Conservation Magazine's article "Not So Silent Spring" details how animals are affected by noise pollution: "A male European blackbird was terrorizing the neighborhood. For several months, he started singing at around 5 a.m. each day, but this was no ordinary song. The bird imitated the sounds of ambulance sirens and car alarms at a jarringly life-like volume. It even produced cell-phone ring tones that went unanswered for hours."

Has Obama fulfilled his campaign promises? In These Times looks to the Obamameter to find out. 

"The artist should be as ruthless in pursuing cultural harmony as the terrorist is bent on destroying it.”  Le Monde Diplomatic reports on a literary festival in Jaipur, India that brings together artists from India, Pakistan, and around the world.

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Gay Culture, for Popular Consumption? New York City markets itself as a "gay tourist destination"

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1950-2009  "It is difficult to calculate the impact of Sedgwick's scholarship, in part because its legacy is still in the making, but also because she worked at a skew to so many fields of inquiry. Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis and literary, legal and disability studies—Sedgwick complicated and upended them all, sometimes in ways that infuriated more anodyne scholars, but always in ways that pushed established parameters." More

'Shoe Thrower' Sentence Reduced "Muntadar al Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist convicted after he threw a shoe at President George Bush, has had his jail sentence reduced from three years to one year."

The Digital Divide and the Color Line  "Across the country, many urban families are struggling to explore job opportunities, communicate with loved ones, and attain an education—because they lack access to a high-speed Internet connection."

Sex, Drugs and ESL: new laws policing foreign teachers in Thailand are mostly ignored "The second most popular justification is that it’s “part of their culture and who are we to interfere?” As though having sex with a prostitute in Thailand is akin to a pig-roast in Hawaii or a thermal pool in Iceland. You simply haven’t experienced Thailand until you’ve tried it!"

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The Progressive reports on the Authors Guild of America forcing Amazon to turn off the Kindle 2's text-to-audio feature arguing that it violates copyright laws by enabling people to listen to books without paying for audio rights.  Paul Schroeder of the American Foundation for the Blind writes, "There are more than 20 million Americans who report experiencingsignificant vision loss, and many others who would benefit fromtext-to-speech, such as people with dyslexia and people with physicaldisabilities, to name just a few."

Bitch blogs (with some great illustrations) on women's comics of the '70s and '80s.

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Worthless money [via Wooster Collective]: "'Thanks To Mugabe'…[small Zimbabwean newspaper prints] all their advertising on actually money - which, unfortunately, has become completely worthless":

Oil money [via Political Affairs]: "During the second Summit of Arab and South American Nations in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez proposed a new international currency backed by oil reserves and an international bank managed jointly by petroleum exporting countries."

Fear money [via FAIR]: "There is money to be made from fear—and business has been good for those hawking the online child predator threat. Exploiters of the scare range from the Internet-policing groups who ferret out suspects and share information with authorities (and sometimes, for a fee, with journalists) to vendors of [...]More