Immigration as a Source of Renewal in Japan

Here is a paper I contributed to the Carnegie Council’s journal Policy Innovations following a Sophia University conference on migration. Japan’s population is on a downward slope, a trend which causes analysts no small amount of concern. As the Japanese government warned in a report a few years ago, “The speed with which the birth rate [...]

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Do People Have a Right to Move Across National Borders?

This was the question explored at a recent interdisciplinary conference in Tokyo, jointly sponsored by Sophia University and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, where I was lucky enough to be a panelist. After the conference, James Farrer of Sophia University and Devin T. Stewart of the Carnegie Council prepared an excellent summary of what [...]

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Tweeting and the Public Sphere

I’m not sure if this is for real but it does seem that the philosopher Jurgen Habermas has a twitter page. See here. (Thanks to Paul Waldman for the tip).  Since Habermas is noted for his long and complicated sentences, it will be curious to see what he can do with 140 characters or less. [...]

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Salinger & family

There will be many obituaries and tributes to J.D. Salinger, who died yesterday. I said my piece about him in a review of his daughter’s memoir, which ran in the National Post on Sept. 10, 2000. Here it is: DREAM CATCHER: A MEMOIR By Margaret A. Salinger Washington Square Press, 436 pp., $39.95 Although he [...]

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Avatar and the Way We Live Now

Avatar has elicited a great deal of political commentary, much of it of the extremely simpleminded “Hollywood is too liberal” variety. The novelist John Crowley and the commentators on his blog have the most sophisticated take noting: that the movie rehashes many familiar tropes from the history of European/First Nations contact, particularly the myth of Pocohantas; [...]

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The Trouble with Earthquake Prediction and Haiti

  As the ongoing tragedy in Haiti makes clear, earthquakes remain a great blight on humanity. One question worth asking is what is the best way to deal with earthquakes, through prediction or by trying to build more securely in earthquake zones. Writing in the New York Times, geophysicist Susan Hough noted that “scientists have [...]

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Chatting About Culture With Coren

Michael Coren is a Canadian journalist, a cultural conservative whose every sentence is inflicted with a tangy cockney undergrowl. Aside from much columnizing, he has a daily talk show. Every once and awhile, I go on the show as part of his regular “arts panel”. You can see the show I most recently appeared on [...]

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Shakespeare-Hatred: An Underground Literary Tradition

Over at Crooked Timber, they are having a lively discussion  provoked by George Bernard Shaw’s scorn for Shakespeare. On many occasions Shaw expressed extreme distain for the Bard of Avon. In a 1906 letter Shaw wrote “I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his [...]

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Popeye the Crossdressing Man

My earlier post on historical representations of gays in the comics garnered many interesting comments and responses. I wanted to take an opportunity to point out a few of them and also make some further notes on the topic.

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Climate Change and Existentialism

At its core, climate change is essentially a collective action problem. The political scientist Stephen Walt has a very fine blog post which lays out why collective action on this issue is so difficult: In addition to the scientific uncertainties (not about the fact of climate change, but about the impact of different policy responses), [...]

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