Uppity-Negro.com

Then again, I sometimes read comic books, so my taste is suspect. In today's New York Times, Nick Hornby writes that Graphic Novels Speak Louder Than Words:

The more exposure to graphic novels one has, the more one realizes that the relative youth of the medium, at least in its current adult form, presents its artists with problems of appropriateness that the more established arts don't have. Whereas most established writers know what constitutes a novel, and filmmakers understand what will sustain a film, even the best comic-book artists sometimes seem unsure of their material and their intended audience.

Which might be a perception of the reader, not a problem on the part of the artist, but eh.

Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons is mentioned favorably. Read the article for that.

Update: Actually, I'd been at NYT looking for The Shifting Lexicon of Race, a link to which Giles sent me, proving once again the value of leaving mail on the server if you're going to be dual-booting.

Apart from older words like "anti-Semitism" and "xenophobia," "racism" was the earliest and most potent of those terms. The word had actually been coined in the 1930's as a variant of "racialism," to describe the racial doctrines of the fascists. By 1960, however, people were using the term to describe a personal or collective disposition that ran too deep to be accessible to cursory introspection. That was the Catch-22 of "racism": if you denied it you could be suspected of not really understanding what it was about.

All of a sudden you could be held responsible for feelings you didn't know you had. "I'm not a racist" came to sound a bit like "I don't have any homosexual anxiety."

It's by Geoffrey Nunberg, "a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University [and] a Consulting Professor in the Stanford Department of Linguistics."

Just because he's in linguisitcs, you shouldn't bring any anti-Chomsky feelings to the piece. The East Coast-West Coast rivalry among linguists is way worse than the one between rappers back in the day. . .