Links, links, and more links...

These have been sitting in my bookmark folder for awhile now:

1) Some takes on the new Great Gatsby movie. We talked about this in my ENGL 301 class (after reading Gatsby). I am going to withhold judgment for now, but I do find Ta-Nehisi Coates' points quite compelling:

"As in so many of the books I love, I found the plot in Gatsby to almost be beside the point. Whenever I see it translated to cinema, the film-maker inevitably crafts a story of doomed romance between Daisy and Gatsby. It's obviously true that Gatsby holds some sort of flame for Daisy, but what makes the book run (for me) is the ambiguity of that flame. Does he really love her? Or is she just another possession signaling the climb up? I always felt that last point—the climb up—was much more important than the romance. What I remember about Gatsby is the unread books. His alleged love for Daisy barely registers for me."

2) Random, but kind of cool: Kevin Harvick's wife is a 1996 graduate of UNCG's English program. See, you can do anything with an English degree.

3) I've been wrestling with how to help students in my advanced composition class write stronger reviews of the Buffy episodes we are watching. Carrie, my friend/colleague, pointed me towards a terrific TV critic, Heather Havrilesky (most recently, she worked at Salon). Here's a link to Havrilesky's take on Glee that rings pretty true to me. I think the show is more great than awful, but it can be so very bad and still doesn't seem to know what the heck kind of show it wants to be. She's got another keeper on Modern Family.

4) A study from The University of Chicago that isn't surprising at all: "Writing about worries eases anxiety and improves test performance." Composition teachers have been saying this for years, but I guess we've got scientific proof now. 

5) And this one is from way back in January: healthy cats pretend to be sick when we annoy them. Duh. They are geniuses that way.