As we hurtle to the end of the semester, here are some stories for the week that caught my eye:
- Felix Salmon on why wonk bloggery is the future of journalism
- From Kyle Dropp and co-authors, Americans who can’t find Ukraine on the map are more likely to support intervention there. What does this say about low information voters?
- Kim Yi Dionne and coauthor review the strange raid of a US-funded AIDS effort by Ugandan authorities as part of the emergent state-backed homophobia campaign
- Rich Cincotta pours cold water on the idea that food prices drove the Arab Spring: local prices didn’t increase that much
- Seymour Hersh suggests that Turkey might have been behind the chemical weapons attacks in Syria, as an attempt to draw the U.S. in
- New York Times encourages the U.S. to ratify the treaty that would deny ships laden with illegal fish from being able to dock; treaty needs a few more states to enter into force
- Megan Price and Anita Gohdes remind us that conflict event data are all artifacts of the truth, that they represent reporting of events and may suffer from lack of completeness or other biases, each dataset with its own wrinkles and issues.
Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.
Seymour Hersh’s last foray into proving that the Syrian rebels were responsible for the attack on Ghouta had a number of problems. This latest article has more. I’ve collected several articles that pull different aspects of his argument apart and added some of my own comments here.
Hersh ignores pretty much all the evidence that has accumulated – the UN sampling results that line up with the composition of government sarin, for one – in favor of a single anonymous source whose story makes up most of his argument with little or no confirmation.
I don’t see how the LRB decided to publish this.