• David Silbey on the long century of the US surveillance state.
• Don’t throw the espionage baby out with the domestic-surveillance bathwater?
• Tom Nichols throws the gauntlet down at opponents of more active US involvement in the Syrian civil war.
• Dan Trombly ruminates on the concept of “blowback” in light of recent domestic terror attacks in the west.
• Developments in Arabic translation.
• Many people in my circles are gleefully forwarding a proposal for Massively Open Online Administration (MOOA). The e-magazine responsible is itself kind of interesting in of itself — a product of the libertarian Manhattan Institute that publishes an odd stew of old-style conservative, libertarian, and liberal criticisms of contemporary university practices. So you’ll read anti-affirmative action screeds, arguments for expanding due-process protections for those accused of sexual assault on campus, attacks on importing business-consulting practices into academia, and robust defenses of the humanities. The last, of course, triggers an old interest of mine: the sense that the scorched-earth warfare between the “new left” and “cultural conservatives” over the humanities left neither well-positioned to defend “liberal arts” against the relentless logic of the corporatization of higher education.

And also:

• On that note… the impact of under-representing women in introduction to philosophy courses.
• … and Durkheim vs. Weber!
• Daniel Little discusses Ian Hacking discussing Thomas Kuhn. It sounds like Hacking might downplay Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis (IT) claim, but that Little overplays it. Regardless, focusing on the original version of IT is probably a waste of time.
• Worth reading: the spate of posts at Constructing the Academy on assessing journal and scholarly quality.
• How should we approach violence in fantasy literature?