Summer Update

It’s been too long since I’ve done an update, but I’ve been waiting until I could announce big news…

And I got tired of waiting. Things at UCLA (and in Los Angeles… and in California… and in the U.S.) are a little wacky right now, but let’s soldier on and update you all on what’s up with things in my little corner of the social sciences.

After a lot of hard work by a lot of people, Matt and I have sent the corrected page proofs of the Princeton book back. The above is a glimpse of one of our cover design prospects, which you’ll hopefully be seeing in all its glory on the Amazon listing for the book. Oh, and we just got a (provisional) acceptance on a related project from International Organization, which is a pretty big coup. Doing IR as my second field in grad school continues to pay unexpected benefits.

APSA’s coming up fast (too fast), and I’m doing a roundtable, a regular paper presentation, and a discussant slot. I’d forgotten about the latter until just now when I typed it. The roundtable is at the PolCom preconference, which is always interesting and a lot of fun. The paper will the be first fruits of that massive newspaper partisanship data collection project I’ve been working on in the background for a few years. I’m working on it with Erik Engstrom, who has lots of experience with historical voting patterns. The data have been taking forever to get clean (in part because of gaps in the original newspaper survey listings, delays in getting the books via ILL, and other fun stuff) but seems to be coming together now. I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting stuff coming out of the project.

The Cambridge revisions continue apace. Obama and the Blue Dogs appear to be writing themselves into more parts now that the fine members of Minnesota’s judiciary branch finally resolved the supermajority issue. The spinoff article is also about to go out, although it looks like that will have to wait until we get back from Indiana.

Speaking of travel, we just got back from the UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference Center, where I gave a few talks. Such an amazing facility and great time (except for the part where an ant tried to Wrath-of-Khan my eardrum). Other stuff continues apace, but will hopefully speed up a bit once I clear the APSA hurdle for the year. I’m not teaching this Fall, so I’m looking forward to sinking into my various simmering projects like a warm bath.