Category: Uncategorized

Welcome!

August 27, 2022

I had far greater ambitions for this site but I will no longer be teaching Global Politics after taking a new job so this is it.

I’ve taught Global Politics for a few years and created this site to post work that I’ve done with my students along with useful resources that I’ve found around the internet.

I owe a debt to other teachers and websites I’ve learned from (you will see their finger prints here). Please feel free to use what you find here however you want.

Please contact me with questions at TokTopics[at]gmail.com

You can also check out the work I’ve posted for other courses I have taught (and also no longer teach):

Theory of Knowledge

American Government

Economics

W.H.O. Warns That Pipeline for New Antibiotics Is Running Dry

August 12, 2021

In two new reports, the global health agency says only government intervention can fix the broken market for new antimicrobial drugs.

Some 700,000 people die each year because medicines that once cured their conditions are no long effective. Yet the vast majority of the 60 new antimicrobial products in development worldwide are variations on existing therapies, and only a handful target the most dangerous drug-resistant infections, the agency said in a report.

America’s Great Passport Divide

August 10, 2021

This topic connects well to concepts related to populism, Brexit, Republican-Democratic Divide, and the concept of “Anywheres” vs. “Somewheres” to explain schisms within western societies

How income, education, and other factors influence our propensity for globe-trotting

Passport holding also reflects something about the underlying personality of places.  American states are not only sorting by income, education and political orientation, but by personality type, according to research by the Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow and his colleagues.  Passport holding is in fact related to three of the five major personality types.  There are positive correlations between passports and Openness-to-Experience personalities, and negative ones to both Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.  “The results suggest to me that this is also linked to Openness,” Rentfrow noted after looking over these findings. “Openness is about curiosity and adventure, so it would make sense that Open places have high numbers of passports.” 

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/americas-great-passport-divide/72399/

What the West Gets Wrong About China

August 10, 2021

Why do leaders in the West persist in getting China so wrong? In our work we have come to see that people in both business and politics often cling to three widely shared but essentially false assumptions about modern China. As we’ll argue in the following pages, these assumptions reflect gaps in their knowledge about China’s history, culture, and language that encourage them to draw persuasive but deeply flawed analogies between China and other countries.

https://bg.hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china#

Throughline Podcast: The Sunni-Shia Divide

February 10, 2021

The Sunni-Shia divide is a conflict that most people have heard about – two sects with Sunni Islam being in the majority and Shia Islam the minority. Exactly how did this conflict originate and when? We go through 1400 years of history to find the moment this divide first turned deadly and how it has evolved since.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943938323/outside-in-war-of-the-worlds