Wednesday Links

* Our laws regarding parenthood are in dire need of revision: Louisiana Gay Dad Raises Child, But He’s Powerless as Partner Skips Town With Boy.

But when the men’s relationship fell apart, his partner determined he was the biological father and took the boy out of state to Texas and eventually to Washington State.

Louisiana does not recognize same-sex marriage or second-parent adoption, so Liuzza was left with no legal parental rights.

* The Sound and the Fury, as Faulker absolutely, definitely intended.

* Obama’s Scramble for Africa.

* A secret LEGO vault at LEGO HQ contains all sets ever manufactured. Yes please.

* “If he’s lost National Review, he’s lost the right.” Given how strident Romney has been that he definitely can’t release any more tax returns, it’s a bit odd to me that so many of his fellow travelers are turning on him. Why not take him at his word that the returns are too toxic to see the light of day?

* And Bill Murray almost played Batman? This truly is the darkest timeline.

Ideologies of Citizenship

A child adopted overseas by a U.S. citizen is eligible to become an American, and a baby born in the USA is American even if the parents are not.

But a child born to a U.S. citizen overseas through the increasingly common practice of in vitro fertilization with embryos from donor eggs and sperm is not American, unless an American is one of the donors.

Friday!

* International adoption nightmare. What a mess for everyone involved.

* Here’s something much less horrible: Where’s WALL-E?

* Very cool House of Leaves assignment that gives me hope for the “digital humanities”:

That is, I propose starting the forum from scratch. In our classes we’ll explicitly (and temporarily) forbid students from reading the House of Leave forum. Instead, we create an alternate forum of our own, seeded with a few initial threads that appeared in the original forum. The idea is to recreate the forum, and see how its trajectory would play out ten years later, in the context of a literature class. The 50-60 students from the five classes seems a manageable number to launch a new iteration of the forum; enough to generate a sense of “there” there, but not such an overwhelming number that keeping up with the forum becomes unmanageable (though that would in fact replicate the feel of the original forum).

After three weeks of intensive cross-class use of the renetworked forum, the final step would be to lift the ban on reading the official forum, giving students the opportunity to compare the alternate forum with the original, and draw some conclusions from that comparison.

* A provocative Matt Yglesias post asks what exactly right-wingers are so nostalgic about if not male privilege and white supremacy.

* The coming war on the NLRB. A key figure in all this is the legendary Darryl Issa, who made news this week after the discovery of a former Goldman Sachs VP working incognito for him as a staffer (under an assumed name!).

* And from the “Damn you Krugman!” files: Just 48% of Democrats in a recent national poll said they were “very excited” about voting in 2012.  In 13 previous polls, the average level was 57%. It had been as high as 65% and only twice had the number even dipped below 55%. Meanwhile, confidence in both Obama and the economy is cratering. It didn’t have to be this way, but it’s hard to imagine the way back now.

Closing a Few Tabs

Closing a few tabs.

* Scientific American considers the cognitive advantages of depression.

* Marginal Revolution has a nature/nuture post on educational outcomes in adoptees.

* Dark Stores of the American recession. More at MeFi, including the British counterpart.

* The Beatles, remastered in mono. Reviews are positive.

* …last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels. You had me until “Captain Underpants.” (via Vu)

* Smells of New York.

Progress

A judge on Tuesday ruled that a strict Florida law that blocks gay people from adopting children is unconstitutional, declaring there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting. Yes, yes, yes. No moral reason, no practical reason, no good reason, no reason, period.