Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Posner and Becker Comedy Gold

As Eszter notes, the Becker/Posner Blog has solved whatever collective action problems it was having earlier in the week and now the first two substantive posts are up, both on the topic of preventive war, one from Becker and one from Posner. Right now, my working theory is that the blog is an elaborate hoax. […]

Academic Job Markets and Status Hierarchies

Over at Brian Leiter’s blog, there’s a debate going on about the role of publications in the hiring process. Keith DeRose is arguing that a graduate student’s publication record should be given a larger role than it often is:

[W]hich graduate school one gets into and what job one initially lands tragically does very much to […]

Draft Contribution to Tech Central Station

So, there appear to be no explicit arguments in the peer-reviewed scientific literature against the consensus position that, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years […]

Freedom on the March

The news services report the latest effort by legal officials of the U.S. Government to get Americans to agree that the use of torture by the military is no big deal:

WASHINGTON —U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep […]

Brio

Eugene Volokh complains that a recent draft of one his papers is missing something:

Verve. “Energy and enthusiasm in the expression of ideas . . . . Vitality; liveliness.” My writing was the usual lawyerese, flabby and clausy. The substance was getting there (though it still needs a lot of work), but it was missing vigor, […]