A slideshow from The Huffington Post about what they're calling the Texas Textbook Massacre (ha!). The lede: "A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade."
An article from Daily Finance about how enhanced electronic versions of books are "a boon for readers, a headache for agents." Basically, there are copyright issues that come up when the enhanced features are added to the electronic editions.
A series of posts in the New York Times blogs by Steven Strogatz on math. I've particularly enjoyed the post about complex numbers and the one about the Pythagorean theorem.
A Roger Ebert blog post about how Glenn Beck thinks Jesus was a Nazi.
A very interesting article from the New York Times magazine about how to "build" better teachers.
An old interview with David Foster Wallace where he notes that the coolest bookstore ever is the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. He had excellent taste.
A very interesting article from Michiko Kakutani about books in the digital age, touching on: fiction's loss of relevance; copyright questions; the Internet's cultivation of niche culture, or as Cass Sunstein calls it Cyberbalkanization; and celebrity as "the great new art form of the 21st century."
A short thing from the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Romans of the New World?" about an exhibition at the Getty Malibu Villa (which is beautiful and great, by the way) of Aztec stuff. Apparently the Getty is playing up the comparison of the Aztecs to the ancient Romans. The article is short and doesn't say much, but the comments . . . man the comments. Apparently you shouldn't compare the Aztecs to the Romans on the Internet, because the crazies will come out and go off about how barbaric the Aztecs were, how they sacrificed babies, et cetera, etc, and so on.
A story from NPR about "linguistic pet peeves." The author is of the opinion that a peeve cannot be pet unless it is rather unusual. But the whole thing is kind of fun.
Gail Collins on how jacked up Illinois politics are. My favorite part:
"Then there was the No. 2 slot. In Illinois, the candidates for lieutenant governor run all by themselves in the primary. Then the winner is yoked to the gubernatorial nominee on the ticket in November. Would-be lieutenant governors tend not to be household names, so the results of these primaries can be peculiar. (In 1986, Democratic voters nominated a 28-year-old follower of the extremely strange Lyndon LaRouche. This happened on a night that the Chicago LaRouchians were busy holding a mock exorcism in front of the home of a religion professor they had decided was a warlock. The gubernatorial nominee, Adlai Stevenson III, was so horrified that he bolted the ticket and ran as a third-party candidate. Everybody lost.)"
The March 27 Best Seller lists from the New York Times. I'm very pleased that Michael Lewis holds the #1 spot in both paperback and hardcover nonfiction (undoubtedly aided by the movie for The Blind Side, but whatever). Not so thrilled that Nicholas Sparks is the current king of fiction paperbacks.
My friend Marco's five-part series about Krzysztof Kieslowski's film White. It's loaded with spoilers, FYI.
The Awl's take on a new acid-trip-like commercial from Friskies.
OK, no reading involved here, but this Teletubbies video is amazing. I've never taken hallucinogens, or whatever, but I imagine the effect would look something like this. Either that, or the Friskies commercial.
And a New York Times Book Review essay about the rise of bad parents in Young Adult Fiction.
Oh, I almost forgot. Also an epic interview of David Lipsky about his forthcoming book that is essentially a five-day roadtrip with and interview of David Foster Wallace. It includes a question from a very cool guy with the same name as me.
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