On one hand, I’m glad the television news coverage has left its anchormen braving the storm phase. On the other hand, that’s a bad thing, because it signals that there’s rising damage and emergency from the post-hurricane floods in Louisiana. At this point, now that best case scenario has slipped away, one can only hope […]
I’m glad to have left the student phase of my life behind me, but it’s this back-to-school time when I see the syllabi professors have posted and remember how exciting it was to embark on new material. And would love to audit Kieran Healy’s class on social theory, which includes a piece on Adam Smith:
Although […]
I sure hope the following says more about the intellectual climate at NYU than the state of social science today.
Year 3 (2006-2007): Rethinking the Social
The possibility of something called "society" and its place as a dynamic element of human experience was once the founding problem of the social sciences. But the discipline came to take […]
Thanks again to Book Club participants for an interesting and spirited discussion. Next month we’ll tackle Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History.
Part of the enjoyment of a book with the scope as broad as Guns, Germs and Steel is that you end up learning lots of small details that you didn’t know before. And, certainly, knowing […]
It’s Foreign Policy Week at LeftCenterLeft, during which I’ll attempt to articulate some first principles for a left-liberal-meets-center-left foreign policy. See this post for an explanation.
Back on the eve of the Iraq War, I wondered where, in all the Wilsonianism being bandied about, the ideal of self-determination had gone:
[W]asn’t one of Wilson’s key principals […]
Mike the Mad Biologist laments the lack of political and public relations savvy of the “scientific leadership.”
One major problem that those who fight for evolution face is an inept scientific ‘leadership.’ Only the DLC has worse political instincts. This is a leadership that has presided over the gradual and steady de-funding of science, […]
It’s Foreign Policy Week at LeftCenterLeft, during which I’ll try to articulate some principles for a left-liberal-meets-center-left U.S. foreign policy. See this post for an explanation.
Pelican sees my call yesterday for first principles of foreign policy and puts to me an excellent question:
I think the debate though should be about context or frameworks for [foreign […]
I joined the crowd at Drinking Liberally over at Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge last night. It’s a great idea, and the folks I talked to were all nice and refreshingly excited about politics. They have nights in Boston (city center) and JP, too, as well as other towns, so check out their site.
Meanwhile, I’m […]
I told you it was a dumb question: Shiite Iraq overwhelmingly speaks Arabic, not Farsi. Confirmation comes via the Iraqi constitution-in-process and the State Department’s country profile. I guess that leaves open the question of if there is Shiite nationalist sentiment across the language divide, but from first glance, chances for separate nationalisms seem higher […]
Sage words from Kenneth Baer:
[T]here are deep divisions within the Democratic Party on Iraq, the War on Terror, and international economics. Instead of trying to make nice all the time, we Democrats owe it to ourselves to use this time in the wilderness to have a robust debate about what our vision is of America’s […]
The moving market must have big gaping holes that entrepreneurs are rushing in to fill. Around Jamaica Plain, I have seen signs for Man with a Van, who is clearly targeting those beneath the price-threshold of professional movers but without transportation of their own. At the other end of the market, Metrosexual Movers offer a […]
With all these sensible sounding exit plans for Iraq being bandied about, I have a dumb question.
Why couldn’t Shiite Iraq unite with Iran? I don’t mean this in the normative sense of why shouldn’t they. Clearly, it’s against U.S. foreign policy interests, and I know I’d prefer theocratically flavored democratic government to an outright theocracy […]
I’m just about finished with Guns, Germs, and Steel for next Thursday’s book club gathering. Funnily enough, I turn to the back page, where I see that the paperback edition has discussion questions for reading groups!
Um, they’re not very good questions, so let me point to an interesting blog debate that’s popped up. […]
Bay Windows puts out an impassioned column against the ex-gay movement and the notion of “conversion.” Let me point out an interesting tidbit from that James Dobson site I mentioned:
There is growing evidence that change of sexual orientation is possible. Pro-homosexual organizations and members of the media have tried to convince our society that homosexuality […]
David Eisenthal looks at a growing and seemingly insurmountable problem (the budget deficit) and comes up with an interesting, reasonable sounding solution that I’m nonetheless going to have to disagree with: a line-item veto amendment to the constitution. First, his case for it:
One idea that should be considered is an amendment to the […]