[Butterflies and Wheels]
Faith is not a mere failure of reason: Faith is the willful abdication of reason. Faith isn't a mistake along the same lines as a logical error such as affirming the consequent. It is not simply an oversight of evidence that ought to be under consideration. Faith is the declaration that reason may be all well and good in other areas, but reason ends here where the believer says it does...

[literature-map.com]
Literature-map lets you discover author relationships in a tag cloud.

[Paperbackswap.com]
A site where people trade their old, unwanted books—for free!

[Processed World]
Pietro Basso’s book details the human consequences of the workhouse society: overtime, speed-ups, shift work, night work, on-call work, temp work, “accidents,” ruined health and lives.

[The Cortland Review]
Interview with poet A.E. Stallings, including some clips of her reading some of her work (RealAudio).

[DamnInteresting.com]
A linkblog that aims to collect and dispense damn interesting facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, present, or the (anticipated) future.

[School of Wisdom]
A short dialogue between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore:

EINSTEIN: The same uncertainty will always be there about everything fundamental in our experience, in our reaction to art, whether in Europe or in Asia. Even the red flower I see before me on your table may not be the same to you and me.

TAGORE: And yet there is always going on the process of reconciliation between them, the individual taste conforming to the universal standard.

[ABC News]
Egypt gives peek at first new tomb uncovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut's in 1922.

[Kircher Society]
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, a linkblog of the unusual and the fascinating.

[Editor & Publisher]
American newspapers cowed into not printing disputed cartoons. That's right, the United States of America. And the Associated Press refuses to even distribute them.

[Slate]
The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

[The Huffington Post]
Are all you religious fundamentalists so unsure of your so-called eternal truths that you cannot dare defend them with ideas? You must resort to violence or legal strictures because you have neither intellect nor facts on your side. Certainly, the Muslims rioting throughout the world this past week have proven this. They must resort to violence because they are ideologically bankrupt.

[New York Times]
Memorials are for cemetaries, not highways. States are beginning to regulate impromptu roadside memorials, which some deem dangerous, inappropriate, and even offensive.

[Emerald City]
Jeff VanderMeer considers whether reflections of politics in fiction represent an intrusion: For me, not because of 9-11 but because of everything since then...I cannot not react in a different way than before. These issues permeate our world, and if you do not internalize that, if it doesn’t affect your writing, then it lies like an unhealing wound in your heart, and you go a little bit crazy.