Daniel Drezner writes that Meghan McCain's proposition that attention paid to Miley Cyrus can crowd out attention paid to Syria is bunk. With all due regard to Drezner, let me debunk the bunk claim---or, at least, show that the "Twerking Kills" hypothesis is...
 Now THAT is Korean art – the Seokguram Buddha; I’ve been to see it 3 times The Internet has slapped down my arrogance. I told myself I wouldn’t write about k-pop, but that post on ‘Kangnam Style’...
Flyer below. Posting does not indicate endorsement. But it does look cool.
Have you wasted any time viewing Bear cam? This Wired story explains:Media company Explore has teamed up with Alaska's Katmai National Park to install webcams that will deliver live video feeds of...
Teaser from DMW on Vimeo.
It's not going to get on anyone's list of top ten IR movies, that's for sure. But that doesn't mean I'm disappointed, exactly... more like a little shell-shocked.Lawyers, Guns and Money doesn't have a peekaboo function, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone else, so my reactions from seeing the film only once so far are hidden safely below the fold. Foreign policy subtext - decidedly post-Global War on Terror. The original Federation always was presented as a metaphor for liberal internationalism ala Western Hemispheric U.S. hegemony; during the Cold War this meant as opposed to a...
Abi Southerland on the current popularity of Zombies:I mentioned this puzzle to my better half, who happens to be in the middle of a reread of World War Z. His answer? ... You can have a fascinating story about a single zombie in a world of humans or the last human in a world of zombies. You can do one on one human-zombie interactions, or set entire armies against each other. They work differently as individuals (stupid and clumsy) and in crowds (lucky by means of what sheer numbers can do with probability theory). A group of them is as impersonal as a natural disaster; a single one is as...
So this is a spoof of facebook news feed created for the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries. Hat tip to Robert Farley. Also, Season 4.0 was released today, so any of us who didn't follow the series in real-time from the start now have ten days to quickly catch up on all our episodes before the final season begins on January 16th... Yikes, too bad I'm in New York doing interviews and can't start until this Friday... Gods help me...
What are you watching?I'm tuned to the History Channel's "Next Nostradamus":Two men sharing startling visions of the future possess distinctly different backgrounds: Michel de Nostradamus was a French apothecary and healer in the 16th century; he would become the most famous seer in history. His 21st century counterpart is Dr. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a renowned political scientist who teaches game theory at New York University and Stanford. While Nostradamus looked to the stars and mysticism to divine his apocalyptic revelations, Dr. Bueno de Mesquita relies on the most omnipotent tool ever...
My son and I finally saw Clone Wars this weekend. Afterward, I went back through some of the reviews I'd been ignoring during the past month of moving and settling in. No one seems to think the movie was great, but people are disappointed for different reasons. David Germain of the AP writes: You'll know you're in a different galaxy within the first seconds of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," which substitutes the Warner Bros. logo and theme music for the familiar 20th Century Fox searchlight and fanfare. Whether because of its cartoony format or its relatively lightweight story, "Clone Wars"...
I know Dan and Charli have been diligently (and quite helpfully) blogging about war, but it's the weekend and I went to see "Dark Knight" yesterday. After it ended -- and if you've seen it, you probably already know why -- I kept thinking that every Batman and his villain antagonist(s) simply reflect their times. In their own way, they are social constructs. If this is true, what, exactly, is this latest Batman film trying to say about post-9/11 America? If you want to read about Russia's latest war, skip this post. You might also want to skip over the remainder if you haven't yet seen the...
If you've not done so, open up your Political Science & Politics and read James Fowler's article "The Colbert Bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful than Truthy." In this brilliant piece, Fowler empirically tests whether support exists for Stephen Colbert's claim that Congresspersons who appear on his late-night comedy show receive a "bump" in their approval ratings.Now I need to go back through my video archive to make sure I'm correct in thinking the correct indicator of approval ratings, according to Colbert, is opinion polls (Fowler uses donations to Congressional campaigns as a...