New Year Links

I have been intending to blog more this year than I did last year, but the first week of the new year has coincided with the first week of classes (my first two, the introductory fiction writing course and the course on writing and publishing for senior writing majors, were on Tuesday), and now I am off to the Modern Language Association's annual convention in Los Angeles, so I haven't had any time to focus on any of the topics I've wanted to. Instead, here are a few links:


The new Congress opens, with GOP controlling the House and Democrats running the Senate

Mass die-offs of birds, crabs, fish across globe alarming scientists, observers

Whither progressivism in the United States from hereout?

After a lifetime of activism, Jean Quan takes office as Oakland's new mayor

Scholar bowdlerizes Huck Finn, changing n-word to slave

Michael Berubé on how conservatives have adopted postmodernism to ill ends

The very rich are very, very different from you and me (or maybe just me)

Republican Allen West joins Congressional Black Caucus, Tim Scott will not

Curtis Mayfield, blackness, autonomy, and resistance

Ivory Coast deadlocked, violence escalates, as Gbagbo refuses to concede

Is Sudan on the verge of a split into Muslim North, oil-rich Christian South?

And, as a bit of lagniappe, a rare random photo:

FRS workers' electric slide outside of the Apple Store, 14th St., NY