A few of my students have asked to me to give another round of reading recommendations, particularly as they head of for the summer. So I’ve added a number of new recommendations to the first page of my Pronto* Recommends book list. I hope you enjoy them!
This week’s Economist has a story suggesting that Colombia’s Uribe is “edging towards autocracy.” While I think the term “autocracy” is perhaps a bit exaggerated (just as it would be to call Venezuela’s Chávez an “autocrat”), I agree w/ the overall sentiment.
Yesterday I posted some (very) early predictions for Bolivia’s December 2009 elections. I decided to make up a table showing some possible vote distributions based on some possible scenarios.
I’m going to forgo a lot of the he/she speculation about a number of Bolivian topics swirling around the internets. But let me address those briefly, before turning to the upcoming December elections.
We recently took our second trip to the Baltimore Zoo (excuse me, the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore). It was part of our Mother’s Day outing, which began w/ our second visit to Miss Shirley’s Café. We highly recommend both.
This fall I used Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World again in my introduction to comparative politics course. Again, I was relatively happy w/ how that went, as we tried to tie Foer’s observations back to the material we covered earlier in the semester. I was particularly happy w/ the final exam questions (all essay, all open-ended). Here they are, for your amusement: