There’s something vaguely cool (in a dorky way) about the decision by the cities of Clayton and Richmond Heights to use a blog as the public face of their study exploring a possible merger between the two municipalities, even if my mostly-regressive civics teacher gene would like to see more comments by residents.

If nothing else, I learned from the maps that most (but not all) of the Washington University campus is an unincorporated area of land in St. Louis County wedged between University City, Clayton, and the city of St. Louis. Not sure when knowing that might come in handy, but you never know…

As Kurt Angle would say, “It’s true, It’s true”; I’m joining James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway as a contributor, along with Robert Prather (who was a co-blogger here for a while) and Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas.

Going forward, most of the academic and personal blogging will stay here at Signifying Nothing, but my political blogging will (for the most part) be appearing at OTB. It should be fun and I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve been reading From The Archives for the past couple of weeks, upon recommendation from the Marginal Revolution gang, and I have to say it’s well worth it.

Incidentally, if I didn’t know any better I’d swear Megan was someone of past acquaintance based on this post alone, although I’m quite certain we’ve never met. Plagues and locusts indeed.

Thanks to Silflay Hraka and John in Carolina for their kind words and links; both have interesting posts of their own on the Duke lacrosse rape allegations (which I linked earlier this sentence) that are worth reading.

Steven Taylor and Bryan S. take different sides on the issue of leaks; I think Bryan has the better argument:

“Unnamed Sources” damage the credibility of journalists, who often use such sources on stories that have absolutely no real need for such anonymous sourcing. From a political perspective, leaking is not so problematic. From the journalism perspective, it is a cancer on the Washington press corps, which has shown itself craven by not refusing such charades.

On the lighter side, Joy went to see Death Cab and Franz Ferdinand on Saturday night and has reactions to the evening. Now if I can just get tickets for Jimmy Eat World’s next tour my belated transformation into an emo kid will be complete.

NRO has gallantly lept into the debate about the academy with a blog that, at the very least, should be as worthy of being relentlessly mocked as “The Corner.” Case in point would be this nonsensical post from Joel Malchow, who can’t even figure out what particular phenomenon (co-ed dorms? co-ed dorm rooms? co-ed bathrooms?) he is complaining about, only to make the statement that “like unisex showers, co-ed dorms are generally met with very little interest among students.” Proudly spoken like a man who’s never seen Undeclared. Or gone to college.

If that weren’t enough, the decision to grant posting privileges to the terminally vapid Kathryn Jean Lopez is surely the death knell for this project as any worthwhile contribution to debate over the current state of the academy.

þ: Orin Kerr and Stephen Karlson.

Via Steven Taylor and others:

You scored as SG-1 (Stargate). You are versatile and diverse in your thinking. You have an open mind to that which seems highly unlikely and accept it with a bit of humor. Now if only aliens would stop trying to take over your body. SG-1 (Stargate) 81% Serenity (Firefly) 81% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 75% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 75% Moya (Farscape) 63% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 50% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 50% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 44% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 38% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 38% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 19% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

And, an apropos NewsRadio quote of the day (vaguely related to memes):

Lisa: If everyone thought you should jump off a bridge, would you?
Dave: If everyone around here thought I should jump off a bridge, they’d probably just get together and push me.

Former Signifying Nothing co-blogger Brock Sides has moved on to Battlepanda in the wake of the end of Dark Bilious Vapors, thus continuing his streak of moving to blogs with ever-cooler names.

Apropos the previous post, I give you the American and Comparative Jobs rumor mill (courtesy of first-time commenter Wesley). It’s not quite as organized as the IR version, but it will do in a pinch.

Fresh on the heels of the Mungowitz comes the return of Battlestar Galactica head honco Ron Moore to blogging. As they say, Woot!

Before my panel Saturday, I had a nice breakfast (at IHOP, no less) with personable fellow political scientist/blogger Michelle Dion, who receives only minor demerits for being a Tar Heel.

Let me echo Bryan’s appreciation for the invite to a small get-together at the Rock Botton Brewery in Buckhead with some Atlanta-area bloggers last night. In addition to Bryan, I met the “masked bandito” Rusty Shackleford, Zonker, the Grouchy Old Cripple, and Key Monroe. Double thanks to Zonker for the ride back to the Intercontinental.

Colby Cosh, on the uneasy relationship between social conservatives and the exercise of judicial review:

Can’t social conservatives tell the difference between judicial activism that expands the power of the state—like adding newly-invented “protected grounds” to discrimination law—and judicial activism that inhibits it?

Nah. What they care about is that the power of the state be used for their own preferred ends.

Like all good social science, it generalizes to both sides of the 49th parallel.

That’s where I’ll be tonight, along with all the other cool kids in the Mid-Southern blogosphere.

I am speechless.

Prof. Munger makes a rare appearance in the blogosphere to recount his recent run-in with your Transportation Security Administration screeners (presumably) at RDU.

Part of an ongoing series.

Cable news also-ran MSNBC, best known for being the current organization signing Keith Olbermann’s paychecks, has decided to blow $1 million on an online advertising binge that is notable for two reasons: its use of imagery that wouldn’t be out of place on a sign for a strip club, and its abysmal failure to direct any cash toward the proprietor of this blog.

Compare and contrast: me last Friday and Stephen Bainbridge today.

Now I get the sense of what Kevin Drum must feel like every day Paul Krugman publishes a new New York Times op-ed.

Steve of Begging to Differ thinks it’s hard to be enthusiastic about posting to one’s own blog when most of the hits are for people looking for “Gay Batman”.

I certainly know the feeling; the quantity and quality of SN has gone down over the years, and—ultimately—that really doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve never seen a check from Google Ads, BlogAds ignores me, and that Pajamas/Open Source/Pajamas outfit is just sort of “out there” in the zone I frankly don’t care about. And I am simply content to stop worrying and go about my daily business, posting just enough nonsense to stop panicked phone calls worrying that I’m maimed or deceased, in a way that perhaps I wouldn’t have a couple of years ago.

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.

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

Ah, well, it’s more exciting than the Plameout…

þ: Amber Taylor, whose blog’s worth appears to be underestimated.

I think Jason Kuznicki gets to the heart of my discomfort with same-sex marriage opponent Maggie Gallagher’s guest-starring gig at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Analogy of the day: Ann Coulter : Josef Goebbels :: Maggie Gallagher : Clayton Cramer. Discuss.

One of the more positive outcomes of the Drezner debacle has been some more serious thought about the role of blogging in the academy, exemplified by this post from Michelle Dion and this contribution from Matthew Shugart. Herewith are a few thoughts from my little corner of the academic universe.

First and foremost, I think it’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have this job if I didn’t have a blog. No blog, no Public Choice panel in New Orleans on blogging in the academy with Dan Drezner and Mike Munger, no after-panel beers with Mike (and Dan and Leslie), and no Duke job for Chris. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t have any job (in the counterfactual universe, I don’t know who would have made me offers—I just know who I had to turn down for interviews when they called me)... but I doubt it would be quite as rewarding as this one has been thus far.

Second (and following from point one), it’s fair to say I wouldn’t have the academic network I have today without the blog. Dozens of political scientists know who I am solely because of Signifying Nothing, and I hope most of them have a positive impression. If academic blogging is going to be a “virtual conference,” a big part of that has to be the informal networking that conferences are at least supposed to encourage… indeed, blogging may do a better job of fostering networking than conferences, where the temptation is to go catch up with one’s grad school cohort rather than meeting new people.

Third, I don’t think the blog has demonstrably hurt my career. I think it’s reasonably common knowledge that I wouldn’t be at Duke (or, for that matter, anywhere else) if I’d been offered the tenure-track Americanist position at Millsaps. The person they hired instead had a blog too—and I am reasonably certain that the search committee was aware of it at the time.

Fourth, I think that the message (intentional or unintentional) that the U of C has sent to denying tenure to Dan is an unhealthy one. Our discipline is—rightly—often criticized for a failure to engage the real world and real political debates. It is very tempting for an academic to avoid those debates, and to either retreat to the world of models that have no bearing on reality or the comparably disengaged world of deconstructing the arcania of political philosophy. The best academic blogs have tried to bring the real and potentially useful knowledge that we have accumulated to bear on contemporary political debates. It is one thing to sit back and opine about politics from a partisan standpoint bereft of the benefits of any particular expertise (and certainly this is a popular tactic for many academic bloggers of all partisan stripes). Dan, to his credit, has rarely—if ever—taken that approach.

Finally, on the question of the academic study of blogging (versus the merits of academics being bloggers), I think there are noteworthy parallels to the beginnings of other research programs. Decades ago, the study of particular social and ethnic groups was considered fundamentally unserious—and certainly there are plenty of observers (mostly outside the academy, but also inside the academy as well) who still see these pursuits as unserious, or at the very least as backdoor mechanisms for hiring scholars who lack intellectual rigor in the “traditional” disciplines. The fact that the people who study blogging are, themselves, bloggers is something not lost on contemporary critics of this research program, and this is likely to be a difficult reputation for people who do want to study the role of weblogs in politics and society to overcome.

Of course, my contribution to this academic study thus far (beyond doing a few favors to colleagues doing research in this area) has been confined to some off-the-cuff comments at Public Choice and my upcoming paper on my use of blogs in my American politics class for SPSA—which manages to combine blogs with another topic “real” scholars refuse to take seriously, pedagogy. Maybe I should quit while I’m still ahead.

Hopefully the final post in this series: my ex-blogger boss pops up in comments at PoliBlog, Matthew Shugart (a political scientist at UCSD and the co-author of Presidents and Assemblies, one of my absolute favorite comparative politics books) points up the positive aspects of blogging in academe, and Jim Hu has more thoughts.

As Steven Taylor notes, the Drezner story has made it to the New York Sun; for your own amusement, try to parse this non-denial denial from the department chair:

While refusing to go into specifics about Mr. Drezner’s tenure case, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Chicago, Dali Yang, dismissed the notion that his department considered Mr. Drezner’s blog in making its decision. “I can assure you it’s not specifically about the blog,” he said.

(There is no paragraph here. You may pass.)