We don't think this second video is as funny as the first — partly because it doesn't involve William Shatner, but also because unlike this poor woman whose 15 seconds of sorta-fame include her talking about slavery on East Coast, Sarah Palin isn't actually crazy. She's just ignorant and incurious, which is maybe scarier. Can't we draft William Shatner to run for President in 2012 instead? Sadly, no, because unlike Barack Obama, he was born outside the US.

William Shatner Reads Sarah Palin Farewell Speech [BuzzFeed]
Sarah Palin Vs. Crazy Woman [Funny or Die]

From "And Wilt Thou Weep When I Am Low?" (1808)

From "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year." (1824)

From "When We Two Parted" (1817)

From "The First Kiss of Love" (1806)

From "So, We'll Go No More A-Roving" (1817)

Earlier poetry: Teen Prom: Grotesque Gowns & Girl-On-Girl Action
French Vogue: The Wind Beneath Our Wings

The situation: Padel and Walcott were both candidates for the prestigious position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Walcott, a 79-year-old poet born in St. Lucia, was the frontrunner, until members of the Oxford faculty received anonymous letters detailing past sexual harassment allegations against Walcott. Walcott stepped down, and Padel was chosen. Then The Sunday Times revealed that Padel had sent two journalists emails drawing their attention to the allegations. Now Padel has stepped down, saying, "I acted in complete good faith, and would have been happy to lose to Derek, but I can see that people might interpret my actions otherwise."

One of Padel's nominators, Professor of Philosophy A.C. Grayling, said,

It would have been really marvellous actually to have a women professor of poetry at Oxford, had it been a straightforward, clean fight. So it's deeply, deeply disappointing that things worked out this way and that this kind of scurrilous...campaign was run against Derek Walcott.

But it's also disappointing that any discussion of Walcott's history of sexual harassment — and he has admitted to propositioning one student — is now tainted by Padel's appearance of self-interest. Padel's involvement has sunk the issue into the realm of identity politics, leading Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent to compare the conflict between the two poets to "the fierce contest between race and gender represented by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton." Like Clinton, Alibhai-Brown argues, Padel has come in for harsher criticism because of her sex:

the shockwaves set off by her emails suggests that ambitious women are not allowed to play hard. Men can and do use any weapons they have when battling against competitors, but not so the gentler sex. How many male professors across the land can honestly say they have always played fair to reach where they are?

And like Obama, "Walcott was judged by uniquely high standards and I do wonder if that was because of his race." But the fact that both Padel's emails and Walcott's harassment might have been excused if perpetrated by white men doesn't mean that either action is acceptable. Padel has made unbiased discussion of Walcott's misdeeds impossible by injecting her personal ambitions into the conflict. And these misdeeds themselves are hardly any less reprehensible because they are common. Alibhai-Brown writes,

When Walcott stood down, he must have felt he was being "punished" for something that is widespread in higher education, even today when universities have anti-harassment policies. When in Oxford in the early Seventies, we all knew who the letch tutors were, so too the obliging wenches who happily gave themselves to the lotharios. I walked into the office of my "moral tutor" to find him and a young woman certainly not engaged in matters of the mind. His large 18th-century desk was clearly good at multi-tasking.

If it's true that, as Alibhai-Brown says, this "tradition [...] is alive and well today," this is all the more reason why Oxford shouldn't be fostering it by honoring professors with records of harassment. Unfortunately, the debate over what Oxford should have done in this situation — and what it should do with future candidates who stand accused of similar infractions — is likely to fade amid arguments over Padel's motives.

Oxford Poet 'Sorry' Over Vote Row [BBC]
Oxford's First Female Professor of Poetry Resigns [New York Times]
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: A Male Poet Wouldn't Have Been Blamed For Rough Tactics [The Independent]
[The Movement to Stop Derek Walcott's Election as Oxford Professor of Poetry] [The Suburban Ecstasies]
Walcott Set to Take Britain's Second-Highest Post in Poetry [The Suburban Ecstasies]
Derek Walcott - Possible Inaugural Poet [Suite101.com]

11-year-old Tuba Sahaab is described as "a slight girl of 11, living in a simple home in a suburb of Islamabad." In a profile rife with superlatives, the author describes her work thusly:

With her pen, Tuba is taking on the swords of the Taliban. She crafts poems telling of the pain and suffering of children just like her; girls banned from school, their books burned, as the hard-core Islamic militants spread their reign of terror across parts of Pakistan.

Tuba lives near a Taliban-controlled region where opponents of the regime are routinely executed in what's known locally as "slaughter square." Tuba's parents are proud of their daughter's courage and apparently feel her safety isn't compromised by her politcally-charged work. As to the poet herself, she speaks of wanting to be an astronaut and meet President Obama. "I want to go the White Palace and show him my poems, show him what is happening and ask him to come to Pakistan and control it because he is a super power."

This is indeed heartwarming, but the piece is troubling; Tuba is apparently active in local media, and the piece describes a recent appearance on public radio. Surely exposure in an international media outlet such as CNN will only increase her visibility. While her parents' support is great, is this kind of activism truly safe under the "reign of terror" the author describes? She is, after all, a child - even if one "wise and brave beyond her years" - and while her sentiments may be laudable, it's also true that she's obviously in agreement with her parents, who facilitate her activism. I'm not questioning that the impetus comes from the child herself, or that someone her age can bring an unusual passion, but something about the obvious danger of her position makes me highly uneasy. I wish her safety and look forward to seeing her mature into what will surely be a force to be reckoned with. Girl poet takes on the Taliban with her pen [CNN]

Alexander, who met Obama during their time as faculty members at the University of Chicago, is thrilled at the opportunity, and says that her parents are even more excited: "This is an incomparable thrill to them in the way that Obama's presidency is an especially potent and powerful thing for African-Americans in their 70s who have devoted their lives to progress," Alexander says, "To be a part of it, I almost can't imagine it myself."

Alexander follows Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, and Miller Williams as the only poets to read at inauguration ceremonies; she says she hopes, through her poem, "to symbolize and demonstrate is the important role that arts and literature can play in this moment when the country is thinking so keenly about moving forward and coming together." As for her friendship with Obama, Alexander notes, "That friendship makes this opportunity all the more special."

Yale Poet Prepares For Inauguration [AP]

Oh yeah, and none of that would have been discovered if an intrepid photographer for state-run news service Xinhua hadn't learned all this upon learning a few stories about Lin and daring to ask the question, "But why would the Party imprison someone so clearly passionate about socialism and the brotherhood of the proletariat?" After all, she had supervised a the execution of a landlord.

No really, he really wondered this. See, your average Chinese college student is almost as ill-informed about the Cultural Revolution as your average American college student. The difference is that your average Chinese college student, upon realizing this, might find something actually wrong with that.

For nearly a month, he had been trying to learn about Lin Zhao, an obscure poet who grew up not far from Nanjing and attended Peking University in the 1950s. A friend told him that of all the students at the school, Lin was the only one who refused to write a political confession during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao Zedong's 1957 purge of Communist Party critics. Her intransigence was rewarded with a prison term, and then a death sentence at the age of 36. But she left behind a secret legacy: She had continued writing in prison, using her own blood as ink.

Hu was stunned. He had never heard a story like Lin's, never imagined that anything like it could happen in China. He began looking into her story and was quickly drawn in. It was as if he had stumbled upon a mystery waiting to be unraveled. Why had she been executed? What did she do?

In essence: she basically just refused to shut her mouth, or succumb to torture and use it to take back everything she said about the Communist Party needing scrutiny and input from dissidents etc. etc.

Hu read feverishly deep into the night. The document was ostensibly a letter to the People's Daily, the party's official newspaper, but it was unlike any letter he had ever seen. Lin condemned the Anti-Rightist Campaign and accused the party of taking advantage of the idealism of her generation. She wrote of the abuse she suffered in prison, of guards who handcuffed her in painful positions and force-fed her through her nostrils. She described how she wrote in blood after they took away her pen, and how the prison saved her writing to use against her. Occasionally the letter deteriorated into an incoherent rant, but every page was brimming with emotion and defiance.

Anyway, an ex-boyfriend of Lin Zhao daringly managed to save the poems, which is more than you can say for all the countless other priceless ancient edifices, artifacts, artistic and literary works and sundry other manifestations of counterrevolutionary thought destroyed during the campaign, and when Hu Jie got hold of them, he decided to film a documentary about Lin. Of course, since China is decades ahead of us on FISA-type tricks, the authorities were onto him, but after a brief chat, they decided not to break his legs or anything. So, the documentary is out and Lin's story can now go on to activate the spirits of that tiny half-percentage of the population interested in things like mob rule and groupthink and the disarming sincerity of the victims of some of history's most incomprehensible acts of cruelty... and maybe what the consequences suffered by people dedicated to the seemingly benign pursuit of the truth can teach us about the present condition.

While leaving the rest of us to ponder such questions as, 'So you think she used her menstrual blood?'

A Past Written In Blood [Washington Post]
Out Of Mao's Shadow [Amazon]
To Remember History: Hu Jie Talks About His Documentaries [Senses Of Cinema]