil King, Jr. take issue with Brad's analogy between the UK and the US in the nineteenth century. Brad quotes them:Brad DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California at Berkeley, sees a useful parallel in Britain's policy toward the emerging industrial colossus of the United States in the 19th century.... As late as the 1840s, he notes, the U.S. and Britain -- then the world's sole superpower -- came close to war over territorial disputes in the Pacific...

John Hawkins' interview with Mark Steyn recently made the rounds at conservative and right-leaning international-relations blogs. Since I spent part of last year involved in an edited book project on religion and Europe, I thought it might be interesting to look closely at Steyn's arguments. The caveat, of course, is that my contribution involved the history of religious conflict in Europe. John Hawkins: In your opinion, why is it that Europe has become so much more secular than the United States, where Christianity is still strong?Mark Steyn: The short answer is separation of church and...

President Bush's address on Iraq made choosing today's maxim very difficult. Many of Guicciardini's maxims put a different spin on the speech, and particularly about what people are writing about its strengths and weaknesses. So, given a wealth of possibilities, I have settled on this one:If you are involved in important affairs or are seeking power, you must always hide your failures and exaggerate your successes. It is a form of swindling and very much against my nature. But, since your fate more often depends upon the opinion of others than on facts, it is a good idea to create the...

First, the administration explained in a famous advertisement featured during the 2002 Super Bowl that buying drugs abets terrorism.Then, in 2003, Arianna Huffington's "Detroit Project" ran ads claiming that owning an SUV indirectly aids terror; buying lots of gas provides lots of cash to the Iranians and Saudis.Now, apparently, it turns out that feeding your baby fosters global terrorism. This link is explained by FBI Director Robert Mueller (quoted by Bradley C. Bower of AP) in today's Christian Science Monitor: "Middle Eastern criminal enterprises involved in the organized theft and...