• Inside Higher Ed: Temple College in Texas bans the Nietzschean phrase Gott ist tot from a professor’s door on the grounds that it is religious and offensive to some. (EDIT: Temple College president reversed the decision and allows the words on the door)
• Newsweek: Pre-election, on how Obama is loved by the world. “How the U.S. Election Became the World’s Election.”
Outside of the United States, the election played large and transformational: a 21st-century man with whom the whole world can identify versus an old cold-warrior out of synch with the complex political and economic crises of our age. The election, it seemed, had morphed into a meta-election. If at home, especially as the election neared its end, Obama seemed to be playing down his blackness, his intellect, his eliteness and his progressive ideas, these were the qualities that more and more drew the rest of the world to him. The world loved the idea that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could become America’s 44th president after a 200-year string of white guys named Washington and Jefferson, Clinton and Bush. Asia was trying to claim Obama for his Indonesian childhood, Africa for his Kenyan father, and the Middle East for his middle name, says Ahmed Benchemsi, who edits both of Morocco’s leading newsweeklies, one in French, one in Arabic.
• Feministe: “No, We can’t.”
• Chronicle of Higher Ed: “Writing Is Not Just a Basic Skill” by Mark Richardson, a great column about teaching writing. He writes, “Common-sense myths of literacy are akin to other common-sense myths. The truth often turns out to be more complicated than we thought.”
• Newseum: a great resource that archives the front pages of newspapers.
• Joseph Orosco: Argues that politics is not a game of virtue, but a game of strategy.
• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: “Why I’m Not Celebrating an Obama Victory”
• via Derek: Wired columnist Paul Boutin argues “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004”:
Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.
Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.
• Lauren Berlant: “Marry, Hang the Idiots” on gay and straight marriage.
In any case, I am not about to cede civil rights to heterosexuals just because they have a sexual pattern that they like. It’s a sexual pattern, not a way of life! A way of life is a much richer and more complex thing than a sexual pattern. That’s really all I’d like to say.
• Liberal Values Blog: Ralph Nader’s poor choice of words. And Faux News even calls him on it!
