KC in Lights

Variety reports today that HBO has acquired the rights to Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor, Jr., and our colleague, KC Johnson. Alixandre Witten and Josh Maurer, who produced"The Pentagon Papers" and"Introducing Dorothy Dandridge" for HBO, will be the executive producers of its film on the Duke lacrosse case. Casting begins in comments at Cliopatria!

On another front, Michael Nelson's"Stereotype, Then and Now," CHE, 5 October, is the latest review of UPI. Nelson compares the stereotyping of the lacrosse players at Duke to that of Jim Thorpe, the native American football and lacrosse player at Carlisle Indian School early in the 20th century. Nelson's concluding paragraph:

It's too bad that ... the new Duke lacrosse books are polemics (Taylor-Johnson ... even hoist the red flag of"political correctness" in their subtitles). For one thing, the persecution of the students was itself so unjust that it doesn't need any rhetorical pumping up. For another, the books' harshly anti-left tone will make them easy to dismiss by the very people who most need to reflect on why prestigious intellectuals erred so heinously. The book we really need is a sober, even empathetic account of why people who care about justice can behave so unjustly, and why scholars who know how harmful prejudice is sometimes succumb to stereotyping of a kind that would have put the sportswriters of the Carlisle era to shame.