Translating Shakespeare into English (sorry snobbies) how to get kicked out of preschool (don’t cut your hair) “Android Karenina” which right-wing nut job is going to replace Bill Moyers and more on today’s list.

On a regular foundation Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture art and communication visual communication and media portrayals of minorities Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Newer links are on top.

The Scholar’s Guide to the Kindle
The airplane rises from the runway. Bent folded and spindled into the last seat in tutor class—the one that doesn’t truly recline—I pull my Kindle out of the seat pocket in the front of me slide the little switch and lose myself in Matthew Crawford’s story of his passage from policy wonk to motorcycle mechanic.

Is It Time to Translate the Bard Into Understandable English?
Isn’t it great to be here at the theatre enjoying some of the mightiest drama culture has to offer? Yet it has been a long day. It’s going to receive some concentration to follow this well to be sure gorgeous and profound except if we may rather dense language.

Tolstoy Will Do the Robot in the Next Quirk Classic
Quirk Books the folks who brought you “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” its prequel and “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” have moved on from bloodying the frock of Jane Austen and set their sights on a new author: Leo Tolstoy. No the company’s fourth augmented classic isn’t going to be “War and Pieces of Brain” nor will it be “The Undeath of Ivan Ilyich.” It’s “Android Karenina.”...

Circular Ratings
New research raises additional questions about the “reputational” survey that is worth 25 percent (more than any other factor) on the U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges.

Entropy Beat: Public Television Losing Bill Moyers but Gaining a Right-Winger Who Predicted a 36000 Dow
Two of the hardest-hitting shows on public television—“Now” and “Bill Moyers Journal”—will be going off the air in April love FAIR reported last month. The two shows stand out as examples of what PBS public affairs programs should be: unflinching independent journalism and analysis. The shows have covered poverty war and media consolidation—not to mention serious discussions of subjects taboo elsewhere like the case for impeaching George W. Bush.

Obama Received $20 Million From Health Care Industry in 2008 Campaign
While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats’ massive health concern bill little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

Milestones in Preschool Education: 4-Year-Old Suspended From School
First the facts. This kid is 4-years old. Four! He’s in pre-kindergarten. His name is Taylor Pugh but he prefers the nickname Tater Tot. Do you not love him already?! All he wants to do is go back to the classroom and be with his friends. But he has been suspended since November since his hair is considered as well long by his public academy (which is Floyd Elementary School in suburban Dallas). His hair by the way barely touches his shoulders. From what I can tell it’s also clean and brushed.

Don’t Blame China
The Chinamen did it. In the great American tradition of finding foreign scapegoats for our problems the hunt is on to somehow hold China responsible for the misery that Wall Street financiers inflicted upon the world.

The Fundamental Unreliability of America’s Media
Consider the record of the American media through the last two weeks alone. Justin Elliott of TPM documents how an absolute falsehood about the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing—that Abdulmutallab purchased a “one-way ticket” to the U.S. when it was actually a round-trip ticket—has been repeated far and wide by U.S. media outlets as fact. Two weeks ago Elliott similarly documented how an equally false assert from ABC News—that two of the Al Qaeda leaders behind that airliner offensive had been released from Guantanamo—became entrenched as fact in media reports (at most it was one not two). This week Dan Froomkin chronicles how completely discredited claims about Guantanamo recidivism rates continue to be uncritically “reported” by The New York Times and then inserted into our debates as fact.