A few disjointed points from some media things I've been gathering: 

First, Brookings is studying Muslims as the "other" throughout the West.  This seems a good idea, as it is obvious that so much of the present fraughtness of politics in Europe and the United States has attached itself to Muslims. In this way Islamophobia really is becoming a kind of fresh parallel to antisemitism...

Here you go.

Write a novel!  Here are some interesting (to non-novelist me) guidelines and technologies to help that process "unfold," as the kool kids say these days, on the page.

University Presses are very valuable, though some of them have come under the budgetary axe from their home Universities in recent years.  They typically produce much more durable books than popular presses (don't come at me with anecdotes of popular press books that are exceptions to this rule, because they are in fact exceptions, and terrifically rare ones).  Because they are not so desperately profit-driven, and because they typically have longer time-horizons than many other presses, their books typically endure longer.  (Again, typically.) ...

A sharp review of a book by a colleague of mine, on international geo-politics and the importance of prudence.  "What, one is forced to ask, should be made of a work that is so scrupulous in historical analysis yet so impoverished in critical self-reflection?"

An...

Learn throughout life with Aristotle!  Seriously, CDC Reeve, the author of this piece, is a great scholar of ancient philosophy; his Philosopher-Kings was hugely important for me in thinking through Plato's Republic in a way beyond all the clichés (trust me--read it), and...

I've got a big backlog so I'll try to get one of these up every day this week.  

A fascinating idea: the four-day workweek.  Long predicted, but it never quite arrives.  A nice article discussing what it might look like, how it would help businesses and employees, and why it's unlikely.

My old friend Jonathan Malesic...

My father was an infantryman in the Korean war. He served only the final six months or so of the war, in static trench fighting. It gave him the opportunity to go to college (he graduated from the Citadel, class of 1957? 1958?) and become a civil engineer, and so it gave him the capacities that led him on the amazing life he had.  The war also ruined him as a human in some ways--not for others (as he was, pretty reliably, a loving and a joyous man), but for himself.  From when I was a small child, till my last times visiting him and my mother at home when he...

I am a child of public television, in important ways. What I mean is that I reliably saw Sesame Street and Mr Rogers for the first five or six, or maybe more, years of my life.

Sesame Street was wonderful--I imagine it still is--but it had a fundamentally shallower effect on me. I remember it helping me learn to count, to know my...

Just some stuff I've found:

David Runciman interviewed by Joshua Cohen, a very sobering conversation.

Interesting: The most common kind of graduate students to study international he is a...

Thirty years ago today I was in college.  I went to college at Georgetown University, a very political school, and my friends and I were pretty gripped by politics and what we called (do the kool kids still use this phrase?) "world affairs," and 1989 was a year of some interest for geopolitics.  

I still remember the night of November 9th.  We had heard rumors all day that all sorts of things were happening, but you know, no one had the news on their phones or anything like that, so what we knew was spotty at best.

I got home at the end of the...