A decade ago, very few political scientists had either the opportunity or the incentive to engage with the political public in a direct, unmediated way. Today, there is a dense and eclectic ecosystem of political science and international relations-focused blogs and online publications, where good work can easily find an audience through social media. There are multiple initiatives dedicated to supporting academic interventions in the public sphere, and virtually every political or cultural magazine of note now offers a robust online section featuring commentary and analysis in which political scientists are well represented. This has transformed publication for a broader public from something exotic to something utterly routine. I discuss how these changes have affected individual scholars, the field of political science, and the political world with which we are engaged.

Political scientists did fail to predict the precise timing and nature of the outbreak of the Arab uprisings. They, however, did not miss the realities of rising social discontent, institutional degradation, economic struggles, and political stalemates. The literature generally concluded that authoritarian Arab regimes had proven their ability to survive such challenges, and retained sufficient capabilities and strategies to overcome their potential challengers. The survival of most Arab regimes in the face of protests and the resurgence of the old regime in Egypt suggest the continuing relevance of attention to the power of these authoritarian structures. There are a wide range of vital new research questions currently being explored, such as the intensity and rapid diffusion of protest across borders, the variation in the political choices by militaries, the distinctive resilience of monarchies, and the post-uprising struggles to consolidate new institutional orders. Overall, however, the response of Middle East specialists in political science should be viewed as a success story rather than a failure.

The present study relates the survival rate of bagworm eggs to extreme winter temperature and weight of egg clutches. The eggs were collected in the spring of 2009 at 104 locations in the mid-western United States of America across a latitudinal range from 36.5–41.5 °N. Egg survival after a 1-week incubation period was overdispersed, suggesting that survival of individual eggs within a clutch is highly correlated. Logistic regression analysis revealed that the survival of eggs, assessed after 1 or 12 weeks of incubation, significantly increases with the weight of egg clutches and increasing minimum winter temperature (expressed as the maximum temperature during the coldest day of winter). Lethal temperature for 50% of egg clusters was −14 °C for clusters weighing 0.1 g and −18.1 °C for 0.4 g clusters. The regression model developed here provides a tool to forecast the persistence of bagworm populations in recently colonised locations in Michigan, United States of America and southern Ontario, Canada.

The uprisings which swept across the Arab world beginning in December 2010 pose a serious challenge to many of the core findings of the political science literature focused on the durability of the authoritarian Middle Eastern state. The impact of social media on contentious politics represents one of the many areas which will require significant new thinking. The dramatic change in the information environment over the last decade has changed individual competencies, the ability to organize for collective action, and the transmission of information from the local to the international level. It has also strengthened some of the core competencies of authoritarian states even as it has undermined others. The long term evolution of a new kind of public sphere may matter more than immediate political outcomes, however. Rigorous testing of competing hypotheses about the impact of the new social media will require not only conceptual development but also the use of new kinds of data analysis not traditionally adopted in Middle East area studies.

David Patrick Houghton's U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis explores the power of historical analogies in foreign policy decision making, offering along the way an engaging, thought-provoking account of decision making during the Iranian hostage crisis. Posing the question “How do decision makers reason when confronted by a problem which seems almost entirely novel in character and therefore without precedent?” (p. 19), Houghton follows Khong's Analogies at War in arguing for the centrality of analogical reasoning. The seizure of the American embassy by Iranian student radicals presented a genuinely perplexing problem for decision makers on all sides, and Houghton captures their uncertainty well. Since decision makers can rely on different historical analogies, and even the same historical analogy can offer competing lessons or be subject to divergent interpretations, Houghton focuses attention upon the interpretive interplay of analogies. As the crisis unfolded, decision makers deliberated, directly and indirectly, over the most relevant and useful analogy. These analogies, according to Houghton, are not merely justifications for strategies chosen for other reasons but directly affect individual policy preferences by shaping beliefs about the nature of the problem. Houghton convincingly establishes the prevalence and power of historical analogies in shaping the response of policymakers to unfamiliar situations. His efforts to construct generalizable theoretical propositions about their relative causal weight are somewhat less successful but are consistently thought-provoking.