A reply to Walter Russell Mead.

A reply to Walter Russell Mead.

One of my earliest memories is of an incident in the kindergarten of my childhood in Vienna. I must have been at most five years old. I was supposed to speak a line in a play about which I have no memory. All I remember is that I was wearing a top hat and was […]

The Blue Model is on the way out. What should come next?

Over the past decade the mantra in both development studies and comparative politics has been “institutions matter”—that is, you aren’t going to get economic growth or other human development objectives in the absence of institutions like rule of law, transparent and accountable governments, low levels of corruption, and the like.The empirical basis for this assertion […]

For a literature and history buff like me, teaching political studies has been an eye opening experience. For one thing, I’ve slowly come to realize that students trained in political studies and philosophy approach what people my age used to call “books” and what my younger colleagues call “texts” in different ways.Back in the stone […]

If you are a current or former state employee in the state of Minnesota, watch out.  Your pension depends on hot air, sketchy arithmetic, and the willingness of future taxpayers to make huge sacrifices to cover the deceit, wishful thinking and sketchy math at the heart of your pension system. According to a recent analysis […]

Now that the awareness-raising blackouts over the notorious anti-piracy SOPA/PIPA legislation are behind us, it’s a good time to look ahead to what comes next for internet freedom. In the coming days, thousands of digital column-inches will be devoted to trying to see if these unprecedented virtual protests have managed to move the needle in […]

On January 7 The New York Times reported that Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Department of Church and Society of the Moscow Patriarchate and one of the highest officials in the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, said in a radio interview that the ROC should serve as a mediator between the state and […]

I have been reading Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species at the recommendation of David Sloan Wilson, who has been one of the leading proponents of group selection (or more properly, multi-level selection) in evolutionary theory over the last few years.  (These are people who took issue with the views of Richard Dawkins and many older […]