[China View]
The Chinese market for translated bestsellers like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Da Vinci Code and My Life by Bill Clinton is growing.

[Reuters]
A study of more than 1,800 patients who underwent heart bypass surgery has failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact. In fact, some of the patients who knew they were being prayed for did worse than others who were only told they might be prayed for.

[BibliOdyssey]
A blog of old book illustrations and eclectic bookart.

[diserio.com]
The Top 15 skylines in the world.

[UMNnews]
A telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households has shown that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry. Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years, says Penny Edgell, the study’s lead researcher.

[Times Online]
The Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. The late Pope John Paul II sought to achieve Muslim-Christian reconciliation by asking “pardon” for the Crusades during the 2000 Millennium celebrations. But John Paul’s apologies for the past “errors of the Church”—including the Inquisition and anti-Semitism—irritated some Vatican conservatives. According to Vatican insiders, the dissenters included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

[sourcelabs.com]
Live scroll of del.icious bookmarks as they are added. Addictive!

[New York Times]
One of the things wrong with today's animated films and cartoons: the characters chatter incessantly, as if they're trying to use up their last 500 minutes from Verizon. The audience isn't subjected to this barrage of words and jokes because the characters have something to say, but because filmmakers and studio executives are afraid to let them be quiet.

[AlMagnus.com]
Art galleries by Al Magnus.

[Crooks and Liars]
Superb speech by Alan Shore on Boston Legal. Every American should watch this.

[Sign and Sight]
The loser may accept his fate and resign himself; the victim may demand satisfaction; the defeated may begin preparing for the next round. But the radical loser isolates himself, becomes invisible, guards his delusion, saves his energy, and waits for his hour to come.

[Right To Create]
Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window and patent law: When patents that clearly harm innovation, science, industry, and the freedom of creation are allowed to punish those who seek to bring inventions to the market, do we see the broken window for what it is?

[Zacappa.com]
An entertaining page of literary lagniappe.

[Reuters]
378 billion cigarettes were sold in the United States in 2005, the lowest number since 1951.

[The Threepenny Review]
It might be comforting to be the Something Professor of Anything at the University of Whatever, but the writer's self-sufficient—and therefore ideal—status is expressed with sad and beautiful pride by Lawrence: "I am no more than a single human man wandering my lonely way across these years."