In my earlier post I suggested that voters in rural areas and small industrial towns are often two rather distinct demographic groups that should not be conflated. Yes, Democratic candidates lost votes in both postindustrial towns and their surrounding rural environs. But their losses were especially dramatic in the latter, while they still have pockets of support in the former. In larger towns with an industrial history or a university (or both), Democrats still win majorities.

Media professionals and intellectuals in the large coastal cities have long struggled to understand the white, non-metropolitan counties in the middle of the country. Just as Christians often fail to understand the diversity of the faraway Islamic world, American coastal elites have come to see the non-metro sections of the heartland as an undifferentiated mass of white, evangelical Republicans. This is far from the reality.

Here’s how Donald Trump can reassure our alliesthatthe United States won’t abandon its friends.

In recent years, political and social scientists have made increasing use of conjoint survey designs to study decision-making. Here, we study a consequential question which researchers confront when implementing conjoint designs: how many choice tasks can respondents perform before survey satisficing degrades response quality? To answer the question, we run a set of experiments where respondents are asked to complete as many as 30 conjoint tasks. Experiments conducted through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Survey Sampling International demonstrate the surprising robustness of conjoint designs, as there are detectable but quite limited increases in survey satisficing as the number of tasks increases. Our evidence suggests that in similar study contexts researchers can assign dozens of tasks without substantial declines in response quality.

How Inception changed the way we listen to movies.

Insight into why the largest professional association of humanities scholars in North America rejected a BDS motion to boycott Israeli universities

Not that long ago, debates over politics were anchored in a clear opposition between universalism and relativism. Proponents of an inclusive structure of, at least aspirationally, all states—the new world order—envisioned an unchallenged entrenchment of democratic capitalism everywhere. Where dictatorships endured, as in North Korea, they were treated as bizarre outliers, exceptions that proved the rule of the progress of mankind toward Kant’s perpetual peace. Universalist values held sway; ultimately all rights were to become human rights, due to all humans solely on the basis of their humanity, implying that rights pursuant to national citizenship, to membership in any particular national community, would dwindle in significance: no borders, no sovereignty, no traditions. However this conceptual expression of globalization faced sophisticated critics, variously postmodern, which treated that universalism with disdain and suspicion, insinuating to it an imperial agenda and offering an alternative program of multiplicity, diversity, and multipolarity

Born into a Jewish family in Algeria in 1948, Bernard-Henri Lévy was raised in Paris, where he enrolled in the elite Ecole Normale in the embattled year of 1968. It was a dramatic historical moment. Revolutionary illusions and intellectual inflation filled the streets, while student uprisings were erupting from Japan to Germany, and from Berkeley to Harvard. That same year witnessed the crushing of the Prague Spring when the tanks of the Warsaw Pact rolled into Czechoslovakia, postponing the end of the Soviet Empire for two more melancholy decades. It was a time when rebellion and totalitarianism collided, and that experience ignited debates which defined French intellectual life for years to come.

In the month of April, I found myself saying “I agree with Trump” more than anytime ever. On China, Russia, NATO and Syria, President Trump signaled radical changes in policy, nearly the complete opposite of what he said as a candidate. All were changes for the good — that is, new policy positions that advance American security, prosperity and values. The lingering question is whether these recent statements signal a fundamental change in Trump’s thinking about foreign policy or rather short-term reversals that could be reversed again. Is he learning or ad-libbing? It’s too early to tell.

After the vote results came in last November, many Russians close to the Kremlin celebrated. “Our Trump” — or #TrumpNash, as they tweeted — had been elected president of the United States... Of course, many factors combined to produce Trump’s victory, but Putin’s intervention most certainly played a contributing role.