Bye-Bye, Bill Moyers Edition

Translating Shakespeare into English (sorry, snobbies), how to get kicked out of preschool (don’t cut your hair), “Android Karenina,” which right-wing nut job is going to replace Bill Moyers and more on today’s list.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Newer links are on top.

The airplane rises from the runway. Bent, folded and spindled into the last seat in coach class — the one that doesn’t really recline — I pull my Kindle out of the seat pocket in front of me, slide the little switch, and lose myself in Matthew Crawford’s story of his passage from policy wonk to motorcycle mechanic.

Is It Time to Translate the Bard Into Understandable English? Isn’t it great to be here at the theatre enjoying some of the mightiest drama civilization has to offer? Yet it has been a long day. It’s going to take some concentration to follow this, well, to be sure, gorgeous and profound, but, if we may, rather dense language.

Tolstoy Will Do the Robot in the Next Quirk Classic Quirk Books, the folks who brought you “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” its prequel, and “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,” have moved on from bloodying the frock of Jane Austen and set their sights on a new author: Leo Tolstoy. No, the company’s fourth augmented classic isn’t going to be “War and Pieces of Brain,” nor will it be “The Undeath of Ivan Ilyich.” It’s “Android Karenina.”…

Circular Ratings New research raises additional questions about the “reputational” survey that is worth 25 percent (more than any other factor) on the U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges.

Entropy Beat: Public Television Losing Bill Moyers, but Gaining a Right-Winger Who Predicted a 36,000 Dow Two of the hardest-hitting shows on public television — “Now” and “Bill Moyers Journal” — will be going off the air in April, as FAIR reported last month. The two shows stand out as examples of what PBS public affairs programs should be: unflinching independent journalism and analysis. The shows have covered poverty, war and media consolidation — not to mention serious discussions of subjects taboo elsewhere, like the case for impeaching George W. Bush.

Obama Received $20 Million From Health Care Industry in 2008 Campaign While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats’ massive health care bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

Milestones in Preschool Education: 4-Year-Old Suspended From School First the facts. This kid is 4-years old. Four! He’s in pre-kindergarten. His name is Taylor Pugh but he prefers the nickname Tater Tot. Do you not love him already?! All he wants to do is go back to the classroom and be with his friends. But he has been suspended since November because his hair is considered too long by his public school (which is Floyd Elementary School in suburban Dallas). His hair, by the way, barely touches his shoulders. From what I can tell, it’s also clean and brushed.

Don’t Blame China The Chinamen did it. In the great American tradition of finding foreign scapegoats for our problems, the hunt is on to somehow hold China responsible for the misery that Wall Street financiers inflicted upon the world.

The Fundamental Unreliability of America’s Media Consider the record of the American media over the last two weeks alone. Justin Elliott of TPM documents how an absolute falsehood about the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing — that Abdulmutallab purchased a “one-way ticket” to the U.S., when it was actually a round-trip ticket — has been repeated far and wide by U.S. media outlets as fact. Two weeks ago, Elliott similarly documented how an equally false claim from ABC News — that two of the Al Qaeda leaders behind that airliner attack had been released from Guantanamo — became entrenched as fact in media reports (at most, it was one, not two). This week, Dan Froomkin chronicles how completely discredited claims about Guantanamo recidivism rates continue to be uncritically “reported” by The New York Times and then inserted into our debates as fact.