Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
among them was Walt Kelly. I grew up on Pogo, as my kids did on Calvin and Hobbes. Finally, here is volume I of something that should have been done a long time ago (all the Amazon reviews seem to say, correctly, “Finally!”) . My daughter gave it to me for Christmas and after all [...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
January 13th, 2012
October 3rd, 2011
Category: Reviews, Technology and Society
This is my favorite tech gadget in at least a year. Just buy one, whether you’re taking notes in class or doing interview research. The basic idea is that the pen contains audio recording hardware and software, and a camera that looks where it is writing. The paper is covered with an almost invisible light-blue [...]
December 22nd, 2010
Printer cartridges and safety razor blades, move over: this year’s Ramsey pricing award winner is the Nespresso coffee system…and these guys don’t even have the good grace to give you a break on the initial purchase that puts the tapeworm’s head in your wallet. Making espresso-family drinks at home has always been something of a [...]
May 13th, 2010
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Reviews
Our Mother’s Day expedition was to the newly reinstalled Oakland Museum. We loved it, and I spent some time composing a post about it in my head, planning to write it up about now. Imagine my surprise at finding that Jon Carroll somehow entered my personal brain and extracted the entire post, and I don’t [...]
October 16th, 2009
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Crime Control, Policy Analysis, Politics and Leadership, Prisons and penal policy, Reviews
Want law enforcement that’s really tough on Mexicans? Try Mexico’s. Only seven years until accused there are presumed innocent, and meanwhile the cops aren’t afraid to do what’s needed to get the job done. Like lie under oath. Roberto and Layda are students in my shop (Roberto is my PhD advisee), and I am over-the-top [...]
September 5th, 2009
Category: Policy briefs, Reviews
I came upon a whiteboard marker with a foam eraser on its cap in one of our seminar rooms yesterday and entered a fugue state whose themes were “Wow, this is a big improvement!” and “What took them so long?”. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the most important design choice for these common items, which [...]
January 5th, 2009
Category: Reviews, Terrorism and its control
A book that purports to be a memoir by a 25-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service paints a picture of a bureaucracy without any focus or capability in human intelligence. This suggests intelligence reform requires a thorough refounding rather than rewiring at the top.
March 6th, 2008
Category: Reviews
On Tuesday, my home institution put on a day-long festsprach, or festpotenzpunkt, for Tom Schelling, rounding up a really impressive collection of heavy hitters in economics and related fields (three Nobel Prize winners sprinkled in) to talk about what they’ve been able to see by standing on Schelling’s shoulders. Among them was RBC’s own Mark [...]
March 3rd, 2008
Category: Reviews
They say that criticism makes you stronger. So Paul Pillar’s review of my book -Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11- in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs makes me a freakin Terminator. Pillar, an ex-CIA guy, didn’t like much about my analysis of the CIA’s failure to adapt to terrorism [...]
