March 24, 2009

William Milam on the Importance of Economic Assistance for Pakistan

William Milam, former ambassador to Pakistan and author of Bangladesh and Pakistan: Flirting with Failure in South Asia, recently testified about Pakistan before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Milam was joined by Steven Coll, author of Ghost...

March 23, 2009

Ann Florini on Global Governance

Last month Ethics and International Affairs, a publication of The Carnegie Council interviewed Ann Florini, editor of The Right to Know Transparency for an Open World, about issues relating to global governance. The Carnegie Council has now made available video...

March 20, 2009

Tibet and China: The Past in the Present — Tsering Shakya in Open Democracy

In commemoration of the events of 1959, the Chinese government recently announced the creation of “Serf Liberation Day” to celebrates China’s “liberation” of Tibet from the evils of the oppressive Tibet’s former rulers. In an article published yesterday in Open...

March 19, 2009

Measuring the Legitimacy of States — Bruce Gilley's The Right to Rule

Can the legitimacy of a state be measured? Is it possible to determine how much faith a citizenry has in its government? What’s Denmark doing right and what’s happening in France? In his new book The Right to Rule: How...

March 18, 2009

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Earlier this week at South by Southwest, there was a surprise screening of Todd Haynes’s legendary and brilliant film Superstar. The film has become notorious for its use of dolls to narrate the tragic life of the singer Karen Carpenter,...

March 17, 2009

Selling Gandhi — Joseph Kip Kosek on History News Network

Yesterday, the History News Network posted an article by Joseph Kip Kosek, author of Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. In the article, “Selling Gandhi,” Kosek writes about the very un-Gandhian spectacle of Gandhi’s personal effects being...

March 16, 2009

Peter Gay reviews Breeding by Jenny Davidson in Bookforum

Peter Gay has many good things to say about Jenny Davidson’s Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century in the most recent issue of Bookforum. However, before getting to a discussion of the book itself, Gay focuses his attention...

March 16, 2009

Political Manhood by Kevin Murphy Named as a Finalist for the Lambda Awards

The Lambda Literary Foundation named Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform, by Kevin Murphy as a finalist in the category of LGBT Studies. The winners will be announced on May 28th. In a review...

March 13, 2009

Herve This Video for Building a Meal

In conjunction with the publication of Herv&eacute This’s new book Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, we’ve produced a special video of This in the lab discussing the book and his ideas about cooking.

March 12, 2009

Further Thoughts on the UCSD Breast Cancer Cluster: The Garland Report — A Posting by Geoffrey Kabat

The following post is by Geoffrey Kabat, a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Kabat has conducted studies of environmental factors, including EMF, in relation to breast cancer risk, and is the author of Hyping Health Risks:...

March 11, 2009

Robert Barnett on the 50th Anniversary of the Dalai Lama's Flight from Tibet

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s forced exile to India and to discuss the event, NPR interviewed Robert Barnett, director modern Tibetian studies at Columbia University and author of Lhasa: Streets with Memories. Barnett, who was in...

March 11, 2009

Is Obama Satan's Warm-up Act? Mark Hulsether in Religion Dispatches

As Mark Hulsether, author of Religion, Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States, notes in his recent piece in Religion Dispatches, “End Times believers consider Barack Obama as a serious contender for the Antichrist.” The Obama-as-Antichrist rhetoric got...