HathiTrust Verdict Could Transform University Access for the Blind; Library Journal, 11/7/12

Meredith Schwartz, Library Journal; HathiTrust Verdict Could Transform University Access for the Blind: "Now that the HathiTrust verdict has held that digitizing works for the purpose of providing access to the blind and print-disabled is not only a fair but a transformative use, schools can feel safer hanging onto those scans until the next student who needs them comes along, and can spend their efforts on improving them or scanning more books, instead of doing the same bare minimum of texts over and over. And Goldstein believes making the text available to sighted persons to crowdsource the manual work would also be fair use. Even more revolutionary than just keeping their own book scans, the Honorable Harold Baer, Jr., held that the University of Michigan libraries can be considered an authorized Chafee entity. That means the library could make digitized collections available not just to the university’s own blind and print disabled students, or even to blind and print disabled students at other colleges, but to any American who qualifies as blind or print disabled under the Chafee amendment."

James Gunn apologizes for ‘poorly worded and offensive’ comments; ComicBookResources.com, 11/30/12

Kevin Melrose, ComicBookResources.com; James Gunn apologizes for ‘poorly worded and offensive’ comments: "Faced with growing criticism, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has apologized for insulting comments he made about women, gays and lesbians in a nearly two-year-old blog post, characterizing his remarks as “poorly worded and offensive to many.”

Out of the Closet and Into a Uniform; New York Times, 11/16/12

Rachel L. Swarns, New York Times; Out of the Closet and Into a Uniform: "Colonel Gary A. Packard Jr., who directs the Department of Behavioral Science and Leadership at the Air Force Academy and co-wrote a recent report on the effect of the repeal on the armed services, said that the transition has gone remarkably well at the military academies. “Are there still pockets of resistance? Absolutely,” said Colonel Packard, who said that some older staff members and retirees would prefer to see openly gay students barred from the academies. “But we hear more stories about the positive,” he said. “Cadets have a more open dialogue with each other because it’s now safe to have the conversation. You don’t see a great big coming-out-of-the-closet party. But what you do see is the ability to have a conversation that you couldn’t have before. That’s an important step.”"

Spinning Their Web: Book review of ‘Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,’ by Sean Howe; New York Times, 11/16/12

J.D. Biersdorfer, New York Times; Spinning Their Web: Book review of ‘Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,’ by Sean Howe: "Marvel’s attempts at diversification in the late 1960s and early 1970s — both in its characters and its media formats — are where the book gets particularly ­intriguing... “The X-Men,” another Lee and Kirby invention that first appeared in 1963, eventually gave Marvel an excellent platform for exploring social issues and making its readership more inclusive. By 1981, Howe writes, “the shocking revelation that the X-Men’s silver-haired archenemy had been a child prisoner at ­Auschwitz ramped up the title’s long-present themes of bigotry and persecution and pointed to the direction that ‘The X-Men’ would take for the decades to come, in which discrimination toward mutant characters was put explicitly in the contexts of racism and homophobia.”"

Lifelong Scholar of the Japanese Becomes One of Them; New York Times, 11/2/12

Martin Fackler, New York Times; Lifelong Scholar of the Japanese Becomes One of Them: "BUT what is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth. When he legally became a Japanese citizen this year, major newspapers ran photographs of him holding up a handwritten poster of his name, Kinu Donarudo, in Chinese characters...Mr. Tsujii said that Dr. Keene was accepted by Japanese scholars because he has what Mr. Tsujii described as a warm, intuitive style of thinking that differs from what he called the coldly analytical approach of many Western academics. He said that this has made Dr. Keene seem even more Japanese than some of the Japanese novelists whom he has studied, like Mr. Mishima, an ultranationalist influenced by European intellectual fads."