notes from the interblags: literacy, dangerous courses, change.gov

• The NEA reports that reading literature is on the rise. Millie Davis summarizes:

This week the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reported the first rise in the number of adults reading literature since they began their survey in 1982. In fact, 16.6 million more adults reported reading literature (novels and short stories, plays, or poems) in 2008. And, the most rapid increase was in literature reading by young adults aged 18-24.

• Infodoodads reports in December that doodle, the great scheduling tool, is now on Facebook.

• Michael Bérubé discusses the Family Security Matters’ third annual America’s Most Dangerous College Courses. I hope one day I have a course on their list. 😉

• PhD Comics: Abstract MadLibs!

• Crooked Timber has a post discussing how change.gov is working against Obama. Contributors are demanding an investigation into torturing practices by the Bush Administration, something that doesn’t match so well the Obama agenda. An excerpt:

This goes to the heart of the contradictions that the Obama people successfully managed to straddle during the campaign, but are (I think) going to have increasing difficulty in dealing with going forward. The Obama people combined very tight top-down message control and campaign coordination with a fair degree of openness at the bottom to independent initiatives by volunteers. As long as everyone agreed on the same underlying goal (beating the Republicans), this worked. But as that overwhelming imperative recedes, people are going to start pursuing their own objectives – and the ‘open’ architecture that the Obama people have constructed provides them with plenty of opportunities to do this.