September 15, 2004

Fragments

Posted by Henry

Following up on my review of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell last week, there’s a very nice piece on the book at N+1, which has a lot more to say about the book’s “levelling streak” than I could fit in a blogpost.

I know about N+1 thanks to a conversation with Scott McLemee, who does a very interesting article on ‘big processes’ sociologist Michael Mann for the Chronicle. There’s a short critical quote from David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist - this reflects a long standing argument (Laitin is no great fan of the kinds of research that Mann and others like him are interested in).

Finally, Cosma Shalizi makes it into Physical Review Letters, which I understand from my colleagues in the hard sciences is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.

Posted on September 15, 2004 09:20 PM UTC
Comments

Ah, I noticed Cosma was in PRL when the list of abstracts arrived in my inbox. Congrats! I read his “notebooks” years before “blog” was even coined; they were superb even then.

Posted by will · September 16, 2004 02:32 AM

Particularly I note his deep knowledge of both neoclassical econ (market socialism and analytic Marxism included) and complexity theory, a condition I can only envy.

Posted by will · September 16, 2004 02:35 AM

He knows a fair amount of sociology too, the bastard. There ought to be some kind of law of conservation of erudition, such that any supernumerary knowledge he acquires about institutional theory should be complemented by me suddenly knowing a great deal more about, say, partial differential equations.

Posted by Kieran Healy · September 16, 2004 04:31 AM

To all: many, many, thanks! The credit for the paper really goes to my co-authors, who did the heavy lifting. And any appearance of erudition on my part is purely due to my shameless habit of assuming an air of authority while holding forth on subjects about which I am profoundly ignorant.

Posted by Cosma · September 16, 2004 09:37 PM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.