Blogging

Ezra Klein “asks”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/economists-in-t.html

This is one of my perennial bafflements, but the lack of suggestions on my request for political science blogs reminds me how odd the robust representation of economists in the blogosphere really is. Between Tyler Cowen, Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Max Sawicky, Dani Rodrick, Greg Mankiw, Kash Monsori, the folks at Angry Bear, and all the other econobloggers out there, a fairly broad channel has arisen for publicizing and popularizing relevant economic research in the political sphere. Not so with relevant political science research, even as it it would seem, if anything, more relevant. Why have economists taken to the blogosphere in so much greater numbers, and with so much more apparent success, than practitioners of other disciplines that also intersect with contemporary politics?

and the blogosphere “delivers”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/polsci/, sort of. I’ve set up a blog to link to new political science papers that are likely to be of interest to a general audience (where ‘general audience’ denotes the kinds of people who read Ezra, CT, Dan Drezner’s blog etc). At the moment, it consists of nothing more than abstracts of interesting papers and links to them. I hope over time to do a bit more than that (but not for a couple of months; I also have a book to finish over the summer). This is intended to be somewhat more specifically pol-sci focused than _Political Theory Daily Review_ (now at “Bookforum”:http://www.bookforum.com) but also to appeal to people who aren’t cardcarrying political scientists. Please feel free to email me suggestions for papers to link (I know that there are a fair few political scientists who read CT, including a couple of journal editors; send me stuff and if it’s appropriate, I’ll happily link to it). Such suggestions should include the abstract or other relevant info for the paper, the bibliographical details, and, of course, the URL. Feel free also to make suggestions as to how the site can be improved (it’s rather barebones at the moment, but will get a little prettier over time).

I’d started to write a short post responding to the first of Michael Gorman’s “essays”:http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/author/mgorman on the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ blog about the Eclipse of Reason in the Age of the Internet, but given up. However enjoyable the shoddiness of Gorman’s reasoning and grotesque luxuriance of his metaphors (the new digital barbarians are associated in succession with creationists, global warming deniers, Maoists, hive mind wannabes, dirty Haight-Ashbury hippies, and some sinister Borg-like collective), it was hard to get into it with a piece of which nearly a quarter was an extended rejoinder to our old friend, Some Dude in a Comments Section Somewhere. Thankfully, Scott has “taken up”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/06/20/mclemee the grim task of responding from his berth at _Inside Higher Ed_. This bit towards the end seems to sum it up nicely:

The tone of Gorman’s remedial lecture implies that educators now devote the better part of their day to teaching students to shove pencils up their nose while Googling for pornography. … But the idea that new forms of media require training in new kinds of literacy hardly counts as an evasion of the obligation to cultivate critical intelligence. Today the work of acquiring knowledge on a given subject often includes the burden of evaluating digital material…. let’s not pretend that such nostalgia is anything but escapism at best. What really bothers the neo-Luddite quasi-Mandarin is not the rise of digitality, as such. The problem actually comes from “the diminished sacredness of authority,” as Edward Shils once put it, “the reduction in the awe it evokes and in the charisma attributed to it.”

I can see why the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ has an urgent interest in pushing this line, but I don’t understand why the intellectual standards of argument among its appointed critics is so low (and they aren’t an aberration; I understand that they’ve made somewhat of an effort to publicize these pieces and get them talked about). There’s a quite reasonable and serious case to be made about the flaws of Web 2.0 type technologies (I tend meself to think that these flaws are greatly outweighed by the advantages, but I certainly recognize that they exist and can be quite important). However, I’m not aware of anyone, apart from the odd blogger in the odd blogpost who is making that case in a compelling and sophisticated way (I’d be grateful to be pointed towards any counterexamples by commenters).

“This”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004576.html is a nice story. The latest issue of Southwest Airlines’ inflight magazine features some “recommended diversions”:http://spiritmag.com/clickthis/8.php. They include the usual summer books, movies and music, and a plug for “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ as blog reading. Academic blogs have come a long way if they’re being recommended in inflight magazines. Now we only have to get them to be promoting other academic blogs the same way.

I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Language Log around the web recently, particularly to their prescriptivist-bashing posts. I particularly liked this attack on the “alleged rules for using less and fewer”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, complete with examples from King Alfred’s Latin translations. It’s an example of how academic blogs can make an impact on public life not by dumbing down their work, or by stretching to find alleged applications, but simply by setting out their work in a clear and accessible way. Or, to bring things back to a favourite theme of mine, of why academics should get credit for successful blogs not necessarily as examples of research, but as examples of service to the community. Now giving people diversions alongside summer blockbusters isn’t quite the same kind of service as solving their medical or social problems, but it is a service, and a praiseworthy one.

We’ve just had an issue with some spam showing up on the site. Not the run-of-the-mill comment-based sort. It was hidden in a block of html enclosed in a tag. Weirdly, and this is the disturbing bit, it appeared as a block of HTML appended to our index.php file, which really shouldn’t happen at all. The result was that WordPress would render CT pages and then this bit of spam text would be right at the bottom of the html, outside the body tags, etc, as the index.php file closed out.

The permissions on the index.php file are right and our WP installation is up to date. There doesn’t seem to be anything else amiss, and apart from it appearing in a very strange place it seems like automated rather than handcrafted spam. (Another odd thing was that some of the spam links pointed to some personal pages hosted by washington.edu, but I didn’t follow the links.) Unfortunately I don’t know how long the spam has been there. What happened to us is approximately the same as what happened to this guy on the WP support forum, but there wasn’t any helpful followup from that thread. Has anyone encountered this issue before?

I have a new “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=284 up with Ross Douthat- we spend the hour discussing the parlous state of American conservatism. Looking through the early comments, I get some well deserved grief for my tv manner. I find it hard to concentrate on a webcam, and I have a terrible habit of clicking randomly around on a computer when I am talking to someone or thinking (I’m one of those people who find the new _New York Times_ ‘helpful’ feature of pulling up a dictionary when you click on a random word, _really annoying_ ) I also have some academic tics; viz. I don’t interrupt people very often (interruption is considered pretty rude in a seminar). And I’m sure there’s more. It would be interesting to hear from readers with media experience about dos and don’ts of live TV or its cheapo webbed cousins. What kinds of things should you do? Should you not do? (I remember Brad DeLong had some tips on how to prepare yourself for TV interviews a long while ago, but I can’t find them).

My fifth blogiversary was almost two weeks ago and I nearly missed it. I think when I came on sabbatical my blogging went on one as well even though I’ve tried to stay on the scene to some extent.

Looking back, I can tell I was an early adopter, because in my first post I felt the need to explain what a blog is.

People often wonder when (if ever) is a good time to start blogging. I’ve decided that graduate school was the perfect time. [click to continue…]

Someone just asked if Phil Nugent — whose blog I have promoted at Crooked Timber pretty much since arriving here — is related to Ted Nugent, the guitarist best known for “Yank Me, Crank Me (But Don’t Wake Me to Thank Me)” and other tender ballads.

I am unable to answer that question. I don’t know anything about the man, or even remember how I came to read his blog. The last reference to The Phil Nugent Experience here was picked up by Kevin Drum and briefly propagated across the netrootsosphere. It seemed as if some glorious future beckoned.
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Two developments worth blogging. First, the _Political Theory Daily Review_ is in the process of transplanting itself to “Bookforum”:http://www.bookforum.com/. This is a good thing; it gives the famously information-dense PTDR a new design which makes it a bit easier to read, while bringing a few more eyeballs to Bookforum, an estimable site in its own right.

Second, Rick Perlstein is now blogging regularly at the “Big Con”:http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/thebigcon/, where he’s bringing his vast accumulated knowledge of the history of the conservative movement to bear on current politics. This “post”:http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/legionnaires_diseased on the American Legion’s guff about how Democrats are “politicizing” Memorial Day ought to be of particular interest to CT readers who remember the outrage among some of our commenters when Kieran “suggested”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/30/memorial-day/ a couple of years ago that they use Memorial Day to “reflect on what it means to serve and perhaps die for your country, and to think about the value of the cause, the power of the reasons, and the strength of the evidence you would need before asking someone—someone like your brother, or friend, or neighbor—to take on that burden.”

Cory Doctorow coins a phrase about Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Megan McArdle’s dog, Finnegan, contracted an infection and had to be put to sleep. She posted about it. I thought: soon, some gobshite will show up in the comments, deriding the way she felt at four in the morning the night her dog died. And sure enough. Gotta love the intertubes.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell has died, too. In terms of net good brought into the world during their respective lives, Megan’s dog is probably ahead of Falwell. The conjunction of events reminded me of Oliver Goldsmith on morality, dogs and men.
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Commenting on this Instapundit post: “I have no idea if it’s actually true, but sounds pretty plausible.” And that, my friends, is how the pros blog.

Several days late and dollars short, my response to Jonathan Chait’s “essay”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=xQrNb9zsY1hUSr5ditd9qS%3D%3D on the Netroots. It’s taken me a while to write something, because his underlying thesis is expressed a little circuitously, and I’ve wanted to be sure that I understood exactly what he was saying. Short version – there’s a serious argument in there. But it’s wrong, or at the least badly exaggerated. [click to continue…]

Just a note to welcome my former colleague Andrew Levine to the blogosphere, in a blog named “Democrats Now“. His first post explores and explains why it will be so hard to defeat Clintonism within the Democratic Party, and his second delineates some of the mysteries of modern American politics (like, how on earth did the Republicans become Reds?), and makes a reasonable case that Monica Lewinsky saved social security. Andy’s a prolific and clever writer with a quirky sense of humour, and his blog will join the tiny handful that I read daily.

New Yorker Matt Yglesias’s westward march, from Washington DC to Santa Fe and maybe beyond, has been attracting some attention. So far the highlight has been what you might call the Fashion Trail of Tears, pictured here. An iconic image, I think. Today he freely admits to never having heard of Kit Carson (knowledge of whom had even made it to the Ireland of my youth) and notices how sunny it is in New Mexico.

Maybe Matt will continue west and get to Tucson and see the saguaros. (“Some kind of spiny tree.”) Of course, I’m a relatively recent transplant to the Southwest myself. One thing I didn’t want to have happen when I moved out here was to succumb to a common disease of grad students recently relocated to new jobs, which is to chronically pretend you are still living on the campus where you got your degree, or — worse — in the downtown NY apartment or beachfront West Coast condo you daily fantasized about living while writing your dissertation. So I bought a mountain bike and started exploring.

Although it takes a long time to really get to know a place, it’s surprising how quickly you can adapt to some things. For example, I can now wear jeans in the kind of summer temperatures that, when I first moved here, I didn’t think were capable of sustaining human or other animal life.