Historians find myriad errors in VA textbooks

Just a day after Virginia’s textbook-error story returned to the local news, it’s gone national again, because there turned out to be problems beyond the claim that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks.” Jay commented on this yesterday, but today Talking Points Memo has headlined the story, reporting that “Among the textbooks’ errors are claims that the Confederacy included 12 states and the U.S. entered World War I in 1916.”

I can relate to this, because my high-school textbook in Tennessee also said we entered the war in 1916. Imagine my shock when I got to college. The plus side is when I’m wrong about things, I can blame Tennessee; the drawback is that when I write counterfactual-history science fiction, I’m liable to create timelines meant to be uncanny by virtue of their mere eleven Confederate states.

I hope we’re checking math and physics textbooks too. I don’t want us raising a generation to believe Cantor’s Theorem states that the cardinality of the power set of a set S only sometimes exceeds the cardinality of S itself. George W. Bush famously asked, “Is our children learning?” but in Virginia an equally important question is “What is our children learning?”

The state says it’s tightening the approval process for textbooks, and they should hurry. It will be yet another embarrassment if a new process isn’t in place before next month’s Gettysburg Address sesquicentennial.

Cuccinelli is a hoax

Donate $10 to the Virginia Sierra Club and get a bumper sticker.

Judge rules Pilot can access Norfolk schools’ documents

No word on whether AltDaily will be able to read them too.

Nye eager to mount reelection bid?

I guess Obama didn’t offer him an ambassadorship.

As frustration grows, airports consider ditching TSA

Many airport managers believe that private security firms—and I’m not making this up—would be better at conducting security checks “with a personal touch.”

Man strips in protest at Richmond airport

Scrawled across his chest was an ad for a private security firm.

What the Tea Party wants from the Constitution

The Post’s Ezra Klein dismantles the “strict constructionist” argument. When the constitution was written in 1812, who could have predicted the problems of today?

Vice cops: Norfolk a hotbed for Web prostitution

A lengthy and well-reported Pilot story about prostitution-related police stings.

Don’t drink and drive: Free rides for New Year’s revelers

Tidewater AAA and the Portsmouth Sheriff’s Office will drive you home for free tonight if you’re intoxicated.

New Year’s Eve

Eleven years ago, on 31 December 1999, a small subset of the populace tore its hair out in frustration at everyone else’s belief that the new millennium was a day away. Those people are called pedants, and they alone tomorrow will celebrate the start of a new decade. The rest of us welcomed the teens—or whatever we’re calling them—364 and a half days ago.

I’ve been too busy watching C-SPAN to read many new books or hear much new music this year, so I can’t draw up long lists of my favorites in any particular category. What follows instead is a haphazard grab bag of 2010’s best things. Why should you care what I liked best in 2010? I don’t know! Probably you shouldn’t. But if for some reason you do, then read on.

I’ll start with books: Room by Emma Donoghue is the gripping and heartbreaking story of Jack, a five-year-old boy who has never been out of the windowless room where a psychopath has imprisoned Jack’s mother as his sex slave. This National Book Award nominee was inspired partly by the depraved case of Joseph Fritzl in Austria. I read the whole thing in one sitting.

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff is a remarkable history of Egypt’s last pharaoh, written in superb prose; it will bring a fully realized ancient Alexandria to life in your mind. If you think you pay too much in taxes, read about life under the Ptolemies. In the first century B.C. Egyptians submitted to the most regulated economy in history without rising up against it, but when a visiting Roman aristocrat accidentally killed a cat, they erupted in relentless outrage until the monarch let them put him to death.

Secret Historian by Justin Spring brings us the incredibly well-documented life of Samuel Steward, who was a professor, tattoo artist, pornographer, gay-rights pioneer, lover of Rudolph Valentino, and good friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Steward kept a meticulous card file containing information on every sexual encounter of his life: all five thousand of them. Photos of his orgies are under lock and key at the Kinsey Institute. It’s a fascinating biography.

Two books that I’ve just started will probably wind up on my best-of list: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, which examines the African-American south-to-north migration of the 20th century, and To the End of the Land, the novel that David Grossman had nearly finished writing when his twenty-year-old son Uri was killed in the 2006 Lebanon War.

Now for music. I marvel at the ability of Pitchfork critics to come up with tangible language to use in album reviews, e.g. “the bubblegum hookwork of their gauzy soundscapes gives way to a brittle crevasse field hiding ice caves of milky emptiness,” but it’s a skill I lack, so I’ll only list my favorite albums of the year: The National, High Violet; Titus Andronicus, The Monitor; Arcade Fire, The Suburbs; Hot Chip, One Life Stand; LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening; Girls, Broken Dreams Club.

I won’t name any films; who has time for films when AMC makes such good serial dramas? Season three of Breaking Bad and season four of Mad Men together consumed 26 hours that I could have spent reading political blogs. And Friday Night Lights remained as good as ever.

Actually, disregard what I just said about blogs. I’m sick of them all except two: Unclaimed Territory, Glenn Greenwald’s blog at Salon, and The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s at The Atlantic. There’s really no understating the importance of what Greenwald is doing to expose the abuses of our ever-increasing secrecy state. He has been relentless in reminding us of the two-tiered justice system that imprisons the poor while letting elected officials torture at will. He’s also one of the only sane voices in the ongoing Wikileaks debate; his recent pieces on Bradley Manning, Wired, and Julian Assange are essential reading.

In 2004 I’d have laughed at the suggestion that I’d ever admire Andrew Sullivan, but since then he has said unequivocally that he was wrong about the Iraq War. I’m glad, because he writes so many thoughtful posts every day, and links to so many intriguing articles, that he seems to defy the laws of time. It’s as if he never leaves his computer except to sleep for two hours per night. The level and breadth of intellectual curiosity on display at the Daily Dish are unparalleled—not to mention that there’s the weekly View From Your Window contest. I wonder if he’d sue AltDaily for plagiarism if we started a local version of that contest.

Finally, I’m supposed to be writing about local news, so here are my favorite local stories of the year: Pride in the Park is coming to downtown Norfolk; Phil Odango of the Generic Theater is opening a 24-hour coffeeshop on 35th Street soon; passenger trains are set to return to Norfolk in 2013; a moratorium was placed on offshore Atlantic drilling.

If you’ve noticed that all these stories are from the last few months, it’s because I can’t remember any further back, except I do remember the World Cup. That tournament made 2010 the best year since 2006 and the best year we’re likely to have until 2014. So let’s all hunker down to endure a long three years.

I can’t find a YouTube video of Robert Burns singing Auld Lang Syne, so I’ll leave you instead with some of its more obscure and—I would argue—more evocative verses. In case your 18th-century Scottish dialect is rusty, the Pilot offers a handy glossary. Happy Hogmanay, everyone.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp,
and surely I’ll be mine,
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin’ auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere,
and gie’s a hand o’ thine;
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
for auld lang syne.