Your humble blogger went to see Contagion over the weekend for two reasons.  First, Slate movie critic Forrest Wickman concluded his review by calling it, "the most believable zombie movie ever made." He's not the only one to make the zombie connection, and well, now I've got some skin in that game.  Second, the FP editors have asked me to review other disaster scenarios, so I figured I'd just pre-empt their request and join the legions of moviegoers who get their ya-yas seeing Gwyneth Paltrow die on film be entertained. 

So, let me provide the MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT klaxon here and get to the assessment.  How well did Steven Soderbergh and company portray what would happen if a lethal pandemic were to break out? 

OK, good news first:  in terms of both accuracy and suspense, Contagion is a far, far better film than, say, either Outbreak or The Andromeda Strain.  The first reason is that Soderbergh does not bother with the anti-government paranoia that those earlier films possessed in their DNA.  Instead, the treatment of the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Homeland Security, and World Health Organization officials is fair.  They are depicted as flawed but well-meaning bureaucrats, getting some decisions right and some wrong.  They also speak in jargon, a surprising amount of which makes its way into the film.  I fully expect to see the term "R-0" bandied about by news anchors the next time a flu bug breaks out.  A CDC official utters the two most chilling words in the entire movie -- "social distancing" -- to describe the necessary freak-out by citizens to avoid human contact with other humans as a way of slowing the spread of the virus.  That's the perfect dash of bureaucratese. 

The second reason is that Soderbergh almost perfectly nails the first stage of the pandemic.  Unlike, say, most zombie or other apocalyptic films, Soderbergh doesn't get to the breakdown of social order in the first reel.  He takes his time, which helps to amp up the pressure and make it seem all the scarier when things do seem to break down (Matt Damon's character is the perfect vessel here; Damon's best work is in his reaction shots to other people behaving badly).  He also deftly demonstrates in the first ten minutes how globalization would abet the spread of any kind of superbug. 

Despite this slow ratcheting up, I haven't seen a director kill off so many Hollywood starlets since Joss Whedon. 

The third reason is that the movie, intriguingly enough, does not end in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Consistent with the arguments I made in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, humans prove to be just as adaptable as the biological threats to humans. 

That said, here are my beefs: 

1)  Really, the blogger is the Big Bad in the movie?  Really?  The villian of the piece is Jude Law's crudely-named Alan Krumwiede, who detects the spread of the virus early but hawks a homeopathic remedy to enrich himself.  Exactly how he gets rich doing this is not entirely clear -- he has some shady meetings with a hedge fund manager, but it's not entirely clear why, after gaining fame and fortune, he doesn't start acting differently as more attention gets paid to him.  It's also presumed that Krumwiede has the monopoly of blogging on the issue -- I'm pretty sure that as he gained popularity, a few other health bloggers would try to cut him down to size. 

Neither Soderbergh nor his screenwriter Scott Z. Burns like bloggers, like, at all.  At one point the virologist played by Elliott Gould tells Krumwiede, "Blogging is not writing.  It's graffiti with punctuation."  Hah!  That shows what Soderbregh knows -- us bloggers are lucky if we remember to use commas, much less semicolons.  

Look, as a founding member of the International Brotherhood of Policy Bloggers, I can't claim that actors like Krumwiede don't exist.  My skepticism is over whether they'd really wreak as much havoc as Soderbergh thinks.  Myths and rumors can spread on the Internet, but so can the corrections of those myths.  In the end, someone like Krumwiede would affect a very narrow, already paranoid subculture -- the larger effect would be minimal. 

Even if Krumwiede is an absurd villain, I also didn't buy it when the DHS official let him go free once he made bail.  At a minimum, they'd hold this guy for 48 hours without charging.  I'd also wager that they'd try to deport him too. 

One final note:  I'd love to see Lee Siegel hire Sodebergh to direct and Aaron Sorkin to write a movie about the Internet, just to see the final dystopic product. 

2)  Where the hell is the Chinese central government?  The most absurd subplot is when a WHO official gets abducted by her translator as collateral to protect his infected village.  She's held hostage for at least six months -- during which time she goes native -- until the WHO barters some (fake) vaccine for her life. 

Apparently during this entire time, the Chinese central government does not bother to intervene to try to rescue her.  This seems juuuuuuust a bit implausible.  It also leads to the next problem....

3)  Where the hell is the rest of the WHO?  Beyond Marion Cotillard's character, the WHO does not really appear in the film.  It's the CDC's show, and only their show .  They act in Contagion pretty much how they promised they would act if the zombies arrive.  Maybe that's how things would play out, but I suspect other governments and IGOs would still matter more than this film suggests.  Given that the movie virus started in China, and that the head of the WHO is also from China, they might be useful in this kind of situation. 

4)  Few second-order effects.  The virus leads to looting, crime, and other social ills, but I wish they had said something about the total economic devastation that would have occurred.  At one point after a vaccine has been developed, Matt Damon's character walks through a mall to buy his daughter a prom dress -- and 80% of the mall looks to be closed.  Soderbergh suggests a bunch of unions going on strike because they don't want to ge sick.  I'm curious what happens once they find themselves unemployed as well.   

Forget the domestic discord however, there's also...

5)  No international conflict whatsoever.  After the first 15 minutes, almost all of the action takes place in the USA.  Once a vaccine is discovered, there is no discussion of the international wrangling that would take place over scarce supplies.  No diversionary wars happen.  And so forth.  Soderbergh doesn't really address possible problems in world politics.  Because of this, the film implicitly assumes a liberal institutionalis kind of a world.  I hope he's right, but I'm not so sure myself.   

To be fair to Soderbergh and his collaborators, I'm not sure it's possible to get everything right in such a film.  Unless it's a television series I'm not sure it's possible to get all the nuances and complexities right.  Given these limitations, Contagion is a movie worth seeing.  Just bring your own Purell. 

Last night a fellow International Studies Association 9isa0 attendee sent me the following request: 

Hey, aren't you supposed to be providing pithy commentary on events of the last week for the rest of us ISA survivors? Get on that! 

Sigh... it's back to the blogging salt mines.  [Welcome back.... now get to work!!!--ed.]

Let's start off with an easy meta-point.  So far, 2011 has been one of those  years when it seems like a lot has been going on in international affairs -- but is that reality or just perception? 

Hey, turns out it's reality:

Propelled by revolution in the Middle East and radiation in Japan, television news coverage of foreign events this year is at the highest level since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks 10 years ago, news executives in the United States say....

The busy season for foreign news started in January in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt, where networks and newspapers deployed hundreds of journalists. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducts a weekly accounting of news coverage by national outlets, foreign news added up to 45 percent of all coverage from mid-January through mid-March. In the four years that the accounting has been done, foreign news has averaged about 20 percent of coverage....

But despite extensive coverage of Libya and Japan, the television networks have had major blind spots. Last week, none of the broadcast networks had correspondents in Bahrain, where the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet is based, when security forces crushed the protest movement there, nor in Yemen when forces there killed dozens of protesters. The dearth of coverage of Yemen is largely because of its government’s refusal to grant visas to journalists....

So, cui bono?  Here we get to a veeeerry interesting detail:

If there is any media beneficiary, it is CNN, a unit of Time Warner, which has the most robust international staff levels of any network based in the United States. CNN has paired its domestic and international channels for hours on end, and last week it scored several rare — though probably fleeting — ratings victories against Fox News.

“This is the time when the judicious investments we’ve made in a proper international infrastructure are paying off,” Mr. Maddox said. 

Say, isn't it convenient that CNN had all these assets in place and now gets to use them?  Can anyone out there prove that network hasn't played an instigating role in some of these crises? 

I didn't think so.  I'm gonna start paying very close attention to Anderson Cooper for the rest of 2011.  [Yeah, that doesn't sound weird at all!--ed.]

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about why he largely abstains from cable news appearances and why this is in and of itself a problem:

The outlines of the problem are becoming clear--I'm a snob. More seriously, it's my impression that much of cable news is rigged. Complicated questions are forced into small spaces of time, and guests frequently dissemble in order to score debate points and avoid being intellectually honest. Finally, many of the guests don't seem to be actual experts in the field of which they're addressing, so much as they're "strategists" or "analysts." I strongly suspect that part of the reason this is the case is talking on TV is, itself, a craft and one that requires a skill-set very different than what is required of academics. I'm sure many academics themselves share the disdain for the format that I've outlined. Finally, the handful of scholars who regularly appear on the talk shows, generally aren't of the sort that hold my interests.

With that said, it's very difficult to inveigh against these shows when you refuse to participate. The discomfiting fact is that cable news reaches a ton of people, many of whom--presuming they're interested--could use the information (emphasis added).

As an academic who is occasionally asked to be on TV/radio after the producer has gone through their top ten options, I have similarly mixed feelings about the skill mismatch. Speaking from my own experience, I find that my biggest weakness in these venues is that I genuinely want to answer the question asked of me.

You'd think this would be a good thing, but it's not, because it means that you're a hostage to the interviewer's ability to ask good questions. Usually if you're asked to be on a program, you know what the news hook is, and you should (obviously) know your overarching take on the issue. The problem, for me at least, is that no interviewer asks, "So what do you think?" Instead, they'll ask a more specific question -- which I then try to answer specifically. I've rarely been able to integrate a specific answer with the larger theme I want to stress in the appearance.

I suppose I could just admit my failings and abstain from these kinds of media appearances. One of my 2011 resolutions, however, is to try and get better at doing this sort of thing.

I'll have my list of proposed resolutions for the rest of the foreign-policy community tomorrow.

With the latest WikiLeaks dump, Julian Assange clearly thinks he's blown the doors off of American hypocrisy:

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US's public persona and what it says behind closed doors -- and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what's going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington "the country's first President" could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today's document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments -- even the most corrupt -- around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

Um... a few things:

1) I don't know about other Americans, but I was taught that the "not telling a lie" story was apocryphal.

2) You know, polite people tell their friends and neighbors about embarrassments that could affect them as well as Big Lies.

3) There are no Big Lies. Indeed, Blake Hounshell's original tweet holds: "the U.S. is remarkably consistent in what it says publicly and privately." Assange -- and his source for all of this, Bradley Manning -- seem to think that these documents will expose American perfidy. Based on the initial round of reactions, they're in for a world of disappointment. Oh, sure, there are small lies and lies of omission -- Bob Gates probably didn't mention to Dmitri Medvedev or Vladimir Putin that "Russian democracy has disappeared." Still, I'm not entirely sure how either world politics or American interests would be improved if Gates had been that blunt in Moscow.

If this kind of official hypocrisy is really the good stuff, then there is no really good stuff. U.S. officials don't always perfectly advocate for human rights? Not even the most naive human rights activist would believe otherwise. American diplomats are advancing U.S. commercial interests? American officials have been doing that since the beginning of the Republic. American diplomats help out their friends? Yeah, that's called being human. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but it strikes me that these leaks show other governments engaged in far more hypocritical behavior.

In the first season of Mad Men, there's a great scene when ad man Don Draper encounters some beatniks. After one of them rips into Don working for The Man and his square ways, he responds as follows:

I hate to break it to you, but there is no Big Lie.

There is no System.

The universe is indifferent.

That's pretty much my reaction to the utopian absurdities of the WikiLeaks manifesto.

It is worth thinking through the long-term implications of this data dump, however. Rob Farley observes:

I'm also pretty skeptical that this release will incline the United States government to make more information publicly available in the future. Bureaucracies don't seem to react to attacks in that manner; I suspect that the State Department will rather act to radically reduce access to such material in order to prevent future leaks.

Rob is correct, which means that the chances of an intelligence failure just shot up. As the Guardian explains here (and in further detail here):

Asked why such sensitive material was posted on a network accessible to thousands of government employees, the state department spokesman told the Guardian: "The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath revealed gaps in intra-governmental information sharing. Since the attacks of 9/11, the US government has taken significant steps to facilitate information sharing. These efforts were focused on giving diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to more data to more effectively do their jobs."

Well, I think it's safe to say that compartmentalization will be back in vogue real soon -- which means, in the long run, both less transparency and less effective policy coordination. It's not the job of WikiLeaks to care about the second problem, but they should care about the first.

Am I missing anything?

Over the weekend I finally saw The Social Network and read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay about social networks. Both Gladwell and Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter for The Social Network, have their issues with futurists who embrace these technologies as the beginning of a social revolution. 

Now I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments. In the past, I've expressed a fair amount of ambivalence about the power of Internet technologies to transform the world. After reading the essay and watching the movie, however, I can't say I'm all that convinced by their theses. 

Let's start with Gladwell, because it's the lesser of the two arguments. Gladwell contrasts the relationships and connections forged on Twitter/Facebook with real-world movements. He argues that the latter work when based on a hierarchical structure with strong ties among the participants. The former is based on a networked structure with weak ties. Therefore:

Social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well.... Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

This sounds good, except this doesn't describe networks all that well. Networks eliminate neither hierarchical power nor strong ties -- they're simply expressed in different ways. Actors in central nodes, with lots of dynamic density among other actors, can command both power and discipline. Not all networks will look like this, but the ones successful at fomenting change will likely resemble it. To put it more precisely: social networks lower the transactions costs for creating both weak ties and strong ties, loose collaborations and more tightly integrated social movements. 

It's not either/or, a point Oliver Willis raises:

Things bubble over to real world via social networking when influencers push the influenced to do something. Social networks tend to magnify this, and the web does give some of us who would never be real-life leaders a way of having some sway. I find it odd that Gladwell misses this, because this is the whole point of his bestseller The Tipping Point.

I’ve no doubt that getting your followers to do something in the real world is more complicated than getting them to retweet or “Like” something, but I don’t think the barrier to doing that is social networking’s distributed nature but rather the intensity of the network following you. But this is the same as in the real world. Network leaders need to have leadership skills no matter the medium.

The movie The Social Network was far more interesting. There is some controversy over what's been fictionalized, what's been mysoginized, and what's been left out of the film, and I'm sympathetic to some of these arguments. Taking what was intended to be on the screen, however, The Social Network also suggests the ways in which offline and online structures intersect. There were many reasons for Facebook's rise, but I have to think that the site's initial exculsivity helped to give it something that MySpace and Friendster lacked. 

The film has many great moments (if Aaron Sorkin was meant to translate any real-life figure onto film, it was Larry Summers). Both the ending and Sorkin's interviews about the film, however, suggests that there's an emptiness at the core of Facebook that hollows out 21st-century friendships. 

I don't buy this. Social networking sites giveth as much as they taketh away. Speaking from my own experience, I've found myself becoming closer with some friends and less close with others based on Facebook. 

More generally, there seems to be a generational effect whenever a new social technology emerges. Different generations react in radically different ways:

1) The Mature Generation tends to disdain the technology as yet another example of the world going to hell in a handbasket. 

2) For the Maturing Generation, the new technology is both a blessing and a curse. The adroit learn how to use the new technology to vault to social, political or economic heights that they would not have otherwise achieved. At the same time, a new technology without new social norms inevitably creates confusion about what is acceptable and what is taboo. Some people lose status as a result. 

3) For the Youngest Generation, the technology isn't new by the time they come to use it. They're savvy in the ways that the technology is both an opportunity and a risk, and can navigate those waters without thinking too hard. For this generatioon, the social technology is part of the new normal. 

Sorkin has demonstrated his Oldest Generation credentials since the "Lemon-Lyman" episode of The West Wing. Which is fine. But there are other generations out there, and they're not relating to these technologies the way that Sorkin thinks. 

The post-mortems on the political journalism and political science APSA panel have been pouring forth like the body count in The Expendables.  There's one thread in particulat that has piqued my interest, however.  It starts with this Rob Farley observation: 

By and large, IR and comparative haven’t had the same impact on the journalist community in either their quantitative or qualitative forms.  I think that several major concepts/grand theories from both comparative and IR have found their way into the general policy conversation (deterrence theory, for example) but it’s more difficult to find uses of clear, sound political science research.  IPE might be an exception to this.  The immense political science literature on ethnic conflict seems utterly detached from the way that ethnic conflict is treated in the popular media.

To which, Matthew Yglesias responds:

I think you find almost no journalistic interest in comparative politics scholarship as just part and parcel of the overall solipsism of American popular political debates which take place in a kind of comparison-free void. The IR scholarship issue is quite different, since there’s tons and tons of journalistic work on subject matter to which scholarly IR research is plainly present. And the issue here, I think, is really primarily one of politics. The kinds of policy approaches that find support in the IR literature or can be usefully illuminated through it are just too far off the center of the American political consensus.

To which, William Winecoff responds with, er, some urgency:

There are all kinds of problems with this. To begin with, [Yglesias] basically starts by admitting that journalists really couldn't care less about educating their readers, at least if the prerequisite of that is having a basic familiarity with the subject they are covering. Instead, all journalists care about are the "bounds of the DC debate", not stupid boring messy things like facts or scientific inquiry. No, those get in the way of "catastrophically misguided" right-wing policies that Democrats supported, dammit! Better to have a purely insult-based foreign policy discussion, completely void of theory or substance....

I would be surprised if Yglesias could outline more than one or two "scholarly controversies" in IR in any detail, much less describe how foreign policy has no interaction with those arguments. Bush 43's entire foreign policy was based on a mutation of democratic peace theory, which is hotly contested in the academy and elsewhere. Clinton's foreign policy was the largest experiment in neoliberal institutionalism that the world has ever seen, and it too was vehemently debated in the scholarly circles, and still is. The whole Cold War was practically a petri dish for IR theory. In all cases American foreign policy was engineered in part or full by IR scholars. What on earth is Yglesias waiting for?

In other words, it's just not true that scholarly debates have nothing to say about political controversies, or that they are "too far off the center of American political consensus". Every foreign policy decision that governments make has been discussed and analyzed, however imperfectly, by IR scholars and has been adopted or denied by politicians and ideologues. Yglesias just hasn't done his homework. Which is sad, because "homework" in this case basically entails e-mailing Drezner. Or even me.

Boys, boys!!  Everyone in a neutral corner please!! 

There are a few things to unpack here.  In essence, I have to take issue with all of these excerpts.  Part of the problem is that the panel that inspired this whole discussion in the first place was dominated by people who blog/write/care a hell of a lot more about American politics than world politics.    Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but it's dangerous to tease out implications from such a group. 

As someone who has consumed and interacted with foreign affairs journalists from time to time, here are my observations: 

1)  The big mismatch between American journalists and IR academics is that when journalists are writing about international relations, they're likely focusing on a single event or episode -- a crisis with China, a disaster in Pakistan, sanctions against Iran, etc.  International relations scholars, on the other hand, tend to think in more abstract terms that involve multiple observations:  great power relations, humanitarian disasters, or sanctions episodes.  Because journalists are far more interested in the particulars of individual narratives, however, the skill set does not always match up.  Journalists writing about a particular case are understandably not fond of stating the average probability of policy success in a generic class of events.  Doing so eliminates the particularities and idiosyncracies of the individual event -- i.e., the very value-added provided by the journalist. 

This doesn't mean that IR scholars are completely ignored -- I find I get calls/queries when journalists are writing their "news analysis" pieces that take stock of a particular policy.  It does mean that our research is not likely to appear in the first wave of stories about an event, however -- and that wave has a way of framing the subsequent narrative.

2)  To be honest, I suspect that this state of affairs bothers IR scholars all that much, for two reasons.  First, as I suggested at the panel (and Yglesias blogged), there are a lot of professional reasons why political scientists don't want their work to break through to the public sphere.  Second, good IR scholars care less about access to journalists because they have better access to the actors they really care about -- the policymakers themselves.  There is a decent amount of interaction between mid-ranking officials and IR academics, and those channels can influence policy a lot more than talking to journalists.  Of course, this contributes to gaps between public opinion and foreign policy elites, but that's been going on for many a decade already. 

3)  To be honest, I'm not sure what Yglesias is talking about with respect to IR scholarship and political partisanship.  It might be that the IR paradigms don't map neatly onto political cleavages.  Realist and liberal approaches can be found in the mainstream of both party's foreign policy communities.  More broadly, rational choice thinking is shot through the foreign policy mainstream.  There are some schools of thought -- constructivism, feminism, etc. -- that might be thought of as outside the mainstream.  On the other hand, these approaches aren't exactly mainstreamed within the scholarly community either. 

Scholars who advocate policy positions out of favor with the current administratio n have opportunities to exercise their voice, through op-eds, congressional testimony, etc.  Once they've done that, political journalists can find them to get critical quotes, etc. 

4)  Drezner to Yglesias:  please call Winecoff before calling me.  My cup, it runneth over right now. 

Am I missing anything? 

Ezra Klein made an interesting observation a few days ago about how opinion journalists read papers by experts:

[T]his is one of the difficulties with analysis. Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren't. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world.

One way to weigh competing research papers is to consider the publishing outlet.  Presumably, peer-reviewed articles will carry greater weight.  Except that Megan McArdle doesn't presume:

Especially for papers that rely on empirical work with painstakingly assembled datasets, the only way for peer reviewers to do the kind of thorough vetting that many commentators seem to imagine is implied by the words "peer review" would be to . . . well, go back and re-do the whole thing.  Obviously, this is not what happens.  Peer reviewers check for obvious anomalies, originality, and broad methodological weakness.  They don't replicate the work themselves.  Which means that there is immense space for things to go wrong--intentionally or not....

This is not to say that the peer review system is worthless.  But it's limited.  Peer review doesn't prove that a paper is right; it doesn't even prove that the paper is any good (and it may serve as a gatekeeper that shuts out good, correct papers that don't sit well with the field's current establishment for one reason or another).  All it proves is that the paper has passed the most basic hurdles required to get published--that it be potentially interesting, and not obviously false.  This may commend it to our attention--but not to our instant belief.

This jibes with a recent Chonicle of Higher Education essay that bemoaned the explosion of research articles: 

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

None of this provides much comfort for the layman interested in navigating through the miasma of contradictory research papers.  How can the amateur policy wonk separate the wheat from the chaff? 

Below are seven useful rules of thumb to provide you.  These are not foolproof -- in fact, that's one of the rules -- but they can provide some useful filtering while trying to discern good research from not-so-good research: 

1)  If you can't read the abstract, don't bother with the paper.  Most smart people, including academics, don't like to admit when they don't understand something that they read.  This provides an opening for those who purposefully write obscurant or jargon-filled papers.  If you're befuddled after reading the paper abstract, don't bother with the paper -- a poorly-worded abstract is the first sign of bad writing.  And bad academic writing is commonly linked to bad analytic reasoning. 

2)  It's not the publication, it's the citation count.  If you're trying to determine the relative importance of a paper, enter it into Google Scholar and check out the citation count.  The more a paper is cited, the greater its weight among those in the know.  Now, this doesn't always hold -- sometimes a paper is cited along the lines of, "My findings clearly demonstrate that Drezner's (2007) argument was, like, total horses**t."   Still, for papers that are more than a few years old, the citaion hit count is a useful metric.

3)  Yes, peer review is better.   Nothing Megan McArdle wrote is incorrect.  That said, peer review does provide some useful functions, so the reader doesn't have to.  If nothing else, it's a useful signal that the author thought it could pass muster with critical colleagues.  Now, there are times when a researcher will  bypass peer review to get something published sooner.  That said, in international relations, scholars who publish in non-refereed journals usually have a version of the paper intended for peer review. 

4)  Do you see a strawman?  It's a causally complex world out there.  Any researcher who doesn't test an argument against viable alternatives isn't really interested in whether he's right or not -- he just wants to back up his gut instincts.  A "strawman" is when an author takes the most extreme caricature of the opposing argument as the viable alternative.  If the rival arguments sound absurd when you read about them in the paper, it's probably because the author has no interest in presenting the sane version of them.  Which means you can ignore the paper. 

5)  Are the author's conclusions the only possible conclusions to draw?  Sometimes a paper can rest on solid theory and evidence, but then jump to policy conclusions that seem a bit of a stretch (click here for one example).  If you can reason out different policy conclusions from the theory and data, then don't take the author's conclusions at face value.  To use some jargon, sometimes a paper's positivist conclusions are sound, even if the normative conclusions derived from the positive ones are a bit wobbly.  

6)  Can you falsify the author's argument?    Conduct this exercise when you're done reading a research paper -- can you picture the findings that would force the author to say, "you know what, I can't explain this away -- it turns out my hypothesis was wrong"?  If you can't picture that, then you can discard what you're reading a a piece of agitprop rather than a piece of research. 

7)  Fraudulent papers will still get through the cracks.  Trust is a public good that permeates all scholarship and reportage.  Peer reviewers assume that the author is not making up the data or plagiarizing someone else's idea.  We assume this because if we didn't, peer review would be virtually impossible.  Every once in a while, an unethical author or a reporter will exploit that trust and publish something that's a load of crap.  The good news on this front is that the people who do can't stop themselves from doing it on a regular basis, and eventually they make a mistake.  So the previous rules of thumb don't always work.  The  publishing system is imperfect -- but "imperfect" does not mean the same thing as "fatally flawed." 

With those rules of thumb, go forth and read your research papers. 

Other useful rules of thumb are encouraged in the comments. 

The most important thing to read in political science today was not written by a plitical scientist.*  Instead, check out Christopher Beam's Slate essay about how a standard politics story would read if written by someone who cares a lot more about structural factors in political life than bulls**t narratives the human element.

There is already an IPE version of this kind of story, but I can't find it.  I know a Financial Times reporter (or maybe it was The Onion) had something out there on the interwebs that writes up a standard G-8 meeting.  To update it for the G-20: 

Today the Group of Twenty Nations issued a series of meaningless exhortations which will be ignored as soon as the heads of government leave the summit city. 

President Barack Obama said, "it is critical to global stability that we agree on these vital economic issues of the day.  Unfortunately, because we all face serious domestic constraints during this global economic downturn, there's not a chance in hell that we'll be able to abide by these pledges." 

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, standing next to Obama, gave the slightest of Gallic shrugs in an effort to draw the press corps' attention to him. 

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva dissented as well, arguing, "These words will have meaning for next year's very important summit, which will be held in Brasilia, I hasten to add." 

The communique promised action on the Doha Round, financial regulation, redressing macroeconomic imbalances, and reapportioning power within the international financial institutions.  A prior, leaked draft of the communique also pledged greater efforts to create a global tax on the Tooth Fairy and leprechauns, as well a greater subsidies for Santa Claus.  Chinese premier Hu Jintao objected, however, arguing that the communique should stick to moderately unrealistic pronouncements and not edge over into complete and total fantasy. 

In light of this and this, readers should be able to replay this report for several years to come. 

UPDATE:  Hat tip to William Winecoff for finding Alan Beattie 's generic column on international institutions, which really does outshine my own feeble efforts: 

An ineffectual international organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about a situation it has absolutely no power to change, the latest in a series of self-serving interventions by toothless intergovernmental bodies.

“We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness,” said the head of the institution, either a former minister from a developing country or a mid-level European or American bureaucrat. “This is a wake-up call to the world. They must take on board the vital message that my organisation exists.”

The director of the body, based in one of New York, Washington or an agreeable Western European city, was speaking at its annual conference, at which ministers from around the world gather to wring their hands impotently about the most fashionable issue of the day. The organisation has sought to justify its almost completely fruitless existence by joining its many fellow talking-shops in highlighting whatever crisis has recently gained most coverage in the global media.

“Governments around the world must come together to combat whatever this year’s worrying situation has turned out to be,” the director said. “It is not yet time to panic, but if it goes on much further without my institution gaining some credit for sounding off on the issue, we will be justified in labelling it a crisis.”

The organisation, whose existence the White House barely acknowledges and to which hardly any member government intends to give more money or extra powers, has long been fighting a war of attrition against its own irrelevance. By making a big deal out of the fact that the world’s most salient topical issue will be placed on its agenda and then issuing a largely derivative annual report on the subject, it hopes to convey the entirely erroneous impression that it has any influence whatsoever on the situation.

The intervention follows a resounding call to action in the communiqué of the Group of [number goes here] countries at their recent summit in a remote place no-one had previously heard of. The G[number goes here] meeting was preceded by the familiar interminable and inconclusive discussions about whether the G[number goes here] was sufficiently representative of the international community, or whether it should be expanded into a G[number plus 1, 2 or higher goes here] including China, India or any other scary emerging market country that attendees cared to name.

The story was given further padding by a study from an ambulance-chasing Washington think-tank, which warned that it would continue to convene media conference calls until its quixotic and politically suicidal plan to ameliorate whatever crisis was gathering had been given respectful though substantially undeserved attention.

*Unfortunately, that's not an uncommon occurrence.   

Last week, ABC announced that foreign policy correspondent extraordinaire Christiane Amanpour would leave CNN to take over This Week Sunday morning talk show come August.  Yesterday, Washington Post's Tom Shales wrote a sloppy, badly edited story which closed as follows: 

From many angles, it was a bad choice -- one which could create so much consternation that Westin will be forced to withdraw Amanpour's name and come up with another "nominee" for the job. That would hardly be a tragedy -- considering how many others deserve it more than she does.

A bunch of bloggers and commentators jumped on Shales, accusing him of anti-Iranian bias and poor reporting/framing of the story.   The first charge is a stretch, but the second charge holds up. In a chat, Shales reveals his preference even more blatantly, writing that, "I think Christiane is one of the most over-rated and hyped personalities of our day" and suggesting she's had a bad-hair year. 

Sweeping away the silliness, the question I find interesting is whether a This Week-style Sunday morning talk show can pivot more towards foreign policy and still generate ratings/buzz/interest. That certainly seems to be ABC's intent: 

Amanpour, in an interview, said she intended to increase the focus on foreign affairs on the Sunday-morning program. Previous host George Stephanopoulos made his insider's knowledge of Washington the show's hallmark.

The challenge for Amanpour will be to strike a balance between international and domestic policy debates while continuing to satisfy an audience that has come to expect large doses of inside-the-Beltway skinny and analysis of U.S. politics. If Amanpour can attract new viewers -- those who normally don’t tune in to the Sunday-morning news shows -- it would be a boost for ABC News, which has lost ratings momentum for some of its key programs....

In announcing her hiring, ABC News President David Westin said: “All of us know how much the international and the domestic have come to affect one another – whether it’s global conflict, terrorism, humanitarian crises or the economy. And our international reporting has long been a hallmark of ABC News, part of the legacy Peter Jennings left for us.”

Westin hinted to Washington insiders that, though their importance to the show would not be diminished, “This Week” would attempt to depart from the worn format of left/right political debates.

Christiane will bring the international and the domestic together," Westin said. "Our audience has come to us for years to see differing points of views expressed in intelligent and compelling ways; now the different points of view will be expanded beyond partisan politics alone."

As an world politics wonk, I really, really hope this works. The Sunday morning talk shows started to blur together long ago in my eyes, so anything distinctive is welcome.  Anything distinctive and focusing on foreign affairs/international relations is even more welcome.  Amanpour might have the celebrity to attract the kind of viewers who long to watch as many ADM commercials as possible see a civil discussion of the connections between America and the world.  If everyone else does generic inside-the-Beltway stuff, This Week might find a nice sinecure for itself on the international front. 

That said, I'm skeptical that it will work, for two reasons. First, most Americans just don't care that much about foreign policy -- particularly right now. I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that it's true. 

Second, I'm not sure that the number of foreign policy wonks who ordinarily wouldn't watch This Week but might tune in now will compensate for the drop in those uninterested in foreign affairs. Last year, This Week attracted 2.3 million viewers, while Fareed Zakarias's GPS show attracted less than 200,000 viewers. There are numerous reasons for this, but one of them might be that world politics wonks don't watch much television about world politics.  (full disclosure:  I haven't watched This Week since having children David Brinkley left). 

Still, I'll be rooting for Amanpour to succeed, and will even offer one nugget of advice -- put Laura Rozen on the roundtable the moment you take over the show. She's a great bridge between the substance of foreign policy and the machinations of the foreign policy community. 

In honor of The Princess Bride, your humble blogger describes someone as "going Vizzini" when they repeatedly use a word in a way that doesn't correspond to how the rest of society would use it.  

Today's example is the New York Times story, "Attacks on Detainee Lawyers Split Conservatives."  The lead: 

A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe, kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects.

But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group, which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. (emphasis added)

The story repeatedly argues that the conservative legal community is deeply divided on the issue. Now, I understand split as implying that members of this community are lining up on one side or the other. The thing is, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that anyone in the conservative legal community is really lining up behind Keep America Safe. The Times story by John Schwartz has a quote by John Yoo that kinda sorta supports the ad, but it's really weak tea -- Yoo "said he had not seen the material from Ms. Cheney’s group," according to the story.    

Then we get to this section: 

A Keep America Safe spokesman responded to a request for comment by passing along links to essays by supporters like Marc A. Thiessen, a columnist for The Washington Post, who wrote on Monday that the detainees did not deserve the same level of representation as criminal defendants.

The lawyers, Mr. Thiessen wrote, “were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants.” He said, “They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military’s ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.”

Thiessen is not a lawyer (he's not the best debater in the world either).  I would describe the conservative legal blogososphere as not really supportive of the ad.   

Even if we expand our orbit to include other prominent conservatives, it seems pretty clear that beyond Thiessen, Bill Kristol, Michelle Malkin, and the Cheneys, there ain't a lotta conservative love for the attack ad.  Over at The Cable, Josh Rogin tried to get a GOP Senator to endorse the ad and failed.  I wouldn't characterize Glenn Greenwald as a defender of the right, but even he notes that, "only the hardest-core ideological dead-enders are defending them." 

The more interesting way to frame this story would have been to show that professional norms do act as a serious constraint on political behavior.  Schwartz quotes David B. Rivkin Jr., co-chairman of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism in exactly this fashion:

“I appreciate the partisan advantage to be gained here,” Mr. Rivkin said, but “it’s not the right way to proceed.” He said he preferred “principled ways for debating where this administration is wrong — there’s no reason to resort to ad hominem attacks.”

So, just to sum up -- the Times got to this story at least a day later than everyone else, and then used an inappropriate frame to describe the situation. There's no conservative legal split -- there's a pretty strong consensus that the Keep America Safe ad crossed the line. 

The New York Times' Alexei Barrionuevo and Simon Romero report on an entertaining leader summit for the Union of South American Nations.  One bone of contention at the summit was a recent military accord between the United States and Colombia. 

The proceedings were apparently broadcast live.  This part stood out: 

Mr. Chávez had previously described the [U.S.-Colombia] accord as a step toward war and had said it involved American designs on Venezuelan oil. He has been threatening to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia.   

President Alan García of Peru, who has warm relations with the United States, took a shot at Mr. Chávez, noting Venezuela’s continued willingness to export oil to the United States.

“Man, why are they going to dominate the petroleum if you already sell it all to the United States?” Mr. García said. The remark drew laughter, though not from Mr. Chávez.

With the caveat that this as a speculative, half-assed generalization, it does seem that certain regions produce vastly more entertaining summits than other regions.  Latin America and the Middle East produce summit meetings with open and entertaining feuding.  Europe and the Pacific Rim, not so much. 

Why is this?  I don't think it's the number of "colorful leaders" -- if that was true, then Silvio Berlusconi would have made the EU summits rip-roaring affairs years ago.  I don't think it's the degree of security tensions -- East Asia has more enduring rivalries than Latin America. 

Seriously, why? 

The Financial Times' Peter Garnham reports that China is getting serious about internationalizing the use of the renminbi:

China has kick-started a major plan to internationalise the renminbi and the process is likely to be faster than many expect, according to HSBC....

“China is beginning an ambitious scheme to raise the role of the renminbi in international trade and finance and to reduce reliance on the US dollar,” said Qu Hongbin, China chief economist at HSBC.

“This will likely be a multi-year and gradual process. Yet, we believe the pace is likely to be faster than many expect.”

HSBC said the internationalisation of the renminbi was long overdue, given China’s rising economic power relative to the limited use of the renminbi overseas.

If you read the whole story, you discover that the FT's evidence for this assertion rests entirely on assertions by HSBC officials.  Which leads one to wonder whether maybe, just maybe, the FT should have checked to see whether HSBC has any financial stake in globalizing the use of the renminbi. Crazy talk, I know...

Loyal readers are surely aware that this is not the first time the Financial Times has hyperventilated over Chinese moves that don't necessarily amount to all that. 

Now before anyone accuses me of going all Brad DeLong on the FT, I think a lot of their China coverage (particularly by Jamil Anderlini and Geoff Dyer) has been very informative.  That said, this kind of thinly sourced story does lead one to wonder just how much of the coverage of China's financial moves is hype from financial players with a vested interest in feeding the China bubble. 

Readers -- am I underreacting to this? 

Whenever there is a discussion about the structural shifts taking place in the American economy, there's usually a question along the lines of, "where will the new jobs come from?" 

This is a fantastically difficult question to answer.  The answer requires an ability to predict future sectoral trends in the economy, which last I checked is pretty difficult.  For example, we know that many journalists are going the way of do-do, but what will they do instead?

The New York Times' Noam Cohen, however, has pointed the way towards future employment opportunities for writers: 

In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.

But someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.

Because Twitter is seen as an intimate link between celebrities and their fans, many performers are not willing to divulge the help they use to put their thoughts into cyberspace.

Britney Spears recently advertised for someone to help, among other things, create content for Twitter and Facebook.  Kanye West recently told New York magazine that he has hired two people to update his blog. “It’s just like how a designer would work,” he said.

Guest Twitterers are just the beginning.  I see a robust future for Twitter script doctors ("the first clause is great, but the last three words died in the 18-24 demographic."), Twitter proofreaders ("are we using the English or American version of 'harbor'?"), and -- in world politics -- Twitter translators and diplomatic advisors ("Mr. President, I'm not sure that twittering 'the dollar is here to stay, motherf***ers!' is really the right message to send right before the London summit.") 

And, as Tom Ricks points out, foreign actors might need some assistance on this front as well.