Students gather and read in the courtyard of the mosque at Al-Azhar U., in Cairo, where the country’s top clerics teach the next generation of religious leaders. (Thomas Brown)
Muslim clerics hold a lot of power. As interpreters of the Koran, they issue religious rulings, or fatwas, that can sway millions of people. Yet in the study of religious extremism, remarkably little work has been done to determine why some clerics become radical and others do not.
Rich Nielsen, a doctoral student at Harvard University, aims to change that. His dissertation, Clerics of the Jihad, explores that question by poring over the scholarly works and biographies of high-profile clerics. His conclusion: It’s all about career opportunities. Those with poor networks are much more likely to preach extremism.
San Francisco — If you’re looking for a conversation starter, calling your next book “Why Democracy Encourages Terrorism” would probably work. The idea behind the provocative title goes like this: Democracy allows interest groups and political parties to flourish, which then leads to competition. Among those groups that feel most marginalized in the ensuing din, some take extreme measures in the pursuit of attention.
In other words, the conventional wisdom that democracy is the antidote to terrorism—because it provides outlets for people’s grievances—is completely wrong.
I sat down with Erica Chenoweth, author of the forthcoming book and an assistant professor at the University of Denver, at the International Studies Association conference here, to find out how she…
Prepare yourselves, dear readers: The United States of North America is coming.
Writing in the newest issue of Dædalus, two historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have taken on a quixotic task: imagining a future historian looking back at our time, in an effort to tease out how we failed to avert a climate-caused collapse. Or, as they put it, how it came to be that “a second Dark Age” fell “on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.” (The full version of the article is online here.)
Known for their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which examined the role of industry in casting doubts on the findings of scientists on cigarettes, climate change, and other topics, Oreskes, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, and…
In 1995 a study in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology estimated that Americans used guns to defend themselves 2.1 million to 2.5 million times a year. That sounds like a lot, too much really—and the authors, Gary Kleck and Marc G. Gertz, acknowledge that, though they argue that it’s “not implausibly large” when you consider that there are 200-million-plus guns in the United States.
Nearly two decades later, that statistic has been recited countless times, and it often comes up in the aftermath of a horrible mass-shooting incident, like the one last week in Newtown, Conn., to make the case that on the whole firearms actually save lives and that gun-control advocates fail to see the big picture.
When Bob Costas recently argued, in response to a football player’s killing his girlfriend and himself, that “handguns do not enhance our safety,” the executive director of the…
If you watched Meet the Press this past weekend, you learned that the presidential election was “statistically tied” and could be a “photo finish.” The Associated Press predicted a “nail biter.” The Philadelphia Inquirer threw up its hands, saying the vote was just “too close to call.”
Sam Wang begs to differ. By day, Wang is a neuroscientist at Princeton University, where his lab uses lasers to monitor the chemical signals of cells in the cerebellum. He co-wrote a recent paper that found that mathematics and science majors are more likely than humanities students to have a sibling on the autism spectrum.
But in the evenings, after his wife and 5-year-old daughter are in bed, the 45-year-old turns his attention to polls. Since 2004, Wang has used his considerable data-crunching chops to forecast…
President Obama explained at a news conference on Monday how the federal government was preparing for the impact of Hurricane Sandy. When he was finished, a reporter asked how the storm might affect the election. Here’s what the president said:
I am not worried at this point about the election. I’m worried about the impact on families. I’m worried about the impact on our first responders. I’m worried about the impact on our economy and on transportation. The election will take care of itself next week.
Which is the right answer. The election is much, much less important than all of those things.
But still. Could Hurricane Sandy affect it?
I asked Neil Malhotra, an associate professor of business and political science at Stanford University, who has a paper forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science about the various factors, including disasters, that influence…
Last week CNN pulled a story about a study purporting to demonstrate a link between a woman’s ovulation and how she votes, explaining that it failed to meet the cable network’s editorial standards. The story was savaged online as “silly,” “stupid,” “sexist,” and “offensive.” Others were less nice. Most of the vitriol was directed at CNN and at the reporter, Elizabeth Landau, who pointed out on Twitter what should go without saying: She didn’t conduct the study.
The person who did conduct the study is Kristina Durante, along with two co-authors, Ashley Arsena and Vladas Griskevicius. Durante, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, whose doctorate is in social psychology, often writes about how ovulation affects women’s choices. Another forthcoming study of…
William H. Press had been messing around with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the classic game-theory conundrum, as a sort of side project. That is apparently what you do in your spare time when you’re a computer scientist and computational biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, not to mention president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Press wrote a computer program to assist in this happy diversion, but it kept crashing and he couldn’t figure out why.
He was still mulling it when he ran into Freeman J. Dyson at a conference. Dyson, who is 88, is a professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., a renowned mathematician, and the author of a number of popular books, including Disturbing the Universe. In 1951 Dyson was given a professorship at Cornell even though he lacked a doctorate. Press was tenured at Harvard while …
Barack Obama apparently cannot manage the U.S. economy because he never ran a lemonade stand. Mitt Romney presumably won’t ever understand the struggle of paying for college because his dad always covered his bills.
Such personal charges and countercharges in the past few days at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions are a reminder why it’s good that American universities are supplying the country with trained professional economists. Economists, after all, can be counted on for sober and dispassionate fact-based evaluations of what really works in the areas of taxes and government spending.
Or can they?
A new study from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln may be cause for doubt about how much of cold economic analysis is based on objective fact and how much is personal philosophy.
The study, led by Ann Mari May, a professor of economics, was based on…
In the introduction to a new paper answering his critics, Mark Regnerus writes that his gay-parenting study “raised a variety of questions” among readers. That is a bit of an understatement. The paper started a controversy that has yet to die down, with critics questioning the motives of Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as his research methods.
The new paper, which is a commentary and not a peer-reviewed study, was published online on Monday, a couple of days before the University of Texas released the results of an inquiry into the original study that found no evidence of scientific misconduct. (The university’s report did not rule out the possibility that the study might be “seriously flawed,” finding only that there was no apparent ethical breach.)
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