Timberites

There’s a short profile of me up at the National Journal’s Blogometer today. Feel at liberty to slag me off in comments.

Three discussions worth taking note of.

* Our own Eszter Hargittai will be talking about blogging with Dan Drezner and Sean Carroll on Milt Rosenberg's show on Chicago radio station WGN this evening. Should be fun.

* The Chronicle is running a discussion tomorrow on how to beat academic procrastination with professor of psychology, William Ferrari. Leave yer questions or comments here. Left untouched is the topic of whether some forms of procrastination may actually make you productive.

* Our libertarian comrades at the Cato Institute have created a new institution, Cato Unbound. Each month, they’ll have an essay by some luminary, responses to that essay, and trackbacks to blogs that take up the discussion. Not entirely unlike our Crooked Timber seminars, albeit somewhat more ambitious in scope. It looks to be a very interesting experiment – blog/online discussions of this kind seem to me to have a lot of potential to shake up the academy.

I’m back in the UK after a trip to the US which included a week spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Thanks to Harry and everyone else who made it such a memorable and enjoyable visit, and to those Crooked Timber readers who made suggestions about what to eat. (The frozen custard was excellent, but I passed on the cheese curds.) One piece of good luck I had there was the following. Having eaten dinner and enjoyed interesting conversation with some of Harry’s students, I was wandering down State Street last Thursday when I saw a poster advertising a Mary Gauthier gig. When? I wondered. Tonight! I produced my $15 dollars admission and made my entrance. It was a terrific performance by Mary and her German guitarist Thomm Jutz, leavened by some great monologues including one about “Brits who listen to Radio 2.” Afterwards, I was able to identify myself as such whilst getting my copy of Mercy Now autographed, a memorable evening.

I see that the left sidebar now has a permanent link to Eszter’s Frappr Map of Crooked Timber readers (scroll down: under Frenzy of Renown). Add yourselves (if you want to and you haven’t already – especially if you come from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe or Antarctica).

Some things I only post on my own blog thinking that they probably have limited appeal. However, now that this has been picked up by several others I’m thinking that perhaps it’s worth a CT mention.

Frappr uses Google Maps to present the locations of people who share some type of affiliation. Frappr maps can have whatever theme you choose. I created one for Crooked Timber readers. You can add your own location (with or without photo plus a short message). Despite what it may seem like at first, non-U.S. locations are supported as well.

So far I’m the only one on the map. I’m heading to bed now. It would be cool to have the map populated with all sorts of CT readers (and writers:) by the time I wake up.

UPDATE: Thanks for the many additions, keep on pushing those pins onto the map! A few logistical notes: If you’re not in the US then be sure to click on “Not in the US? Click Here” below the “Zipcode” field. You will then have to enter both city and country. (And yes, it does hte curious thing of assuming that your city is in a county with the same name even if it isn’t (e.g. Budapest, Budapest, Hungary), but so it is.) Although it looks like you are required to leave a Shoutout, try leaving some spaces or a hyphen if you’re not inspired to leave a message. That should work.

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Ted Barlow has just sent along word that he’s gotten out of Houston safely, and is now with his fiancee and dog in Washington, D.C.

I’m very pleased to hear that Ted is OK, and I hope everyone that everyone here knows will be just as safe in the days ahead.

I spent the afternoon at the Houston Convention Center. According to people I spoke to, they were directing volunteers away from the Astrodome to the Convention Center. As I left, the Convention Center had a lot of volunteers, but it could use them.
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A point of occasional confusion for people linking to, or commenting on CT – “Henry Farrell” is not the same person as “Harry Brighouse” . When a post is by “Henry,” it’s written by me, and when it’s by “Harry,” it’s him. I’m not really complaining about this, as I get much the better end of the deal – while I get to author books on political theory without actually having to write them, he gets attacked for saying rude things about Robert Conquest that he didn’t in fact say. But still, perhaps better to keep things straight.

About a month ago, Chris noted a new book that our own Harry Brighouse co-edited. Well, I’m here to tell you there’s more Brighouse that you should read! Specifically, Harry’s new book Justice published by Polity, as part of their “Key Concepts” series. Here’s a US link to it on amazon; here’s a UK link. (Disclosure: I just finished a book for the series that should be out early next year on Global Justice.)

This is simply the best introduction to contemporary philosophical accounts of justice around. So if readers of this blog want to learn about or brush up on their Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum, Nozick, Kymlicka, Jerry Cohen, et. al., you couldn’t do better than to read this. Best of all, it is written in a very accessible style that doesn’t presuppose any philosophical background. Really!
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I’ve just wheeled the latest issue of Imprints (8:3) to the post office and it will shortly be sent out to subscribers. Having just done this, I’ve noticed there’s *a typo on the cover* Crossland for Crosland — aargh!! Still, if you can get past that there’s a great deal of interest inside:

bq. * An interview with Joseph Raz
* Philip Bielby on equality and vulnerability in biomedical research
* Kevin Hickson on revisionism from Crosland to New Labour

and reviews by — cue drumroll — Crooked Timber stalwarts Harry Brighouse and Kieran Healy of, respectively, Anne Alstott’s No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents and Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago . Kieran’s long-awaited review was pre-published here on CT .

Flickr’s photos tell me that it’s cold and sunny in Canberra. I knew that already. The Lobby Bar is closing in Cork, which comes as a shock. (It’s a great venue.) And the Saguaros are flowering in Tucson. That means it’s really hot in Arizona right now — dangerously hot, in fact — just as I’m about to return there. One advantage of desert life, though, is that it’s possible to live in a more-or-less solar powered house. Even though the materials needed to build a house like this aren’t really that expensive anymore, few are built because housing construction is a lot like film-making. The difficulty of bringing together so many specialized contractors for what’s essentially a small-scale, often one-off project means that a lot of energy goes in to ensuring that all the bits hook up together in a reliable, predictable manner. The paradoxical result is that a lot of fluid network activity amongst creative individuals produces a tendency to conservatism and a bias against innovation in the actual outputs. Reconfiguring some bit of the house (the cooling system, say) means that a bunch of other people back along the supply chain have to adjust their standard practices, and they don’t want to. Symmetrically, prospective buyers may be nervous about the resale prospects of such a house in a market where the demand for innovation is strictly limited. So in much the same way that most films are boring and cookie-cutter, so are most houses, despite the fluidity and high potential for creativity inherent to the enterprise. Nicole Biggart makes this argument for commercial buildings, and large parts of the housing market seem similar.

There is still a fair amount of innovation. It’s just difficult to get it incorporated into standard plans for homes. Tucson has many examples of solar-powered or otherwise energy efficient homes, including one of the few zero-energy homes in the country. The ZEH is _net_ zero energy, of course: it’s designed to produce what it needs via solar panels, and its overall energy consumption is very low. An “ordinary” solar home is not a ZEH, but if its built right it’s very cheap to run. If things go according to plan, I’ll be living in one come November.

This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!

Here I am in Brisbane airport, though at the moment the chance of sunburn is low (it’s raining) and only 50 percent of our luggage seems to have decided to come along with us. The fact that there was a giant roulette wheel on top of the luggage carousel (advertising the local casinos, I think) did not augur well. We’re en route to Canberra, where we’ll be at the RSSS for a couple of months. Despite the “social sciences” contained in that acronym, it looks as though I’ll be surrounded by ontologists the whole time.

I’m off to UCLA tomorrow to give a talk to their Comparative Social Analysis group. Provided, that is, I don’t get shot on the way to campus.