Omar Wasow

I am going on the academic job market this fall and now have a separate site for anyone interested in my work in African American studies and political science. The URL for the other site is: http://scholar.harvard.edu/owasow

In today’s Huffington Post, Rebecca Carroll looks at Pres. Obama’s sagging support in the black community. I’m quoted toward the end:

“At the heart of the debate is the absence of a clear black policy agenda for the post-civil rights era,” says Omar Wasow, co-founder of BlackPlanet.com and a Ph.D candidate in African American Studies at Harvard University. “And, whether President Obama wins or loses in 2012, that debate is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.”

Omar Wasow’s TV Highlights from Omar Wasow on Vimeo.

Earlier this year I had the privilege of being interviewed for the new Teach.gov campaign that’s working to recruit one million new teachers in the U.S. Here’s the short videoclip of that interview:

FeedMag.com is back from the dead and my 1998 piece on Facebook precursor SixDegrees is resurrected:

Sixdegrees, as the name implies, is a site built around the idea that everyone in the world can be connected to everyone else by no more than six intermediate friends, relatives and acquaintances. Though sites riffing off of the same concept have been on the Net for years, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” and the variations thereof were never serious attempts to map the human interconnections of the world. Sixdegrees, on the other hand, set out to build a human genome project for the business card set.

I am privileged to be among the the Fall Fellows of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute announced in today’s Harvard Crimson.

What would you say to the teacher who changed your life? @jenbrea movingly gives thanks in this video:

Why is the United States a rich country with the homicide rate of a poor country? I went on the Callie Crossley radio show today to share some of the research on homicide in America.

BlackWeb 2.0 picks up my TEDxBoston talk: “How a $10 Computer Changed My Life.”

Today, danah boyd and I discussed “Race Dynamics In Cyberspace” on public radio’s Callie Crossley Show.

Slate’s article on “How Black People Use Twitter” article quotes me and my colleague Brian Meeder.

At TEDxBoston, my 6-min talk was “How a $10 Computer Changed My Life” & what it means for education:

I was a geek but now aspire to wonk. Joe Walker at Wall Street Journal Careers thoughtfully captures the ups and downs.

“Q&A: The Hacker’s Approach to Education Reform” (My thanks to @losangelista for distilling the interview into a coherent whole.)

Reid vs. Steele? My comments on NPR’s Tell Me More and in a great roundup in New York Magazine.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid privately told two journalists in 2008 that Obama was more electable because he’s “light-skinned” and lacked a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” While the media is abuzz about “sensational…racially tinged remarks.” Over at The Root, I ask: “Was Harry Reid Right?”

Lost in all the handwringing and shock, however, is any clear explanation of what’s wrong with Reid’s comment. Clearly, using “Negro dialect” is about half-a-century behind the times, but does anyone think Reid meant ill by his anachronism?

About ten years ago, Brian Lamb, founder of C-SPAN, had just interviewed the writer Frank McCourt. McCourt invited Lamb to head uptown on the subway. My mom sees them and introduces herself to McCourt as the mother of a former student (McCourt was one of my HS English teachers). En route uptown, they all chat and it makes such an impression on Lamb that he reached out recently and invited me to be a guest on his show Q & A.

Some tips for saving money this holiday shopping season:

• find the right products with ConsumerReports.org
• find the best prices with shopping.google.com
• find discounts and coupons with retailmenot.com
• comparison shop while in-store with redlaser
• find coupons and discounts for nearby retailers with Yowza
• stay on top of your money with mobile banking
• keep track of receipts from your iphone with DocScanner
• store your notes and paper for ready access with Evernote

Have other tips or suggestions? Send me an email at owasow {-at-} gmail dot com or find me on twitter: @owasow

Five tech gift suggestions on Today in two minutes and twenty-six seconds:

{and in under five seconds: Kindle for readers, Ooma free phone calls in US, Kodak Zi8 for portable HD video, Jawbone PRIME for quiet calls, Samsung LCD TV for couch potatoes}