The Duck of Minerva

This is a guest post by Michael Bosia, Associate Professor of Political Science at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. You can find him on Twitter at @VTPoliticsProf. In December 2001 – less than two months after the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and not even a month from the day US and UK forces invaded Afghanistan – I was with Act Up Paris as activists carried a banner emblazoned “AIDS: The Other War” to lead their annual World AIDS Day march.  Behind the banner, marchers raised signs reminding that more people were dying from complications of HIV every day than were...

The Trump Administration has decided it’s finally time for it to whip out its best George Carlin impression. It’s announced its own list of seven words you can never say—at least not if you are working for the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. In 1972, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” was the last track on his stand-up album, Class Clown. In an interview with Terry Gross in 2004, Carlin explained that the routine was all about calling out hypocrisy and double-standards. There is nothing inherently bad about these words, and keeping them off of the airwaves ignores the...

When I was 16, I went to Switzerland. It was my first time outside of the US, and I worried about the normal things that a worry-wart teenager might fret about—Where is my passport? (In my handy-dandy passport holder.) Did I remember to get gifts for all of my family members? (Yes, and you’re welcome.) How much fondue can I possibly eat? (Lots, and yet somehow not enough.) Here’s one thing I didn’t worry about: Am I going to get malaria? According to a recent short blurb in The Economist, though, that question may become more common. While the global malaria incidence rate has fallen more...

When you think great diplomats—the sorts of folks who can inspire large numbers of people, bring together disparate groups, and raise public awareness of key international issues—Robert Mugabe probably isn’t the first person who springs to mind. And yet…guess who the World Health Organization just announced as its new goodwill ambassador for noncommunicable diseases in Africa? Mugabe is the 93-year-old president of Zimbabwe and has served as president or prime minister since 1980 (when an independent, majority-rule Zimbabwe came into existence)—meaning that he has been in charge for the...

Does the international community need a Charlie’s Angels of global health? You remember Charlie’s Angels. Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Jaclyn Smith were three detectives in Los Angeles who worked for a never-seen Charlie. Charlie would call the Angels whenever there was some sort of emergency, and they would go wherever in the world in order to take care of the problem. They were highly competent and glamorous, though we can rightfully criticize the show for emphasizing the Angels’ sex appeal over their crime-fighting skills. I mostly remember the show for being on WGN in the afternoon...

What happens when three major philanthropies come together to form some sort of global health Voltron? Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Michael Bloomberg are among the world’s most accomplished people. Zuckerberg is one of the founders of Facebook, the social media site we all love to hate. Gates not only has one of the nerdiest mugshots in history, but he’s also the man who unleashed Clippy on the world as the cofounder of Microsoft. Bloomberg  created a financial services and technology company, served three terms of mayor of New York City, and even had a cameo on “30 Rock.” They’re also...

Microbes are turning into the Borg; our resistance is becoming futile. As any Star Trek: The Next Generation nerd knows (and this is an IR-related blog, so I’m guessing the Venn diagram of DoM readers and ST:TNG fans shows quite a bit of overlap), this is incredibly worrisome for humanity and threatens to give all of us the life expectancies of a red shirt. The international community may yet have a chance to fight back, but it will require both forward thinking and a willingness to cooperate. The basic problem is the growth of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). An antimicrobial is something...

Ebola is back, but that doesn’t mean that the world should panic. A little more than a year ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the West African Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people in the largest outbreak of the disease ever, was officially over. On May 11th, WHO announced that the Democratic Republic of Congo had identified 9 suspected cases of Ebola over the past three weeks. Three people had already died, and laboratory testing has confirmed that at least one of the cases has tested positive for the Zaire subtype of the Ebola virus. This is the first...