Friday Notes

Both the Boston Globe and the Harvard Crimson report this morning that Drew Gilpin Faust is likely to be named the next president of Harvard by its Board of Overseers on Sunday. That's a result Cliopatria's Rebecca Goetz has been suggesting for many months. Thanks to Inside Higher Ed for the tip.

John Noble Wilford,"Meet the Relatives. They're Full of Surprises," NYTimes, 9 February, reviews the new exhibit at New York City's American Museum of Natural History.

Tad Friend,"Power Play," New Yorker, 8 January, and Helena Andrews,"‘Rome' Offers Lessons from Some Very Old Pros," The Politico, 5 February, review HBO's"Rome".

Jerry Weinberger,"The Scientific Mind of Benjamin Franklin," New Atlantis, Winter. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip. At Little Professor, btw, Miriam Burstein has a fine linkography of online sources for"Victorian Science."

Shashi Tharoor,"India's Quiet Revolution," Washington Post, 4 February, reviews Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India.

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Jim Lindgren takes on the claim by Holy Cross sociologist Jerry Lembcke in multiple places that reports of American veterans returning from the Viet Nam war were sometimes spat on is an"urban legend." Lindgren is not through rounding up his evidence, but Lembcke won't be left standing when this is over.

Patricia Cohen,"In Books, A Clash of Europe and Islam," NY Times, 8 February, looks at the controversy over the naming of Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.

Both conservative black academics and radical MIT faculty members, including Noam Chomsky and Soviet historian Elizabeth Wood, have rallied to support James L. Sherley's bid for tenure. His fast, protesting tenure-denial continues, but the institution's decision seems unlikely to change.