We live in a merciless age.  And maybe many of us need to suffer mercilessness for a while.  There’s very little space given on social media for people to overlook things done by other people near or to them.  We like to track people going bad, losing their shit, flailing in public.  We’ve all done it, of course—both the tracking people going bad, and the going bad itself—but not all of us (yet) have been caught out doing it in public.  Social media, and to a lesser degree phone cameras, take the blessed oblivion of chance away.  Everything we...

Just because I have a ton of them.

Brookings on Europe’s large-scale shift, over the past few years, on China—from fundamentally engaging to more complicatedly confronting.  But it being Europe, it’s never whole-hearted.

Apologies for being slow to post these. 

A good review of Eduardo Porter’s new book AMERICAN POISON.  

“There is something essential about the suffering of black people that can’t be reconciled with the suffering of other people.”...

Scientific collaboration is improperly characterized as “growing” these days; it is all growed up.  Most "science" in the sense of physical and natural science is done in teams and groups (this varies between disciplines, but it seems pretty common across all the sciences).  How you coordinate the discrete capacities of the individual scientists has fallen a bit into background, as the processes and their replicability speak to an extra-subjective character to the knowledge thereby produced.  I think of this by reading this morning about...

It's Tuesday, time for some links.

Some good advice on public writing for academics.

Danielle Allen—a...

A quiet Sunday, and are you looking for reading?  Look no more:

Thorstein Veblen a century ago diagnosed what is ailing the university now—too much presence of businessmen trying to run things.  These authors don’t like that.  I tend to agree, though I think they maybe don’t realize that a person with a name like “Richard F. Teichgraeber III” is as likely to appear in one...

I am so deeply American, in the insecure but blustery way that some Americans are taught to be American, that it has taken me all my adult life to develop a more mature picture of what it means to be American.  (This isn't at all the fault of my parents, who were deeply committed to my sister and I becoming aware of the amplitude of the world, and the possibilities for goodness and value to be discovered everywhere; it is my adolescence.)  And of course I'm still developing into a sufficiently adequate resemblance to "maturity."  Like my country, I...

One of the things I’ve been doing on sabbatical is reading more widely and deeply in books that I would consider classics, but which are not necessarily of immediate professional interest in my field at the moment.

I always try to do this, but sabbaticals and summer often provide the most expensive opportunities to explore such works. Even so, I do not try to go up them down, but sip them slowly reading a bit every day, slowly chipping away at...

A good analysis of how Americans’ views on policing and race today are different than they have ever been before.  As Galston says, “it’s not 1968 anymore.”...

Here's a nice passage from Edmund Burke, on the idea of society as a contract across generations, though he doesn't do enough I think to distinguish society from the state.  I found the passage from the e-TOC of a weird journal I get, Population and Development Review, it's about demographics, I recognize that's not everybody's cup of tea but...