Via my pal Socrates: Joel Pett's cartoon in today's Lexington Herald-Leader. [Link updated 11/08 - it's the one of Abraham Lincoln's statue and Barack Obama bumping knuckles.]

Heather Jacobson's Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference is now available. It's a study of families with children adopted from Russia and China and the assumptions/expectations they deal with. [Full disclosure: I was the book's copyeditor.]

(Another recent book I edited for VUP is Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games, which some of you culture- and media- theory junkies might find good fun.)

[I really do love my job: Playing included an essay on testing text-based games' responses to cusswords, and another manuscript I worked on this year gave me a professional reason to look at Wikipedia's page on its Lamest Edit Wars.]