The West Virginia primary has kicked up talk of racism but it’s worth noting that nepotism is fought there too. The Chronicle (subscription): A gathering of more than one-third of all full-time faculty members at West Virginia University voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to call on their institution’s president, Michael S. Garrison, to resign over his involvement in the awarding of an unearned executive M.B.A. degree to the daughter of the state’s governor. The motion calling for Mr....

And there’s real reason to be afraid… NPR last night spoke with Kevin Merida about his piece in the Washington Post on racist incidents on the campaign trail. This is some of what was said: Mr. JEAN MORRIS(ph): Don’t want Obama in there. I don’t like his background. They’re putting the man in because of his race, and I don’t – I’m not ready for that. Ms. JOETTA KUHN(ph): Mr. Obama doesn’t have much of a chance here because they will not vote for...

I find Richard Thompson Ford’s, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, compelling and convincing in just about every way but one: he argues gay marriage is not like miscegenation. Ampersand reminds us that Mildred Loving didn’t agree. On the 40th Anniversary of Loving v Virginia Mrs. Loving released a statement: My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it...

AP: In a monumental victory for the gay rights movement, the California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage Thursday in a ruling that would allow same-sex couples in the nation’s biggest state to tie the knot. Domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage, the justices ruled 4-3 in an opinion written by Chief Justice Ron George. CNN: With the ruling, California becomes the second state to allow same-sex couples to legally wed. Massachusetts adopted...

Says Stewart poking fun at Hillary, “Relentlessness ain’t free… ‘Here me now poor working class white people of West Virginia… SHOW ME THE MONEY!’” hilzoy says: For some reason, what got me the most was hearing her ask for more money. She is, after all, an extremely wealthy woman. And she was asking those people she claims to be fighting for — the nurse on her second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner,...

I’m happy for the Edwards endorsement,* but share the distress of those concerned about sweetie: Our candidate is the smoothest orator in the recent history of American politics. Hillary Clinton is usually the one who misspeaks. We’re giving bloggers and newspapers too much ammunition. Especially when this is the second time he’s called a woman sweetie on the campaign trail. Striking sweetie from our candidate’s vocabulary is an admittedly modest measure, but this is linguistic...

Ande @ Toweroad has the good news: United States District Court Richard Smoak ruled in favor of high school student Heather Gillman yesterday in a suit she and the ACLU brought against her school’s principal and the Holmes County School Board. Gillman claimed that her First Amendment rights were violated when the school forbid her from wearing clothing or displaying stickers supporting tolerance and fair treatment of LGBT people. Via the ACLU: “During the trial, which was held in Panama City...

The New York Times: The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are spirited around the city in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments, and eat in special “family” sections of cafes and restaurants, which are carefully partitioned from the sections used by single male diners. Special women-only...

The NYTimes: The muffin cars, electric-powered vehicles built to resemble cupcakes, scoot around the open spaces of the San Mateo Event Center & Expo, a sprawling fairground about 20 miles south of San Francisco and, on this day, a million miles from normal. Just inside the gates of the third annual Maker Faire, a converted fire engine belches an occasional explosive flare that sends a chest-pounding Pfoomp! throughout the fairground, startling bystanders over and over again. That contraption...

At the close of the second of NPR’s two part look at how parents are addressing their children’s gender-identity issues which aired last week, Robert, the father of Violet, who is “absolutely certain” that she is “genuinely transgender,” explains how he finds himself “almost offended” when people suggest that he and his family have been too quick to embrace a transgender identity: “It puzzles me because we even have well-intentioned parents who...

As ABC News reports that John McCain is poised to flip on abortion, it’s worth remembering that social conservatives have done some flipping of their own. UPI, June 1971: The Southern Baptist Convention called today for the legalization of abortion in certain cases, including those where there was “carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother.” I was pointed in the direction of that article by Randall Balmer,...

In describing the cancelled panel, Dr. David Scasta sounds like he had been searching all along for the reasonable middle. The Bryant Park Project’s Rachel Martin sometimes tips towards typical media mayhem — “You think it’s important to engage the people at the fringe, at the very extreme side?” While the activists win on points — they are, indeed, correct in many respects — morally and ethically and I think in the very human terms we live every day, Scasta...

CNet: Two Harvard researchers have concluded that there’s no data to support the notion that violent video games cause the kids who play them to act out violence in real life, contrary to the vast majority of media outlets that would have the public thinking otherwise. The $1.5 million study, which began in 2004, closely examined 1,200 children after bouts with violent games like Grand Theft Auto and not-so-violent titles like The Sims. Psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson found that...

New York Times national legal correspondent Adam Liptak, named last month to replace Linda Greenhouse (who shocked folks at the Harvard Crimson when she accepted a buyout after covering the Supreme Court for 30 years), was interviewed last week by Dave Davies for Fresh Air. They spoke about Liptak’s American Exception series. The United States, with less than five percent of the world’s population, has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. That’s 2.3 million Americans....

A friend (who is a female science professor) sent along this piece from The Chronicle News Blog: For women contemplating careers as science professors, the numbers are daunting. More than half of the bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering these days go to women, but they run into a high hurdle when it comes to securing academic jobs. Fewer than one in three science and engineering professors are female, and the numbers for full professors drop to one in five. So Congress held a hearing today...

Sara P., YouTube Film: Today is Pangea Day, a global event dedicated to bringing people together through film. With its eclectic mix of movies, live music and passionate speakers, Pangea Day aims to help us see life through the eyes of others. There are live events taking place right now in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. But don’t worry if you live far from any of these cities or couldn’t make the actual festivities: On today’s YouTube homepage, you’ll...

Reuters: News Corp’s decision to walk away from Newsday is an unexpected twist in the three-way bidding war for the paper. Murdoch and Tribune Co Chief Executive Sam Zell had an agreement in principle to sell the paper to News Corp, with Tribune retaining a small stake to create a way to defer large capital gains taxes that a total sale would incur. As recently as three days ago, Murdoch said on a conference call with investors to discuss News Corp’s quarterly financial results that the...

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen reports: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. We’ve known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don’t read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding. The only thing we’ve been missing is a mathematical formula to quantify exactly how...

Morley Winograd and Michael Hais have written a new book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future Of American Politics. In it they say that every 30 or 40 years in the history of America there is a generational transition in politics and we’re in for one now. A big one. The Millennial Generation are those who are born between 1982 and 2003. There’s about a million more millennials than there are baby boomers, and twice as many than the generation that preceded it, Generation...

It turns out that one of the doctors in yesterday’s piece on families coping with gender identity issues, Kenneth J. Zucker, Ph.D., is on the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group for the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Pam says that’s not good news: Needless to say, gender-variant LGBT and straight youth, as well as transsexual adults, will likely have to deal with another decade plus of being considered seriously...

Inside Higher Ed, reporting from the front lines of the culture war: A federal judge has ruled that the Georgia Institute of Technology had materials in its office to support gay students that amounted to unconstitutional support for some religious groups over others. [...] The ruling came in a case involving a range of issues over speech codes and support for religious groups at Georgia Tech — issues that mirror those being raised at other public colleges and many of which were resolved in earlier...

I began this piece the other day and should have posted it then. I’m late to the party. I was responding to a commenter who wrote: It’s really sad how much the talk circles around race. It’s a constant reminder how far we haven’t come. Even though I knew that to be true, this campaign is just a daily reminder. The comment was in response to me quoting Thomas Schaller. The irony is that much as I liked what Schaller had to say the other day I’m highly ambivalent about...

I don’t know nearly enough about them. But I was fascinated to learn they had put up a website. On The Media has more: BOB GARFIELD: The FLDS community has been described as something like a tribe in Papua, New Guinea, that is untouched by the modern world. Are they really living in the middle of the 18th century? BROOKE ADAMS: I think that’s a false perception of this group. They have a number of people who have been to college. They are quite Internet-savvy, as the world now knows with...

NPR has a terrific and nuanced story on a difficult and challenging topic. One issue to dispose of right away, the story is headlined Two Families Grapple with Sons’ Gender Preferences, which may suggest to some that those boys make a choice about their gender identity. As their story makes clear, little choice is involved. To people of my sexual identity (I self-identify as gay) using the words gender identity in the title would be more precise. Please forgive the quibble and let’s move...

The tale of the two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who after trying to incubate a rock in the Central Park Zoo were given an egg by a zookeeper to hatch together, tops the list of `challenged’ books again this year: “And Tango Makes Three,” released in 2005 and co-written by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, was the most “challenged” book in public schools and libraries for the second straight year, according to the American Library Association. “The complaints...