But here are two belated presents – take your choice as to which one you put beneath your poisonwood tree. George Scialabba tries to see (as George always does), the good side. For the tragic waste of Krauthammer’s considerable talents represented by Things That Matter, a good deal of the blame should doubtless go to […]
Henry Farrell
Henry Farrell is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Universities are Highly Responsive to Very Rich People
As a kind of side-note to Corey’s most recent post, most people, including, I suspect, most academics, don’t realize how important rich people are to the running of universities. Some months back, I was able to listen in on a conversation including a college president (not my own), and was startled to discover how much […]
Posted inPolitics
“Bad Cess”
Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Twitter today wished bad cess on a Hugo nominee apparently belonging to the richly-deserving-of-the-worst-cess-possible class. ‘Bad cess’ is an Irish expression; I suspect Patrick got it from Flann O’Brien, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have come across it somewhere else. This reminded me that I’ve been meaning for […]
Posted inPolitics
Ronald Reagan and Plagiarism
So I’ve been in the West of Ireland without proper Internet access for several days, and am catching up with umpteen posts in my RSS reader. I was going to write a post about plagiarism anyway, focusing on this weird Gawker story accusing True Detective of plagiarizing Thomas Ligotti. If unacknowledged quotes or references, intended […]
Posted inPolitics
Why “Ann Coulter” Would Love Cricket
Somehow I saw this rather lame attempt to parody Ann Coulter yesterday. I don’t mind football, I’ve even come to enjoy watching it a bit as a result of my daughter’s enthusiasm, but I do enjoy the odd rant against it, and have always found it funny that Americans assume that because of my accent […]
Posted inPolitics
Democracy is Bad for Business
A story that has gotten weirdly little play in the US (I can’t speak for the UK press or the press in other countries) is the pushback by the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms against the democracy movement in Hong Kong. On July 1, over 100,000 people marched in protest against Chinese plans to curtail democracy […]
Posted inPolitics
Fun Summer Reading
Books I’ve read in the last while that I’d recommend: Linda Nagata, passim. (Powells, Amazon). In particular, Vast. It’s the final novel in her Nanotech Succession series, which I read in reverse order when Vast first came out, and which is not a bad way imo to read them. Deception Well, the middle book in […]
Posted inPolitics
Unread Books
Jordan Ellenberg has devised an ingenious way of working out what books get bought but not read: Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature provides one quick and dirty measure. Every book’s Kindle page lists the five passages most highlighted by readers. If every reader is getting to the end, those highlights could be scattered throughout the length […]
Posted inPolitics
Cross-National Intelligence and National Democracy
Over the last year, there’s been a lot of writing about Edward Snowden (I’ve contributed a fair amount to the genre myself). Most people have discussed either the question of (a) whether domestic NSA surveillance in the US is appropriate and whether it is breaking US law, or (b) the purely political consequences of international […]
Posted inPolitics
George Packer and His Problems
George Packer’s review of Glenn Greenwald’s book on the Snowden affair is largely based around an argument taken from Max Weber. Edward Snowden is a child of the internet and at the same time an old American type—the solitary individual whose religion is conscience, and who follows his own regardless of where it takes him. […]
