Photo: “New Native Photography”; “Shiprock Fair, 2009.” Credit: Jinniibaah Manuelito

Jacqueline Trescott of the Washington Post writes that the Smithsonian Institution and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello are collaborating on a new exhibit about Jefferson and slavery.

“Jefferson and Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty” will open at the National Museum of American History in January. It is being prepared by the National Museum of African American History and Culture,  which won’t have its own building until 2015,

“New Native Photography,” An exhibit of photos by Native Americans is on display at the New Mexico Museum of Art through Oct. 2.

The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat prepared with impish elan from Twitter feeds by the bots at paper.li. Today, the bots like Goebbels’ secretary breaks her silence and the $30-million price tag on the Kim K. sex tape.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. of the New York Times has an appalling story about U.S.-funded medical experiments in the 1940s in which Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mental patients were intentionally infected with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein reviews “The Cambridge History of the American Novel” (edited by Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby and Benjamin Reiss, 1,244 pages, $185) .

Through the magic of dull and faulty prose, the contributors to “The Cambridge History of the American Novel” have been able to make these presumably worldly subjects seem parochial in the extreme—of concern only to one another, which is certainly one derogatory definition of the academic. These scholars may teach English, but they do not always write it, at least not quite. A novelist, we are told, “tasks himself” with this or that; things tend to get “problematized”; the adjectives “global” and “post”-this-or-that receive a good workout; “alterity” and “intertexuality” pop up their homely heads; the “poetics of ineffability” come into play; and “agency” is used in ways one hadn’t hitherto noticed, so that “readers in groups demonstrate agency.” About the term “non-heteronormativity” let us not speak.