June 2012
1 post
“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
– George Orwell
May 2012
7 posts
Shahre Farang Website →
sanamgoli
“You may disagree with me that your sovereignty as citizens has been largely...”
– Another wonderful address, this time by the publisher of Harper’s, John R. MacArthur. Some good ones this year!
“So what’s the purpose of the interpretive disciplines? The biologist who...”
– Occidental College :: Kwame Anthony Appiah Commencement Speech
A wonderful address at my future place of employment. I’ve long been an admirer of Appiah’s philosophical insights, which make me that much more disappointed that I couldn’t be there earlier to hear him in person and...
Excellent rant by Stephen Walt:
Strategy is all about setting priorities: Deciding which problems merit the most attention and allocating the right level of resources to each challenge. It is about not letting the urgent overwhelm the important, and not getting blown off course by random events or unexpected surprises. Whether we are talking about a country’s overall policy menu, a...
April 2012
19 posts
“His 21st-century stance was not that of a historian so much as a ‘public...”
– Eric Hobsbawm · Memoir: After the Cold War: Tony Judt · LRB 26 April 2012
“The Justice Department finally took aim at the monopolistic monolith that...”
– Amazon Low Prices Disguise a High Cost - NYTimes.com
Want to help the future of good and honest publishing? Stop ordering your books from Amazon.
“The event was moving because it offered Kissinger, at 88, a platform for...”
– For a new order in Iran, look to post-revolutionary France - The Washington Post
Proof positive that Henry Kissinger will always be remembered as a terrible student of history. I also find it more than a little disturbing that David Ignatius is credulous enough to find this rubbish...
“You think of the optimism both fan bases seemed to have 12 to 18 months ago,...”
– Liverpool and Red Sox — Same Owner, Parallel Debacles - NYTimes.com
What do the input by this guy and his law school affiliation have anything to do with this story? The Times reporting drives me up the wall sometimes…
On that earlier note about my painful discovery...
Well, it turns out that I was far too harsh on myself! I had a long chat with mentors and former advisers today, and they seem to agree that I was mistaken to think that I was mistaken in my reading of my premise (how’s that for saying nothing by saying a lot?!). All’s good. And the march goes on….
The Bee's Knees: Why the price of your e-book... →
annadevries:
The recent news that the DOJ has brought a lawsuit against major publishers over e-book pricing with tales of secret meetings and greedy publishers has pushed the industry into the headlines. Even Brian Williams covered it.
For people who don’t work in publishing or who can’t quite…
1 tag
painful discovery...
In the confessional mood, so here it comes: I’m in the midst of revising for publication two chapters of my doctoral dissertation which I defended with distinction last fall. I’m having a devil of a time making one of these chapters make sense, and I just discovered why. Basically, one of the views on which I had set the premise for my argument turns out to have been totally misread by...
Cut in E-Book Pricing by Amazon Is Set to Shake... →
This is an ill-considered lawsuit by the DOJ. It will do more injustice in the long-run by clearing the field for Amazon’s dominance of the publishing business.
I’ve substantially scaled back my purchases from Amazon (independent booksellers are the way to go, if you agree that physical bookshops are important features of civilized society), even if on average it costs me $3-5 more....
“A glance leaves an imprint on anything it’s dwelt on.”
– Joseph Brodsky, from “A List of Some Observations” (via libraryland)
1 tag
“The 11th is exceptionally well written, the first encyclopedia where readability...”
– The magic of Encyclopedia Britannica’s 11th edition | Books | guardian.co.uk
Gotta get my hands on this!
“Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is...”
– John Lanchester · Marx at 193 · LRB 5 April 2012
This is a great piece on Marx, and it grips you from the beginning to end (which most pieces on Marx usually don’t).
“I am not at all optimistic about the discipline of US Political Science. Indeed,...”
– The Duck of Minerva: The constructivism that wasn’t by Patrick Jackson
Excuse another geeky IR post, but this was too good to pass on.
4 tags
“As this century unfolds, sustaining American power will be the easy part. The...”
– America’s Place in the New World - NYTimes.com
I’m going to put my IR geek hat on and point out the obvious: we are all constructivists now, aren’t we? For those of you not in the International Relations theory world, Charles Kupchan is a renowned “realist,” which means that...
“The killing of 16 Afghan civilians — nine of them children — by a...”
– Why Afghanistan was Obama’s biggest mistake | Stephen M. Walt
There’s a lot that this administration has done “right” when it comes to foreign policy, but when it comes to the continuing, futile campaign in Afghanistan, there can be no doubt that Obama’s decision to...
March 2012
17 posts
2 tags
“III
The signature to a life requires
the search for a method
rejection of...”
– From Endpapers by Adrienne Rich.
You can also read her poem from Going Back here.
3 tags
BBC 3's 'Spirit of Schubert' Project
The Spirit of Schubert is a gigantic project not just for Radio 3 broadcast, but also for Radio 3 Online. To make it easier to find all the rich online content which is currently available, here’s an easy click-through guide. We’re adding material to the site (and this guide) every day, so do revisit this Blog for the latest updates.
Graeme Kay, Interactive Producer, BBC Radio 3 and...
3 tags
Courtesy of Bookforum:
From TPM, a special section on Health Care Before the Court. SCOTUS 101: A Wonkblog guide to health care oral arguments (andmore), and an interview with Don Berwick, former administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The constitutional challenge to the Affordable Health Care Act is rhetorically powerful but analytically so weak that it dissolves on inspection. Forget...
“The more fundamental challenge to the individual mandate trains its sights … on...”
– “The Health Care Challenge Threatens All Regulation” by Pam Karlan (Boston Review, March/April 2011)
If you’re not out there arguing against the libertarian loons (who are very much in the minority, by the way) who are orchestrating a coup against the very idea of the state, then shame on...
“But what’s interesting about Romney: it’s not just a problem of him and...”
– Corey Robin (via azspot)
3 tags
“What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a...”
– Paul Krugman, writing in today’s Times. Thanks to JBJ for flagging this, and for forwarding the list of companies behind ALEC and their contributions. I’m pasting the list below. It’s frightening to see how many products and services they encompass:
Organization 2009 2010 ...
“Befitting that lineage the album mingles love songs with social commentary. Its...”
– Esperanza Spalding on a Year in the Spotlight - NYTimes.com
Enchanting.
4 tags
Contain Israel, Compel Iran
From the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion, here is an opinion piece I’ve just written with Nina Tannenwald, a colleague (and former dissertation adviser) at Brown for CNN Opinion. Originally, we had much more on the internal politics in Iran and Israel, but op-ed page editors being who they are, they forced us to get rid of them! Oh well…
Moving forward, the challenge for the...
“After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.
Those...”
– After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses - NYTimes.com
Adieu, my first learning kit.
1 tag
The Morning News is prepping for its eighth annual Tournament of Books with a pre-game primer. The literary bloodsport kicks off tomorrow, when author Emma Straub will deliberate the first bracket: Julian Barnes’s Sense of an Ending vs. Donald Ray Pollock’sThe Devil All the Time.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik dwells on “what makes a great essayist,” and names five masters of the form.
WatchA pretty accurate representation of how ordinary Iranians feel about the sanctions, the West, and their own government.
2 tags
Why does Wall Street appear so rarely in fiction? John Lanchester claims it’s because explaining the intricacies of high finance would bog down good storytelling. Explanation, he says, is “fine in small doses, as a dollop of rationale before the main course of drama, but anything longer and the reader wakes hours later to the familiar clanking noise of the milkman delivering bottles to the front...
2 tags
Perry Anderson responds to critics of his The New Old World in New Left Review:
Most of the literature on the EU, as noted in [The New Old World’s] foreword, is highly technical, enjoying little currency among non-specialists; in addition much of it is so ideologically uniform as to stifle, rather than arouse, any interest in the variety of political conflicts and cultures across Europe....
The real face of Mr. Khatami in Iran. Perhaps my... →
The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic →
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the...
Bismarck speaks →
“Santorum says that 62 percent of people who go to college lose their “faith...”
– Santorum’s Arrested Development by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
Well said.
February 2012
17 posts
4 tags
Off the Charts Blog | Center on Budget and Policy... →
“In the end Mr. Shadid realizes that he relishes the quiet life and creative...”
– ‘House of Stone,’ a Memoir by Anthony Shadid - NYTimes.com
“Strategy is actually a fraud perpetrated by those who covet power and are intent...”
– The American Century Is Over—Good Riddance - The Chronicle Review
For the record, I find the debate about American decline for the most part meaningless. Nevertheless, I tend to agree with the likes of Bacevich that those strategists who bark on about American greatness and exceptionalism from dawn...
Interview: Anthony Shadid | New Writing | Granta... →
On Thursday, Anthony Shadid died in Syria whilst covering an armed insurrection against the government. The following interview was published on August 23, alongside the publication of Shadid’s essay in Ten Years Later,‘The American Age, Iraq’. It is respectfully dedicated to his memory.
