On her book Jimmy Carter,Human Rights,and the National Agenda
Cover Interview of June 29, 2009
Lastly
I think this book is significant for two reasons.
First, there is so much smart work in the world that it is almost impossible to keep up with your own field, much less get into a field where you aren’t comfortable. I’m lucky because I’ve always been at the intersection of different areas. That is not to say that I am the expert in any one of them, but I am aware of the work in a lot of different fields. So I was able to synthesize some of the most important ideas from several different subfields. Hopefully, the book brings some insight that we wouldn’t otherwise have.
Second, I think it is important for us to understand how the presidency really works in relation to the mass public. When are presidents persuasive? How does that persuasion work? What are the consequences? The presidency looms so large in public affairs and the stakes are so high that any insight we can muster on the institution is important.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Lastly
I think this book is significant for two reasons.
First, there is so much smart work in the world that it is almost impossible to keep up with your own field, much less get into a field where you aren’t comfortable. I’m lucky because I’ve always been at the intersection of different areas. That is not to say that I am the expert in any one of them, but I am aware of the work in a lot of different fields. So I was able to synthesize some of the most important ideas from several different subfields. Hopefully, the book brings some insight that we wouldn’t otherwise have.
Second, I think it is important for us to understand how the presidency really works in relation to the mass public. When are presidents persuasive? How does that persuasion work? What are the consequences? The presidency looms so large in public affairs and the stakes are so high that any insight we can muster on the institution is important.
© 2009 Mary Stuckey