Following on from the last N&C on the way the Bush administration listens to developers rather than to environmental scientists in its own agencies – there is a post on corruption, and the history of attempts to limit the effects of money on political culture at Cliopatria. It is highly frustrating to see the open, unembarrassed acceptance of the role of money in politics in the US, and to see how little that changes, what a non-issue it is, how easily it keeps going, how cheerily everyone accepts it. Bribery and corruption are usually considered bad things, but the fact that huge corporations give enormous wads of cash to US political campaigns and parties is, for some reason, just … Read the rest

There is a very interesting article about the Bush administration’s interference with science in the Christian Science Monitor. I was a little distracted while reading it, because I kept thinking I had posted an article on the same subject fairly recently, but not so recently that I could remember when, or what it was called, or where it was from. But luck was with me (or perhaps it was my guardian angel, or baby Jesus, or both, one on each shoulder), and I found it anyway. It’s here. It’s well worth reading both: they are related but quite different. The Monitor article treats science in general; the Grist one discusses cases where the Bush administration forced federal agencies to … Read the rest

It’s odd to discover that sometimes readers know more about what I’m doing than I do. I’d actually forgotten that I’d commented on the hijab-headscarf-veil issue all the way back in October, but Socialism in an Age of Waiting reminded me.

The issue of Muslim girls wearing, or not wearing, hijab in state schools in France has given rise to extensive comment and debate all over the blogosphere. We’d cite as the most interesting discussions so far the posts, and the comments, at Butterflies and Wheels, where Ophelia Benson has been blogging about it, on and off, since October and at Harry’s Place, where the debate was taken up in December partly in response to the news that “a

Well my questions have been answered – the ones I asked a couple of days ago, about Why is Judith Butler a superstar and who the hell thinks comp lit teachers are superstars anyway and why don’t they embarrass themselves talking that way? Well no, I didn’t ask that last question, but it’s what I was thinking.

I should have realized. Silly me. The subject is a whole field, a discipline, it has an anthology and everything. The excellent Scott McLemee, of the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as other publications, dropped a word in my ear to the effect that he wrote a few words on this subject a couple of years ago. And sure enough, he … Read the rest

Well I made good on my threat, and did that In Focus. I’ll be adding a lot more links, since it’s a large subject.

I also posted again at Cliopatria, about Romila Thapar. There are more interesting comments there, from people who know far more about history and historians than I do. Timothy Burke makes this excellent point:

This is one of those junctures where the tragic confusion of some scholars in the US and England about where their sympathies should lie potentially becomes pretty dangerous if not corrected. It strikes me that Hindutva’s self-representation is actually pretty fair in one respect: it is more genuinely popular, “from-below”, and less obviously “Western” than scholarly history practiced in Indian academies (though