I spoke about Metro on the “Kojo Nnamdi Show on Wednesday, June 25.

The Journal of Policy History has accepted my article, “How Talking Became Human Subjects Research: The Federal Regulation of the Social Sciences, 1965-1991,” drawn from my book-in-progress on the history of IRB review of the social sciences and humanities. The article is tentatively scheduled to be published in spring 2009, but in the meantime you can read a draft at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1124284. I welcome feedback.

I’ve been awarded a 2008-2009 Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress to work on my book on the history of American riot control.

Ariel Schrag, Awkward and Definition. A reissue of two of my cousin’s autobiographical graphic novels about her high school years. Thank heaven, I appear in neither.

David Ngaruri Kenney and Philip G. Schrag, Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America. My father’s latest. I contributed two words: the title.

As of March 1, I have joined the editorial board of the Journal of Urban History.

My former colleague Robert Hawkes, who retired from George Mason University in 2006, died this morning in Blackstone, Virginia. Bob was a gifted and popular teacher, who let me sit in the back of his classroom, then explained the tricks he had used. I will think of him whenever I try to make a course a little better.

On January 30 I lectured on Metro as part of Virginia Tech’s New Metropolis Lecture Series. The website includes a podcast of my talk and some of the accompanying images.