Just before Thanksgiving last year, I sent an email to the
Institute’s Director, Robbert Dijkgraaf, whom I had never met.
Acknowledging that my missive was somewhat “out of the blue,” I
explained that I had spent most of the previous eight years...
On December 11, 2003, when asked in a press conference whether
his Iraq policy was consistent with international law, President
George W. Bush joked, “International law? I better call my lawyer;
he didn’t bring that up to me.”
I was in my final year of graduate school, writing a
dissertation on the place of persuasion in the success of
contemporary American social movements, when the nearly
two-year-long campaign for the American president who would succeed
George W. Bush...
Does war have a time? The idea of “wartime” is regularly invoked
by scholars and policymakers, but the temporal element in warfare
is rarely directly examined. I came to the Institute in 2007–08
intent on exploring the history of war’s impact on...
