I was sitting in the Fargo airport awhile back, and there was Glenn Beck talking with David Horowitz about Jimmy Carter. People were watching, some smiling and some grim. I couldn't tell whether they agreed with Beck or not, but they paid attention. He's a gadfly.

Gadflies prosper in particular circumstances. They gather fans when elements of public life strike enough people as strange, perverse, or just plain wrong, but those people don't feel that they have the access or the influence to change them. Gadflies arise when prominent figures are aggrandized into figureheads, when dubious ideas expand into right-thinking wisdom, or when insulated groups perceived as "elites" seem unaccountable to democratic processes.

For Beck's supporters, the last six months are a case in point. They regard Obama's popularity as an irritating phenomenon -- not the fact that...

The MLA Newsletter has a helpful but depressing count of jobs listed this year in languages and literature. According to the numbers, the drop in job opportunities from 07-08 to 08-09 was 24.4 percent in English and 27 percent in foreign languages. 

In total numbers, the MLA Job Information List this year had 1,380 jobs in English and 1,227 in foreign languages. A full analysis of the figures appears in this MLA report by David Laurence, research director at the MLA.

Traditionally defined jobs in English literature (not American or Anglophone lit, or drama) look especially meager. The MLA report lists 362 ads in all fields of "British Literature," down from 499 in 2000-01. I went through the print copy of the October MLA Job List several days ago and did a quick informal and...

Literary study is in terrible shape, as everyone knows. The language and literature majors are down, the job market in English looks terrible this year (see this), and unit sales of a literary monograph are lucky to reach 400 copies. Also, the insularity of the perspectives and approaches, not to mention the boggy prose, makes the reading of them a wearisome exercise.

But there are great exceptions, and here are three.

Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression is an entertaining and sophisticated ramble through the books, films, music, and ideas of the 1930s. It doesn't do tight interpretations, and there is no grand thesis or theory in play. Rather, it's an engaging...

Two weeks ago, the Audit Bureau of Circulation released figures for average daily circulation of newspapers in the United States.  (See stories here and here.)  For every large daily except The Wall Street Journal, the trend is abysmal.

Here's what happened to paid circulation from April-May 2008 to April-May 2009:

Wall Street Journal                   + 0.6 percent

USA Today                             - 17.2 percent

Two stories in The Wall Street Journal today deserve note. The first one explores the results in Virginia, where the governor's race swung well toward the Republican candidate.  One paragraph offers a sober warning to people who have made the Millennial Generation into a hyper-civically-engaged, heavy-voting, liberal-leaning age cohort. It says:

"Voters ages 18 to 29, who made up more than one in five of the 2008 electorate in Virginia and voted overwhelmingly for the president, were just 10 percent of voters there Tuesday; those who went to the polls backed the Republican, Bob McDonnell, by a wide margin."

The second one is a column by Daniel...

Back in August 2006, AOL released data on some 35 million search queries and 20 million "clickthroughs." One thing they showed was just how important it is to be in the top spot in any Google search. (See here for background on the release, and here for AOL's apology.) 

A breakdown of the popularity of sites that come up in a search reveals a steep downward curve from number 1 onward (see chart here).

The top Web site received 42 percent of all clickthroughs.

Number 2 dropped to 12 percent.

Number 3 dropped to 8.4 percent.

A few weeks ago, Mark Lilla had an article in The Chronicle on the high-handed way in which conservatives and conservatism are treated in academe in general and the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at Berkeley in particular.

A month later the Chronicle published a "Counterpoint" by Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director of the Berkeley center. It is a symptomatic reply, and it deserves further comment.

Lilla's main contention is that the academic understanding of conservatism tends toward flat narratives and smooth summations, such as the placement of anti-communism at the center of conservative thought and the identification of conservatism with right-wing...

With C-SPAN's BookNotes, various local cable shows such as Connie Martinson's interviews, and author appearances on national shows such as Charlie Rose and Colbert (which are preserved on the Web--see this appearance, for instance, by Andrew Keen), there is, in fact, more screen exposure for authors and books than ever before.

It's a fact that cultural conservatives mistakenly overlook, and when they speak of culture going down the drain, they are vulnerable to example after example of literary and bookish material out there on multiple channels all the time. A better conservative argument is that while book culture has spread across TV, non-book...

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press put out a report two weeks ago entitled "What Does the Public Know?" (see here).  The results come from its "News IQ" quiz, which asks people about current events and conditions such as the unemployment rate and Max Baucus. As usual, folks under 30 come up at the bottom of the age-based groups, but another score will surprise many Chronicle readers.

It appears under the heading "Partisan Knowledge Gap." Republicans, it turns out, score higher than Democrats. Here is a chart of numbers for several questions.

In the current controversy over whether Rush Limbaugh is a racist, he and his supporters have based their denials on what they claim are inaccurate accounts of radio and TV broadcasts. A more verifiable source, however, is the text of his two mega-best-selling books published in the early 1990s.
            
The following passage from pages 117-18 of The Way Things Ought to Be (1992) reads sickeningly like a Ku Klux Klan tract.

The civil rights coalition in this country has had its way with the Democratic party since 1957. That was the last time the coalition, as a liberal constituency, was defeated. The coalition includes the ACLU and the leaders of such civil rights organizations as People for the American Way and the National Association for the Advancement of (Liberal)...