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.