Congratulations to Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, who shares this year's Kluge Prize with Paul Ricoeur. Pelikan has been a major figure in my pantheon for many years, the kind of historian whose work is described as"magisterial." When I was still in seminary, word went out that Pelikan was brilliant. At his history oral exams, it was said, a member of his examining committee thought to stump Pelikan with a question about some obscure leader of the Polish Reformation. Not missing a beat, the story went, the young church historian not only answered the question, but he answered it in Polish.

The Dictionary of Received Ideas welcomes Greg Robinson to Cliopatria's circle with a series of links to the history of French North America.

My neighbor, Mark Bauerlein, is clearly on a roll. He's taken a leave of absence from Emory to become Director of Research & Analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts. He may need that tenured professorship if congressional Republicans and Democrats agree on Jonathan Chait's suggestion that NEA is an obvious target for elimination. It would be an easy gift to fiscal and social conservatives. But Bauerlein has a pen that is mightier than anybody's budget-cutting sword. Beyond his three books, there are his recent essays:"Bad Writing's Back" which Erin O'Connor calls"absolutely smoking" and"Liberal Groupthink is Anti-Intellectual" [subscription required]. George Will called the latter essay"dazzling" and it dazzled at least twobloggers at HNN into reflecting on it.

Blogging is just an amazing thing. So, you're posting about a book, which you haven't yet read, but you're posting about it because you've been stimulated by a review of it. All of a sudden, there's a note from the book's author on your blog. He'd be happy to discuss it with you via e-mail, if you first read the book, he says.
Or, you're normally one of those short ‘n snappy posters when you're at home in California. Then, you visit Copenhagen and your blog fills with beautiful pictures and detailed accounts of activity. My guess is that Alex Pang is keeping the family informed.
Or, the Volokh Conspiracy is suddenly pre-occupied by a Supreme Court case about medical marijuana. It could be because Randy Barnett, one of the Conspirators, is a lead attorney in the case and he's fighting an up-hill battle. It inspires Barnett to a rare VC photograph ("Look, ma, it's me and Nina Totenberg!") But you know that blogging is the wave of the intellectual future, when Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker and Federal Judge Richard Posner join forces in The Becker-Posner Blog.

In case you hadn't heard,"blog" tops Merriam-Webster's list of the top 10 new words of the year. Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber suggests that there's a huge disparity about blogging among academic disciplines. Law, philosophy, and political science are heavily represented. History is not so well represented. Well, er, actually it is. CT needs to up-date its blogroll. Break of Day in the Trenches, Chapati Mystery, Dictionary of Received Ideas, Early Modern Notes, Far Outliers, Frog in a Well, Ghost in the Machine, Medieval Studies, No Great Matter, No Loss for Words, Philobiblion, and Renaissance Weblog are just a few of the many fine history blogs that the Crooked Fellows haven't yet discovered and explored.