The praying hands prey with deliberate cunning

• Glenn Beck is deeply worried about the Black Problem. So is Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.).

• Ta-Nehisi Coates on the rape accusations against Bill Cosby. Coates discusses his own failure to engage those accusations seriously when he wrote his 2008 essay on “The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism,” a piece that explores the problem of Bill Cosby accepting the construct of the Black Problem.

• Shane Claibourne provides an earnest, inspiring description of a lovely tradition at our alma mater. (I’m old enough to recall the genesis of this tradition– a not-always-pleasant process that needn’t be revisited so long after it produced a pleasing outcome. But let me say this much: sometimes snark works.)

If you’re a student, or a professor, an administrator or an alumnus, you should probably examine your school’s housekeeping curriculum. And don’t think for a moment that it’s not a curriculum — or that what this arrangement teaches is any less important than anything else being taught in any classroom. The hidden curriculum of who cleans up after whom and how much we value them is an inescapable lesson absorbed by everyone involved in the institution. (And by “value” I mean wages, monetary compensation, benefits, etc. Hugs and recognition and “Housekeepers Appreciation Day” are all nice too, but they mean nothing if they can’t be heard over the roaring of the lesson being screamed by actual, tangible paychecks.)

See also: adjunct professors.

• Don Jolly offers a gloriously strange piece involving Dungeons & Dragons, Mazes and Monsters and Dark Dungeons. Jolly’s essay is structured as a conversation with a (probably) fictional ghost, but the real ghosts of what he discusses are still haunting us.

• The in-store music at the Big Box continues to surprise, as the Simple Minds channel seems to be evolving. Last night included two pre-Document R.E.M. songs, and two Joe Jackson songs, neither of which was “Stepping Out” or “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”

These are welcome developments, but it all becomes irrelevant next week when the dreaded discount-bin Christmas music begins.

• Speaking of Christmas music … apparently somebody at the Vatican said, “Hey, Pope Francis, what do you want to hear at the Christmas concert?”

And Pope Francis said, “I want to hear this“:

The pope has much better taste in American music than he seems to have in American Protestant theologians.