Number One for 7 July 2011

You got a thing about you, I just can't live without you:

• Good advice on handling journal submissions and budgeting your time [FPArena]
  
• So far, the best book I've read this year [Springer]
  
• Old but still reassuring: China's aircraft carrier sucks [Wired]
  
• Kevin Drum sums up more of the Obama administration than he may have intended: "Obama isn't doing this because he has to. He's doing it because he wants to."
  
• Let's take note of Georgetown Professor Hans Noel's recent fame. If the conceit of this blog is that I am the prime minister, then Hans was very recently its sovereign (viz., my boss). So, an extra-special Noel in July roundup:
  
  • Columbia Journalism Review
    
  • The Monkey Cage
    
  • Enik Rising
    
  • Matthew Yglesias
    
  • Three-Toed Sloth, notable also for this para:

    On the other and more positive side, we have it seems to me lots of examples of successfully pursuing scientific, causal knowledge in fields where experimentation is even harder than in sociology, such as astronomy and geology. Perhaps explaining the clustering of behavior in social networks is fundamentally harder than explaining the clustering of earthquakes, but we're even more at the mercy of observation in seismology than sociology.

    As cheerful as this prognosis is, it does seem to gloss over the problems inherent in studying the activities of self-aware and calculating (or norming) agents, especially agents who might also be reading our articles.
    
  One thing that I think that CKNZ should stress in their discussion--and Hans does get at this in his discussion of the "terrain" of horse races--is that many of the journalistic tropes about presidential campaigning do not apply to the general election (cf King and Gelman 1993) but they are in full force in the "invisible primary." I should also say that I love CKNZ because it does help bring back the kind of engagement with elite, backroom politics that I loved about, say, The Making of the President 1960 (as partial--in both senses of the word--as it was) and the grittiness of What It Takes.

The Turtles, "Elenore"