Tetlock wins Grawemeyer

From the Chronicle:

Berkeley Professor Wins Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order

Philip E. Tetlock, a professor of business administration and political science at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2008 Grawemeyer Award for “ideas improving world order,” the University of Louisville has announced. Mr. Tetlock will receive the $200,000 prize for his research on the accuracy of high-profile advisers on issues of public policy.

Predictions on political issues are frequently wrong, says Mr. Tetlock, which is unfortunate because lawmakers frequently rely on such analyses to shape policy. In a 20-year study of 27,000 predictions made by 284 “experts” cited in the news media, he found that, very often, the professionals were no more accurate in their crystal-ball gazing than ordinary people.

“In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area-study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations,” writes Mr. Tetlock in his 2005 book about the study, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton).

Experts need to receive more training and be held publicly accountable for their advice, he argues in the book.

Dan Drezner blogged about Tetlock's findings here, here, and here. Tyler Cowen called Expert Political Judgment "one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005." I worried about the propensity of public-intellectual academics to make pronouncements as if their expertise went far beyond its genuine boundaries my very first substantive post on this blog (scroll down, permalinks that old seem to have rusted away).

DeLong on Schumpeter

at the Chronicle.

Moi je reste calme

I have no idea how to embed youtube videos, but have a look at this (sent to me as a "cautionary tale"). The song is in French, but non-francophones will still get the idea pretty easily.

Update:
Full lyrics. I've always thought that rhyming seems unfairly easy in French...

"Pour bien commencer
Ma petite journée
Et me réveiller
Moi, j'ai pris un café
Un arabica
Noir et bien corsé
J'enfile ma parka
Ça y est je peux y aller

«Où est-ce que tu vas ?»
Me crie mon aimée
«Prenons un kawa
Je viens de me lever»
Étant en avance
Et un peu forcé
Je change de sens
Et reprends un café

A huit heures moins l'quart
Faut bien l'avouer
Les bureaux sont vides
On pourrait s'ennuyer
Mais je reste calme
Je sais m'adapter
Le temps qu'ils arrivent
J'ai l'temps pour un café

La journée s'emballe
Tout le monde peut bosser
Au moins jusqu'à l'heure
De la pause-café
Ma secrétaire entre :
«Fort comme vous l'aimez»
Ah mince, j'viens d'en prendre
Mais maintenant qu'il est fait...

Un repas d'affaire
Tout près du Sentier
Il fait un temps super
Mais je me sens stressé
Mes collègues se marrent :
«Détends-toi, René !
Prends un bon cigare
Et un p'tit café...»

Une fois fini
Mes collègues crevés
Appellent un taxi
Mais moi j'ai envie d'sauter
Je fais tout Paris
Puis je vois un troquet
J'commande un déca
Mais recaféiné

J'arrive au bureau
Ma secrétaire me fait :
«Vous êtes un peu en r'tard
Je me suis inquiétée»
Han ! - J'la jette par la f'nêtre
Elle l'avait bien cherché
T'façons faut qu'je rentre
Mais avant un café

Attendant l'métro
Je me fais agresser
Une p'tite vieille me dit :
«Vous avez l'heure s'il vous plaît ?»
Han - Je lui casse la tête
Et j'la pousse sur le quai
Je file à la maison
Et j'me sers un - devinez ?

«Papa, mon Papa,
En classe je suis premier»
Putain mais quoi ?
Tu vas arrêter de m'faire chier ?
Qu'il est con ce gosse !
En plus y s'met à chialer !
J'm'enferme dans la cuisine
Il reste un peu d'café

Ça fait quatorze jours
Que je suis enfermé
J'suis seul dans ma cuisine
Et je bois du café
Il faudrait bien qu'je dorme
Mais les flics vont m'choper
Alors je cloue les portes
Et j'reprends du café..."

Get smart

Fabio Rojas on the limits of "smarts" as a tool of academic evaluation. (I've seen at least one, er, very lively discussion at a hiring meeting about just this question.)

Bagels

Matt Yglesias follows up Megan McCardle's entirely justified complaint about the dearth of decent bagels in DC. The two New Yorkers commiserate about how New York has the only respectable bagels, though Matt rightly praises Bodo's in Charlottesville. (My wife is a UVA alumna, and pilgrimages to Bodo's are part of each return visit.)

But Matt, amusingly, illustrates his New Yorker's complaint with a picture that is undoubtedly of Montreal bagels coming out of a Montreal oven-- and that might well be from the St. Viateur six blocks from my house. If you're insisting on the evils of the huge puffy bread that passes for bagels in most of America, you want a picture of something visibly different-- something well-boiled with a hole that takes up half the total bagel-space. That means Montreal; New York bagels aren't so visually distinctive.

Ingrown?

Noam Scheiber, over at TNR's Stump, notes the following from Barack Obama's Nightline appearance.

I think there's no doubt that the fact that my name is Barack Obama and that my father was from Kenya and that I grew up in Hawaii that there's that whole exotic aspect to me that people, I think, have to get past. But they also, surprisingly enough, even in rural Iowa, recognize the opportunity to send a signal to the world that, you know, we are not as ingrown, as parochial as you may perceive or as the Bush administration seems to have communicated, that we are, in fact, embracing the world, we are listening, we are concerned, we want to be engaged.

Noam reasonably notes that 'the "even in rural Iowa" part could stick in some people's craws' as unappealingly condescending. What jumped out at me was ingrown. As far as I know there's no use for the word "ingrown" that refers to people. So the question is what word Obama was reaching for to describe a stereotype about rural people (since the context is "they prove themselves better than that by supporting me")-- and I can't think of any possibility other than "inbred."

Update: I understand perfectly well that what Obama meant was something like "inward looking." But there's not a word that means that which is readily confused with "ingrown." As far as slips of the tongue go, it's better to have called people toenails than to have called them cousin-marrying yokels-- but I think the slip of the tongue has to have gone with a slip of the brain that thought there was some "in-" word that fit into the sentence.

Wishful thinking alert

November 15: France's Conseil constitutionnel judges unconstitutional a proposed law authorizing social scientists to gather statistical information on ethnicity, on grounds that it would violate Article 1 of the French Constitution:

"La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale. Elle assure l'égalité devant la loi de tous les citoyens sans distinction d'origine, de race ou de religion."

(This is the same article that was used to strike down a law on Corsican autonomy/ As Jeremy Waldron has been telling us for years, an active court enforcing a written constiution will not necessarily protect minorities, nor will a democratic legislature necessarily imperil them. The complaints that follow are agnostic about whether the CC correctly interpreted Article 1; I'm willing to believe that it did, but am sure that Article 1 is the source of much constitutional mischief. If it means what the CC says it means, it ought to be amended.)

The last two nights: Immigrant-populated Parisian banlieues erupt in violence, again, this time with rioters bringing out guns. 77 police officers injured overnight, after two teenagers of African descent were allegedly (though the allegation doesn't seem very persuasive) killed by police in a hit and run.

While good social science analyzing the multiply-caused multiple ills of the banlieues won't by itself solve those ills, it well might be a prerequisite to such solutions. To the degree that the research can't seriously consider ethnicity because it can't ethnicity, the social science will be seriously impaired. There's a real level of ostrichness here.

That the French state normatively aspires to the irrelevance, invisibility, and non-existence of ethnic and racial distinctions within French society doesn't make such distinctions sociologically irrelevant. No matter how "imagined" categories like race and ethnicity are, they do not become unimagined just on the state's say-so.

Onto the reading list

Andrea Sangiovanni
"Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality"
Journal of Political Philosophy (OnlineEarly Articles)

IT is uncontroversial that the limits imposed by existing institutions and practices are relevant in determining how best to implement a particular conception of justice. The set of precepts, rules, and policies that best realize the demands of justice (whatever one thinks they are) in Corsica will be different from those required in Poland. It is uncontroversial, that is, that information about institutional and political context is needed in coming to a concrete judgment regarding a particular course of action or policy. No one disagrees that constraints derived from particular institutional forms and practices should play a crucial role in the application of a theory to the ‘real world’.

Less well understood, by contrast, is whether existing institutions and practices should play any role in the basic justification and formulation of first principles.1 A common view holds that, in setting out and justifying first principles of justice, one should seek a normative point of view unfettered by the form or structure of existing institutions and practices. To assign any greater role to institutions and practices—to allow them, as I have said, to influence the formulation and justification of first principles of justice—is a fundamental mistake: constraining the content of justice by whatever social and political arrangements we happen to share gives undue normative weight to what is, at best, merely the product of arbitrary historical contingency or, at worst, the result of past injustice itself.

This article aims to bring to light, clarify, and defend the opposite view: existing institutions and practices, I shall argue, should play a crucial role in the justification of a conception of justice rather than merely its implementation. Our task is to explain both why and how. What I call the ‘practice-dependence thesis’ in its most general form is as follows:

Practice-dependence Thesis: The content, scope, and justification of a conception of justice depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern.

CFP: International Society for Utilitarian Studies

CALL for PAPERS
ISUS X – 11-14 September 2008
U.C. Berkeley - Berkeley, California, U.S.A.

The Tenth Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies will be held on 11-14 September 2008, at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, California, U.S.A.). The meeting is co-hosted by the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and its Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs.

The conference seeks paper and panel proposals concerning the study of utilitarianism and the utilitarian tradition broadly conceived. This includes scholarship (both positive and critical) on contemporary utilitarianism and consequentialism, as well as more wide-ranging scholarship concerning figures within the utilitarian canon and the leading social and political issues – such as democracy, law reform, political economy, welfare and equality, colonization and international law – which have figured centrally in the utilitarian tradition.

Scholars representing all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are encouraged to participate. Past ISUS meetings have included faculty and graduate students in philosophy, political science, law, economics, history and literature. Conference highlights will include distinguished plenary lectures and panels, as well as monetary prizes awarded to the best graduate student papers presented at the meeting. Papers from younger faculty and advanced graduate students are encouraged.

The conference welcomes proposals for individual papers and encourages proposals for panels of 2-3 papers or round-table discussions linked to a common theme. All proposals should include a 200-word abstract for each paper and a 1-page C.V. for each participant, including current contact information and email address. Proposals for panels of papers and round tables also should include a brief précis of the panel topic as a whole. Please place the proposal and C.V. in electronic format and submit as an email attachment to: ISUS@ law.berkeley.edu.

The deadline for application is February 18, 2008. Notification of conference participation will be made by the end of March 2008. Additional information concerning the conference program and travel information is available at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/centers/kadish/isus/. Please send any inquiries concerning the conference or call for papers to: ISUS@ law.berkeley.edu.

The University of California, Berkeley, is located in the beautiful San Francisco Bay area of northern California, and provides easy access to San Francisco and other regional attractions. The conference convener is David Lieberman (dlieberman@law.berkeley.edu). Those unable to submit proposals electronically should mail their proposals to: Professor David Lieberman; School of Law; U.C. Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720-7200; U.S.A.

"La philosophie politique et la ville/Political philosophy and the City"

The Montreal Political Theory Workshop conference: "La philosophie politique et la ville/Political philosophy and the City"

November 30, 2007
9:30 to 5
Universite de Montreal
2910 Édouard Montpetit, room 422

9:30 - 10: Daniel Weinstock (UdeM): "An agenda for a political
philosophy of the city".

10:15 - 11:30: Loren King (WLU): "Cities, Citizens, and Democracy".

11:30 - 1pm Lunch

1 - 2:15: Frank Cunningham (UofT): "Urban Philosophy: An Approach".

2:15 - 3:30: Patrick Turmel (Laval): "Are Cities Illiberal: Municipal
Institutions and the Scope of Liberal Neutrality"

3:45 - 5: Martin Blanchard and Christian Nadeau (UdeM): "L'impasse
morale et politique de la voiture en ville/The moral and political
dead end of cars in the city"

5 - 5:15 Wrap-up

RSVP to emmanuelle.richez@mail.mcgill.ca

Reports like this have a very bad track record...

but for what it's worth. From the Chronicle.

The job market for Ph.D.'s who want to teach in Canada is hot and will get hotter over the next 10 years, according to the findings of a study that examined faculty trends.

The study, the second in a series called Trends in Higher Education, was conducted by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. According to a report released on Tuesday, the study found not only that universities were expanding but also that they will have to replace half their faculty members because of retirements over the next decade.

That means Canadian universities will need 21,000 new faculty members to replace the retirees, plus 3,600 to 13,600 new professors by 2016 to keep up with projected increases in student enrollment.

"It's a sea change in the hiring market," said Herb O'Heron, the report's author. He pointed out that in the mid-1990s, universities were forced to cut the ranks of full-time faculty members by 10 percent because of budget cutbacks. However, from 1998 to 2004, the universities hired 20,000 new full-time faculty members. In 2006 the number of full-time professors reached 40,800, representing a 21 percent increase over the number in 1998. About a third of the new appointees came from outside of Canada, and half of those were from the United States.

Now administrators at Canada's universities are worried about where they will find additional faculty members and senior researchers because other major democratic countries around the world will also be looking for replacements for retirees. Both Canada and the United States have the smallest proportion of faculty members younger than 40 and the largest proportion of professors over 55.

See my messy office...

tonight on the 6 pm Global TV evening newscast, where ten minutes of highly intellectual discussion about the reasonable accommodation in Quebec will undoubtedly be cut to three words spoken at the moment when I was making a funny face.

Update: A sentence fragment, but not too funny a face. It's here, click on screen on the left that says "accommodation," and go to about 03:30.

Harold Berman, RIP

Scott Dinsmore reports that the great legal historian Harold Berman has died. Law and Revolution, vol. 1 was on my office desk already, next semester I'll be teaching more of it than I ever have before, and am looking forward to it tremendously. Berman's voluminous work in choice of law and conflicts of laws is on my medium-term to-start-reading list, as well. Never met the man, but have tremendous admiration for the scholar.

Rankings games, continued

In January I noted a new, annual, for-profit ranking system of Ph.D.-granting departments that relies entirely on productivity measures and not at all on reputation measures. The new round of rankings has been published. Political science is here; Chronicle subscription may be required. The top ten:

1. Harvard Government
2. Harvard Kennedy School
3. Berkeley
4. Michigan
5. Stanford
6. USC
7. UNC Chapel Hill
8. Columbia
9. Yale
10. Wisconsin-Madison

Compared that with last year's list:

Wash U
Harvard
Yale
SUNY Stony Brook
UIUC
U Kansas
U Maryland College Park
Princeton
UCSB
UVA

The only change in the formula I can find is that it seems the weighting of books:articles has been reduced from 5:1 to 3:1 in the social sciences. (I think that's been done.) But that's very strange. There's no way Wash U should drop from #1 to below the top 10 as a result of increasing the relative weight of articles. SUNY Stony Brook and UIUC should also be helped by that change, not hurt by it.

The new rankings look a bit more like what one would expect than the old ones did, though they're still not the same results as one would get with a reputation measure. But that suggests that the ostensibly objective measure has been tweaked to better fit preexisting intuitions (the way US News changed its formula after it reached the implausible result that Caltech was the best university in the US)-- which would seem to undermine the rationale for universities to pay large sums of money for the proprietary objective data being collected.

Now online

in the new APSR: Leigh Jenco, "'What Does Heaven Ever Say?'” A Methods-centered Approach to Cross-cultural Engagement."

Full ride

One occasionally-recurring topic here has been private boarding schools and their relationship to class and perceptions of class. As an Exeter alum who was able to attend only because of massive financial aid, I was unendingly irked to go to my expensive private college (also on financial aid) and run into kids from wealthy suburban public schools that call their tuition "property taxes" and have them presume that it was prep schools that were the morally problematic reinforcers of class privilege. The affected moral superiority of the wealthy public school parent has bothered me ever since. On the positive side, I'm always happy to tout prep schools as an avenue of social mobility. Getting into Exeter with a scholarship was the most important event in my educational-professional life, and made everything that followed it possible.

So anyway, I'm happy to see this.

Phillips Exeter Academy is offering a free boarding school education to admitted students whose families earn $75,000 or less.
more stories like this

The change will take effect next fall for current and new students.

Principal Tyler Tingley says in addition to a full scholarship and room and board, the school will cover books, supplies, other mandatory fees and a computer.

"We want to be clear that money does not stand in the way of an Exeter education," Tingley said in a statement. "Students who qualify academically will find Exeter affordable."

The prestigious prep school already provides financial aid to nearly half of its 1,000 students and has a policy of offering no loans, so graduates can enter college debt free.

William Fitzsimmons, Harvard College's dean of admissions and financial aid, called the move "a very significant initiative."

"Colleges and universities depend on a pipelines that promotes opportunity and academic preparation for all students," Fitzsimmons said.

For boarding students, the full cost to attend Phillips Exeter is more than $38,000. The full cost for day students is nearly $30,000.

The school's endowment recently passed $1 billion. A recent $305 million fund raising campaign helped make the new policy possible.

(The "no loans" policy postdated me, and unfortunately was not made retroactive...)

The rankings game

From the Chronicle; rankings should of course be taken with liberal helpings of salt, but for what it's worth:

Montreal’s McGill University got a double dose of good news within the past 24 hours, as two sets of rankings gave it high marks. A ranking published by the Times Higher Education Supplement and Quacquarelli Symonds called McGill the top public university in North America, and Maclean’s, a Canadian news magazine, ranked it as the No. 1 institution in the medical-doctoral category.

The annual Maclean’s rankings were released this morning. The University of British Columbia and Queen’s University tied for second (last year they were fourth and second), and the University of Toronto slipped to fourth. Maclean’s noted that Toronto topped the rankings from 1994 to 2005 in the medical-doctoral category.

Question of the day

"What have you been reading lately that you learned from?"

For me, very lately: Richard Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, and Adrian Vermeule, Mechanisms of Democracy. And, yes, in the distinction between "edifying works" and "works that challenged me and taught me" Tuck qualifies as the latter-- it's a book that does teach a lot of new stuff but also unsettles a lot of old stuff in a very productive way. Not that there's anything wrong with reading just for the sake of learning new stuff...

Update:

I like this exchange from the comments thread, too:

Another equally important question, I think, is "what have you written about lately that you learned from?"

Writing is one of the best ways to learn, especially if it's about what you're reading.

Posted by: Adam | November 05, 2007 at 08:57 AM

Adam,

Excellent point.

I have always enjoyed writing professional book reviews precisely for that reason ... it forces me to think about what I am learning from what I am reading.

My colleague Richard Wagner often says something to the effect that "Thinking without writing is little more than daydreaming." And Buchanan always stressed to us (his students) that "Writing is research."

Anyway, excellent point about writing and learning.

Pete

Posted by: Peter Boettke | November 05, 2007 at 10:19 AM

Paper updates

Now forthcoming, Texas Review of Law and Politics: Three Perversities of Indian Law.

Newly posted on SSRN, and forthcoming in Hypatia: Self-determination, non-domination, and federalism.

Taylor-Bouchard Commission quote of the day

From CBC:

André Bissonnette described himself as a "frustrated Quebecer" who said he's tired of watching immigrants impose their religion on Quebecers.

"I'm not a practicing Catholic, so why would I yield to the religion of others? They can go worship in their churches, I have nothing against that, but don't make us follow you."

People keep saying things like this. I cannot begin to understand what they think they mean. The results of the polls on accommodation show that anti-minority-religion sentiment isn't just a matter of misunderstanding; it's not that all will be well if it's made clear that no one's proposing to make Islam the official religion of Quebec. But there does seem to be some portion of the populace who's convinced that that's exactly what's on the agenda.

Scholar-blogging:

pro and con, by Scott Kaufman and Adam Kotsko at Inside Higher Ed.

I've only ever been an occasional long-distance observer of the Valve- Long Sunday disputes Kotsko discusses (and when I've peeked in, my sympathies haven't lain with him). But he seems to me to get at something important about a couple of shifts in the academic blogosphere, as comments sections have become ubiquitous and group-blogs have become the norm. The tendency toward institutionalization in such a fluid medium is kind of odd, really, and it may come at a price.

There are enough institutional turf wars in academe – if blogs are to play a productive role in academic discourse, they should not gratuitously recreate those same dynamics, and for me that means moving away from having quasi-institutional group blogs with stated missions and back toward conversations dispersed among many blogs.

I haven't ever articulated this to myself as my reason for ending up back here on my low-traffic, casual, comments-free solo blog. But I think he's onto something there.

Remember, remember

By now you've heard the mind-bending political news of the day-- multiply so for someone who, like me, is interested in early modern history and comic books and libertarianism.

Antiwar Republican presidential candidate and sometime Libertarian Ron Paul raised over four million dollars in one day yesterday, breaking the Republican one-day fundraising record and the online one-day primary fundraising record, thanks to a "moneybomb" [think googlebomb] organized by this independent website. The date selected for the concentrated donations was November 5-- Guy Fawkes Day, the old English holiday commemorating freedom from papism and the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot. Guy Fawkes Day did have a certain kind of place in the English Whiggish self-interpretation, since freedom from Catholicism was always understood as partly constitutive of and partly symbolic of English liberty. The fact that it was Parliament Fawkes had tried to blow up only made the symbolism starker-- thedevotee of a slavish religion who wanted to enslave good Englishmen tried to destroy the symbol of English liberty. And that anti-Catholic Whiggish ideology is one of the great-great grandparents of certain kinds of anti-statism in the Anglo-American world, something that entered the intellectual DNA of the U.S. in particular in the 18th century.

But the Alan Moore comic book V for Vendetta inverted the ideology. V dresses in the traditional Guy Fawkes Day mask while conducting his anarchistic campaign against a fascistic British state. "Remember, remember, the fifth of November," the beginning of an old English nursery rhyme about remembering Fawkes' treachery and the survival of the British state, got transformed into the creepily memorable slogan of the quasi-heroic freedom fighter who ends up successfully blowing up Parliament.

I take it that, in the comic (originally published for a British audience), this was all meant to be apparent. It was deliberate irony. The inversion was part of the point: it's now the British state that has become the enemy of British liberty, and those who once rooted against Fawkes should now root for him.

But that was mostly lost on American audiences, I think-- even the politically self-aware nerdy libertarians, anarchists, and socialists for whom V was a favorite work.

Some really weird confusion has resulted, with American anti-statist types celebrating Fawkes-as-commemorated-by-V using the words and imagery of the celebration of Fawks' defeat. ABC writes:

The catchy slogan comes from a nursery rhyme about Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century crusader for Catholics rights caught in the basement of parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder. He failed in his mission to blow the place up. ["Crusader for Catholic rights" may well have been accurate after a fashion-- Catholicism was prohibited and persecuted in 1605 England-- but is hardly the position of the nursery rhyme.-- JTL]

[...]Asked if it is appropriate to invoke a nursery rhyme about a man who tried to blow up parliament in the 17th-century as a fundraising tool, Lyman said, "Some people want to go that way. We're not going in any way violent."

[...]The date Nov. 5 corresponded with the movie "V for Vendetta" and the Guy Fawkes rhyme.

"If you look at the pop culture feel-good message of the movie," Lyman said, "the people in the end say we are the deciders. That's the best way to describe it. And this is a country of and by the people."

Emphasis added. That sound you hear is my brain exploding and dribbling out of my ear. Over at TNR's Stump we get this quote:

Mr. Benton clarified that Mr. Paul did not support blowing up government buildings. “He wants to demolish things like the Department of Education,” Mr. Benton said, “but we can do that very peacefully, in a constructive manner.”

Something very strange has happened when one's uses of Guy Fawkes Day require some clarification that one doesn't actually wish to blow up government buildings.

Just to finalize the weirdness: notice that V portrayed a fable of a fascistic British state in the 1980s. Anti-Thatcherism ran through the work, in big, boldfaced, highlighted, and underlined subtext. Ron Paul is an anti-statist of an entirely market-oriented variety, who has said of Thatcher that she
"embraced American values such as freedom and limited government", and Thatcher is wildly popular among Ron Paul's conservative-libertarian fanbase.

By now I've lost track of the number of symbolic inversions. The world is a complicated place.

Taylor-blogging that doesn't involve the commission

hat-tip Henry: SSRC has created a new scholar-blog: "The immanent frame: secularism, religion, and the public sphere," and it currently features Professor Taylor among others blogging about A Secular Age.

Professional news

I don't do a lot of these kind of posts, but a blogosphere-jurisprudence-Chicago Law combination means this one's too noteworthy to pass up: Brian Leiter from Texas to Chicago.

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...

From time to time we run into the old discussion about academic book reviews: too many puff pieces, too little incentive to be critical when a book calls for it, vs. too high of stakes if (especially) a junior author gets a bad review in a major journal.
Brian Leiter excerpts from a review whose author is... not afraid to say what he thinks.