Moral Mondays vie for share of Kardashians’ attention

“In teaching about inequality, protest, and social change, I’ve sometimes cited the Moral Mondays/Forward Together movement to offer an example, or to link general principles to local events.

“In doing so, I’ve found that, in a class of thirty or so students, only a few will know what I’m referring to, let alone who is protesting what. I am thus reminded that most of the time students spend on their smartphones is not devoted to following the news but to communicating with their equally detached peers….

“It would be a mistake to blame students for what they don’t know, to chide them for being absorbed in social media or celebrity trivia. Students are products of their culture, time, and place. As are we all. If college students today know more about the Kardashians than about politics and policy, it’s because of what they’ve been taught to mind and taught to ignore….”

If it’s not in today’s link dump, you don’t need it

— A visceral provenance indeed: The staircase where Harriet Jacobs was beaten.

— The hoopla for “The King’s Speech” gives cause (were any needed) to look back at the insightful and unblinking work of Durham’s Barry Yeoman, e.g.,  “They Called him B-Biden” and “Why My Stutter Makes me a Better Reporter” and “Wrestling with Words.”

— From the farthest front, 77 accounts by North Carolinians at Gettysburg.

— Jock Lauterer’s latest A Thousand Words selection, from Dorothea Lange, depicts  74-year-old Caroline Atwater in the doorway of her Orange County log home on July 1, 1939.

Just wondering: Might she be kin to Anthony “Shine” Atwater of “Reet and Shine,” the  inexplicably uncelebrated dual biography by Michael Schwalbe? (Ranking one-two worldwide in frequency of the Atwater surname: Chapel Hill and Durham.)

— ” ‘Hush puppies don’t have sugar in them,’ she stated categorically.”