Sixteen Writing Tips from Marcus Rediker - Pittsburgh Review of Books Editor's Note: Acclaimed writer and Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh Marcus Rediker has long informally circulated

Fantastic writing tips by Marcus Rediker.

pghrev.com/sixteen-writ...

Just under 2 weeks to go for Research Development Group applications! Deadline is March 1.

Early career scholars get detailed comments from senior scholars to help turn papers into journal submissions. Great feedback + mentorship opportunity! We meet Sept 2.

Info: web.apsanet.org/mena/wp-cont...

❤️

Someone’s working to monetize this with an app, no doubt.

More US academics are freaking out about the “department of war” than they are about an actual genocide being enabled by their government.

Truth in advertising.

I’m not on board with every statement in this piece, but it needed to be written and is well worth reading.

Mills takes the stage to welcome class of 2029 - Washington Square News Kicking off her third year as university president, Linda Mills welcomed thousands of first-year students at Radio City Music Hall during two showings of NYU’s biannual Presidential Welcome Reality Sh...

Pretty amazing that the university president who on more than 3 occasions in the past 18 months called police onto campus to arrest faculty and students, started the new school year by telling students “Question those with the urge to silence or cancel others,” nyunews.com/news/2025/08...

Remembering Sonallah Ibrahim: The Novels That Defined A Literary Legend Egypt has lost one of its most important storytellers. Sonallah Ibrahim, the legendary novelist whose books have shaped how generations see Egypt and the Arab world, passed away at the age of 88 after...

RIP Sonallah Ibrahim: scoopempire.com/remembering-...

The Guardian view on Israel’s Gaza takeover plan: a destructive act that must be stopped | Editorial Editorial: Benjamin Netanyahu has embarked on an operation that guarantees fresh miseries and will solve absolutely nothing

A strange editorial that treats the new offensive as a misconceived, "unworkable" counterinsurgency strategy rather than what it demonstrably is: an ethnonationalist campaign of genocide which, within its own monstrous logic, may well be "workable".

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Fondly recalling my own experience with NSF review... in which one reviewer questioned why fieldwork couldn't just be done on Zoom and another referred to feminist IR as not a "well-established body of research." 🫠

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Concord NH

Nailed it.

To be clear, this executive order does not “mistake” dissent for bigotry, it purposefully conflates the two. This toxic politics is at one and the same time anti-Palestinian and antisemetic.

A buffer zone for the buffer zone.

I got an Egypt starter pack kicked off.

I'm sure I'm missing many brilliant folks. Please flag accounts I should add!

go.bsky.app/7ujBLzQ

We noticed there wasn't a starter pack on authoritarian politics yet – Now there is!

go.bsky.app/UFHn7sS

Spread and ask to join!

...his recent essay with the following sentence: "I’ve wandered away from political science, though I could argue that political science has wandered away from me.”

It's touching to read all the tributes to James C. Scott and his scholarship. But I wonder how many political scientists paying tribute would reject his scholarship if they were reviewing it for the APSR, because it doesn't fit within the strictures of the discipline. It is fitting that he opened….

Thanks for this, I will ask, but the idea behind the question is that even when a manuscript is reviewed by folks doing similar work (e.g. formal theory by formal theorists, qualitative by qual) there is more convergence among peer reviewers for certain approaches. Thanks again.

…has there been any effort to demonstrate this empirically?

…formal theory papers were evaluated according to their deductive logic, a criterion that produced uniform reviews, whereas this was not the case for political philosophy. One can make similar distinctions between quantitative treatments versus interpretivist treatments, etc. So, my question is…

…noted that formal theory submissions “almost never gave an adverse review of any manuscript.” Political philosophy had the opposite dynamic: “It was hard to get any consensus among the readers…. I would send it [and] back would come the most wildly varying evaluations.” Obviously, the…

Polisky, this may be a long shot, but I wonder if anyone knows of an empirical study that examines how the peer review process may inadvertently work against some research methods while benefitting others. Here’s an example of what I’m after: Austin Ranney, the APSR editor in the 1960s…

As a matter of policy, the NSF does not release that data.

I'm glad you find value in the study, Ingo. Of course, I would have loved to compare application by method with funding by method, but no data is available on applications to the NSF. Happy to converse furhter by email, so feel free to reach out.

No worries, and yes SSHRC funding is a whole different game up here. I’d love to hear your reaction to the archival stuff in the second half of the article if you’d care to comment after reading it.