As of this morning, I have an offer for a tenure-track position (the one in Rams land, for those keeping score at home).

You can go home again; it just won’t feel much like home.

On the other hand, it was nice seeing a lot of folks again, and you can’t ask for better dinner companions than Kamilla and Andy (Sunday) and Kelly (Monday).

Part of the difficulty of being in job limbo: am I supposed to be rooting for the Rams or the Packers? Given the teams’ records, I’d rather not have to root for either.

Stephen Karlson has some thoughts that apply well beyond the economics faculty, even if the supply-demand equation in Econ World is a bit less off-kilter than in other disciplines.

While we can’t explore the counterfactual universe, I suspect ABC News wouldn’t have bothered with this story on CIA interrogation techniques if the White House weren’t stonewalling the McCain anti-torture amendment—putting aside whatever merits or demerits the McCain amendment may have. (þ:Orin Kerr)

Apropos my newfound popularity, I just volunteered to take on a second section of Quantitative Political Analysis in the spring in exchange for a modest pay bump and a TA to handle the grading for the two methods sections. The only real downside is that it looks like I’ll no longer have Tuesdays off.

As someone broadly sympathetic to the idea that students should have full disclosure about the courses they take, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out this effort at student-run evaluations launched by Duke sophomore Elliott Wolf. He further articulates his motivations in this op-ed in today’s Duke Chronicle.

And, in the interests of full disclosure, he’s my one lonely rating thus far.

Steven Taylor and Dan Drezner link this Chronicle piece by Harvard history grad student Rebecca Goetz that sticks up for academic blogging, adding to the anecdotal evidence that blogging isn’t the career poison it might often be perceived as.

The only place I ever seem to get any reading done (beyond that essential for my scholarship and teaching) is on airplanes, so I finally read Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization on my last interview junket—actually, I had it read by the time I got to the Frozen Tundra; I had to settle for finishing my Economist backlog on the way back.

It’s an enjoyable enough read, and Foer has a good, clear narrative style. My major quibble: I’m not sure soccer “explains” much of anything in the book; at best, it’s an indicator or reflection of the phenomena that Foer discusses.

We may not get a full third season of Arrested Development, but I’ll take a third season of Battlestar Galactica as a nice consolation prize.

If you think the executive has a hard time controlling the bureaucracy it nominally heads, or that the Supreme Court has difficulty keeping the 9th Circuit reined in, just remember: these principal-agent problems could be worse. In the case of the Debian project’s constitution, much worse.

I just realized I have worn a suit all three weekdays thus far this week. Maybe I’m closer to going corporate than I thought; I may have to dress down for office hours Thursday to compensate.

Plus, the woman who works at the Sanford Deli cash register complimented me today on the coordination between my second-newest tie and my new Oxford blue Stafford dress shirt, so apparently I’m quite the fashion plate these days.

I just got back a couple of hours ago from Frozen Tundra country, where the weather gods almost managed to produce some real frozen tundra for my enjoyment. Instead, I just got bitterly cold winds and rain; I’d have preferred snow, to be honest. The interview process went about as well as can be expected, and of the Realistic Prospects™ I think it’s the place I’d enjoy working the most, but given the crapshoot nature of these things and the fact I believe I may have to give someone else (and maybe even two someone elses) an answer before these folks are in a position to make up their minds I’m not going to be getting my hopes up.

Even better, tomorrow afternoon I get to explore my fallback option at a nearby public institution: a demotion in academic rank and salary coupled with a doubling of workload, but a year-to-year renewable contract. Job security, it’s a good thing.

Michael Blowhard compares the experience of using his iPod Shuffle with taking Viagra. I guess you need the proper frame of reference to figure that one out…

þ: Amber Taylor.

One of my students in my American government class dug up this odd article from the Washington Post about a machine that allegedly turns sewage and garbage into clean water and electricity that was on display in Washington this week; the more interesting part may be the sideshow involving ex-mayor and current city councilman Marion Barry and a local pastor:

On Wednesday, the church’s pastor, [Rev. Willie F.] Wilson, confronted Barry about placing the machine in a parking lot used by the church.

The confrontation between Barry and Wilson devolved into a yelling match so heated that police intervened.

Wilson called Barry a liar and told him to watch his mouth, according to footage of the fracas captured by WRC-TV (Channel 4). In return, Barry called Wilson “power hungry” and threatened to have the church’s nonprofit status “investigated.”

If the inventors have some spare time, I’d think a similar device that ran on Barry’s hot air might be very promising.

Arrested Development is apparently history, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Jeff Harrell thinks the show was on a bit of a creative downturn; since I haven’t seen a single episode of this season (thanks, in large part, to the power outage I had earlier this week) I can’t really judge for myself.

Now, if Fox cancels House I’ll be really annoyed.

I currently have 11 students on the waiting list to enroll in my methods class in the spring semester (in addition to the 30 already in the class). Apparently my rep for evilness hasn’t propagated very widely around campus yet…

Steven Taylor is attempting to assemble a list of blogging political scientists; drop in and add your knowledge to the list.

If you spend a lot of time on planes, do yourself a favor and invest in a set of Koss Spark Plug earphones for your portable music player iPod nano; they work a heck of a lot better than any of the active noise-cancelling headphones I’ve seen and won’t set you back anywhere near as much as the upmarket Shure and Etymotic brands, the marginal benefits of which will be drowned out by the jet engine roaring a few dozen feet from your head anyway.

I just wish I hadn’t paid $19 at Best Buy on Sunday for my pair.

Obviously, the unseasonably warm weather couldn’t last until I actually get back to Jackson later this month. Grr.

Of course, it’s the same everywhere; it was in the 80s in the part of flyover country where I was yesterday (and here too), and the floor will drop out here sometime tonight.

Google’s latest service, which puts Google Maps on your cellular phone, seems like a winner; I tested it out a little on my trip after reading about it in Monday’s USA Today. I did have to lie to the WAP website and claim that my steam-driven Sprint Samsung A620 was really a Samsung A680, but it seems to be working fine. The only thing missing from the big brother service is the “Hybrid” view with streets overlaid over the satellite images. Now, if only it worked with the GPS capability that the phone allegedly has…

Well, I’m now in the interlude between my two interviews—not much of an interlude, considering I have classes to teach, assignments to grade, and clothes to get washed, but an interlude nonetheless.

In the meantime, my only real thought of the day: who exactly told Terrell Owens that it would be a good idea for him to get a heel manager?

Off to the interview (hopefully the first of many) in 48 hours or so. Sometime in there I need to grade the exams I gave my intro class today and prep for my job talk and teaching presentation, in addition to the typical travel nonsense (packing, figuring out which bags to take, getting rid of anything that might look like a knife to an undertrained x-ray jockey, etc.).

Update: And, I just found out I have to do this all again up in Frozen Tundra country in another week.

Lest I be seen as an outlier, Daniel Drezner is similarly unimpressed with the recycled Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Alan Wolfe I was forwarded by a departmental colleague and complained about yesterday.

First off… a semi-apology to those of you who are getting bored with the “inside baseball” academe stuff.

On to the point of this post. Assume for the sake of argument that my “dream job” is to teach at a liberal arts college (which may or may not appear on the Wikipedia list), and also assume that by the time I have to decide on a job offer, I won’t have any offers from liberal arts colleges.

Question 1: Would accepting a tenure-track offer at a different sort of college or university improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 2: Would another year here at Duke (which is by no means guaranteed as of yet), teaching more-or-less what I am teaching now (two sections of undergraduate methods a year and two other courses), getting a bit more research done, and potentially getting a publication or two, improve or diminish the chances of landing a job at a tenure-track liberal arts college in the future?

Question 3: Would a second non-tenure-track job at a liberal arts college improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 4: Assuming I don’t get a job at a liberal arts college this year, is there anything in particular that is under my control that would improve my prospects of getting a job at a liberal arts college? Things that are under my control: research, teaching evaluations, future course selection, attending the APSA Teaching & Learning Conference, etc.; things not/no longer under my control: whatever my letters say about me, where I went to school (i.e. not at a liberal arts college), my past experience, etc.

Anyway, I know at least some of my readers are at liberal arts colleges, so I’d appreciate their feedback in particular—informed speculation from folks at other types of institutions may also be helpful, though.

Last but not least: if you are on a hiring committee at a liberal arts college that happens to have my file, you should also be aware that a tenure-track offer at a liberal arts college would “win” any competition with another offer, ceteris peribus.