Larry’s List: Chicks With Lit Edition

Of Publishers Weekly’s top 10 books of the year, none are written by women. In Texas, right-wingers are writing the textbooks. These and other outrageous facts 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.

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You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world. The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves — Afghanistan.

Report the Truth and Watch the Liars Squirm Right now, there are no incentives to tell the truth. One New York University professor wants to change that.

OK, This Is the Pinnacle of Corporate Crony-Socialism for Wall Street I mean, you really have to understand this.

Computer Method ‘Spots Art Fakes’ A simple method to distinguish artistic fakes and imitations has been demonstrated by researchers.

Is It Still Art With Pasties? Exposed nipples — which are now covered by pasties — on erotic murals at the Erotic Heritage Museum have caused an uproar over the difference between signage and art.

The Key to Literary Success? Be a Man — or Write Like One This fall, Publishers Weekly named the top 100 books of 2009. How many female writers were in the top 10? Zero. How many on the entire list? Twenty-nine.

Are American Students Lazy? Gather faculty members together and it’s not hard to get them talking about the ways students disappoint. They text in class, expect extensions for no good reason, and act surprised when they don’t earn A’s.

How Texan Right-Wingers Affect Your Children’s Textbooks Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics to new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards.

Law Institute Gives Up on Death Penalty Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

Barack Obama, You Remind Me of Herbert Hoover Barack Obama has been compared to almost every American President of the last hundred years — favorably to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan; and unfavorably to Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. I want to put another name in the hat: Herbert Hoover.

The Clintonites Were Wrong The “new economy” was an illusion. Neoliberals have to admit that before they can stop the bleeding.