Thursday Notes

The University of Colorado's Board of Regents will meet on 24 July to act on President Hank Brown's recommendation about whether it should fire Ward Churchill. The case has become a caricature of procedural restraint.

Evan R. Goldstein,"Deconstruct This: The Language of Farting," CHE, 20 July, reviews Valerie Allen's On Farting: Laughter and Language in the Middle Ages.

Caleb Crain,"There She Blew," New Yorker, 23 July, reviews Eric Jay Dolan's The History of Whaling in America and is supplemented by Crain's"Notebook: There She Blew" Steamboats are ruining everything, 15 July.

Susan Ware,"Skin Deep: A Social History of the Clothes that Few People See," Washington Post, 15 July, reviews Jill Fields, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality.

Rick Anderson,"The Worst Internal Scandal in NSA History Was Blamed on Defectors' Homosexuality," Seattle Weekly, 18 July. There's no evidence in declassified NSA files, however, that they were gay. Hat tip.

Our colleague, Jonathan Reynolds, has a new cd out,"Time's Right." The pr says that he was once known as"the finest dancing White Boy in all of Boston." He's teaching African history now at Northern Kentucky University and entertaining country music lovers in greater Cincinnati. Thanks to his brother, Glenn, for the tip.