Dani Filc as Guest Blogger at the Washington Post

Dani Filc, author of Circles of Exclusion: The Politics of Health Care in Israel guest-blogged about Health Care Lessons from Israel on the Washington Post’s Short Stack blog.

Background on Fiji

The Mother Jones report on the sociopolitical and environmental context for the production of Fiji Water—much circulated via the social networking media this past week—has drawn attention to that island nation. Those looking for background on Fiji’s political conditions will be interested in our recent State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji by Susanna Trnka.

Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle (Mother Jones)

Corporate Warriors: sadly still highly topical

As Blackwater continues to be the focus of news attention (CIA terror link puts rebranded Blackwater under fire again, the Guardian), it’s important to remember that P. W. Singer paid early and intense attention to the role of private military contractors in his Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.

Apology as diplomatic tool

In a February 3, 2009, piece on the Foreign Policy site, Stephen M. Walt draws upon Jennifer Lind’s Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics as he takes up the question of relations between the United States and Iran:

Should states apologize?

Ravenswood: End of an Era

The aluminum plant whose crucial role in labor history is described in Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor by Tom Juravich and Kate Bronfenbrenner is closing its doors:

Ravenswood Looks to Future (the Charleston Gazette)

Michael A. Santoro on CNN

CNN turned to Michael A. Santoro, author of China 2020: How Western Business Can—and Should—Influence Social and Political Change in the Coming Decade and Profits and Principles: Global Capitalism and Human Rights in China to explain how China has become—after Japan and Germany—the world’s third-largest economy.

China Passes Germany in Economic Rankings: article and video.

The New Masters of Capital at GlobalHigherEd

The GlobalHigherEd blog (Surveying the Construction of Global Knowledge/Spaces for the ‘Knowledge Economy’) draws upon the work of Timothy J. Sinclair, author of The New Masters of Capital, in a discussion of credit rating agencies. Read it here:

‘Passing judgment’: the role of credit rating agencies in the global governance of UK universities

Austria as Theater and Ideology and Gérard Mortier

In his blog The View from Here, Andrew Patner highlights Michael P. Steinberg’s Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival in his discussion of Gérard Mortier’s “bid to take over the Bayreuth Festival.” Here’s what Patner had to say:

Mortier even went so far as to commission the first ever German-language publication of Michael P. Steinberg’s essential 1990 work, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theatre and Ideology, 1890-1938 (Cornell University Press) in 2000 in both Austria and Germany as Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele 1890-1938 (Anton Puset Verlag, Salzburg and Munich). The German-language edition was the recipient of Austria’s Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001. The book was also republished in English as a Cornell paperback in 2000 with its title reversed and the dates dropped as Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival with an important new preface, discussing, inter alia, Mortier’s role in the modern Festival and the 1999 “Salzburg culture wars.”

Read the whole post here: The view from here to . . . City Opera, Bayreuth, and Gérard Mortier

Read Up on Georgia

Russian troops have entered Georgia today, reports the New York Times. If you want to get up to speed on the context of the conflict, please have a look at two recent books from Cornell University Press:

Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union by Francine Hirsch. This book is the Cowinner of the 2006 Council for European Studies First Book Award, Winner of the 2006 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize given by the AAASS, and Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2007 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize

Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia by Mathijs Pelkmans

Both books are in the series Culture and Society after Socialism, edited by Bruce Grant & Nancy Ries

Suzanne Gordon in the Miami Herald

Suzanne Gordon, coauthor of Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care, spoke at the Miami Dade College Medical Center Campus this week and the Miami Herald has some good coverage:

Nurses’ Union Pushes for Better Staffing