Call for Papers
Les ateliers de l’éthique welcomes articles and book reviews on the multiple domains of ethics, with a particular attention to the normative challenges of public policies and social practices. Submission date: 1 December 2006.
email – cynthia.chassigneux@umontreal.ca
Articles should be between 10 and 20 pages, single spaced (Times New Roman 12). Notes should be placed at the end of the text. An abstract in English and French of no more than 200 words must be inserted at the beginning of the text. Articles are anonymously reviewed by the editorial committee.
Book reviews must not exceed 5 pages, single spaced (Times New Roman 12). Book reviews are evaluated by the editorial committee.
The journal is published by my cross-town friends at the Centre de Recherche en Ethique de l'Universite de Montreal (CREUM). The current issue may be viewed here.-- JTL
Friday, October 27, 2006
Blogging scholarship
Curious but interesting: a $5,000 scholarship for a college student-blogger. I don't know anything more about it than is on the site, but worth a look.
Curious but interesting: a $5,000 scholarship for a college student-blogger. I don't know anything more about it than is on the site, but worth a look.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
"One day I realized that sadness is just another word for..."
I haven't read Dilbert in a long time, but a friend pointed this week's strips out to me as being funny and of, er, particular interest. have a look.
I haven't read Dilbert in a long time, but a friend pointed this week's strips out to me as being funny and of, er, particular interest. have a look.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Well-said
Apropos of nothing, and recognizing that the point is in some ways an old and familiar one, I was very struck by this passage from Fontana Labs at Unfogged.
I think that's right, and very nicely said-- and might give a little bit of pause to our assumption that our knowledge of morality is radically uncertain and opaque. At least it suggests a real stability to moral psychology, in good Smithian fashion.
Other than fantasy that defines some humanoid races (e.g. orcs) as Evil as such and therefore outside the boundaries of compassion or sympathy, are there any counterexamples? Interesting science fiction about alien encounters is set in our moral universe-- there may be interspecies war, but the characters face all the usual moral dilemmas about killing in wartime. And in non-fantastic genres, in mainstream fiction, part of our ability to engage with or become interested in a character is typically our ability to empathize with the character's moral problems or questions or failings or successes. The occasional exceptions to that, the Hannibal Lecters, don't posit an alternative moral universe but simply fascinate by their amorality. Lots of fiction emphasizes one moral truth at the expense of others-- loyalty to family at the expense of justice, or compassion at the expense of responsibility, or retributive justice at the expense of procedural justice. But those aren't the equivalent of moral-science-fiction or moral-surrealism.
I think The Stranger might be a kind of counterexample, since it really does seem to posit an alternative moral (or rather amoral) universe, one in which killing a man because the sun was in your eyes seems like no more unreasonable a thing to do than any other. But I've never liked or understood The Stranger, so I'm not sure.
Anyway: loved that second sentence.
Apropos of nothing, and recognizing that the point is in some ways an old and familiar one, I was very struck by this passage from Fontana Labs at Unfogged.
We make moral judgments about characters and narratives all the time, and our moral responses to them are accountable to the same consistency pressures that are brought to bear on our everyday moral judgments about actual circumstances. (It's interesting that our moral responses are less apt for suspension than our [dis]belief[s], since we're able to imagine with ease various counterfactual scenarios but we have a harder time imagining worlds in which basic moral principles are false.)
I think that's right, and very nicely said-- and might give a little bit of pause to our assumption that our knowledge of morality is radically uncertain and opaque. At least it suggests a real stability to moral psychology, in good Smithian fashion.
Other than fantasy that defines some humanoid races (e.g. orcs) as Evil as such and therefore outside the boundaries of compassion or sympathy, are there any counterexamples? Interesting science fiction about alien encounters is set in our moral universe-- there may be interspecies war, but the characters face all the usual moral dilemmas about killing in wartime. And in non-fantastic genres, in mainstream fiction, part of our ability to engage with or become interested in a character is typically our ability to empathize with the character's moral problems or questions or failings or successes. The occasional exceptions to that, the Hannibal Lecters, don't posit an alternative moral universe but simply fascinate by their amorality. Lots of fiction emphasizes one moral truth at the expense of others-- loyalty to family at the expense of justice, or compassion at the expense of responsibility, or retributive justice at the expense of procedural justice. But those aren't the equivalent of moral-science-fiction or moral-surrealism.
I think The Stranger might be a kind of counterexample, since it really does seem to posit an alternative moral (or rather amoral) universe, one in which killing a man because the sun was in your eyes seems like no more unreasonable a thing to do than any other. But I've never liked or understood The Stranger, so I'm not sure.
Anyway: loved that second sentence.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
A prediction
The 34-year-old Haitian-born Quebecoise soprano Marie-Josée Lord (see biographical stories here and here) is going to be a major figure on opera's world stage very soon.
We saw her in the lead of Puccini's Suor Angelica at the Opera de Montreal on Saturday and were completely awestruck-- both as an actress and as a singer she gave what may be the most compelling, enrapturing operatic performance I've ever seen-- and I've seen dozens of operas at the Met and the Lyric. She has a hauntingly beautiful voice, and real mastery-- Angelica is a demanding role, with a long, uninterrupted, and difficult aria ("Senza mamma") at its heart-- and she was captivating in it.
For now, she seems to mostly sing here. I don't expect that that will last very long, but we're going to treasure being able to attend her performances for as long as it does.
The 34-year-old Haitian-born Quebecoise soprano Marie-Josée Lord (see biographical stories here and here) is going to be a major figure on opera's world stage very soon.
We saw her in the lead of Puccini's Suor Angelica at the Opera de Montreal on Saturday and were completely awestruck-- both as an actress and as a singer she gave what may be the most compelling, enrapturing operatic performance I've ever seen-- and I've seen dozens of operas at the Met and the Lyric. She has a hauntingly beautiful voice, and real mastery-- Angelica is a demanding role, with a long, uninterrupted, and difficult aria ("Senza mamma") at its heart-- and she was captivating in it.
For now, she seems to mostly sing here. I don't expect that that will last very long, but we're going to treasure being able to attend her performances for as long as it does.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
In which I geek out...
more than would be seemly to do on Open University.
So, there's something delightfully immersive about the geekiness around me in Montreal. Within a two-block radius of my front door, there's this place, my terrific neighborhood comics shop; this place, my neighborhood gaming shop and one of the best gaming shops I've ever seen; and the neighborhood armory. (I don't say my neighborhood armory, because SCA geekery isn't my type of geekery, but there seems to constantly be a huge group of SCA warriors in a big field on the mountain path where I bike with my dog). Right across the street from my department is the student center... officially the William Shatner University Centre, named for McGill's Kobayashi-Maru-winningest generous alumnus.
But today I saw the thing that put it all over the top-- made me burst out loud laughing. The old campus gym, which contains the swimming pool, is named afer a former Principal [a.k.a. chancellor or president] and is called...
wait for it...
the Sir Arthur Currie Memorial Gymnasium-Armoury. Yes, we have a swimming pool in a building named Arthur Currie.
If you have to ask, I'm not going to explain it...
Update: Coincidentally, other blogospheric geeks have been raving about Montreal this week.
more than would be seemly to do on Open University.
So, there's something delightfully immersive about the geekiness around me in Montreal. Within a two-block radius of my front door, there's this place, my terrific neighborhood comics shop; this place, my neighborhood gaming shop and one of the best gaming shops I've ever seen; and the neighborhood armory. (I don't say my neighborhood armory, because SCA geekery isn't my type of geekery, but there seems to constantly be a huge group of SCA warriors in a big field on the mountain path where I bike with my dog). Right across the street from my department is the student center... officially the William Shatner University Centre, named for McGill's Kobayashi-Maru-winningest generous alumnus.
But today I saw the thing that put it all over the top-- made me burst out loud laughing. The old campus gym, which contains the swimming pool, is named afer a former Principal [a.k.a. chancellor or president] and is called...
wait for it...
the Sir Arthur Currie Memorial Gymnasium-Armoury. Yes, we have a swimming pool in a building named Arthur Currie.
If you have to ask, I'm not going to explain it...
Update: Coincidentally, other blogospheric geeks have been raving about Montreal this week.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
I just noticed...
that Judith Shklar's wonderful autobiographical essay, "A Life of Learning," is available online. I'd completely forgotten that Shklar spent her teen years in pre-Quiet Revolution Montreal, and that she attended McGill:
When my father was at last able to settle his financial affairs, we finally went to Montreal. It was not a city one could easily like. It was politically held together by an equilibrium of ethnic and religious resentments and distrust. And in retrospect, it is not surprising that this political edifice eventually collapsed with extraordinary speed. The girls’ school that I attended there for some three years was dreadful. In all that time I was taught as much Latin as one can pick up in less than a term at college. I also learned some geometry, and one English teacher taught us how to compose précis, which is a very useful skill. The rest of the teachers just stood in front of us and read the textbook out loud. What I really learned was the meaning of boredom, and I learned that so well that I have never been bored since then. I report without comment that this was thought to be an excellent school. I dare say that there were better ones around, but I remain unconvinced by those who respond with vast nostalgia to the manifest inadequacies of high-school education today.
I do not look back fondly to my college days at McGill University either. That may have something to do with the then-prevailing entrance rules: 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. Nor was it an intellectually exciting institution, but at least when I arrived there, just before my 17th birthday, I was lucky to be in the same class as many ex-servicemen, whose presence made for an unusually mature and serious student body. And compared to school it was heaven. Moreover, it all worked out surprisingly well for me. I met my future husband and was married at the end of my junior year, by far the smartest thing I ever did. And I found my vocation.
Originally I had planned to major in a mixture of philosophy and economics, the rigor of which attracted me instantly. But when I was required to take a course in money and banking it became absolutely obvious to me that I was not going to be a professional economist. Philosophy was, moreover, mainly taught by a dim gentleman who took to it because he had lost his religious faith. I have known many confused people since I encountered this poor man, but nobody quite as utterly unfit to teach Plato or Descartes. Fortunately for me I was also obliged to take a course in the history of political theory taught by an American, Frederick Watkins. After two weeks of listening to this truly gifted teacher I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If there was any way of making sense of my experiences and that of my particular world, this was it.
Watkins was a remarkable man, as the many students whom he was to teach at Yale can testify. He was an exceptionally versatile and cultivated man and a more than talented teacher. He not only made the history of ideas fascinating in his lectures, but he also somehow conveyed the sense that nothing could be more important. I also found him very reassuring. For in many ways, direct and indirect, he let me know that the things I had been brought up to care for, classical music, pictures, literature, were indeed worthwhile, and not my personal eccentricities. His example, more than anything overtly said, gave me a great deal of self-confidence, and I would have remembered him gratefully, even if he had not encouraged me to go on to graduate school, to apply to Harvard, and then to continue to take a friendly interest in my education and career. It is a great stroke of luck to discover one’s calling in one’s late teens, and not everyone has the good fortune to meet the right teacher at the right time in her life, but I did, and I have continued to be thankful for the education that he offered me so many years ago.
Well, Montreal's much easier to like these days, and I think students now tend to be rather fonder of their time at McGill. But I'm still fascinated-- and now interested to go look up Frederick Watkins. And the thought that there might be a young Judith Shklar waiting to be inspired in class is an exciting and daunting one.
Update: So I google Watkins... and one of the first pages to come up is the ASPLP page that I put up myself, because Watkins was president right after Lon Fuller.
Watkins was a Rousseau scholar who later went to Yale. Given the timing of his years here, I'll bet that he had something to do with the creation of the McGill Library's Rousseau collection.
that Judith Shklar's wonderful autobiographical essay, "A Life of Learning," is available online. I'd completely forgotten that Shklar spent her teen years in pre-Quiet Revolution Montreal, and that she attended McGill:
When my father was at last able to settle his financial affairs, we finally went to Montreal. It was not a city one could easily like. It was politically held together by an equilibrium of ethnic and religious resentments and distrust. And in retrospect, it is not surprising that this political edifice eventually collapsed with extraordinary speed. The girls’ school that I attended there for some three years was dreadful. In all that time I was taught as much Latin as one can pick up in less than a term at college. I also learned some geometry, and one English teacher taught us how to compose précis, which is a very useful skill. The rest of the teachers just stood in front of us and read the textbook out loud. What I really learned was the meaning of boredom, and I learned that so well that I have never been bored since then. I report without comment that this was thought to be an excellent school. I dare say that there were better ones around, but I remain unconvinced by those who respond with vast nostalgia to the manifest inadequacies of high-school education today.
I do not look back fondly to my college days at McGill University either. That may have something to do with the then-prevailing entrance rules: 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. Nor was it an intellectually exciting institution, but at least when I arrived there, just before my 17th birthday, I was lucky to be in the same class as many ex-servicemen, whose presence made for an unusually mature and serious student body. And compared to school it was heaven. Moreover, it all worked out surprisingly well for me. I met my future husband and was married at the end of my junior year, by far the smartest thing I ever did. And I found my vocation.
Originally I had planned to major in a mixture of philosophy and economics, the rigor of which attracted me instantly. But when I was required to take a course in money and banking it became absolutely obvious to me that I was not going to be a professional economist. Philosophy was, moreover, mainly taught by a dim gentleman who took to it because he had lost his religious faith. I have known many confused people since I encountered this poor man, but nobody quite as utterly unfit to teach Plato or Descartes. Fortunately for me I was also obliged to take a course in the history of political theory taught by an American, Frederick Watkins. After two weeks of listening to this truly gifted teacher I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If there was any way of making sense of my experiences and that of my particular world, this was it.
Watkins was a remarkable man, as the many students whom he was to teach at Yale can testify. He was an exceptionally versatile and cultivated man and a more than talented teacher. He not only made the history of ideas fascinating in his lectures, but he also somehow conveyed the sense that nothing could be more important. I also found him very reassuring. For in many ways, direct and indirect, he let me know that the things I had been brought up to care for, classical music, pictures, literature, were indeed worthwhile, and not my personal eccentricities. His example, more than anything overtly said, gave me a great deal of self-confidence, and I would have remembered him gratefully, even if he had not encouraged me to go on to graduate school, to apply to Harvard, and then to continue to take a friendly interest in my education and career. It is a great stroke of luck to discover one’s calling in one’s late teens, and not everyone has the good fortune to meet the right teacher at the right time in her life, but I did, and I have continued to be thankful for the education that he offered me so many years ago.
Well, Montreal's much easier to like these days, and I think students now tend to be rather fonder of their time at McGill. But I'm still fascinated-- and now interested to go look up Frederick Watkins. And the thought that there might be a young Judith Shklar waiting to be inspired in class is an exciting and daunting one.
Update: So I google Watkins... and one of the first pages to come up is the ASPLP page that I put up myself, because Watkins was president right after Lon Fuller.
Watkins was a Rousseau scholar who later went to Yale. Given the timing of his years here, I'll bet that he had something to do with the creation of the McGill Library's Rousseau collection.
For the first time I can recall...
There are no academic social scientists or humanists among this year's class of MacArthur Fellows.
Maybe a couple of such years, plus Little Miss Sunshine, could remove the award's mystique and diminish its outsized effect on the psyches of people in our fields...?
Nah, probably not.
There are no academic social scientists or humanists among this year's class of MacArthur Fellows.
Maybe a couple of such years, plus Little Miss Sunshine, could remove the award's mystique and diminish its outsized effect on the psyches of people in our fields...?
Nah, probably not.
Friday, September 15, 2006
For the couple of people who still follow this blog with a bloglines account or some similar, but who don't do the same for Open University: I've got a big post up there about the Pope and Islam.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Congratulations revisited
In this post at the beginning of the summer, which mainly congratulated some graduate students I advise and one who taught for me on various honors and awards, I mentioned that there was more good news coming up. It turned out that there was more of it than I knew: two of my former advisees (that is, people on whose dissertation committees I sat-- I didn't chair them) and another former TA (all comparativists, as it happens) won four best dissertation prizes among them.
Deborah Boucoyannis was awarded the APSA European Politics and Society section's Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award for the best dissertation on European politics and society as well as the Seymour Martin Lipset award for best comparative dissertation from the Society for Comparative Research, for "Land, Courts and Parliaments: The Hidden Sinews of Power in the Emergence of Constitutionalism."
Joon-Suk Kim was awarded the APSA Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section's William Anderson Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, or state and local politics for "Making States Federatively: Alternative Routes of State Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe."
And Matthew Kocher, TA for the Constitutionalism course way back when, was awarded The APSA Gabriel Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics for ""Human Ecology and Civil War."
Again, sincere and hearty congratulations all around. I know that Boucoyannis' and Kim's dissertations were excellent and well-deserving; while I've only read one paper of Kocher's and so can't testify to the quality of his dissertation first-hand, that paper and the conversations we had over the years about ethnic violence lead me to not be at all surprised that the dissertation was superb.
In this post at the beginning of the summer, which mainly congratulated some graduate students I advise and one who taught for me on various honors and awards, I mentioned that there was more good news coming up. It turned out that there was more of it than I knew: two of my former advisees (that is, people on whose dissertation committees I sat-- I didn't chair them) and another former TA (all comparativists, as it happens) won four best dissertation prizes among them.
Deborah Boucoyannis was awarded the APSA European Politics and Society section's Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award for the best dissertation on European politics and society as well as the Seymour Martin Lipset award for best comparative dissertation from the Society for Comparative Research, for "Land, Courts and Parliaments: The Hidden Sinews of Power in the Emergence of Constitutionalism."
Joon-Suk Kim was awarded the APSA Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section's William Anderson Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, or state and local politics for "Making States Federatively: Alternative Routes of State Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe."
And Matthew Kocher, TA for the Constitutionalism course way back when, was awarded The APSA Gabriel Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics for ""Human Ecology and Civil War."
Again, sincere and hearty congratulations all around. I know that Boucoyannis' and Kim's dissertations were excellent and well-deserving; while I've only read one paper of Kocher's and so can't testify to the quality of his dissertation first-hand, that paper and the conversations we had over the years about ethnic violence lead me to not be at all surprised that the dissertation was superb.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Something new
I'll be taking part in a new blog that's launching today: Open University, at the New Republic, along with a terrific group of co-bloggers. I'm at the APSA Annual Meeting now which will probably prevent me from posting much for a few days, but there's already an interesting bunch o' stuff there. Go check it out.
I'll be taking part in a new blog that's launching today: Open University, at the New Republic, along with a terrific group of co-bloggers. I'm at the APSA Annual Meeting now which will probably prevent me from posting much for a few days, but there's already an interesting bunch o' stuff there. Go check it out.
Monday, August 28, 2006
A tale of two campuses...
specifically my undergraduate alma mater and my previous site of employment.
Top Parties and Professors
If you're preparing for the next step in education or just like to get competitive about schools, the Princeton Review has released its annual list of the country's top colleges.
The survey quizzes 115,000 students at 361 top colleges across the country, investigating everything from top academics to top parties, best libraries and, of course, top food.
The University of Chicago heads this year's list for the best overall academic experience for undergraduates, edging out Stanford and Rice for the top spot.
[...]
The rankings even go so far as to identify the college where kids are the "happiest."
"These are really interesting ways to look at a university," Franek said, "because the kids do know a lot about what's going on."
And where are students most content this year?
Brown takes the cake.
Both results seem about right to me.
specifically my undergraduate alma mater and my previous site of employment.
Top Parties and Professors
If you're preparing for the next step in education or just like to get competitive about schools, the Princeton Review has released its annual list of the country's top colleges.
The survey quizzes 115,000 students at 361 top colleges across the country, investigating everything from top academics to top parties, best libraries and, of course, top food.
The University of Chicago heads this year's list for the best overall academic experience for undergraduates, edging out Stanford and Rice for the top spot.
[...]
The rankings even go so far as to identify the college where kids are the "happiest."
"These are really interesting ways to look at a university," Franek said, "because the kids do know a lot about what's going on."
And where are students most content this year?
Brown takes the cake.
Both results seem about right to me.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Apparently I now belong to an iconic cohort.
According to this NYT review, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
"is a masterly comedy of manners — an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11.
"“The Emperor’s Children” entwines the stories of Danielle Minkoff, Marina Thwaite and Julius Clarke, who met at Brown University and came to New York in the early 1990’s, giddy with the parochial entitlement of expensively educated young Americans. Each expected to do something important and each, at 30, is still struggling to make something of him- or herself."
Well, as an early-90s Brown alum who was 30 on 9/11, who had at that time only recently stopped living in New York half the year, and who worked in an intellectual profession and had a number of friends who worked closer to the publishing/ writing/ cultural commentary/ media worlds descibed, I can't say I really recognize the stereotypes in play, other than as stereotypes.
"The most pragmatic of the three (she has Midwestern roots), Danielle has a job as a producer of television documentaries, but her skills exceed the demands of her job, and she finds herself doing stories about liposuction. Julius, a gay half-Vietnamese transplant from a small town near Detroit, is a freelance critic and flibbertigibbet who has failed to live up to his collegiate precocity. He has written no books, has found no steady work and despises the “bourgeois regularity” required to hold down an office job. Marina, a “celebrated” beauty and the daughter of the legendary journalist and liberal opinion-maker Murray Thwaite, has been struggling for years to finish a book that will reveal how children’s fashions reflect “complex and profound truths” about our culture. In their way, these three embody the different methods by which American privilege is accrued and idly sustained."
Danielle is barely evocative of anyone I know, and Julius and Marina not at all. Maybe I ran in the wrong circles, but I tended to know Brown alumnae who, by 30, had, well, held jobs and made some early inroads on careers, gotten advanced degrees or gotten married or otherwise established themselves a bit more firmly in the world. I suppose there were people I knew of whose parents would subsidize a decade of flibbertigibbetting, but mostly I knew people who, one way or another, had to adjust the long-term career plan around the short-term rent plan.
I'll have a look at the book, which does sound interesting. But it's odd to feel like I belong to a cohort that could evoke a set of associations so utterly unfamiliar to me.
According to this NYT review, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
"is a masterly comedy of manners — an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11.
"“The Emperor’s Children” entwines the stories of Danielle Minkoff, Marina Thwaite and Julius Clarke, who met at Brown University and came to New York in the early 1990’s, giddy with the parochial entitlement of expensively educated young Americans. Each expected to do something important and each, at 30, is still struggling to make something of him- or herself."
Well, as an early-90s Brown alum who was 30 on 9/11, who had at that time only recently stopped living in New York half the year, and who worked in an intellectual profession and had a number of friends who worked closer to the publishing/ writing/ cultural commentary/ media worlds descibed, I can't say I really recognize the stereotypes in play, other than as stereotypes.
"The most pragmatic of the three (she has Midwestern roots), Danielle has a job as a producer of television documentaries, but her skills exceed the demands of her job, and she finds herself doing stories about liposuction. Julius, a gay half-Vietnamese transplant from a small town near Detroit, is a freelance critic and flibbertigibbet who has failed to live up to his collegiate precocity. He has written no books, has found no steady work and despises the “bourgeois regularity” required to hold down an office job. Marina, a “celebrated” beauty and the daughter of the legendary journalist and liberal opinion-maker Murray Thwaite, has been struggling for years to finish a book that will reveal how children’s fashions reflect “complex and profound truths” about our culture. In their way, these three embody the different methods by which American privilege is accrued and idly sustained."
Danielle is barely evocative of anyone I know, and Julius and Marina not at all. Maybe I ran in the wrong circles, but I tended to know Brown alumnae who, by 30, had, well, held jobs and made some early inroads on careers, gotten advanced degrees or gotten married or otherwise established themselves a bit more firmly in the world. I suppose there were people I knew of whose parents would subsidize a decade of flibbertigibbetting, but mostly I knew people who, one way or another, had to adjust the long-term career plan around the short-term rent plan.
I'll have a look at the book, which does sound interesting. But it's odd to feel like I belong to a cohort that could evoke a set of associations so utterly unfamiliar to me.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
I don't typically post about my blogroll, just occasionally tweak it. But I realized today that I'd clicked through to, and quite appreciated even when I disagreed with, a lot of Scott Lemieux posts over the past several months, sometimes without fully processing that "the guy who wrote this excellent post also wrote that other really interesting one I read last week." I finally put that together, and started reading the blog Lemieux shares with two co-bloggers on a regular basis instead of just clicking through to particular posts. So I thought I'd note the addition to the blogroll, for anyone who's even further behind than I was in realizing that Lawyers, Guns, and Money is filled with smart and entertaining stuff.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Monday, August 14, 2006
Some good news
I've had no shortage of wonderful discoveries about Montreal and McGill in the last six weeks. Here's a new set I wasn't expecting at all-- exciting for both my research and my teaching next year.
The McGill David Hume Collection
The McGill David Hume Collection research grant, for those who'd like to come visit and consult those archives
Jean-Jacques Rousseau collection
Looking forward to beginning to consult them-- and to talking with those who come on the research grants.
I've had no shortage of wonderful discoveries about Montreal and McGill in the last six weeks. Here's a new set I wasn't expecting at all-- exciting for both my research and my teaching next year.
The McGill David Hume Collection
The McGill David Hume Collection research grant, for those who'd like to come visit and consult those archives
Jean-Jacques Rousseau collection
Looking forward to beginning to consult them-- and to talking with those who come on the research grants.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Newly posted on SSRN: My paper Three Perversities of Indian Law. Comments welcome.
(No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, just off the map of the United States. Blogging's not a priority while packing, moving, unpacking, immigrating, or writing APSA papers-- or while enjoying Montreal's spectacular but too-brief summers.)
(No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, just off the map of the United States. Blogging's not a priority while packing, moving, unpacking, immigrating, or writing APSA papers-- or while enjoying Montreal's spectacular but too-brief summers.)
Friday, June 09, 2006
Congratulations all around
To, as I mentioned last week, Loren Goldman political theory graduate student in the poli sci department, for winning this year's Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching, for his terrific job TAing the winter quarter of my course on 18th century political thought;
To Leigh Jenco, Mara Marin, and Emily Nacol, also political theory graduate students, for winning a William Rainey Harper Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship, and another Mellon Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship, respectively, for 2006-07;
(There's been some more very good news for a former graduate student, but it's not public yet, so I'll put this placeholder here until it is.)
And to Shelley Clark, who is neither a political theorist nor a graduate student but who I have the good fortune to be married to, for again winning the "Best Teacher in a Core Class" award in public policy, for teaching "Statistical Methods for Policy Research."
Always nice when good things, and good recognition, happen to good, deserving people!
To, as I mentioned last week, Loren Goldman political theory graduate student in the poli sci department, for winning this year's Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching, for his terrific job TAing the winter quarter of my course on 18th century political thought;
To Leigh Jenco, Mara Marin, and Emily Nacol, also political theory graduate students, for winning a William Rainey Harper Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship, and another Mellon Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship, respectively, for 2006-07;
(There's been some more very good news for a former graduate student, but it's not public yet, so I'll put this placeholder here until it is.)
And to Shelley Clark, who is neither a political theorist nor a graduate student but who I have the good fortune to be married to, for again winning the "Best Teacher in a Core Class" award in public policy, for teaching "Statistical Methods for Policy Research."
Always nice when good things, and good recognition, happen to good, deserving people!
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
An inconsequential reflection on packing a library
My books reflect nothing like an even alphabetical spread. "I" and "J" disappear into the same box with room to spare. But "Ha"-- Habermas, Hampshire, Hardin, Hart, Hayek-- goes on for a very long time. And "Ma"-- Machiavelli, MacIntyre, Madison (including Publius), Mandeville, and Marx-- took three boxes by itself.
My books reflect nothing like an even alphabetical spread. "I" and "J" disappear into the same box with room to spare. But "Ha"-- Habermas, Hampshire, Hardin, Hart, Hayek-- goes on for a very long time. And "Ma"-- Machiavelli, MacIntyre, Madison (including Publius), Mandeville, and Marx-- took three boxes by itself.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Congratulations...
to Loren Goldman, the very deserving winner of this year's Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching for the social sciences, for his outstanding performance as TA in the winter term of my course on "The Long 18th Century."
to Loren Goldman, the very deserving winner of this year's Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching for the social sciences, for his outstanding performance as TA in the winter term of my course on "The Long 18th Century."
Friday, May 26, 2006
A most remarkable story from today's Chronicle, of interest within political theory and political science, but also perhaps more broadly. (subscription probably required.)
Book Prize Is Yanked From Yale Professors Over Author's Role in Graduate-Student Labor Dispute
By JENNIFER HOWARD
Two Yale University professors, Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz, expected to receive a 2006 Sidney Hillman Award on Tuesday at a ceremony in New York City. Instead, they got phone calls on Tuesday morning telling them that the judges had reversed the decision to honor the professors' book on the repeal of the estate tax, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth.
"I was stunned," said Mr. Shapiro, a professor of political science. "I'd been about to get in the car to go to the city to pick up the award."
Mr. Graetz echoed his co-author's shock. "It came out of the blue for me," he said. "Obviously, I was disappointed."
The telephone calls came from Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which sponsors the awards. The foundation is a project of the labor union Unite Here, of which Mr. Raynor is general president. The awards and the foundation are named for Sidney Hillman, who was a leading worker-rights activist in the New Deal era and founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a precursor of Unite Here.
First presented in 1950, the awards honor "journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good," according to the foundation's Web site.
Mr. Raynor told the authors that the last-minute reversal had been based on information that came to light about Mr. Shapiro's dealings with members of GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, in its efforts to organize a graduate-student union at Yale in the 1990s. Unite Here has been involved with GESO's continuing union drive at Yale.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Raynor cited allegations of "unfair labor practices" and unspecified "threats against graduate students" by Mr. Shapiro.
"It flies in the face of Sidney Hillman's beliefs and his life," he said, "to present the award to someone who had been actively engaged in resisting union-organization attempts by graduate teaching assistants to join Sidney Hillman's union."
[...]
Mr. Graetz and Mr. Shapiro pointed out that the book, which was published last year by Princeton University Press, does not address labor organizing. "There is no connection to GESO at all," Mr. Graetz said. "This book has absolutely nothing to do with the graduate students."
Mr. Shapiro also defended his dealings with graduate students over the years. "In the 1990s, when I was director of graduate studies in political science, I told a group of our students that I thought they had every right to try and form a union," he said, "but in my view it was not a good idea and not a good use of their time. ... I've never threatened anyone in my life, and I'm generally supportive of unions."
[...]
Although Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Graetz had written "an excellent book," Mr. Raynor told The Chronicle, the decision came down to "more than just the words on the page."
Once news of the award got out, Mr. Raynor said, his office received dozens of complaints "from numerous current and former graduate teaching assistants who'd been involved in these campaigns."
"We got deluged by this information that we did not know," he said. "I brought it to the attention of the judges."
One of those judges, Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, said that Mr. Raynor called him on Monday and said, "Harold, we have a problem." Mr. Raynor then told him about the objections to the award but left the final decision to him and the other judges, who include Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and Sheryl WuDunn, an editor at The New York Times.
Mr. Meyerson read a reporter the statement he delivered Tuesday night at the awards ceremony. "Normally judges evaluate the dancer, not the dance," he said. "What we tried to do in the excruciatingly limited time available to us was to gauge the severity and credibility of the allegations. ... A crucial factor for us was that the National Labor Relations Board in the region issued a complaint against several Yale professors, and Professor Shapiro most particularly, for these actions."
As Mr. Meyerson and Mr. Shapiro both noted, the labor board never adjudicated the graduate students' complaint because their labor action failed to meet certain legal criteria.
"There was never any hearing on the merits of the complaint," Mr. Shapiro said. "People like me never got to come into a hearing and say, What's the evidence that I threatened anyone?"
[...]
Monday, May 01, 2006
The news of an official intra-Vatican debate on whether condoms might be permissible within marriage to prevent the spread of HIV is simultaneously very welcome and very strange. For one thing, it is strange that even the most wholehearted natural lawyer could think that married couples with, say, medically-documented infertility, or married couples in which the woman is post-menopausal, would be acting sinfully by using condoms within marriage to prevent HIV transmission. There is an odd elevation of the condom as symbol of contraception into an absolute moral rule-- a rule that is by then utterly untethered from its supposed underlying moral justification. Intercourse with condoms is "disordered," according to Catholic doctrine, because it intereferes with reproduction; but if it does not do so, if the condom use has both only the intent and only the effect of reducing the likelihood of HIV transmission, what could the moral problem possibly be, even in doctrinal terms? Of course, the debate isn't restricted to infertile couples. But infertile couples are the limiting case to show how strange a position is being articulated by those who elevate "no condoms" into an absolute moral and doctrinal prohibition.
But that's not what struck me the most. Quoth the Times, unsupported by quotes or evidence:
A change would address a relatively small part of the problem since most transmission of AIDS is not between married couples.
Well, a change might have only a very small effect in the world, because the reluctance of married couples to use condoms in high-HIV settings has a lot more to do with their desire to have children than it does with a desire to follow church doctrine. But that doesn't mean that intra-marital transmission is a "relatively small part of the problem." Indeed, it appears to be a major problem in much of Africa-- men who acquire HIV prior to marriage transmit it to their wives (and thence to their children) after marriage, when sexual frequency goes up and condom use goes down compared to premarital relations. (See: Bruce and Clark, 2004, Clark 2004.) The change in doctrine might not make much of a change in infection rates, but that's because married couples refrain from condom use for other reasons than Catholic doctrine.
But that's not what struck me the most. Quoth the Times, unsupported by quotes or evidence:
A change would address a relatively small part of the problem since most transmission of AIDS is not between married couples.
Well, a change might have only a very small effect in the world, because the reluctance of married couples to use condoms in high-HIV settings has a lot more to do with their desire to have children than it does with a desire to follow church doctrine. But that doesn't mean that intra-marital transmission is a "relatively small part of the problem." Indeed, it appears to be a major problem in much of Africa-- men who acquire HIV prior to marriage transmit it to their wives (and thence to their children) after marriage, when sexual frequency goes up and condom use goes down compared to premarital relations. (See: Bruce and Clark, 2004, Clark 2004.) The change in doctrine might not make much of a change in infection rates, but that's because married couples refrain from condom use for other reasons than Catholic doctrine.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Intelligentsia wedding of the year
Katha Pollitt and Steven Lukes
Published: April 30, 2006
Katha Pollitt and Steven Lukes were married yesterday at Provence, a restaurant in Manhattan. Justice Emily Jane Goodman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan officiated.
Ms. Pollitt, 56, is keeping her name. She writes a magazine column, Subject to Debate, in The Nation and is the author of "Virginity or Death! and Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time," a collection of her columns scheduled to be published by Random House in June. She is also the author of "Antarctic Traveller" (1982), a volume of poetry. She graduated from Radcliffe and received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia. Ms. Pollitt is the daughter of the late Leanora and Basil Pollitt, who lived in Brooklyn.
Dr. Lukes, 65, is a professor of sociology at New York University and the author of "Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work" (1973), and "The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas" (1995). He graduated from Oxford, where he also received a master's degree and a doctorate in sociology. Dr. Lukes is the son of the late Martha and Stanley Lukes, who lived in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England.
The bride's first marriage ended in divorce. The bridegroom was a widower.
Katha Pollitt and Steven Lukes
Published: April 30, 2006
Katha Pollitt and Steven Lukes were married yesterday at Provence, a restaurant in Manhattan. Justice Emily Jane Goodman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan officiated.
Ms. Pollitt, 56, is keeping her name. She writes a magazine column, Subject to Debate, in The Nation and is the author of "Virginity or Death! and Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time," a collection of her columns scheduled to be published by Random House in June. She is also the author of "Antarctic Traveller" (1982), a volume of poetry. She graduated from Radcliffe and received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia. Ms. Pollitt is the daughter of the late Leanora and Basil Pollitt, who lived in Brooklyn.
Dr. Lukes, 65, is a professor of sociology at New York University and the author of "Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work" (1973), and "The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas" (1995). He graduated from Oxford, where he also received a master's degree and a doctorate in sociology. Dr. Lukes is the son of the late Martha and Stanley Lukes, who lived in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England.
The bride's first marriage ended in divorce. The bridegroom was a widower.
Friday, April 28, 2006
For no particular reason that I'm aware of, Amazon has put The Multiculturalism of Fear on a 15%-off sale, in case any readers have been eagerly waiting for a chance to snag a copy below cover price.
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