Scott Reinhard, Expert Button (February 2010). Print at Scott Reinhard Co. Image source. Last month Tom Nichols, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a well regarded authority on Russian foreign policy and American nuclear strategy, published a thought-provoking essay on his blog titled “The Death of Expertise:” […]
Late last year Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology published a study titled “The Immigrant Paradox: Immigrants are Less Antisocial Than Native Born Americans.” Given how closely certain sections of the blogosphere cover all things ethnic I was a tad surprised to find that no one has been talking about this paper and its conclusions. This […]
I found myself immensely entertained with Faine Green‘s cartoon caricature of the young, progressive Ivy League graduate who arrives in Cambodia ready to save the world (and look good doing it). The caricature is smartly captioned: “She graduated from Princeton on a mission: a mission to save the world. Preferably with microcredit and hugs, and […]
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 […]
Taken from Michael Swaine, et. al, U.S.-China Security Perceptions Survey: Findings and Implications, p.11. Earlier this week the Carnegie Endowment for Peace published an important study (pdf version here) that presents and dissects an expansive survey of Chinese and American opinions and attitudes about their countries’ relationship with each other. [1] While the Pew Global […]
Science Fiction Hero? Photo of Massoit statue overlooking Plymouth Rock. Taken by Greg Kullberg, 14 Dec 2007. Wikimedia. Why have most Americans never heard the actual story behind Plymouth Bay Colony‘s first thanksgiving feast? Scott Alexander suggests that the problem comes down to narrative. The real tale just does not fit easily into any of […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. This is the first “Notes From All Over” I have written this month, so this list is a long one. TOP BILLING When We Lose Antibiotics, Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose TooMaryn McKenna. Wired. 20 November 2013. If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance […]
Why the West? I do not think there is any other historical controversy that has so enthralled the public intellectuals of our age. The popularity of the question can probably be traced to Western unease with a rising China and the ease with which the issue can be used as proxy war for the much […]
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 […]
The world before the Mongols. Map Created by Thomass Lessman for Wikimedia “I will now tell you all about the Tartars and how they acquired their empire and spread throughout the world.” – Marco Polo, The Travels [1] I suspect the Mongol Empire needs no introduction to the readers of The Stage. No conquests so […]