Is a No Deal” Brexit Still Avoidable? Why the Irish Border Remains a Stumbling Block for Negotiations

W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s comic history of England, 1066 and All That, talks about nineteenth-century British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s efforts to solve the Irish Question—the puzzle of what to do with rebellious Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom. According to Sellar and Yeatman, every time that Gladstone got close to an answer the Irish changed the question. Over the last couple of days, a new Irish question has stymied Brexit negotiations between the United Kingdom and the EU: how to deal with the border between the Republic of Ireland, which

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism – with Marion Fourcade

This short piece compares 21st century machine learning to 19th and 20th century bureaucracy – we hope to write more. While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we ...
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Essay

Web of Influence – with Daniel W. Drezner

Every day, millions of online diarists, or “bloggers,” share their opinions with a global audience. Drawing upon the content of the international media and the World Wide Web, they weave together an elaborate network with agenda-setting power on issues ranging from human rights in China to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. What began as a ...
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