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Political Science

Catch Up with Melissa Harris-Perry on the Rachel Maddow Show

In September, Yale University Press is publishing Melissa Harris-Perry’s new book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, titled after the author’s popular column for The Nation. As guest host this week on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, she steps in for Maddow’s role and brings her informed opinions to the news. We’ve compiled some of the highlights of Harris-Perry’s insightful commentary on the show this week and over the past year.

Facts from a Nameless Decade

In the search for truth, no fact is ever truly useless. Obtaining fact, not factoid, is crucial, because the public usually only hears one tiny facet of any major issue, Timothy Garton Ash argues in Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.

Directed Studies of Literature and Politics to Collide in Grand Strategies

Joan of Arc and Odysseus have more in common than one might think. Not only that, but since the former conversed with saints and the latter with goddesses, today would today recommend them to a shrink. According to Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, both figures exist in literary works that capably demonstrate statecraft.

Listening to Lomborg on Global Warming Means Going the Way of the Dinosaurs

If a group of a scientist’s colleagues started an entire website to warn the world, especially the scientific community, about “the flaws in his work” before the scientist even published a book, you might be at least a little skeptical when his book was finally published. Howard Friel has finally done what should have been done a decade ago, as he points out, in the publishing house: fact-checking. In The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming, all Friel has to do is comb through the endnotes and compare them with their sources to find gaping holes more terrifying than a velociraptor.

Lost in Afghanistan

According to Taliban author, Ahmed Rashid, in this morning’s New York Times: “Afghanistan just got more dangerous and unpredictable.” Tim Bird and Alex Marshall’s Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way not only chronicles the United States’ longest war but also addresses the questions that have plagued the West since the early years.

Yemen: A Disturbing Prediction

With the Arab Spring affecting up to twenty nations, depending on the source, it is hard to know which warrants the most interest or concern. Victoria Clark, author of Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, argues that the United States needs to make understanding Yemen a priority or risk the cultivation of more terrorists.

Globalization Is Not America’s Most Wanted

The “economy” has practically become a dirty word now. It’s usually the answer to the question, “What issue concerns Americans the most?” and has led to frantic searches for explanations. Whatever the “real” cause, one of the major scapegoats for the “Great Crisis,” as Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Kati Suominen call it, is globalization. In their book Globalization at Risk: Challenges to Finance and Trade, they argue that while globalization had a role in creating our current situation, we don’t have to send the Navy SEALs after it.

Tonight on The Colbert Report: Timothy Garton Ash

This evening, Stephen Colbert will talk with Timothy Garton Ash, author of Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, has written extensively on modern political history, notably covering Communism and the 1989 Revolutions

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Ahmed Rashid Talks about Osama bin Laden

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, few people in America had heard of the Taliban. And in 2000, when Ahmed Rashid wrote the bestselling Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, based on his experiences as a journalist covering the civil war in Afghanistan for twenty years,

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Administrative Tyranny: Marx’s Misguided View of the State

The discussion heats up for Why Marx Was Right at Bensonian.org: Andrew Walker, contributor to Mere Orthodoxy, gets into the claim that “Marxism believes in an all-powerful state.” Andrew Walker Terry Eagleton insists that Marx’s understanding of the state has been misunderstood. Objecting to the claim that the state leads

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