Friday recommended reads #23

• Pseudoscorpions are awesome. I mean, literally, they inspire awe. Here are ten facts about pseudoscorpions including some great photos of these tiny creatures, too.
• How are highly ranked liberal arts schools different from the rest of them? This post on Memoirs of a SLACer nails it.
• You may have heard about some furor about a joke by Stephen Colbert and the Washington Redskins that infuriated some members of the Asian-American community. I thought most responses were two-dimensional, but this bit by Jay Caspian Kang in the New Yorker had useful surface texture and an interesting take-home message. For the basic summary of what happened NPR did a great job.
• There’s a great new article in BioScience about the importance of Natural History, with Terry Wheeler as senior final author. It got written up in Nature, too. [update: it turns out W is just near the end of the alphabet.]
• Robert Reich has an excellent short article explaining how, globally and locally, the emergency of tribalism is declining the ability of nation-states to govern.
• Thanks to a survey at the Molecular Ecologist by Jeremy Yoder, we now know who signs reviews and who doesn’t. It turns out that tenure-track faculty are more apt to sign. Less senior academics and tenured faculty? Not so much.
• Richard Sherman comes from Compton, right next to my campus, and he graduated from Dominguez High School with a GPA greater than 4.0. He was the first person from Dominguez High to go to Stanford on a scholarship in twenty years. He graduated from Stanford in 2010, and then got a job with the Seattle Seahawks, playing football. He grew up with another football player, DeSean Jackson, who was just fired from his football team (in Philadephia) because of alleged “gang ties.” This situation is pretty much full of crap. Sherman’s explanation and response to this situation is golden. I don’t even watch or care about American football, and I think this is an important read.. (Especially for me, because this is is exactly the kind of crap that is targeted at my students as well.)
• In which Michael L. Smith uses the peer-reviewed scientific literature as a form of performance art. Otherwise, I don’t know why one would intentionally kill a honey bee by having it sting one’s own scrotum, among other body parts.
• If you are a fan of biodiversity, natural history and wrestle with the balance of experimental and observational approaches to understanding nature, I bet you’ll be infatuated with this essay called A New Age of Naturalists, by Rachel Whitaker in the November 2011 issue of Microbe Magazine. Yes, there is a publication called Microbe Magazine.

Thanks to James Waters, and Jen Biddle for links. Feel free to add to the list in the comments.