Kevin Drum takes a break from politics-blogging to opine on the new series of Survivor. It’s shaping up to be more fun than last season, because there are new - and unpredictable - rules; Kevin suggests that the show’s designers ought to make the rules more unpredictable still.
The appeal of the show is in the human interaction. How do you keep from being voted off? How do you make and break alliances? Who gets betrayed this week? That’s where they need to throw in a few curveballs. The contestants need to learn that the standard way of forming alliances and screwing competitors is subject to change.
He’s probably right - although one of the fun things about Survivor is that there has usually been a high level of unpredictability, even under stable rules. Last season’s show was the very dull exception that proved the rule - the producers threw together tribes in such a way as to generate stable, gender-based cooperation for most of the game. They later made a rather desperate post-hoc attempt to mix things up and weaken alliances, but it didn’t work very well. This season, they’ve deliberately generated tribes in a way that mixes up the sexes.
Anyway, I talked about some of these issues at greater length in a long post on my old blog about the applicability of sociology and game theory to Survivor a couple of years ago. I reproduce it below the fold, if anyone’s interested.
The Sociology of Survivor
I spent yesterday evening with friends watching the three hour Survivor end-of-season finale. Much fun, with many upsets over the course of the evening, and an entirely unexpected winner. But - and here’s the sign that I’m an incurable academic - it set me to thinking about the difference between economic and sociological models of human action.
I expect 90% of my readers to switch off at this point. But you shouldn’t; at least not if you’re a Survivor fan (and Survivor’s about as much fun as junk tv gets). Survivor is all about strategy, and making and breaking alliances. One person gets voted off by the other players every week; nobody wants to be that person. In order to avoid that fate (and to make sure that other, threatening players are voted off), each player tries to create an alliance with other players, where people agree not to vote each other off, or to target other people to vote off, or both. But there’s no way to enforce these agreements. Furthermore, there’s a substantial random element to the game; one person can win “immunity” every week, so that he or she can’t be voted off that week; this can throw pre-arranged strategies into disarray, especially towards the end of the game. Thus, in order to prosper at Survivor, you not only need to be good at working with other people and forming teams; you need to be good at breaking alliances, stabbing people in the back, and finding new allies when circumstances so demand.
Now clearly, you have to behave strategically to prosper in the game. But what does “strategically” mean? Game theorists and sociologists have very different answers to that question. A game theorist would assume that everyone would have a clear map in their head of the different kinds of players that she might encounter, the different kinds of strategies that she could use (perhaps dependent on which kinds of player she is dealing with), and the different kinds of outcomes that will likely result from the various strategies. There’s room for some uncertainty in the game (random acts of “nature” can intervene here and there), but everyone knows that if they are at point x in the game, their interest is best served by a particular strategy y (or perhaps by a set of strategies with identical payoffs; I’m simplifying a little here for the purpose of popularization). Here, it’s a matter of playing within a fixed structure (the parameters of the game), which you completely understand, and where your interest is dictated at any particular moment by the specific point of that structure you’re at.
Sociologists tend to take a different approach to social structures. By and large, they’re interested in networks rather than games. Network theory suggests that a player’s power and influence depends on her position within the network of social interactions that she finds herself in. Again, simplifying wildly, some actors can be at the centre of a spiderweb of relations; everyone comes to them in order to get things done. Others may be gatekeepers or intermediaries between two groups of people who don’t otherwise have much contact with each other; these actors too can be quite important. Here, strategy is all about positioning yourself well within the network, and then manipulating information and resource flows in order to maintain or improve your position. It’s much more open-ended than game theory - the universe of possibilities isn’t fixed at the outset, but changes over time, and can be affected by the conscious action of the players.
Which of these conceptions of strategy best fits Survivor? I think that the answer is obvious to anyone who watched the series. It’s the second, sociological conception. Pretty well everyone who saw this series of Survivor would agree that Rob was the smartest and canniest player. He didn’t win; but this was in large part because he was quite unlucky at the end (Jenna, who did win, survived by a fluke). Both of the two finalists agreed that he should have been there instead of them.
How did Rob play? Not by having a rote set of strategies at the beginning of the game. Instead, as he explained it, he was always at pains to keep his options open; he maintained friendly relations with as large a group as possible (and was rather good at convincing others that he had their best interests at heart, even when he didn’t). He then chopped and changed his strategy as circumstances demanded. When he needed to zig, he zigged, and when he needed to zag, he zagged. He didn’t seek to lead alliances, but instead made himself into the pivotal player, who could move from one alliance to the next, and thus swing the vote in one direction or another. By so doing, he shaped the strategic context which everyone else had to play in.
Compare his behavior with that of Cosimo de Medici in early Renaissance Florence, as depicted in John Padgett and Christopher Ansell’s classic piece, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici.” Padgett and Ansell are sociologists, who want to argue against rational choice notions of strategic behavior, by offering their own notion of “robust action.” Robust action is all about trying to maintain your own flexibility and freedom of choice over as wide a range of options as possible, while narrowing the options of everyone else. It implies that there aren’t any fixed interests - all interests are positional and actors are less interested in pursuing specific goals at any point in time, than in maintaining discretionary options against the day when they do have a definite end to pursue. Thus Cosimo positioned himself at the center of a web of influence, without ever wanting fully to commit to anything or anyone. As Padgett and Ansell describe it,
in nasty strategic games like Florence or chess, positional play is the maneuvering of opponents into the forced clarification of their (but not your) tactical lines of action. Locked-in commitment to lines of action, and thence to goals, is the product not of individual choice, but at least as much of others’ successful ‘ecological control’ over you.
This is a more or less exact description of how best to play ‘Survivor’ (or, at least, to play Survivor as Rob played it). Keep your options open - maintain ties with everyone. Don’t get frozen into a group with a specific agenda; instead, try to be a key player (or potential key player) for every possible group. You’re more powerful (in the sense of maintaining options and contacts) as a swing vote than as tribal chief. Keep your end-goals and specific strategies mysterious - try to be all things to all men and women. Maintain flexibility at all costs. And then go for broke when the opportunity arises.
I reckon that two important lessons flow from this. First, that sociological approaches to the understanding of human behavior capture certain things that economic approaches can’t. They’re much better at dealing with fluid situations, where the future is unknowable, and people want to keep as many options open as possible for dealing with unanticipated problems. And many other things besides, I’m sure. Second, that an academic with time on his hands during the summer break is a dangerous thing indeed.
On the occasion of Arafat’s death, I am going to share a very personal reminiscence. When my older daughter Zoë was about 14 months old, she could not talk reliably, but she could make her preferences known with gestures. Naturally enough, given the interests of very young children, she liked to pretend that various people (dolls, stuffed animals, photographs) were nursing. This was all well and good, until she presented me with a folded page from the Economist displaying side-by-side photographs of Sharon and Arafat, and then held them up to my breasts to suggest that I nurse them. It was a little difficult to explain why I was fine with the random dude in the Gulf Air ad, but resolutely opposed to nursing either gentleman in the Middle East Politics Article. Zoë’s political acumen has increased in the intervening years, however. (She is now 3). I tried to explain to her why I was so dismayed about the recent U.S. elections, telling her of the great powers of the presidency, the relative merits of the two contenders, and so on. She thought for a moment, and then said, “you think George Bush is too stupid to have so much wesponsibility?” Yes, child. Exactly that. Plus malice.
William Bennett on the moral challenge facing America.
Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal (“The Great Relearning,” as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it) — no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected.
Let’s leave Bennett’s well-known hypocrisy to one side - this proposal, (which I suspect has a lot of support among Bush supporters), tells us a lot about what’s wrong with modern US conservatives. Traditional conservatism (from Burke through Oakeshott) is deeply suspicious of projects that try to remake the values of a society, especially when their instruments are “politics and law.” It shares this bias with certain tendencies on the left (viz. James Scott’s Seeing Like a State). What Bennett and his cronies are proposing isn’t conservative in inspiration; it’s a radical experiment in social engineering. It doesn’t try to build on the values already present in a society, but instead to impose a set of mores by brute force. In short, it’s a cultural revolution. We already know that the new administration is likely to be bad news for conscientious libertarians - it may turn out that it’s going to be equally unpleasant for conservatives (as opposed to ‘conservatives’).
Via Andrew Sullivan.
One for the Kipling enthusiasts over at the Volokhs (even if the author is a bit iffy on what ‘approbation’ means).
Take up the Wrong Man’s burden—
And stay above the law—
No treaty or convention
Can stop America.
The moral approbation
Of others near and far
Denounce as soft on terror
And cowardice in war.
Via Maud Newton.
More on transatlantic variations of the English language. I’m reading my way through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series at the moment, and was intrigued to discover that a “scuttle butt” is some class of a naval water barrel. I presume that this means that the historical origins of the term “scuttlebutt” (rumours, especially of the vexatious variety) are closely analogous with those of the contemporary American term, “water cooler gossip.”
Commenter ‘giles’ says:
The most interesting revelation of the night - that Bill thought kerry would make “quite” a good president - was I thought the revelation of the night. The parochial BBC pr department seems to have missed it entirely.
The BBC was probably right not to pick up on it, thanks to a very important difference between British English and American English. “Quite” in British-English, and indeed in its Hibernian variant (which is of course the purest and most supple form of the language) means “reasonably, but not very.” Thus, if Bill Clinton were British, his comment would be an unsubtle put-down. However, in American English, “quite” means “very” or “extremely” - so it’s a considerable compliment. One of my friends experienced this ambiguity at first hand a few years ago, when she invited her (American) boyfriend back to Dublin to meet the family. After eating dinner at my friend’s family home, the boyfriend remarked that the food was “quite good.” He thought he was passing a compliment; my friend’s mother thought he was a snotty Yank making disparaging remarks about her cooking, with predictably unfortunate consequences for familial relationships until it was all explained. So, the odds are that Clinton’s comment was entirely unexceptionable. You could probably still advance a malign interpretation: since Clinton has spent a considerable amount of time in the UK, he might have been aware of this ambiguity, and playing it cute by speaking out of both sides of his mouth at once. Still, an interpretation of this sort would seem a bit forced for what was, after all, one brief comment in a rather long interview.
Update: I’d quite forgotten that Chris has already addressed this point in a post last December.
Apparently, Coke has nicked its business plan for Dasani from Trotter’s Independent Trading - bottled tap water with added contaminants. Does it glow in the dark too?
Some of the most charmingly pointless controversies on my other blog have been about just what region is denoted by ‘Midwest’. (For prior installments, see here, here and here.) I think those are fun, but we seem to have run out of things to say on that word. So it’s time for something new. Just which parts of New York State are denoted by ‘upstate’?
This became topical because some news articles have described New Paltz, where Mayor Jason West has been solemnizing gay marriages, as being upstate. This seems like a mistake to me. (And as someone who once lived in Syracuse and soon will live in Ithaca, I should know.)
Here’s where the border between upstate and not upstate is. It might be helpful if you have a map of the relevant area, like this one. Draw a line connecting up the Massachusetts/Connecticut border with the northern edge of the New York/Pennsylvania border. North of that line is upstate, south of it is not. This is not to say that south of it is downstate or anything else in particular, it’s just not upstate.
As you can see on the map, New Paltz (which is starred) is south of the line, so it shouldn’t be regarded as upstate. If I didn’t approve of what was going on in New Paltz, I’d start lobbying to stop these spurious connections being drawn between New Paltz and the wonderful upstate region.
I was rereading Adam Elga’s paper on On overrating oneself… and knowing it, and it gave me a thought about some possible challenge trades in the NFL.
I think there’s plenty of pairs of teams that, going into the start of the season, each think they are better than the other member of the pair. (Some of the things Adam says suggest that he thinks one or other of them must be irrational, but I think this could be perfectly rational.) So from each team’s perspective, they expect to be better off having the other team’s draft picks. Hence there’s a possible win-win trade with the teams simply swapping all their draft picks with each other.
I guess there’s some rules against this kind of trade, but I imagine they could be circumvented. E.g. during training camp next year the Redskins trade a couple of guys about to be cut and all their 2005 draft picks to the Giants in exchange for a couple of guys about to be cut and all their 2005 draft picks. This would undermine the purpose of the draft, but I think it would be great seeing which teams make the most ridiculous overestimations. (“Yes Mr Bidwell, I think there’s a great chance the Cardinals could finish with a better record than the Patriots next year.”)
So I’m sitting in the library today when the shelves around me start to shake. And I’m thinking to myself: death by books? There must be better ways to go. 4.5 on the Richter scale. Not bad for Virginia.
UPDATE: the Roanoke Times reports that this “was the strongest earthquake in central Virginia since 1875 . . . Central Virginia’s strongest earthquake in the past century took place in August 1984 and was centered near Charlottesville . . . It was a magnitude 4.1.”
Josh Parsons has found a hangover cure hidden in Zeno’s writings. It’s a rather clever variant on the “drink more suffer later” cure. If anyone actually tries it I’d be interested to see the results. As a rule taking medical advice from a philosopher is about as wise as getting involved in a land war in Asia, so I have my doubts about this ‘cure’, but I’d be very happy if it was to work.
When I’m swamped with work, as I am at the moment, I like to have a book that I can dip into for quick five minute breaks - thousand page behemoths like Quicksilver get put to one side until normal conditions reassert themselves. And at the moment, I’m very much enjoying Hazel K. Bell’s Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2001). A surprising choice for leisure reading? Not really. It’s light (broken up into 74 bite-sized chapters, refreshing, and very, very funny.
As A.S. Byatt says in her introduction to the book, “a good index is a work of art and science, order and chance, delight and usefulness.” There’s something fascinating about lists of quasi-related subjects, if they’re well done. Quasi-random conjunctions can inspire the imagination to follow new courses, as the Surrealists and Oulipo crowd always insisted. Byatt mentions a good example of this: Borges’ list of beasts drawn from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia.” We used some of Borges’ categories in setting up our own category list for Crooked Timber - those who have wondered why some posts are classified as “look like flies” now know the reason (apparently, Dive into Mark had the same idea). This list apparently blew Foucault’s mind, and inspired him to write Les mots et les choses, which may be a good or bad thing, depending on what you think of French poststructuralism.
Bell doesn’t provide any indexes to equal that of Borges, but she does have some good ones. An index, if it’s done properly, is an art form in itself. Index entries may range from terse one-liners, which tell a story in a few words, to great wobbling extravagances of quasi-related incongruities and oddities, piled untidily on one another like Pelion upon Ossa. And Bell’s book has them all. Brief nuggets of information (from the index to Sir Thomas Browne’s work comes the irrestistible ‘cabbage, Cato’s chief diet’). Indexes composed by the author to savage his enemies. Indexes composed by enemies of the author in order to denigrate and belittle the author and his work. Index as forms of intellectual slash and burn. As forms of art. Index items which are miniature novels in themselves. Und so weiter. Bell’s book is highly recommended.
From the index of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy
Cabbage brings heaviness to the soul, 192. [perhaps explaining Cato’s dyspepsia].
Fish discommended, 192; defended, 398.
Kisses, honest and otherwise, 701 et seq.
Non-natural things, the six, defined, 189.
Pork, not for quasy stomachs, 190,
Roman courtesans, their elegance of speech, 699.
From the index of de Quincey’s Collected Writings
Coffee, atrocious in England.
Cookery, English, the rudest of barbarous devices.
Dogs in Greece, a nuisance.
Leibnitz, died partly from fear of not being murdered.
Muffins, eating, a cause of suicide.
Music, English obtuseness to good.
Rhinoceros, first sale of a
Servants, England the paradise of household
Spitting, the art of
Toothache, that terrific curse.
From Desmond Ryan’s The Fenian Chief: A Biography of James Stephens.
O’Brien An:
never turns his back on an enemy, 32
would never retreat from fields in which ancestors were kings, 33
does, 34
From Julian Barnes’s Letters from London 1990-1995
Lloyd Webber, Andrew: threat to leave country if Labour elected fails to make enough people vote Labour.
and from Barnes’ index entry on Lady Thatcher
rumours of lunacy; receives electric shocks in bath; ‘bawls like a fish-wife’; accused of war crimes; new version of Saint Augustine; how not to make the poor richer; discovers it’s a funny old world; compared to Hamlet’s father; compared to Catherine the Great; Bursts into flame; omnipresence; effect on carol singers; unimpressed by the French Revolution.
From the front page of yesterday’s Boston Metro:
Rice to get bigger hand in Iraq
Some of the jokes here are too much fun to refuse.
Kerry to get bigger hair in Paris
Bush to get bigger nose in New York
Blogger to get bigger foot in mouth
And there’s plenty more of these in my mailbox, but I’ll refrain from them for fear of triggering New Zealand aiport filters.
The sports page of the Metro also had a nice Dewey beats Truman moment too. In the Hot/Not column of the sports pages, Colts coach Tony Dungy was listed as being Not after his old team, the Bucs, whipped his Colts. What was surprising about this was that they had the box score of the Red Sox game that only ended about half an hour before the Colts staged the most dramatic late-game comeback in Monday Night Football history.
Didn’t someone tell this guy that things can go badly wrong if you try mailing yourself across the country?
Michael Rea, a philosopher at Notre Dame, has posted a reply to Daniel Dennett’s ‘brights’ Op-Ed, complete with a reply from Dennett and a counter-reply from Rea.
Rea argues that Dennett shouldn’t be demanding respect from theists when he shows so little respect towards them. (Rea also equates ‘bright’ with ‘atheist’, which I think is fair. I was writing a long post arguing that this was true, but it all ended up seeming redundant.) But I think Dennett gets the better of the exchange, as long as you’re prepared to allow him a fairly fine distinction.
Dennett argues that he shouldn’t have to respect all religions in order to demand respect for atheism - he doesn’t have to respect religions that encourage mass murder, or genital mutilation, or (and this is the kicker) the teaching of blatant falsehoods. Rea interprets this as disrespect for all creationists. But creationists can fall on the acceptable side of Dennett’s catalogue of religions, as long as they don’t try and poison the minds of the kiddies. This might seem like a fairly arbitrary boundary to toleration, but I think it’s the right one.
It should be noted that Dennett’s ‘tolerance’ for creationists isn’t exactly a mile deep. But he’s not demanding that theists spend as much time studying the canon of humanist ethicists as they spend studying the Bible, so it’s not like his demands are extreme either - contrary I think to what Rea suggests. As long as the creationists don’t try and poison young minds, and don’t resort to guns when we respond to their arguments directed to adults, they get to be part of the community that we all tolerate.
And now that I’ve defended Dennett once in my lifetime, we will now resume regularly scheduled programming. I’d start with humourous evolutionary explanations for why “frequent masturbation may protect men against prostate cancer”, but it’s too hard to come up with anything original.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review