More Noted Things
Michael Wood,"Double Thought," LRB, 20 November, reviews Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, eds., Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, trans. by Eric Patton and Ruth Hein.
Two weeks after the United States' presidential election, we're still busy graphing and mapping it:"From Cotton Pickin' to Pickin' Presidents," Strange Maps, 15 November, overlays a map of bales of cotton picked in 1860 on a map of Southern counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008; and Andrew Gelman's"Race, Region and Obama," red state blue state/rich state poor state, 17 November, compares voting along racial lines by section of the country. See also: Eric Rauchway's variations on those charts at The Edge of the American West. The" cotton belt" appears to persist into the 21st century, but now without sufficient voting strength to win South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, or Arkansas. Deep South voters seem more likely to vote along racial lines than voters in other sections of the country. Yet, see Nate Silver's"For Obama, Will Familiarity Erode Contempt?" FiveThirtyEight, 17 November:"The driving factor in determining how Obama performed vis-à-vis John Kerry, however, appears as though it might not be race, but rather how much Obama camaigned in a given state." The power of the"sun belt" seems diminishedwhen Democrats and Republicans dividethe electoral votes of Florida and Texas.
Congratulations to Gabor Boritt, Richard Brookhiser, and Harold Holzer who were awarded the National Humanities Medal yesterday at the White House; and to Clement Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History and director of the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University, Newark, who will co-chair the NEH transition team for the Obama administration.