Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

VRWC

That would be the fifth Rugby World Cup of course, which is being played down here in Australia and has, I’ve noticed, generally escaped commentary in the blogosphere. But any game where France walk all over the U.S. can’t expect much love in the strongholds of blogging. At Crooked Timber we have a strong representation […]

Dept of Fair and Balanced

David Bernstein, who has been relentlessly flogging his book via his Volokh posts over the last few weeks, complains about NPR:

Typical NPR ‘Balance’: I listened to part of the “Kojo Namdi Show” on WAMU, Washington, D.C. today. The promos said there would be three women Jerusalem residents on the phone, one Christian, one Moslem, and […]

Number Crunching

Kevin Drum is keeping score in an argument about data on global warming. “M&M” (don’t ask me, I’m only reporting this) re-analyzed data for a famous graph and claimed to find serious errors. Now, Kevin says

Somebody — it’s not entirely clear who — exported the original raw data to Excel but somehow exported 159 columns […]

All Things Bright and Easterbrook

Following up on yesterday’s great “spiritual plane debate,” I see via Atrios and Carl Zimmer that Gregg Easterbrook may subscribe to the theory of Intelligent Design. Originating with William Paley, this is the view that, as Easterbrook puts it, “organic biology [sic] is so phenomenally complex that it is illogical to assume that life created […]

Gregg Easterbrook is having a bad month

Fresh from that thing about them greedy, violence-lovin’ jews (for which he paid a big price), Gregg Easterbrook posts something about God. We all know that bloggers say posts from people they like are “characteristically insightful.” Here we have Gregg Easterbrook being atypically sophomoric. Again.

But the article left out the really interesting part, […]

Blogs for the boys

Jacob Levy asks an interesting question about group blogs staffed by academics:

For purposes of academic conflict-of-interest norms, what sort of relationship do co-bloggers have to one another?

He wonders whether people who post on the same blog should do things like review one another’s papers or write tenure letters and so on. I have a picture […]