Thursday, August 12, 2010

Just rereading Vaclav Havel's seminal work, "The Power of the Powerless." Still amazing.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

I'm so glad the US has figured out the deep importance of providing flood relief in Pakistan, though it means taking some resources away from the military effort next door. What with the Pakistan government seemingly AWOL while the general population suffers mightily in the wake of the worst flooding in decades and the initial mobilization of groups with links to local paramilitary groups, this is an almost tailor-made opportunity for the US to both burnish its credibility with the Pashtun street and develop a bit more leverage over the Pakistani government.

US aid winning friends in flood-ravaged Pakistan-- AP.

Friday, June 11, 2010

When I talk to most Americans about Russia, their responses reflect a deep assumption that somehow everything in the country are personally manipulated by Vladimir Putin. They seem to see him as a puppet master, controlling the entire country like a marionette-- in the mode of how they saw the old Soviet Premiers.

This article, written by a really remarkable Russian journalist (and the most recent journalist to be brought to the US by PKF), goes some distance to dispelling this misconception:

"Rules of the Game" by Roman Shleinov
The New Statesman
June 7, 2007

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

This was something too good not to post:

Porn in the USA: The Geography of Desire
(a encapsulation of current social sciences research by Stephen Bates in The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2009)

Who subscribes to pornographic websites? Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business School summarizes data from a major provider of online porn in The Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter 2009). Per capita, Utah has the most subscriptions to porn sites, and West Virginia the fewest. Some religious attitudes correlate with subscription rates, Edelman reports: "In states where more people agree that 'Even today miracles are performed by the power of God' and 'I never doubt the existence of God,' there are more subscriptions." Residents of states with high rates of churchgoing prove to be about average in their appetite for pay porn--the only difference is that fewer of them sign up on Sundays.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

New York has a reputation for being gritty but when I was on the Upper West Side today, I saw something I just have to share. Picture the scene:

A boy about 10 years old with a mop of black hair was sitting on a bench on the edge of the sidewalk, with a particle board easel in front of him. A paper on the front reads, in careful Elementary school scrawl, "I Draw You: 75 ¢." Below that, he had hung an example of his oevre, what I call classic gradeschool portrait (in graphite and colored pencil): a big round oval of a face, with semi-circular ears sprouting from each side of the head, circles for eyes and hair the texture of pencil squiggles.

If Norman Rockwell were alive today, that's the kind of street scene he would paint.

Friday, February 26, 2010

This was too good not to post. I have been on the receiving end of this kind of thing more times than I would care to mention. Haven't had the confidence to come up with this kind of response, though....

If They Won't Email You Back, Pretend They Did
by Neal Hirschfeld
The New York Times
January 24, 2010

Thursday, January 28, 2010

For anyone out there interested in how to understand Russia, this piece comes the closest I have seen to an accurate theoretical rendering of what is happening there.

Russian Transimperialism and Its Implications By Dr. Celeste Wallander, Professor at American University's School of International Service and now Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia

Her term 'transimperialism' might be a bit misleading if you haven't read the piece, but the insight here is real.

I've got a series of interviews tomorrow and Friday to judge whether I am worthy of the Alfa Bank fellowship, which would allow me to work in Moscow for a year. We'll see how that goes. [knock on wood]