In the December issue of International Studies Quarterly Paul Avey and Michael Desch published one of the more interesting articles to come from an academic international relations journal in a long while. For the last few years there has been a rather voracious debate within social science generally and political science specifically about whether or […]
Image Source Sometime in the fall of 2009 I realized that I was having trouble keeping the topics and titles of the many books I have read straight. To fix the problem I started “an annotated bibliography of everything,” recording the bibliographic information and a concise (usually 3-5 sentence long) review of every book I […]
“Books” by Leonid Afremov. Image Source The last two months were far busier than I expected them to be. I apologize to the Stage’s readers for the lull in posting–more than once I started post or essay during these weeks only to discover that I did not have the spare time to finish it. Now that […]
I recently began rereading my copy Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty II, the third volume in Burton Watson‘s translation of Sima Qian‘s famous Shiji. I have made it something of a goal to reread at least one portion of Sima Qian’s record every year. As I began this year’s reading my thoughts turned […]
. . Several months ago I highlighted the work of Nate Thayer, one of the more accomplished investigative journalists of the post-Cold War era, here at the Stage. Some of Mr. Thayer’s most impressive work dates to the 1990s, when he was the Far Eastern and Economic Review‘s man on the ground in Cambodia. One […]
A great divide separates the worldviews of the average Chinese and American. The most profound description of this divide I have heard came from the mouth of a friend who has never been to America and who was not a historian nor accustomed to deep political reflection and debate. She concluded that Americans lived in […]
Image Source. Since late 2009 I have maintained an annotated bibliography that contains the bibliographic information and a concise (usually 3-5 sentence long) review of every book that I have read since then. I strive to update it immediately after I finish every new book. This can be a bit tedious, but in this case […]
A Taureg nomad in the Sahara. Photograph by Carsten Peter, National Geographic. © “The nomadic strategy is one means by which people adapt to thinly spread resources and to the variability of the resources across space and over time. It is also a strategy for avoiding other deleterious environmental conditions, such as extreme heat […]
WARNING – EXTENSIVE PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD. This week the bloggers of Fabius Maximus have posted several times on the evils of Orson Scott Card‘s popular science fiction book, Ender’s Game. I figure I might as well pile on. I read Ender’s Game for the second time earlier this summer. I noticed it was included in […]
Whilst Reading: A Portrait of Sofia Kramskoya, the Painter’s Wife (Ivan Kramskoi, 1866)Image Source. Earlier this year I asked if the ‘great books’ have a place in the 21st century. Jospeh Sobran says that they do: “Dogged readers of my columns will observe that I habitually quote a handful of classic writings, chiefly the Shakespeare […]
