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Enlarge / The Meta Quest Pro.
When we reviewed the Meta Quest Pro headset less than five months ago, we balked at the device's $1,500 price point, which represented a whopping 275 percent price premium over the Quest 2 (with much less than a 275 percent increase in quality). Meta is already taking steps to scale back that massive asking price, though; as of Sunday, the headset is now available for $1,000 in the US and Canada (a similar price drop will take place March 15 in other Quest Pro countries).
The price drop puts the Quest Pro in line with other high-end headsets, including the untethered $1,100 HTC Vive XR Elite and the $1,000 Valve Index (which requires tethering to a gaming PC). That said, for practically the same money, you can get a $550 PSVR2 and the $500 PlayStation 5 to tether it to. And the Quest Pro is still 150 percent more expensive than the cheapest Quest 2, which supports almost all the same software and delivers a sufficient VR experience for most users.
Speaking of the Quest 2, Meta has also announced a 14 percent price drop for the 256GB version of that headset, from $500 to $430. That price drop brings that expanded-storage option almost all the way back to the $400 that Meta was charging for it before last year's unprecedented price increase.
Dima Kortukov. “The Politics of Pseudoscience: Power and Knowledge in Contemporary Russia.” Problems of Post-Communism, 2023.
The Russian government has developed a symbiotic relationship with the country’s pseudoscientific community. State authorities integrate pseudoscience—that is, theories and beliefs that look superficially like science, but are in some way “false, misleading, or unproven”—into their propaganda efforts; Russians who peddle pseudoscience wrap their claims in anti-Western rhetoric in order to achieve official recognition. Examples include Anatole Klyosov and his “DNA genealogy” and Irina Ermakova’s campaign against genetically modified (GM) organisms.
Russian pseudoscientists helped develop, and provided support for, the false narrative that the United States was developing bioweapons at Ukrainian facilities. Appearing on Russia’s ultra-conservative Tsargrad TV channel, Ermakova claimed that Ukrainian researchers modified pathogens so that they would affect only a certain ethnic group; she also asserted that migratory birds could be used to spread these pathogens into Russia.
These claims received enthusiastic support from Russia’s officials, including prominent legislators and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Russian authorities helped spread these claims internationally. During February 2022, the hashtag #USBiolabs began to trend on Twitter. Numerous accounts—some associated with QAnon—amplified the false narrative Russia invaded Ukraine in order to destroy American-installed biolabs that were engaged in the production of deadly diseases. Some Twitter users went even further, claiming that Russia is attacking Ukraine to prevent a ‘Covid-2’ bioweapon from being released.
This episode is but one example of the Kremlin’s growing use of pseudoscience for political ends. Those include not only international disinformation campaigns, but also in its science and education policies.
I employ a multidisciplinary approach that draws on the sociology of Robert Merton and Michele Foucault reading of power/knowledge relations. I use thick description to analyze “DNA genealogy” and the Russian anti-GM movement and explore how they have been received by other scholars and the broader public.
As a scholar of Russian politics and society, I was fascinated by the fact that Russia—a country with a history of impressive scientific achievements—is experiencing a renaissance of pseudoscience. Many of those who promote pseudoscientific theories are popular lecturers; the Russian media accords the the status of scientific experts. Many members of the Russian government, including in Putin’s Presidential Administration, embrace pseudoscientific theories. I thought these developments were overdue for academic analysis.
While working on this article, I found myself going down the rabbit hole of Russian pseudoscience. Earlier versions of the article reviewed the rather unorthodox theories of Peter Garyaev and Vladimir Zhdanov. Garyaev’s Wave Genetics holds that DNA molecules are capable of perceiving information from human voices. Zhdanov advocates for total abstinence from alcohol use; according to him the international alcohol industry wages “an alcoholic genocide” against Russia. Unfortunately, I had to cut this analysis.
I began the project in 2017, but it took on new significance with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Earlier versions were rejected by several journals. In the end, I had a good experience with the review and editorial process at Problems of Post-Communism.
What's the weirdest (good or bad) 1st date you've ever been on?
My date & I sat in a NYC bar on 12/31 and noticed people ringing a doorbell. So we did the same and crashed a strangers party. Upon entering I hear him say "She is cute". I play wing woman. They dated for 3 years. pic.twitter.com/eF3BR0FxP6
— Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss) February 15, 2023
Dear readers, will you share your weirdest / funnest 1st date stories?
Anyone got a good workflow for actually reading email newsletters? (once per day? once per week? push to Kindle or something?)
— Dennis Crowley
I get way too much email. Reading newsletters in my inbox has never been the right context for me to actually enjoy content I am subscribing to. Looks like I am not the only one who is struggling with a workflow that makes sense for consuming newsletters. (Dennis’ Crowley’s Tweet above) I am asking you, my readers, how do you make sure you actually get to the newsletters you subscribed to? My biggest hack is that I have a bookmark folder with all my favorite newsletter landing pages and then I read them like a blog!
Michael A. Allen, Michael E. Flynn, Carla Martinez Machain, and Andrew Stravers. 2022. Beyond the Wire: U.S. Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion, Oxford University Press. Paperback (use code ASFLYQ6 for 30% off), ebook
U.S. military deployments — particularly the individual troops involved — anchor American influence abroad, and for many foreign populations they are the face of U.S. global power. That face isn’t always welcome. U.S. service members commit crimes, cause deadly accidents, and become embroiled in corruption scandals. We find that despite these (and other) sources of friction between U.S. deployments and their host countries, the everyday activities of U.S. service members in overseas communities on balance enhance U.S. “soft power” and generate support for their military mission.
For over seventy years, the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members on foreign soil has profoundly shaped global politics. While other countries have stationed their forces on the territory of other sovereign states — including the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation — the United States enjoyed an unparalleled political infrastructure for global force projection.
That may change as the People’s Republic of China continues to look for opportunities to expand its own overseas military presence. If current trends continue, Washington will increasingly need to convince host-state civilians to support a U.S. military presence over alternative suitors.
The book is the product of three years of intensive research. We spent several weeks in countries that host U.S. military personnel and visited a variety of military installations. We conducted annual surveys over three years across 14 countries — with a final pool of about 42,000 respondents. We interviewed journalists, activists, politicians, diplomats, and U.S. service members in six host countries. We gathered many different perspectives on topics ranging from geopolitics and great-power competition to everyday life with the U.S. military as neighbors
Each of us spent most of our careers trying to better understand the upsides and downsides of U.S. overseas deployments. With support from the Minerva Research Initiative and Army Research Office, we were able to work together to collect crucial data for answering the questions we address in this book. The book is a follow-up to an earlier article where we were able to draw some initial inferences after we completed the first wave of our survey. We also had many exciting and illuminating stories from our three years of fieldwork that a book format allows us to discuss in greater detail.
The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted our fieldwork in Japan and South Korea. Even though we conducted remote interviews, we would have preferred to conduct the same kind of in-country research that we did in Europe and South America.
We also know more now than we did when we started. We would change some of the questions we asked; if we could do it all over again, we would have conduct survey experiments to understand our core arguments better. We also would like to run surveys in some of the specific areas that are most affected by the U.S. presence, such as Okinawa in Japan or Ramstein-Miesenbach in Germany. We would also have liked to better explore the uncertainty around our prediction models.
The process was atypically smooth. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to publish the book in the Bridging the Gap series at Oxford University Press. The Bridging the Gap and Oxford editors were easy to work with and supportive throughout the process. The reviewers were positive and offered constructive criticism that helped shape a better end product.
Latham, Andrew., 2022. Medieval Sovereignty, ARC Humanities Press.
A series of thirteenth-century contests over the locus and character of supreme authority in Latin Christendom provided the conceptual raw materials that later thinkers ultimately assembled into the early modern constitutive norm of “sovereignty.”
It seeks to counter the tendency of scholars in the field of IR to treat the medieval era as an “orientalized” Other comprising an exotic congeries of ideas, institutions and structures that are so alien as to render the epoch simultaneously both irrelevant to the study of modern international relations and inaccessible to the contemporary IR scholar. But this is surely wrong.
That this era is an important period in the history of international relations I now take as a given; for it was in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that the ideas and institutions of sovereignty, territoriality, the state, international law, diplomacy and many of the other core elements of what we have agreed to mislabel the “Westphalian” international system first crystallized and came to dominate the imaginative structure of European social and political elites.
Put slightly differently, attending to the medieval history of sovereignty is important because the “birth” of the modern sovereign state and state-system was more a process (lasting several centuries) than a moment (whether 1555, 1648, 1714) and grasping the logic of that process requires not just a snapshot of a particular conjoncture, but a longue durée perspective encompassing the entire medieval era.
Two ways.
First, I recount how, in glossing the thirteenth-century papal decretals Quanto personam, and Per venerabilem, canon lawyers ultimately defined the character of sovereignty—that is, the distinctive and defining qualities of the supreme authority to command, legislate, and judge.
Second, I reconstruct how, during the turn-of-the-fourteenth century dispute between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII, canon lawyers drew on these new ideas to develop an idea of sovereignty that would have been recognizable to Bodin and other early modern legists and political thinkers.
I first became interested in the medieval political world while writing about what was then referred to as the “Revolution in Military Affairs.”
I initially sough to conceptualize the “historical structure of war” in three discrete eras: the late medieval, the high modern, and the late modern.
Once I started researching the medieval world, however, I was totally hooked. I fell in love with the era and spent the next decade researching and writing on topics related to medieval geopolitics (not coincidentally, the title of my first book on the topic – Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World Order in the Age of the Crusades.)
From there, it was but a short leap to medieval international and political thought.
One of the ideas that kept popping up in my intellectual travels was the concept of sovereignty. As I had been trained to see this as a quintessentially post-medieval or modern idea, the recurrence of both the word and the concept in the medievalist historiography intrigued me no end.
At the same time, the history of the idea of sovereignty was also emerging as a topic of interest in the IR world, though seldom with any meaningful reference to the medieval historiographical literature.
The convergence of these two phenomena prompted me ask how, if at all, the (juristic, theological and philosophical) ideas related to supreme political authority formed in the medieval era were picked up by the early moderns and assembled into the constitutive norm of sovereignty in the post-medieval era.
First, I would locate the argument more squarely in the IR literature.
The publisher that expressed the most interest in this project was a medievalist press rather than an International Relations or Political Science one.
One condition of publishing with them was that I deemphasize the IR-specific debates that I wanted to address and frame it instead a contribution to the history of medieval political thought literature. I was happy to do this, but there was a trade-off that in a perfect world I would not have had to make.
Second, I would extend the historical narrative forward through the 15th century to explicitly link to Bodin and company. As it was, the word limit for this imprint was such that it was not possible to do justice to the 13th century genesis of the concept of sovereignty and to trace its evolution all the way through to the early modern era.
Again, there was a trade-off here that in a perfect world I wouldn’t have had to make.
To be honest, the process was relatively smoot
h. I shopped the proposal around to a few of the usual suspects and several of them expressed provisional interest. In the end, I selected the publisher I felt was most enthusiastic about the project and it turned out to be a great decision.
With grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities I was able to carve out the time I needed to finish the manuscript and submitted it to the publisher in late 2020.
Feedback from the reviewers was both prompt and constructive. I spent the summer of 2021 revising and did more back-and-forth with my editor until that fall. The book was published in February 2022.
A 10-year-old girl from Cumberland, Rhode Island has a big question that she's hoping a DNA test will answer. Wanting to know if Santa Claus is real, she put a cookie he allegedly bit in a plastic baggy and sent it down to her local police department. — Read the rest
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