Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Toxic, Poisonous and Stupid: Iraq War Decision-Making Ten Years On
Even within its own narrow terms the Iraq war was appallingly costly. A bad decision to invade was compounded by shambolic and ineffective leadership of the warfighting itself. Why? The answer seems to lie in the ways in which contemporary large organizations behave
Making Sense of Crime Trends
Much of the current confusion about crime trends is born of the tendency to bunch together a whole range of different harms and actions under the abstract category of ‘crime’. This blinds us to where the significant problems are.
We Aren’t the World
Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.
How Useful are E-Readers for Academic Reading, Really?
E-readers are now commonplace. But how useful are e-readers as a replacement for printed academic books and journal articles?
Undercover Pressures
Some criminal investigations resonate over the years. Even if you’ve only had peripheral involvement with them, as in my case, they still […]
In praise of Sociology! Speech by Pierre Bourdieu
In the February edition of Sociology, a previously unpublished translation of a speech given by Pierre Bourdieu. Here is an excerpt and introduction.
The Politics of Attacking Political Science
As a political scientist, I find it curious that my discipline has been singled out as being particularly wasteful of federal research dollars. How did we join welfare queens and spotted owls as convenient punching bags, things that must not be aided by taxpayer money during lean times?
