Public Writing
Featured Essays:
Essay Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.” Read the full article in Bloomberg ...
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Academic ArticleEssay Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman
Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited and largely symbolic sanctions, which were all Russia faced when it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014, this latest response has had devastating ripple effects. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2022), “Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, ...
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Essay The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely. – with Abraham Newman
For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has unleashed a swift and staggering economic conflict, led by the United States and its allies against Russia. And that war is being waged with new weapons, forged in the post-Cold War age of global networks. As much as we talk about multipolar politics, when it comes to global networks, there ...
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Public Writing Archives
Featured Interviews:
Interview “Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne
A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape? “The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. ...
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Interview Interview with economist Tyler Cowen on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or the EU courts asserting that countries can force Facebook to take down content globally, Henry Farrell has played a key role articulating how global economic networks can enable state coercion. Tyler and Henry discuss these issues and more, including what a big ...
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Interviews
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Essays
Building a Political Science Public Sphere with Blogs with John Sides
We argue that political science blogs can link conversations among political scientists with broader public debates about contemporary issues. Political science blogs do this by ...
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Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics with Sean Aday, Marc Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly and Ethan Zuckerman,
In this report from the United States Institute of Peace’s Centers of Innovation for Science, Technology, and Peacebuilding, and Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, a team ...
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Reading Milton Friedman in Dublin
When I first came to the United States from Ireland in the early 1990s, Americans thought of my home country as a land of green ...
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European Parliament Takes a Stand – with Abraham Newman
Most Americans, if they think about the European Parliament at all, probably imagine a bunch of left-wing backbenchers goofing off in Brussels or Strasbourg with ...
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Do The Netroots Matter?
These should be good times for the netroots, the loose coalition of bloggers, MoveOn activists, and online organizers that sees itself as the Democratic wing ...
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Can Partisanship Save Citizenship?
Public intellectuals don’t agree on much. However, in recent years they seemed to nearly unanimously believe that American public life was in terrible shape. Political ...
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Balancing National Security and Commerce: Information Politics in the New Transatlantic Agenda
Following several years of tension between Europe and the United States, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have rediscovered pragmatism. Apparently irreconcilable differences of ...
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Underworlds (Review Essay on Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah)
Gangsters have guns and muscle, but a good writer always gets the last word. Roberto Saviano is a marked man. After writing Gomorrah and publicly ...
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Bloggers and Parties: Can the Netroots Reshape American Democracy?
The “netroots”—an Internet grass roots that has set out to change the Democratic Party—are often maligned. These progressive bloggers and their readers, who emerged as ...
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Privacy in Europe Suffers in Terror War
The editor of the New York Times has claimed for his part that government surveillance programs are effectively out of control. American Access the full ...
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Remaking Fantasy: China Miéville’s New Crobuzon Novels
Some months ago, Jennifer Howard used a critical review of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to argue that fantasy should be about “high ...
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The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas
In July 2004 an anonymous blogger revealed his identity when he allowed his photograph to be taken at the Democratic National Convention. “Atrios,” the writer ...
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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 ...
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The Invisible Transformation of the Co-decision Procedure: Problems of Democratic Legitimacy. – with Adrienne Hèritier
The relationship between Council and Parliament within the codecision procedure involves a plethora of informal and semi-formal meetings in which many of the real decisions ...
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