Blogging

via “Ethan Zuckerman”:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/06/23/pdf-visualizing-the-political-blogosphere/, a really nice visualization (with clickable information) of the political blogosphere “here”:http://presidentialwatch08.com/index.php/map/.

For thems thats interested, I have a new dialogue with Dan Drezner up at “Bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11994. Perhaps the most valuable bit for me was that as a result of our discussion of the famous Jeremy Paxman demolition job on Michael Howard, one of the Bloggingheads crowd dug up the video on YouTube, and linked to it. “Here it is”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI.

I’m also blogging in the discussion of Clay Shirky’s new book _Here Comes Everybody_ (Powells, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=Clay%20Shirky%20Here%20Comes&tag=henryfarrell-20&index=blended&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ) at TPM Cafe. A post on how the proliferation of groups doesn’t end status competitions “here”:http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/06/18/im_happy_that_clay_is/, and one about power laws and inequality “here”:http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/06/18/getting_power_laws_wrong/.

In the comments thread about homepages of academics, reader Oisin asks:

I’m a PhD philosophy student, entering my 2nd year; is maintaining a blog a good idea for a PhD student, in addition to having a homepage? Or is it perhaps a bad idea? And if so, why?

How having a blog may influence an academic’s career is a topic we’ve discussed at CT numerous times before over the years (example, example, example). Nonetheless, taking it up once again in light of changes in the blogging landscape makes sense. As I consider the question, I will note some significant differences among blog types and why the term “blog” has limited utility.

To blog or not to blog is not really the question. What parts of one’s self one wants to portray publicly and to a professional community is more the issue at hand.
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“Nancy Folbre”:http://people.umass.edu/folbre/folbre/, who is widely considered to be one of the most knowledgeable economists on issues of care work, has recently started a new blog, called “Care Talk”:http://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/. It’s a research blog that “aims”:http://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/welcome-to-care-talk/ to bring together interdisciplinary insights on issues of care — child care, care issues related to primary education, elder care, care for disabled, and health care. Care is a neglected issue in several disciplines and subdisciplines, including economics and political philosophy, and I can only applaud this initiative. I hope that this will become a genuine international blog — much can be learnt from looking at how care work is organised and divided in other countries.

Folbre published earlier this year her new book “Valuing Children”:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/FOLOUR.html which I have here on my desk. I promise our readers a review of that book sometime in June.

I first became aware of Dru because she was a member of the Bristol Flickr group, and I was looking to buy a camera. What better way of deciding than to look through other people’s photos, and see what the ones I liked were taken with? So there was Dru, a slightly mumsy, middle-aged woman with a young daughter and a Morris Traveller. In other words, extrapolating from the various signifiers, I’d formed an impression of what Dru must be like. Then I met her, at one of our monthly get-togethers, in the Royal Naval Volunteer. And then she spoke. “Bloodly hell!” I thought to myself, “you’re a bloke … or used to be.” A very quick update of my mental image of Dru took place.

It isn’t very often that people I know have their biography published. In fact, through not paying attention again, I’d failed to notice that Dru’s was coming out. Only when a friend send me “a link to the Guardian”:http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/relationships/story/0,,2275803,00.html , with the question “Is this Flickr Dru?” did I catch on. Well, “Becoming Drusilla”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184655067X/junius-21 isn’t so much a biography as the record of a friendship, and what happens to it when one of the parties announces their desire to change sex.
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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”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/ for the last couple of months; “Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2008&base_name=psa_2 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:

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This is by way of announcing that “Eric Rauchway”:http://history.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Rauchway_Eric 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”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/ 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”:http://www.soros.org/initiatives/fellowship 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.”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/. 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”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/note-to-megan-m.html and “here”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/monopsony-in-mo.html she explains to Megan McArdle what monopsony actually involves. And “here”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/can-someone-ple.html 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”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/04/faces_and_elect.html politely suggests that he deserves some credit.
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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.