Some Noted Things ...

You may have seen that Arriana Huffington has announced that she will launch the Huffington Post on 9 May. Billed as a challenge from the Left to Matt Drudge's The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post will be a star-studded group blog, featuring 250 Hollywood celebrities and some aging notables, such as Walter Cronkite and Arthur Schlesinger. For a moment, I thought this was a major failure for Cliopatria. Why had we not recruited Schlesinger to our ranks? But a group blog of 250 massive egos? The competition for top billing over there could be ferocious. The Tao of Blogging is not for them. He may yet decide that he'd rather be the big, old frog in our young, little pond.

Chris Bray at Histori-blography has repeatedly attacked the notion that academia is a mono-culture. His article on HNN's mainpage,"Egads! Have the Radicals Really Taken Over Our History Departments," effectively summarizes his argument. When David Horowitz made the mistake of suggesting that this is what you would expect from a graduate student in UCLA's left-wing department, Bray, Paul Harvey, Gonzalo Rodriquez, and Linus Kafka, who blogs at Snoblog, gave him a UCLA education. Really, David, you're out of your league with these people; and the scandal, of course, is that UCLA's indoctrination program failed to produce a single fearsome Lefty among them.

Eight months ago, after several plagiarism scandals broke over distinguished faculty members at Harvard's law school, including Laurence Tribe, a group of students there set up a blog, Harvard Plagiarism Archive, to follow the University's handling of the problem. They believe that the University, President Summers, and Dean Elena Kagan have essentially white-washed the scandal and are demanding further action.

Jennifer Washburn,"Columbia Unbecoming," The Nation, 25 April, is highly critical of the university's handling of graduate students' efforts to unionize. It has a link to Provost Alan Brinkley's memo to deans that outlines possible retaliatory actions.

Stephen Johnson's"Watching TV Makes You Smarter," New York Times, 24 April, caught the attention of my colleagues, Jon Dresner and Rob MacDougall.

Finally, the new edition of The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History is up. It features a symposium on Survival, Resistance, and Transmission: New Historiological and Methodological Perspectives for the Study of Slave Religion, with a response by Princeton's Al Raboteau.