Links: Protests in Brazil, Eurozone, Spying, MOOCs

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People protesting in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Source: Wikimedia (public domain)

Usually, I try to find common themes for the links when it’s my turn in the link duty. Today I do not live up to that. So, here’s a rather cursory collection of what I’ve read over the last couple of days.

So far, we did not cover much of the protests in Brazil and I expect this to change soon. Meanwhile, Natalia Bueno shows who is protesting in Brazil. In case you missed it, check out Jay Ulfelder’s critique regarding laundry lists of causes for social unrest. At least, Gamman and Young’s argue that protests in Brazil are not just about the economy. Robert Kelly speculates whether the protests could spread to Asia’s corrupt democracies.

Giuseppe Bertola suggests how to make the Eurozone work, and work for everyone. Read the whole piece, but he concludes that:

In theory, ‘one market’ should be accompanied not only by ‘one money’ but also by a shared concern about distributional issues. Not only theory, but also pre-crisis empirical patterns and a crisis deepened and prolonged by revision of the convergence implications of economic and monetary integration as well as by lack of risk-sharing buffers for the asymmetric impact of global shocks, indicate that that a robust and coherent European market and policy-integration process would require implementation of the behavioural constraints and redistribution schemes that operate, not without difficulties, within national socioeconomic systems.

Dan Nexon reminds us that it is not so much of a surprise that the CIA is spying on Europe as well.

Yesterday, some of the contributers to this blog dicussed job opportunities and payment in academia. Ironically, David Petraeus’ is going to earn a lot of money for a three-hour class at City University in New York and the Crooked Timber headline nails it: Pay us like you pay Petraeus.

Cai Wilkinson refers to the moral panic in recent Russian anti-gay laws.

Catching up on the MOOCment. We did not properly report the results of the MOOC production fellowship. Mea culpa. Yet, none of my favorites made it to the list of the ten winners. The only sponsored MOOC relevant for IR folks is ‘Europe in the World: Law and Policy Aspects of the EU in Global Governance’. Over at HASTAC, Cathy Davidson is clearing up some myths about MOOCs and has an interesting series regarding her efforts of creating a MOOC (ex. 1, ex. 2, ex. 3; to be continued).

And some fun stuff at the end: Write your own academic sentence might help to overcome your next writer’s block. (h/t to Zoe)

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