The Mischiefs of Faction is now located at mischiefsoffaction.com. Here's how to follow us:

All our posts will appear on our new homepage, here.

You can still follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

We'll leave all our old content on this site for now.
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By Jennifer N. Victor

[We've got a few more posts in our hopper before we officially move to Vox next week. This one is timely.]

While there is lots of excellent reporting and explaining of the Iran deal out there, in this post, I offer some political science explanation of what's happening in the Senate with the Iran proposal.
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by the Staff

We at the Mischiefs of Faction are pleased and honored to announce that we are moving. After more than three years of independent status, we are joining Vox.com, effective next Tuesday, September 8th.

This is a big step for this blog, which we founded in May of 2012 and have been running independently ever since. But we're very excited for this opportunity.
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This is not an announcement. It's not Wednesday yet. Announcements come on Wednesday.
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by Julia Azari 

An op-ed by Brian Grasso, a student at Duke who chose not to read Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home for a summer assignment, has touched off another round of arguments about campus free speech, ideology, censorship, and accommodation.

The internet rattles week after week with another hot take on the suppression of free speech, or, alternately, the oppression of traumatized students.

by Richard Skinner

Ambition is the fuel that makes American politics run: ambition to win office, ambition to hold onto office, ambition to move up the “ladder” of office.  But there are other reasons for seeking office.  A candidate may want to promote a set of ideas.  She may believe that her party deserves representation, even if she’s unlikely to win.  She may want to gain notoriety for herself.
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MEDIA ADVISORY

Mischiefs of Faction will not be making any announcements tonight. Not on a Saturday night. That would be weird.

by Julia Azari 

Since Jimmy Carter’s announcements over the last few weeks about his cancer diagnosis, there's been a bunch of articles about his legacy. Many of these focus on his post-presidential career as a humanitarian. The implicit, and sometimes stated, comparison is with his presidency, which is not considered much of a success. But to characterize Carter’s presidency as simply a failure, end of story, is to miss a great deal of its significance.

by Seth Masket

On Tuesday, the Colorado Republican Party's executive committee voted to cancel the presidential preference poll that would have been held at its 2016 presidential caucus. In effect, Colorado has just dropped out of the Republican presidential nomination process.

To be clear, there will still be a Republican caucus in the state, sometime in late winter. But a caucus generally serves two functions.
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by Jennifer Victor

The dominant political story in the U.S. today is the odd combination of Donald Trump’s polling dominance for the Republican nomination combined with the nearly unanimous attitude that he’s unlikely to win the nomination or the presidency.

One of the reasons Trump is unlikely to win is because no one like him ever has. That is, nearly every person who has ever served as President has been previously elected to public office (e.g., vice-president, senator, U.S.
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