Oppenheimer is the first blockbuster about nuclear weapons in a generation. Framing his film’s namesake with kinetic edits, fractured timelines, quantum imagery, and a pulsing score, director Christopher Nolan has crafted a stylistic triumph. But...
Happy belated New Year! After a rather chaotic December – and lots of work on the backend of this site – we're getting ready to kickstart happenings here at the Duck. We've got a few posts and a...
This is the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
ymena Kurowska of Central European University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kurowska grew up in the northern part of Poland, at a time of world and local...
In the wake of the failed attempt at passing a boycott resolution (of Israeli academic institutions) at the recent MLA conference, here are some thoughts. (Readers of the Duck might be aware that last year’s ISA conference saw a modest attempt at bringing a discussion on BDS forward. That proposal...
Having recently attended a workshop and conference on beneficial artificial intelligence (AI), one of the overriding concerns is how to design beneficial AI. To do this, the AI needs to be aligned with human values, and as such is known, pace Stuart Russell, as the “Value Alignment Problem.” It...
I used to be a Senate staffer, and one of the most interesting parts of my job was helping Senators prepare for hearings. If I were a Senate staffer now, here’s hearing questions I’d recommend for President-Elect Trump’s national security nominees, Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), General...
For the past few months, I've been observing with horror all the cabinet appointments in the incoming Trump administration and the Theresa May government . As someone who originally did a PhD with the intent to become a career diplomat (and yes, I realize there's a foreign civil service pathway...
To be clear, the latest news is "intra-civilian" but is likely to cross over given the stakes. Remember the old days where the "smart" Bolsheviks left the personnel and other boring issues to Stalin? Yeah, so Stalin staffed the new Soviet government with his guys, and the theorists, well, they...
In conversations with friends, I quickly realized that the International Studies Association faces some significant problems ahead. The advent of the Trump administration is likely to lead to two kinds of complications: it may be hard for foreign scholars to get visas to attend the conference...
Consider these two presidential statements: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”—President-Elect Donald Trump’s New Year’s Twitter greeting “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be...
Putin’s annual press conference is a chance for regular citizens to spend 3 hours in a great and rich Russia, where everything is in order and Putin is capable of installing presidents in foreign countries (according to one journalist). In general, the press conference strived to paint a picture...
An event happens. Four different people tell four different versions of what happened. How do we figure out how to move forward? This is a very rough plot summary of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, but it’s also a pretty accurate description of what is happening to the World Health...
The President-Elect has called for expanding the US nuclear arsenal, not just modernizing it (old warheads may not be good warheads). And when asked about whether this might lead to an arms race, he said woot! Who wins arms races? Arms manufacturers and their stockholders Maybe Ken Waltz (who is...
I'll confess that post-November 8th, 2016, I spent a large amount of time in despair and unable to write anything coherent on the topics I am most interested in contributing here at the Duck of Minerva. It was hard for me to imagine what the global order would look like with someone like He Who...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Sean D. Ehrlich, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University who researches international and comparative political economy, trade policy, and democratic institutions. His first book,...