The Seven Most Read Posts Last Month

I’m always curious to see what posts people are reading on the blog, and where readers are from. Last month, the most viewed post was a book review of Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach, a gothic tale set in an indigenous community in coastal BC. When I wrote that post I worried that it would be too distant from the theme of this blog to attract readers. The second most read post looked at lost nuclear weapons in Canada. Visits to this one post were up nearly 300%, which suggests that people have a sudden interest in this topic, perhaps because there was news coverage of this topic recently? Most of the blog’s readership is in the United States (78%), so it struck me as unusual for both of the top posts to focus on Canadian issues. The third most read post came as no surprise, since I would expect readers to be interested in a syllabus for the “Introduction to International Studies” class. The fourth most viewed post was a book review of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work, Provincializing Europe; this also made sense because book reviews tend to receive more hits than other posts, and Chakrabarty’s work is a key text in postcolonial theory. The fifth most popular post was a map of U.S. security interests. I often use this map in my introductory class when I am talking about competing theories of security. It tends to foster a good class discussion, and I hope that it has been useful for other faculty. The sixth most viewed post was on the mystery of Witches’ Broom and Bioterrorism in Brazil. Finally, the seventh most read post looked at a spectacular financial fraud in 1920s Portugal. While a story of a daring crime, I wouldn’t have guessed that early twentieth century Portuguese events could attract more readers than contemporary issues.

I was equally curious to see what posts no longer attracted readers. For almost a year the most read post on the blog was about the lost island of Bermeja in Mexico, but that was no longer in the top ten. The post that looked at the definition of International and Global Studies has received many comments, but few readers. My thanks to all of you who follow the blog. And for anyone who might be curious, Kim Brown and I are hard at work on editing the next edition of the textbook, which will come out in January 2015. We have added more contemporary content, reordered the chapters, and incorporated feedback from many readers. I’ve had to rewrite large sections of the energy chapter, because the world has changed to dramatically. South Sudan is now on the world map, but with events in Crimea it may already be out of date.

Shawn Smallman