Articles

Here are the articles that have caught my eye this morning:

NYT story about the "segregated swimming pool" in Mississippi. Opening sentence: In the fearful cosmos of the segregationist South, the integrated swimming pool occupied a special place: race-mixing carried to an intimate level.

CL article on the revamped Barksdale Reading Institute, based in Mississippi. Jim Barksdale, founder of Netscape, donated $100 million to improve literacy in Mississippi. The Institute has been around since 2000, but they have not been happy with their results thus far so in the last two years they have revamped the program considerably.

Great blog post by our very own first-year, Lisetta Shah. One of those stories that makes you smile and breaks your heart, all at the same time.

Finally, column in today's Daily Mississippian (the student newspaper at Ole Miss) about obesity. The conservative columnist (ostensibly an Ole Miss student, but given the boilerplate feel of the writing week after week I have a feeling the columns are cut and pasted from somewhere else) comes out in favor of Bill Clinton's proposal to eliminate soft drinks and other sugary snacks from public schools in Mississippi as opposed to a similar proposal put forth by a state task force. Sounds good, right? Both proposals are essentially the same, right?

Here's the catch:

Clinton's proposal goes into effect in 2010. The state proposal starts next year. Thus, the multibillion soft drink industry has put their considerable weight behind Clinton's proposal. Of course, that isn't mentioned in the article. Like they say, if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table...