Andrew Gelman, author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, taped a great interview for Bloggingheads.tv with Will Wilkinson earlier in November. Enjoy!

And, though he’s a bit critical of his performance, here’s a post over at his blog about the interview.

Our author and Vanderbilt University Professor David E. Lewis has been discussing the Obama appointments in the media.  His new book THE POLITICS OF PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENTS: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance is a timely new look at how and why presidents use political appointees and how their choices impact government performance–for better or worse.  With Obama’s recent appointees and other vacant cabinet positions, Lewis is the right voice at the right time.  Check out an op-ed piece he wrote for the Nashville Tennessean or today’s feature in the Washington Post. 
 

Please join me in congratulating Sheldon Wolin for winnning the 2008 Lannan Notable Book Award for his recent book DEMOCRACY INCORPORATED: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.  This is a very prestigious and well-deserved award given to Sheldon for his original scholarship and exceptional writing.  You can read more about the Lannan awards and the Lannan Foundation in general here.

On Thursday, November 27th from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM, The British Institute of International and Comparative Law will host a book launch and discussion on the subject of torture and democracy featuring authors Darius Rejali and Philippe Sands. Registration is required–hope you can join us for what will no doubt be a fascinating conversation.

Congratulations go to our colleagues at Yale University Press who celebrated their centennial last Friday, November 14, by hosting a conference in New Haven on “Why Books Still Matter.”  The Press’s first hundred years have been memorialized in a new book by Nicholas Basbanes, A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008.

I’m pleased to introduce a new semi-monthly column by writer, physicist, and Princeton University lecturer Tony Rothman.  His most recent book, with Fukagawa Hidetoshi, is called SACRED MATHEMATICS: Japanese Temple Geometry.  Please enjoy his inaugural post!

“Do The Math”

Tony Rothman

The word “metaphysics” derives from the Greek meta ta physika. It was originally used by Aristotle’s Hellenistic editors merely to refer to his books that came after the books on physika—the things of nature. Thus “metaphysics”—after the things of nature. In this series I do not intend primarily to discuss the things of nature, the latest and most dazzling scientific discoveries, trends and fashions. I would like instead to explore how our world looks through the eyes of a professional physicist, one trained in mathematics and steeped in analytical habits. My particular area of expertise is cosmology, the study of the early universe, but like any physical scientist I value facts and data over opinion, pay close attention to the logic of an argument and show an appreciation for a carefully designed experiment or an elegant mathematical demonstration. To those of us raised in the scientific community such an outlook seems reasonable. When we listen to the news, we learn we do not think much like journalists, talk show hosts or politicians. Sometimes we wonder whether we are space aliens.

Jonathan Macey, author of Corporate Governance: Promises Kept, Promises Broken has been interviewed by Yale Law School.

A quick excerpt:

“It’s unpopular now to talk about deregulation. As I give this interview, we’re in the middle of this big market crash, and everybody seems to be a born again deregulator…My book does focus a lot on deregulation and it criticizes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and frankly I think recent events have proven the source of these criticisms to be correct…All the companies that we see imploding today are subject to this statute, and one thing that is painfully clear is that the increased attention to risk management that we were supposed to get with Sarbanes-Oxleywe haven’t gotten. And that firms have been free to engage in really incredibly excessive risk taking and that these so-called regulatory or legislative solutions just haven’t worked very well.”

Listen to the rest of the interview here.

Margaret Mead, possibly the best-known, and certainly one of the most controversial, anthropologists in 20th-century America worked at the American Museum of Natural History for 50 years. On Thursday, November 13, at 6:30pm in the Kaufmann Theater (first floor) Nancy Lutkehaus, Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California, author of the just-released MARGARET MEAD: THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN ICON, and Mead’s daughter and granddaughter, Mary Catherine Bateson and Sevanne Kassarjian present memories and images of this riveting woman. Introduced by Laurel Kendall, Curator, Division of Anthropology, AMNH. A book signing will follow. This event is co-presented with the Barnard Center for Research on Women and is supported, in part, by Sara Lee Schupf.

For complete line-up of films at the 32nd annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, visit www.amnh.org/mead.

While most of us were sleeping off an evening of watching election returns, statistician Andrew Gelman was busy crunching numbers and creating a great series of graphs.

Six quick takeaways from his post:

1. The election was pretty close. Obama won by about 5% of the vote, consistent with the latest polls and consistent with his forecast vote based on forecasts based on the economy.

2. As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor.

3. The gap between young and old has increased–a lot.

4. By ethnicity: Barack Obama won 96% of African Americans, 68% of Latinos, 64% of Asians, and 44% of whites. In 2004, Kerry won 89% of African Americans, 55% of Latinos, 56% of Asians, and 41% of whites. So Obama gained the most among ethnic minorities.

5. The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.

6. The pre-election polls pretty much nailed the national vote.

We have been very pleased with the international interest Ray Fisman and Ted Miguel’s ECONOMIC GANGSTERS: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations has received–from Hong Kong to the UK to Australia–and now to Shanghai.  The Shanghai Daily ran this review in their pages today. 

Fisman and Miguel’s claim-to-fame was a fascinating study they did in 2006 that measured corruption based on the the traffic tickets diplomats in NYC received.  Chris Shea for the NY Times wrote about it here

In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Princeton professor and author of Unequal Democracy, Larry Bartels, comments on how the electorate as a whole may be wiser and more rational than any individual.

One of the bestselling books of the 2008 election season has been “Just How Stupid Are We?” by popular historian Rick Shenkman. It presents a familiar collection of bleak results from opinion surveys documenting the many things most Americans don’t know about politics, government and history. “Public ignorance,” Shenkman concludes, is “the most obvious cause” of “the foolishness that marks so much of American politics.”

But is that really true? Does it matter whether voters can name the secretary of Defense or whether they know how long a U.S. Senate term is? The important question is not whether voters are ignorant but whether they make sensible choices despite being hazy about the details. (OK, really hazy.) If they do, that’s not stupid — it’s efficient.

From a recent University of Texas poll:

When asked to identify Obama’s religion, 45 percent of respondents accurately identified him as Protestant, however 23 percent erroneously identified him as Muslim.

In a related article over at History News Network, Thomas Kidd, author of American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism, asks “How has the prospect of a secret Muslim as President taken such a prominent place among the cyber-myths of this election?” As he notes the roots of this “fear” of Islam has long roots in American culture and history:

American fears about Muslims precede 9/11 by hundreds of years, with origins as early as the founding of the first English colonies in America. History also shows conflicted American attitudes toward Islam, even among conservative Christians, whose views of Islam have ranged from studied respect to apocalyptic revulsion.

Click through to read more on this historical perspective.