Today's links (11-2-12 edition)

1. I wanted to write something about the latest act of historiophotic gentrification (been waiting a long time to use that), this one involving Spike Lee's ouster as director of the James Brown biopic (to be replaced by the guy who directed 'The Help'). But Aaron Overfield beat me to the punch in bringing the gentrification meme to this week's head-scratching movie news, and I couldn't bear to take this on after thinking about Nina Simone all week. Even though it may be a bit strong to say that Lee was 'ousted' and 'replaced', just based on the circuitous paths that films take to getting made, one needn't be a standpoint theorist to think that the James Brown story  might benefit from having a black director. There's something to say here about the overlapping but different things that soul music and r&b mean to people of different races - you have this thought to thank for the still from 'Animal House' that appears above - but, like I said, I can't bear to think about it anymore. (The guy from 'The Help'? Really?)
2. The Feminist Wire is 5 days into a great, great series on Black women in academia and their health. In an interesting coincidence, I had just read this interesting piece in Meridians (subscription required to get the entire piece) by Grace Hong that begins by reflecting on the health costs of being an academic WB&F (while black and female).
3. I came some days ago to condemn facebook, now let me praise it: were it not for my friends posting on fb, I would never have discovered this wonderful marker of GOP campaign strategies jumping the shark, again. Then again, maybe black people in 2012 should vote Republican -  because, you know, Lincoln freed the slaves. In semi-related news, I'm really tired of hearing about Obama's war on coal. My fault for living - for watching TV - in central PA, I guess.
4. Sometimes a headline makes you angry even when it sort of gets things right. Like this one. Seriously: what if Mike Bloomberg is right, and Sandy was a function of climate change? Bloomberg? Some smart communication theorist must have a name for this. It happened as the Iraq War, the latest one, descended into an orgy of ill-motivated waste and theft and senseless death and stupidity. It happened as the financial crisis exploded into our lives and, well, continues to rain shrapnel on us all. In all these and still more cases, some people tell us how things are for years and years only to get ignored, until the truth can't be denied anymore and then all of a sudden the people who couldn't countenance the foolishness of the doomsayers before suddenly become converts - but without giving any credit to the proselytizers of doom. Maybe Bloomberg believed in climate change before Sandy - I dunno, I've tried not to pay attention to the man. But the fact that Forbes makes him the prophet of climate realism is just - well, it's not quite like saying that Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan are going to save the world from economic collapse. But it's in the ballpark. Still, not a bad article from Forbes.