Gunmen killed scores of students in their sleep at Yobe State College of Agriculture in Nigeria early Sunday morning. via Adam Jones on FB, it is interesting to note this massacre was reportedly sex-selective, with only young males targeted - what Jones has referred...
A little late Friday morning reading: Moving toward a Syrian Tribunal? Several former tribunal prosecutors will introduce their draft resolution on October 3 calling for one. Leslie...
Originally circulating as "Every Sci-Fi Starship Ever In One Mind-Blowing Comparison Chart," there are some pretty important gaps in this picture, including (allegedly) no Serenity and nothing from...
I was transfixed this week by the week's events in Kenya, the attacks by Al-Shabaab on the Westgate shopping center that resulted in the deaths of at least 60 people. With friends just a stone's...
In my email inbox last week was a notification of a fellowship opportunity. Since I have a sabbatical coming up shortly—okay, in a couple of years, but time flies, right?—I eagerly skimmed the details. It’s a fellowship squarely in my field. The funding is pretty generous, probably enough to help me buy out some extra time at my institution, and finish the damn book that is core to my next promotion. But at the end of the description, there sat the deal-breaker: “visiting scholars are expected to be in residence for the entire year.” I understand the advantages of residential...
Breaking Bad is down to two episodes left. Just like a great book, you want to desperately get to the end until you realize that the end means the end of a great story-telling experience. So, here is one set of folks pondering the end with heaps of spoilers.
It seems altogether appropriate to me that my last Duck post should be a post about pedagogy. The more years I spend in this business, the more convinced I am that our area of greatest impact, and the place where our academic vocations are most clearly on display, is the classroom. Whether in-person or virtual, hi-tech or low-tech, as a permanent member of a faculty or as a visitor coming in to guest-teach or participate in a single class session, the most unique and valuable thing that we do is to craft spaces for learning, and set up encounters of many sorts: encounters between students...
The Assad regime says the Syrian conflict is at a stalemate. Meanwhile a cease-fire between Free Syrian Army and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria forces in Azaz. Roy Gutman from McClatchy reports on some of the dynamics between FSA and radical Islamists. Battling it out in public -- McCain in Pravda responding to Putin; Rouhani in yesterday's Washington Post; Assad on Fox. New pressure to bring Israel into the Chemical Weapons Convention? And, Here's another cool data visualization site -- this one on global migration patterns. Malcolm Gladwell looks at some interesting data on...
Casual observation suggests that the two most common answers to the question above are: 1) there's a very good chance that they'd start a nuclear war with Israel; and 2) there's no real reason to think any other state would be impacted in any significant way. I find both unpersuasive for reasons I'll discuss below. Before I do, though, let me get something out of the way---in this post, I will argue neither for nor against the use of force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. To answer questions of what should be done, one must not only draw upon some set of beliefs about the...
The first video ever played on MTV, back when MTV played music videos most of the time, was the one-hit wonder "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. A lament about how new technology ended the career of a singer who was well-adapted to the production standards and genre constraints of an earlier era, the song recounts an irreversible process: In my mind and in my car We can't rewind we've gone too far Pictures came and broke your heart Put the blame on VTR Maybe this rings a faint bell for some of you. In any case, for a quick refresher, you can watch the whole thing here. The great...
The subfield of international relations seems to suffer from an inferiority complex. While most subfields of political science do their research and trust that the results are relevant to policy for a good reason, many an international relations scholar complains that the subfield is not relevant enough. The latest example is Campbell and Desch, who worry that rankings of departments are biased against policy relevance in international relations scholarship. Not surprisingly, Stephen Walt chose the bandwagoning strategy in this case (gated content, sorry). While I don't worry about rankings...
After last week's diplomatic overtures on Syria, we've entered a period of relative calm and back to our mixed bag of stories of interest. NPR is running a fabulous series on Brazil in the lead up to the World Cup, which is also timely since the Brazilian president cancelled her plans to visit the United States as a result of U.S. spying on her and other Brazilians, a revelation that came out of the Snowden affair. In other news, I'm going to link to stories on Chinese extraordinary measures to address pollution, how much energy electricity your average refrigerator uses, Nathan Jensen's...