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This past weekend, I had the pleasure of presenting with author Ashley Hope Perez at the McConnell Conference in Lexington, KY. I always enjoy this conference and this year was certainly no exception. OK, yes I was disappointed in the lack of diversity, both in terms of presenters and participants, but the librarians who attended did not hesitate in asking for titles for their students and patrons of color and in engaging in library and literary conversations. Yes, it was good to be part of the conversation about young adult lit.

No doubt, attending conferences is expensive! Living here in the Midwest, I don’t often have the opportunity to enter the varied discussions about young adult literature that take occur in places like New York and Los Angeles, but there are some more local opportunities that provide relevant opportunities.

If you’re an author, librarian or teacher in the Midwest who is looking for nearby conferences, I have the following.

(No, I don’t live anywhere Mexico City. IBBY is just the one I really want to attend.)

Northern Illinois University Children’s Literature Conference 15 March Tom Angleberger, Lisa Yee and David Lubar

Kent State University’s Virginia Hamilton Conference 4&5 April Angela Johnson, Gary Schmidt and Yuyi Morales

Children’s Literature Association Conference Biloxi MS 13-15 June

ALA Annual Chicago 27 June-2 July

Children and Young People’s Division of the Indiana Library Federation   Indianapolis  25-26 August

Indiana State Reading Association Fall Conference 29-30 September  Linda Hoyt, Cris Tovani, Barry Lane, David Greenberg

IBBY Regional Conference St. Louis, MO 18-20 October

Ohio Kentucky Indiana Children’s Literature Conference 2 Nov Candace Fleming and Steve Jenkins

IBBY Mexico 10-14 September 2014

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

The NAACP was doing its job when it accused the Tea Party movement of harboring “racist elements,” but it didn’t necessarily go about it in the most productive way.

All it took was for supporters of the Tea Party movement like Sarah Palin to write, “All decent Americans abhor racism,” and that with the election of Barack Obama we became a “post-racial” society, and the NAACP’s charge was soundly “refudiated.” Or, as Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell put it to Candy Crowley on CNN on Sunday, he’s “got better things to do” than weigh in on the debate. He was elected to deal with real problems, not problems made up in people’s heads. Case closed.

If one has decided not to see something, one won’t see it. (And to be sure, if one has decided to see something, one will always see it. That’s a stalemate.)

I think the NAACP ought to consider the possibility that the residuum of racism that exist today are more thoughts of omission than acts of commission. Racism is a very different beast today than it was on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, or on the eve of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, it is so difficult to detect and even harder to eradicate precisely because it is no longer hidden behind a white conical hood.

Because our standard for what counts as “post-racialism” has gone up with each civil rights milestone, the NAACP should realize that as the old in-your-face racism is gone, so too should the old confrontational techniques of accusation and litigation. Unconscious racism can only be taught and remedied by explanation, not declamation.

To understand unconscious racism, consider the case of Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, who was expelled by the Tea Party Federation, an organization that seeks to represent the movement as a whole when Williams posted a fictional letter to Abraham Lincoln, saying “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards.”

The stridently mocking tone of this letter belied a breezy assumption that any and everyone could see that this was a l

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s stimulus package. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

President-elect Obama’s big stimulus package is getting bulkier and more complex by the day. No longer confident that the Congress would be able to move quickly to deliver legislation for the newly sworn in president to sign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has tampered expectations by rejecting a “false deadline” for such a delivery.

As is always the case in Washington, we are scheduled for a clash of ideologies even as we seek a solution to our current economic woes. The Republicans want deliberation (or delay) and fiscal restraint and the Democrats want, well, big government. Cognizant of this, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already registered his wariness of “very big systemic changes” proposed in the stimulus package. Republican leaders have taken to calling the proposed $800 billion stimulus package a “trillion dollar” package even though about 40% of it will pay for tax cuts all sides agree on.

But Democrats are likely to prevail in this battle not only because of their store of electoral goodwill locked into congressional majorities, but also because economic history is presently on their side. Traditional monetary policy becomes increasingly ineffective as interest rates fall (because rates cannot fall below zero). The fact is that the banks are still not lending enough. Just in the last three months, cash holdings in banks have tripled to over 1 trillion dollars, according to the Federal Reserve. Other drivers of growth are also unavailable to us this time round. Inventory rebuilding was a powerful engine of growth in 1976, as was residential construction 1992, while consumer spending helped in 2002 (recall President Bush’s invitation for Americans to go out and shop after Sep. 11). The private sector in 2009 is moribund.

This is why Fed officials and economists have come out in support of a fiscal stimulus package. “If ever, in my professional career, there was a time for active, discretionary fiscal stimulus, it is now,” said Janet Yellen, San Francisco Fed president. According to Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics in New York, “When we do recover, the engine will be government spending, not home building or the consumer.” John Maynard Keynes, not Milton Friedman, is the dead economist du jour.

Since the September 2008 Wall Street crash, the S.& P. has moved more than 5 percent in either direction on 18 days. There were only 17 such days in the previous 53 years, according to calculations by Howard Silverblatt, an index analyst at S.& P. If the invisible hand of the market cannot calm its own nerves, then government must.