Carnivalesque LXIX, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Kaye Jones. History Carnival XCIV is up at Jen Newby's Writing Women's History.

On the eve of the AHA's annual convention, Robert B. Townsend,"History under the Hammer: Department Chairs Report Effects of Economic Woes," Townsend,"Job Market Sagged Further in 2009–10," Perspectives, January, and Scott Jaschik,"Job Freefall, Job Recovery, IHE, 3 January, offer up the grim news about academic history's job market.

David Brooks,"The Arena Culture," NYT, 30 December, and Michael Roth,"The Classics as the Antidote to Modern Malaise," NYT, 3 January, review Hubert Dreyfus's and Sean Dorrance Kelly's All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.

Fred Kaplan,"Boastful and bullying to the end," Washington Post, 2 January, reviews Edmund Morris's Colonel Roosevelt.

Eric A. Posner,"One Side Now," The Book, 2 January, reviews Erwin Chemerinsky's The Conservative Assault on the Constitution.

Geoff Dyer,"Elegy for England," NYT, 29 December, reviews Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet. See also: Diana Athill for the Literary Review, Jonathan Derbyshire for the New Statesman, John Gray for the Daily Beast, Andrew Neather for the The Scotsman, Peter Preston for the Guardian, Dominic Sandbrook for the Financial Times, Jane Shilling for the Telegraph, and Eric Weinberger for the Boston Globe.