New Yorker Podcasts, Profiting from Poverty, and Casting Stones at Gays

Some good links from around the web this week.

Dana Goldstein at The Nation: "Selling School Reform." -- How Obama, Duncan, and Democrats for Education Reform are giving education to the Wall Street types. (After all, there's good money to be made in the poverty trade.) Ohanion seems unnecessarily harsh on Goldstein in her prefatory comments.

Fiction podcasts from the New Yorker. Great short stories read by great authors. I can see a million classroom uses, beyond the pure pleasure.

Betty Bowers is without sin, so she casts stones freely: See her latest video  explaining traditional marriage to everyone else. (Not educational, beyond the critical reading of an authoritative text and the fine example of satire - call her a female Stephen Colbert, maybe.)

Arne Duncan's Tall Chicago Tales: Education Policy Blog gives "A look at Chicago schools under Duncan." Coming soon to a blighted and soon-to-be-outsourced neighborhood near you. (More de-mythologizing Duncan's turnaround "successes" here.)

CBS radio coverage of Tiananmen Square is one of hundreds of rich a/v resources at Crooks and Liars growing "Newstalgia" archives. History, politics, media studies teachers will love it.

War-gaming North Korea: Wired's link-rich feature on the possible consequences of a U.S. war with North Korea. (I arrived in Seoul the very week that Pyongyang detonated its first nuke three summers ago. I'm leaving now as it's getting even more batsh!t - and not without reason, frankly, though you won't hear that on CNN. Provoking renewed conflict could bloody this place up bad. It's an ugly situation - and the readings would be great for current events teachers.)

It's moving week, folks. Packing up the stuff for shipment to Singapore, preparing for a month of couch-surfing until we fly out - unless the commies invade first.