Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• The Uyghurs and Cultural Genocide

  

  In the last several weeks I've been thinking a lot about the twentieth century and its unimaginable crimes against humanity on an almost inconceivable scale. Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2020 SOCIETY

• Mass Murder in the Borderlands

  

  The facts of mass murder in eastern Europe in the 1930s through the 1950s are simply too horrific to fully absorb. These decades include the mass killings of... Read more

  Posted on 07 September 2020 SOCIETY

• The Gulag

  

  The ruthless authoritarianism and tyranny of Stalinist rule depended on a leader, a party, and a set of institutions that worked to terrorize and repress the... Read more

  Posted on 05 September 2020 SOCIETY

• Analytic Philosophy of Meaning and Smart AI Bots

  

  One of the impulses of the early exponents of analytic philosophy was to provide strict logical simplifications of hitherto vague or indefinite ideas. Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2020 SOCIETY

• New Thinking About European Genocide and the Holocaust

  

  Image: names of Holocaust victimsIt sometimes seems that some questions in history are resolved, finished, and understood. At various times the industrial... Read more

  Posted on 26 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Rational Life Plans and the Stopping Problem

  

  Image: a poor solution to the stopping problemIn earlier posts I discussed the question of "rational plans of life" (link, link, link, link) and argued that... Read more

  Posted on 25 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Are Randomized Controlled Trials the Gold Standard for Establishing Causation?

  

  The method of randomized controlled trials (RCT) is often thought to be the best possible way of establishing causation, whether in biology, or medicine or... Read more

  Posted on 24 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Tony Judt and Tim Snyder on the Twentieth Century

  

  Timothy Snyder helped Tony Judt to create a "spoken book" during Judt's final months of illness through a truly unique series of conversations about biography... Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Judt on "A Clown in Regal Purple"

  

  There is an intriguing paragraph in Tony Judt and Tim Snyder's Thinking the Twentieth Century that made me curious. Judt says to Snyder:My own tenure case at... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Tony Judt on Memory and Myth in the Twentieth Century

  

  One of the historians whose work I greatly appreciate is Tony Judt. I've posted about his seminal book about Europe after World War II (Postwar: A History of... Read more

  Posted on 04 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Experimental Methods in Sociology

  

  An earlier post noted the increasing importance of experimentation in some areas of economics (link), and posed the question of whether there is a place for... Read more

  Posted on 23 July 2020 SOCIETY

• Mounk on the Crisis of Democracy

  

  Yascha Mounk's recent The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It is one of several important efforts to understand the crisis tha... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2020 SOCIETY

• A New Social Ontology of Government

  

  After several years of thinking about the nature of government as a network of organizations, I am happy to share the news that Palgrave Macmillan has... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2020 SOCIETY

• Conditions for a Resilient Diverse Democracy

  

  Under what conditions can a modern mass society embodying differences of race, religion, and political ideology maintain a functioning commitment to democracy... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2020 SOCIETY

• Who Was Angelo Herndon?

  

  In a previous post I quoted Langston Hughes' 1938 poem "The Kids Who Die", which is very powerful in the context of our current crisis of police use of deadly... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2020 SOCIETY

• The Kerala Dialogue on COVID-19

  

  The Indian state of Kerala has taken an especially active approach to responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kerala, a state of more than 33 million people, is... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2020 SOCIETY

• STS and Big Science

  

  A previous post noted the rapid transition in the twentieth century from small physics (Niels Bohr) to large physics (Ernest Lawrence). Read more

  Posted on 25 June 2020 SOCIETY

• The Arc of Justice

  

  It has been over a month since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The horror, brutality, and relentless cruelty of George Floyd's death moves everyone... Read more

  Posted on 25 June 2020 SOCIETY

• Big Physics and Small Physics

  

  When Niels Bohr traveled to Britain in 1911 to study at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, the director was J.J. Thompson and the annual budget was minimal. Read more

  Posted on 24 June 2020 SOCIETY

• Guest Post by Nicholas Preuth

  

  Nicholas Preuth is a philosophy student at the University of Michigan. His primary interests fall in the philosophy of law and the philosophy of social... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2020 SOCIETY