Congratulations to Jay Rubenstein, a medievalist at UT, Knoxville, who has just won a MacArthur Genius Award for 2007. He joins a group of 17 American historians, 9 art historians, 11 historians of science, 26 other historians, and 5 classicists, including Cliopatria's contributing editor, Thomas G. Palaima, who have won the award.

The only copy of the Magna Carta in private hands or held outside of the British Commonwealth will go on auction in NYC in December. Southeby's expects it to fetch $20 to $30 million.

Katie Roiphe,"Portrait of a Marriage," NYT, 23 September, reviews Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice.

David Margolick,"Through a Lens, Darkly," Vanity Fair, nd. On the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas's Central High School, Margolick looks at what has become of the Little Rock Nine and their white harassers.

Sage Ross,"Urgency," Revise & Dissent, 23 September, observes that developments in modern science rapidly outpace the capacity of historians of science to stay abreast of them. Ross's sense of urgency is explained in his Ragesoss Manifesto, or Why I am a Wikipedian and his contribution of a fine"History of Biology" entry at Wikipedia.

Scott Jaschik,"Another Professor Denied Entry," IHE, 25 September, looks at the case of Marixa Lasso, a Panamanian national who teaches Latin American history at Case Western Reserve. She's been denied a re-entry visa and her classes at CWR have been canceled for the semester.

Leslie Gelb,"Dual Loyalties," NYT, 23 September, reviews John J. Mearsheimer's and Stephen M. Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Our colleague, KC Johnson, is not the only historian who writes from blog to book. In collaboration with The Institute for the Future of the Book, Siva Vaidhyanathan is blogging his next book, The Googlization of Everything. Hat tip.

Finally, congratulations to our colleague, Rob MacDougall. His article,"The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation," American Quarterly, September 2006, is short-listed for the American Studies Association's Constance Rourke Prize for the best article of the year in AQ. That issue of AQ, on the theme of technology and American Studies, has just been published as a book, Carolyn de la Pena and Siva Vaidhyanathan, eds., Rewiring the ‘Nation': The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins UP, 2007); and an earlier article by Rob, on technology and Canadian nationalism, appears in Norman Hillmer and Adam Chapnick, eds., Canadas of the Mind: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalisms in the Twentieth Century (McGill-Queens UP, 2007).