Omar Wasow

Amid stories that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal got hacked, TODAY asked me to discuss online security holes.

I’m thrilled (and not a little bit in awe) to say that in the fall I will be joining the Department of Politics at Princeton. In the 2012-2013 academic year I’ll be there with a post-doctoral fellowship and, in the fall of 2013, I’ll begin teaching as an Asst. Professor.

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.

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:

A clip of my appearance on the WSJ Report with Maria Bartiromo

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.