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Author Archives: Timothy Burke
He Got An-hillee-eight-ed
Unfogged makes fun of Matt Yglesias’ spelling. I used to have the opposite problem as a teenager: I read constantly but I had no idea how most of the words I was reading were actually pronounced, since they weren’t often … Continue reading
Posted in Miscellany
10 Comments
Geekout
Some things that are on my geeky mind: 1) Avatar is just damned amazingly good. Kid-equipped people should be making it preferential viewing. Non-kid people should also consider watching. The episode that really convinced me it was the kind of … Continue reading
Posted in Popular Culture
9 Comments
The Comfort of Being Irrelevant
I had a chance to listen last night to an extremely interesting talk by Brendan O’Leary, who has been part of a consulting team (that included Karol Soltan) advising authorities in Kurdistan about the constitutional negotiations in Iraq. O’Leary is … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
5 Comments
End of a Freelancer
I’ve been meaning for about a week to write about my friend Ben Yagoda’s Slate article in which he bids farewell to a freelance career. I see a few bloggers couldn’t resist taking a dig at him for having another … Continue reading
Posted in Blogging, Miscellany
6 Comments
Diamond, Cultural Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory
Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz have made a series of interesting posts about Jared Diamond, “Yali’s Question” and Papua New Guinea at Savage Minds. I agree with a number of comments I understand them to be making, particularly that Diamond’s … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Books
6 Comments
Passages
I’ve been meaning for a while to blog about Passages, which is a web-based revival of a publication started and maintained by my graduate advisor, David William Cohen. I helped put together one of the original issues in the early … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Africa, Blogging
7 Comments
A Simple Lie, or the Can’t-Do Party
Like I’ve said, predictions and acting on predictions, that’s a complicated business. What’s not complicated is when the head of Homeland Security says, “Nobody could have predicted that this would happen”. You can’t spin your way past that one. You … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
11 Comments
Update on the Precautionary Principle
Gary Farber has been doing an impressive job of compiling a wide variety of reports on the situation in New Orleans, particularly from The Interdictor, who is blogging from within New Orleans. One thing I’ll take back about my original … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
7 Comments
Small Suggestion
This idea has cropped up in a couple of variant forms in various places–Glenn Reynolds notes that the University of Tennessee has already taken 50 law students from Tulane and Loyola— but it’ll take quick action to systematically reproduce that … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
11 Comments
Precautionary Principles
It is hard to know how, when, whether and how much to plan for future events. I teach a course on the history of concepts of the future and the specific post-1945 growth (and decline) of a form of expertise … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
12 Comments