Life Updates

This blog has not been the site of much posting for many years -- but this year I have said even less than usual. These days, I am far more likely to post about global politics on BlueSky. I post short film reviews on Letterboxd and Book reviews on Goodreads. Fellow beer drinkers that I know in some way can also connect at Untappd where I have been checking in beers since 2013!

As readers may know, I am in the midst of a full-year sabbatical. I read and reviewed Ronald Kramer's Apocalyptic Crimes: Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished. You can find that review here (that's a link to the journal Peace & Change). Soon I expect to post a link to an article that is "in press" on "Evaluating the Resilience of US and Canadian Climate Policy" for American Review of Canadian Studies. I submitted page proof corrections October 30 but the journal has not updated online articles since early October. My contribution was meant to be part of a special issue on Canada-U.S. Environmental Relations and focuses on the Electric Vehicle policies that Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau pursued a few years ago. 

What else?

In October, my wife and I took a short road trip to Indianapolis to see a film at the Heartland International Film Festival which was recently named a top 25 film festival in the world. I imagine we'll find our way back up there again in the future though we only managed to see one movie this year: Hello Out There! We intended to go another evening but the remaining tickets at the venues of interest were less than ideal (front row in small theaters). Next year we'll plan better. HIFF does not really have daytime screenings Monday-Friday. We saw Roofman at a mall while we awaited our film the next night. Coincidentally, both of these films featured actors from the TV series Ted Lasso. 

For unfortunate health reasons, a planned October-November sabbatical visit to the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University in The Netherlands had to be postponed until 2026. I'm looking forward to it and my spouse is gradually recovering from an unexpected procedure. I'll post more about the project in the future. 

Meanwhile, I've been revising a conference paper on climate change politics from the Midwest Political Science conference from 2024 and working with Kurt Mills on version 2.0 of our 2020 article on America First and the Human Rights Regime. 

Now anyone who follows me on BlueSky probably has a better understanding of what I've been focusing on these past few months -- lots of climate change and Trump foreign policy -- and actions that seem to threaten American democratic norms and traditions. 


Visit this blog's homepage.

For 280 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on Bluesky.