Jon’s post below reminds me that I’ve been meaning to link to the Kennedy School’s “Program on Networked Governance”:http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/netgov/html/ which co-sponsored a talk I gave last week. A very interesting program, bringing together traditional concerns of social scientists with some of the new arguments about network topology etc. This is also probably a good time to mention that we’re going to be running a Crooked Timber seminar on Yochai Benkler’s new book in a week or two – the book has a lot to say about networks, governance and much else besides. Previously, these seminars haven’t been announced in advance – but it seems to me to make sense to provide some advance warning this time, for those who would like to participate in comments, and want to read the book first. The book is available to read online “here”:http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Table_Of_Contents under a Creative Commons license. It is quite long though, so those who want to save their eyesight can purchase the hardcopy version from Powells (yer union-friendly store) “here”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Yochai%20Benkler%20Wealth%20of%20Networks or Amazon “here”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0300110561%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1146106167%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8. I’m hoping to introduce another innovation to this seminar, which is to link selectively from the seminar to posts on other blogs that seriously get involved in the conversation (I will be somewhat selective in this – but hope to include a diverse set of points of view on the book and what it says).
Via “Locus”:http://www.locusmag.com/ I see that John Crowley now has a “Livejournal”:http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/. Crowley’s novel _Little Big_ is a masterpiece. I keep three or four copies around the house so that I always have a spare to press on visitors. It’s astonishingly good – and if you don’t believe me, ask Michael Dirda of the Washington Post (who thinks it’s a candidate for best American novel of the last thirty years), Harold Bloom (his favourite novel: point blank) or “James Hynes”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR25.6/hynes.html:
bq. I’ve read _Little, Big_ four times now, and wept shamelessly each time over those last, extraordinary fifty pages, and over the years have purchased and given away fifteen copies of it (when I could find it–it is inconsistently in print). When “You’ll love this” isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ and Nabokov’s _Ada_.
Worth blogrolling (how many genuinely great writers are out there in the blogosphere?), and more to the point, worth buying his books (esp. _Little Big_; I also loved his recent chapbook, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”).
On May 11-13, the Kennedy School at Harvard will be hosting a conference on “Equality and the New Global Order.” The three days are organized around “Foundational Questions,” “Institutions,” and “Global Public Health.” The tentative schedule is very impressive. Versions of several of the papers are now available – I’m guessing more will be put up over the next two weeks. The talks are free and open to the public. I’m going to try to make some of the sessions, so please say hello.
Mustafa Barghouti, who is Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, and was recently elected to the Palestinian parliament as an independent, is in Madison at the Havens Center. His first talk (yesterday) is already on the web (audio); my guess is that today’s talk will be up within 24 hours.
Havens Center talks are now routinely recorded and made available on the web, so you might be interested to check out the list here. Two that I would particularly recommend are our own Chris Bertram, and also Richard Miller, both on global justice issues.
I was just in gmail reading some emails from John and Daniel which mention some technical questions about choice under uncertainty and, in the rh pane, there appears under “sponsored links” an advertisment for Tyler Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ — “The greatest econ blog on the web! Insightful & interesting every day.” Well, often, I’ll give them that. Are many bloggers paying google to advertise their on-line scribblings?