Crooked Timber

This post is to welcome the sort-of-pseudonymous ‘Kathy G,’ who will be joining us as a guestblogger for a week. I’ve known Kathy for a while – she’s doing a Ph.D. in public policy in the Chicago area, and has been blogging at the G Spot for the last couple of months; Ezra Klein describes the G Spot as ‘the best new blog on the internets.’ I’d go even further and say that Kathy is the columnist whom the New York Times needs to hire when it fires Bill Kristol’s ass, publicly apologizes for inflicting his vaporings on the American people, and promises to mend the error of its ways by starting to publish an honest-to-God leftie. Her blogging is a mixture of in-your-face feminism, economics empirical and theoretical, blistering takedowns of Maureen Dowd et al., and much else. Great to have her with us.

This post serves less as a public announcement than as a private means of self-commitment with added dollops of embarrassment should I renege, that I am not going to be blogging for the next few weeks (except perhaps one post to introduce a guest blogger), so as to get the damn book that I am writing finally done and ready. When you read me again, all going well, I should have a bouncing 350-page-or-so manuscript to announce. I reserve the right to change my mind in the case of truly dire exigencies – but they will have to be truly dire.

Welcome to Education Optimists, a new blog written by my colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab, and her husband Liam Goldrick. Sara is in the EPS department at Madison, and Liam is Policy Director at the New Teacher Center. My prediction is that you can expect smart, well-informed, and heterodox commentary there. To start you off, here is Sara’s warning about the new TEACH grant program, which offers a $4000 per year grant to students willing to commit to getting an education degree and then spend 4 years teaching in high poverty schools in a particular subject area:

Beware: If a student does not fulfill the terms of the grant it is automatically converted into an unsubsidized loan, with interest accruing starting when the loan began.

One can easily imagine many ways a student could fail to fulfill the terms of the grant.
Here are but a few examples:

This is by way of announcing that Eric Rauchway will be guest-blogging with us for a week. Eric’s been blogging up a storm together with Ari Kelman at The Edge of the American West for a few months; a combination of history, contemporary politics, cutting edge Sesame Street commentary and literary stuff. Sort of like us in other words. We’re very happy he’ll be guesting for a while.

The OSI has a new fellowship program that may be of interest to some CT readers.

The Open Society Fellowship supports outstanding individuals from around the world. The fellowship enables innovative professionals—including journalists, activists, academics, and practitioners—to work on projects that inspire meaningful public debate, shape public policy, and generate intellectual ferment within the Open Society Institute.

The fellowship focuses on four themes: National Security and the Open Society; Citizenship, Membership and Marginalization; Strategies and Tools for Advocacy and Citizen Engagement; and Understanding Authoritarianism. OSI also supports a limited number of fellows whose work focuses on other topics within the scope of its mission.

Also, I’ve been meaning for a week to link to the inimitable Kathy G.. Those of us who’ve known her in other contexts have benefited greatly from her mixture of shit-stirring feminism, sociological chops and interest in political economy; it’s great to see her join the blogosphere. Here and here she explains to Megan McArdle what monopsony actually involves. And here she asks with some justification if anyone can tell her why Salon is publishing the “twisted, misogynist, bizarrely self-obsessed ravings of a freak like Camille Paglia?”

Andrew Gelman politely suggests that he deserves some credit.
Continue reading “Citing blogs”

Two people I’ve read with interest and profit over the years: Stanford’s Joshua Cohen and Cato’s Brink Lindsey manage to have a very reasonable conversation on bloggingheads. Topics include Rawls on baseball, Obama and Wright, the McCain campaign. Check it out.

Fafblog returns! Like, for real! Not a rickroll. We hope it’s not a nasty prank on the part of Giblets.

The pro-war blogosphere is full of the news of Sadr’s defeat in the battle for Basra, manifested in his call for a truce, an end to government raids and the release of all prisoners. Here’s a roundup of the links from Glenn Reynolds. Reynolds, who has chronicled Sadr’s decline into irrelevance from 2004 to the present, is a bit more circumspect than he has been in the past, saying “it’s likely a blink, not a major defeat.”, but most of the bloggers he links to are unrestrained in their triumph.

Among the points I’ve picked up, illustrating the magnitude of the victory

• The number of Iraqi police and military who have defected to Sadr has been much exaggerated, and most of them were bad lots anyway

• The body count ratio looks really good

• Attacks on the Green Zone are a desperate fling, easily countered by staying indoors and wearing full body armor at all times

• The proportion of Basra controlled by the Mehdi Army has not increased much since the conflict began

• The proportion of Basra controlled by militias and criminal gangs (approximately 100 per cent) has not increased at all since the conflict began

• Much of the ground lost by the government elsewhere in Iraq in the first few days of the conflict has been recaptured

• The fact that the purported basis of the government’s action (an attack on criminal elements peripherally associated with various militias), endorsed by the US, is a transparent fiction, covering an attempt by one set of militias to weaken another, hasn’t worried anyone too much

• Allowing for the necessity of air attacks on densely populated areas, civilian casualties have been modest, ensuring that the popularity of the US and British forces will increase still further

• Maliki is still in Basra, proving the failure of Sadr’s attempts to oust him

But the crucial point underlying all of the argument is, that, simply by offering a truce, Sadr has proved he isn’t winning. After all, peace offers are for losers.

We’ve had a few more offensive trolls and sockpuppeteers than usual (that is, more numerous and more offensive) recently, and it seems to be time to make an explicit statement of our policy in this respect. You can read the comments policy in the left-hand sidebar. We’ve just added the following:

We respect the preference of many genuine commenters for pseudonymity and will protect their privacy. However, this respect does not extend to those who abuse pseudonymity to launch personal attacks on posters or other commenters, post racist or sexist comments or employ sockpuppets. We will, if appropriate, publish the identity of such abusers and share their identifying information with other sites.

There’s nothing new here, and we’ve acted on this policy in the past. But it seems like a good time to spell it out.

Matt Yglesias’s book Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats is nearing publication, providing further evidence that very long subtitles beginning with “How …” or “Why …”, and which explain the main thesis of the book, are now completely entrenched in the U.S. publishing industry. It’s the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century “Being a …” subtitle.

Anyway, the blurbs are up and the best one is from Ezra Klein, who wins the inaugural CT American Blurbonomics: How to Praise your Friends while Surreptitiously Taking the Piss out of your Enemies award. Klein says Heads in the Sand is “A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.”

One of the more annoying aspects of academic publishing is that articles are usually behind a paywall and thus effectively unavailable to people without an institutional affiliation. I’ve felt this especially keenly with respect to the Public Choice special issue on blogging that Dan Drezner and I co-edited. Unlike most things that I’ve been involved in putting out there, I suspect that there is a decent non-academic audience out there for this kind of work, who will never get to see it because of the largish fees that they would have to pay as non-subscribers. The good news, via my colleague Eric Lawrence, is that Springer Verlag are making Public Choice available for free to everyone via the WWW until the end of April, as a promotional exercise. So if you want to read my or (more likely) the other contributors’ thoughts on blogging, click on this link and click through to the January 2008 issue. For a limited time only, as they say in the business.