Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science, the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies, and director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. His most recent book (coauthored with Joseph Wong) is From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia. More recently he... Continue Reading →
Peter Turchin Wants to Avoid Political Disintegration
Peter is a complexity scientist who has established a new field of social science research called cliodynamics. He is the author of the book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. If you have grown up in a household... Continue Reading →
Isabel Kershner on Israel and its Divisions
Isabel Kershner is a reporter at The New York Times and the author of a new book called The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul. Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. It's very hard to understand what's happening today without looking at the... Continue Reading →
The Real Danger of AI to Democracy
By Jose Marichal A 2022 article in the journal Nature detailed the study by which a team of researchers took a machine learning model published by Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (called MegaSyn) trained to identify potential pharmaceutical drugs and asked it to come up with toxic compounds that would mirror the composition of VX nerve gas.... Continue Reading →
Cole Bunzel on Wahhābism
Cole Bunzel is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the editor of the blog Jihadica. He is the author of the book Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement. Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. The Jihadis today root themselves theologically and ideologically... Continue Reading →
The Debt Ceiling: Enough Already
By David Bernell and Thomas Graham President Biden and Kevin McCarthy continue to talk about how to resolve the conflict over the debt ceiling and avert a US default on its national debt for the first time ever in the country’s history. But there may be little use to further talking. Kevin McCarthy seems to... Continue Reading →
Daron Acemoglu on Technology and the Struggle for Shared Prosperity
Daron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. He is coauthor (with James A. Robinson) of The Narrow Corridor, Why Nations Fail, and The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. His latest book (with Simon Johnson) is Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity. Support the... Continue Reading →
Serhii Plokhy on the Russo-Ukrainian War
Serhii Plokhy is a Professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and the Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He’s written many books including The Gates of Europe, Nuclear Folly, and Atoms to Ashes. His most recent book is The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation... Continue Reading →
Anne Applebaum on Autocracy, Inc
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. Some of her books include Gulag: A History, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, and most recently Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. She recently gave the Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture titled "Autocracy, Inc." Access Bonus Episodes... Continue Reading →
The Next Iteration of Legal Scholarship
By Kevin Frazier Law reviews--legal publications edited by law school students and the main outlet for articles written by law professors and other legal scholars--may have outlived their utility. Still, they not only persist, but continue to expand in number and volume. The time has come to stop relying on law reviews as the dominant... Continue Reading →