The Carnival of Geneology CX is up at Creative Gene. Four Stone Hearth CXIX, the anthropology carnival, is up at Krystal D'Costa's Anthropology in Practice.

From the "you thought things were bad at your place department":

"Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach's interest-free home loan last year. The women's basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.
"Meanwhile, the history department took away professors' desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey's state university froze professors' salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees."

Thanks to Margaret Soltan's University Diaries for the tip.

Alec Ash interviews "Lyndall Gordon on Biographies" for her recommendation of five books that have reshaped biography as a genre.

Megan Buskey, "War and the City," The Book, 5 October, reviews the NYRB's new edition of Margaret Leech's Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865.

Ben Hufbauer, "Hofstadter's 'Lost' Book," IHE, 4 October, remembers Richard Hofstadter's The American Republic.

Blake Gopnik, "Bob Dylan's Plagiarism Row," Daily Beast, 28 September, has the back story to Richard Prince, "Bob Dylan's Fugitive Art," NYR Blog, 5 October.

John Gray, "Delusions of Peace," Prospect, 21 September, is critical of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes.