Rainmaker’s Coming

A good enough tab is available here: http://www.cowboylyrics.com/tabs/sparklehorse/rainmaker-9503.html

audubon encoulage

See http://www.kaicita.com/2/post/2010/05/the-paints-of-walton-ford-by-adriana-ramrez-de-arellano.html

I am exhausted with a capital REALLY.

Thinking of a friend

who turned 30 today.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination

Mental health, academia and postdocs

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/01/academic-anonymous-leaving-academia

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2014/mar/06/mental-health-academics-growing-problem-pressure-university

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/08/work-pressure-fuels-academic-mental-illness-guardian-study-health

Stephen Marglin, research and politics, and Rethinking Economics

Thanks to Yuan Yang and the other folks at Rethinking Economics for sharing this 1980 article on Stephen Marglin on facebook just now. My favourite quote from the article is this:

After publishing several neoclassical tracts and receiving tenure in 1967, Marglin left again for India. While there, he fell in love with and later married a French woman raised in Morocco who sensitized him to the wealth of non-Western cultures. he explains. At the same time the student uprisings that brought Paris to a near-standstill in 1968 helped to dispel Marglin’s belief in the immutability of the capitalist order. Marglin returned to Harvard no longer believing that the liberal position made sense.

The extreme change in Marglin’s beliefs led some to believe that he had been a “closet Marxist” at the time he was a candidate for tenure. Malcolm Gillis, professor of Economics, attributes this charge to the fact that Marglin was making radical statements during the late ’60s, “a time of academic acrimony.” Marglin today acknowledges that if his present radicalism had then been evident in his work, the University would have probably refused to grant him tenure. Still he denies being a “closet anything. I believed in the separation of my work from my politics then. I don’t anymore,” he says. Having tenure however, made it easier for him to become a radical since he possessed a secure income as well as the “inner security that came from knowing I had made it in their world,” he adds.

electric wizard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHG5enqWt7g

whatevermusics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLuWkvm01t0

Professors of Political Science and the Modi Phenomenon

KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006

Ashutosh Varshney has written yet another piece on the Modi phenomenon. This time he has invoked “the discipline of political science”, which he has “taught for two decades”, and underlined that it fundamentally disagrees with an “institutions-free” view of the rise of Narendra Modi. [See my response to his earlier piece here.] Before I examine Varshney’s ‘arguments’ about present politics, let me cite the following from nothing less than the American Political Science Review – a revealing chapter from the history of the discipline that he and I share:

Following World War I came the turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s. Communism and fascism rose to prominence as the world’s great powers fell to deflation and imperialism. Yet during this time of great political upheaval, political science became a study in irrelevance. Perhaps as a result of no longer sharing common theories and assumptions, the discipline fragmented…

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