University Press Roundup
Time for our weekly look at the best articles from the academic press blogosphere:
Earlier this week, the great Maurice Sendak passed away. He will be greatly missed by children everywhere whose greatest dreams involve taming Wild Things with a simple “BE STILL!” The University of Minnesota Press blog, the University of Mississippi Press blog, and the Harvard University Press blog all have thoughtful pieces on Mr. Sendak’s life and work.
This week was been a big one for Barack Obama, as he openly announced his support for same-sex marriage in an interview Wednesday, a move that will has wide-ranging social and political implications. The OUPblog ran a guest post by Elvin Lim about America’s perception of Obama’s record on Tuesday, before any hint of the Wednesday interview had leaked out. It would be very interesting to see how different a similar article written after the Wednesday interview might be.
Jamie Moyer made his official MLB debut in 1986. He’s still pitching today. This week, his Side of the Pond, the Cambridge University Press blog, featured a fantastic article on Moyer by Stephen Partridge. My favorite Moyer statistic: Moyer has faced ~9% of all players to have an at bat in MLB history. That’s incredible!
Yale University Press’s blog is running a series of posts for Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day focusing on good parenting. This week, they ran a very interesting post looking at the work of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on “childism.” It’s a great read on a subject that isn’t intuitively obvious. Young-Bruehl claimed, “Childism is the hardest form of prejudice to recognize because children are the one group that, many of us think without thinking, is naturally subordinate.”
At the Harvard University Press Blog, Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold has a guest post in which she looks at the education reform ideas of Meira Levinson. Levinson’s project, laid out in her book No Citizen Left Behind, calls for additional civic involvement in schools, particularly for poorer students.
This week is Teacher Appreciation week, and in honor of the occasion Beacon Broadside ran a series of posts on educators and education. Perhaps the most moving of these posts is a heartfelt article by former teacher David Chura on how the standardized test system in America keeps students who have fallen behind in their studies from catching back up, even when they want to and are helped by hard-working and talented teachers.
From the Square, the blog of NYU press, has an interesting piece by Andra Gillespie on Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker recently made headlines for saving the life of a neighbor from a burning building. Unfortunately, Gillespie claims, the popular conception of Cory Booker as a hero hurts Cory Booker as a politician.
The story of the Spanish conquest of Central America is amazingly complicated. The UNC Press blog tackles the political side of the story in an interview with Laura E. Matthew on indigenous conquistadors and how the cooperation with the Spanish has left complicated legacies of racial identity in modern Guatemala.
As always, please leave any suggestions, questions, or criticisms in the comment section!
