Friday’s Reading List
By Taylor Marvin
William of Tyre, Reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem’, 15th century. Via Wikimedia.
What I read this week:
Hints of Syrian chemical push set off global effort to stop it — “I think the Russians understood this is the one thing that could get us to intervene in the war.”
How apocalyptic gun-rights ideology wrecks democracy.
Phil Arena reviews a new paper — “Borrowed Power: Debt Finance and Resort to Arms” — by Branislav Slantchev, who taught one of my favorite classes at UCSD.
Check out Duck of Minerva’s working paper ‘I Can Has IR Theory?’, a further response to the Walt/Mearsheimer ‘not enough grand theory’ argument
Offshore control is the answer in the western Pacific. Not as far as I’d go, but limit, limit, limit is the watchword.
Emily L. Hauser on Obama, Hagel, and feminism.
In Jacobin, Remeike Forbes asks why Django Unchained ignores slave uprisings. Adam Serwer has a convincing defense of the film. I personally think that Tarantino’s depiction of the majority of the film’s slave characters as too mentally oppressed to resist is a strong depiction of the dehumanizing effect of enslavement. [spoiler] Django isn’t one in ten thousand; he’s just lucky [end spoilers].
Smoke & Stir 
