Now, past APSAs have had their moments of peril, but this was still a ratcheting up of security protocols. If I had to guess, I would speculate that the new measures were the result of some threat that was low-probability but nonetheless required some precautionary steps lest APSA get accused of doing nothing if/when something happened. In other words, APSA, like all bureaucracies, engaged in CYA protocols, and it is hard to blame them. Since anonymous, low-level threats are easy to make online, I fear this will be a new feature of APSA.

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2. A new suggestion for roundtable chairs. I chaired a hastily assembled roundtable to honor Robert Gilpin. As chair, my responsibilities were exceptionally light, and so I also live-tweeted the keen observations of my academic all-star panelists. The feedback to this on Twitter was overwhelmingly positive. Given the number of political scientists who are unable to attend APSA, or cannot attend a particular roundtable due to a scheduling conflict, it seems to me that chairs on these panels could use threaded tweets as a means to broadcast the panel to a wider audience. Just a thought.

3. The political science discipline has caught up to 2016. By my count there were more than 200 panels that were Trump-related. The Trump effect could also be felt in the book room, which is where different university and commercial presses hawk their recent and forthcoming wares. It was impossible to look at a press's collection of books without noting two new kinds of releases: books about the rise of populism and books about the pervasive corruption of elites.

On the one hand, this is a clear sign of how Trump has affected political science. Indeed, the degree to which our toddler in chief sucks up all the oxygen in the room is impressive. On the other hand, political scientists often arrive at a problem just after its moment has passed. In the case of Trump, we will see come November.

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4. The key ingredient to a great conference is.... Good coffee. Seriously, I have attended APSAs where the coffee near and in the conference center was subpar, and those conferences did not go well at all. This one, thankfully, was adjacent to the newly opened Prudential Center Blue Bottle cafe, and dear God their coffee was so, so good!!! It was so obviously superior that I confess to devaluing the senior colleagues I observed lining up at a nearby Dunkin' Donuts. Why wait in a longer line for inferior coffee?!