Blog

A blog (a truncation of the expression weblog) is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject. More recently, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.)

Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean (born April 9, 1962) is a professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Biography

Dean received her B.A. in History of Princeton University. She received her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas in San Antonio. She has held visiting research appointments at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, as well as McGill University in Montreal and Cardiff University in Wales.

Work

Drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, she has made contributions to contemporary political theory, media theory, and feminist theory, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism; the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse. She has spoken and lectured in the United States, Canada, Ecuador, Peru, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. She is the co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.

Political science

Political science is a social science discipline that deals with systems of government and the analysis of political activity and political behavior. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics which is commonly thought of as the determining of the distribution of power and resources. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions, and from these revelations they attempt to construct general principles about the way the world of politics works."

Political science draws upon the fields of economics, law, sociology, history, geography, psychology, anthropology, public administration, public policy, national politics, international relations, comparative politics, political organization, and political theory.

Although it was codified in the 19th century, when all the social sciences were established, the study of political science has ancient roots that can be traced back to the works of Chanakya, Plato and Aristotle which were written nearly 2,500 years ago. Political science is commonly divided into distinct sub-disciplines which together constitute the field:

Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Rafiq Thurston (/ˌbærəˈtuːndeɪ/; born September 11, 1977) is an American writer, comedian, and commentator. Thurston co-founded the black political blog Jack and Jill Politics, whose coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention was archived in the Library Of Congress, and was director of digital for The Onion. In 2012, his book How to be Black became a New York Times bestseller.

Early life and education

Thurston was born in Washington, D.C. He grew up on Newton Street in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington. His father was killed when he was young and his mother worked in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. He has an older sister. In junior high, his mother and he moved to a suburban black neighborhood in Maryland. Thurston was educated at the Sidwell Friends School and Harvard University where he graduated with a degree in Philosophy.

Career

Thurston is the author of three self-published books:

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern United States and is the United States' 27th-most extensive, fourth-most populous, and seventh-most densely populated state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border in the Atlantic Ocean with Rhode Island, east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the north and Ontario to the west and north. The state of New York, with an estimated 19.8 million residents in 2015, is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City, the state's most populous city and its economic hub.

With an estimated population of nearly 8.5 million in 2014, New York City is the most populous city in the United States and the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. The New York City Metropolitan Area is one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. New York City is a global city, exerting a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment, its fast pace defining the term New York minute. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York City is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural and financial capital of the world, as well as the world's most economically powerful city. New York City makes up over 40% of the population of New York State. Two-thirds of the state's population lives in the New York City Metropolitan Area, and nearly 40% live on Long Island. Both the state and New York City were named for the 17th century Duke of York, future King James II of England. The next four most populous cities in the state are Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Syracuse, while the state capital is Albany.