Abandoned Footnotes

(Apropos of nothing in particular, though this article on Gaddafi’s cult of personality and this article on the indoctrination of children ...

(Sorry for the recent neglect of the blog. I just started teaching again, and that tends to absorb all my energy. So here’s a teaching-relat...

From a very interesting article in the NY Times : After a strike that March in the city of Mahalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called...

(Warning: an epically long post that meanders through the literature on inequality and democratization and comes to conclusions that probabl...

One of the things I find interesting about the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt is the fact that protest tends to spread along regional an...

Almost without really meaning to, I've joined the ranks of the twitterati (partly I wanted to keep up with events in Tunisia and Egypt, ...

I know basically nothing about Tunisia. (It seems that few people do: I tried a search for articles on Tunisia in Google Scholar and a few o...

Here's a version of the video below , but now with coups d'etat: For a note on the sources, see my post below .

I am mulling over a post on the events in Tunisia, but I've been distracted. I may get around to it eventually, but right now I've b...

The view that oil is bad for democracy and freedom has become conventional wisdom. (Any view espoused by Thomas Friedman is by definition c...

In Romania the temperature never officially dropped below 10deg C, even when there was ice and snow on the ground, because the law said that...

Happy new year! I've wanted to blog this for a while, but sickness intervened. May all your new years be free of bacterial warfare. At a...