[Charlie's Diary]
Classic literature, as reviewed by Amazon.com users.

[The Globalist]
Is Paris the world capital of world music?

[New Statesman]
If bookshops ignore their customers, they go out of business. When poetry publishers and reviewers ignore their readership, this is called "maintaining critical standards." And they still expect the public to defer to their judgement and accept their offerings, because they know best. The producers of poetry aren't in tune with the lovers of poetry.

[eBay]
SF writer John Varley is eBaying his robot collection!

[Telegraph.co.uk]
We're all big babies! Bombarded by petty rules, bossy advice and celebrity tittle-tattle, we have forgotton how to be adults. It's time we grew up.

[Archive of the Now]
The Archive of the Now is an online and print repository of recordings, printed texts and manuscripts, focusing on innovative contemporary poetry being written or performed in Britain.

[The Wilson Quarterly]
That so-20th-century Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote a line in the poem “Burnt Norton” that could be our new national motto: “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Our heads are full of noise, and it’s not just metaphorical. We’re weaning ourselves away from interior silence as if its source were a poisoned spring. The majestic, brooding eagle has been routed by the jittery hummingbird. We’re up and doing before the task at hand is down and done. Attention deficit disorder could be the mascot malady for the national mood.

[comment is free]
It is time to reverse the prevailing notion that religious commitment is intrinsically deserving of respect, and that it should be handled with kid gloves and protected by custom and in some cases law against criticism and ridicule.

[News.com]
On Thursday, the MacArthur Foundation is expected to announce a $240,000 grant to Castronova and his team to build "Arden: The World of Shakespeare," a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, built entirely around the plays of the Bard.

[seattlepi]
Friends don't let friends join the BSA (Brainwashed Scouts of America).

[NewPages.com]
Thorough literary information site—informative and great for browsing!

[YouTube]
Animated short: "Fallen Art."

[The New York Times]
Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures. The American Community Survey, released recently by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples—with and without children—just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

[Salon]
Richard Dawkins: Technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

[treehugger]
If humans disappeared from the earth today, how long would it take for the various signs of their presence to vanish?

[Guardian Unlimited]
Increasingly, "untouchable" Hindu dalits in India are converting to Buddhism to escape prejudice and abuse.

[BBC News]
Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh and the Grameen Bank have been jointly awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

[The New York Times]
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

[BBC News]
Kiran Desai has won the UK's leading literary award, the Man Booker Prize, for her novel The Inheritance of Loss.

[Food and Wine]
Now chefs want to copyright their dishes?!

[Yahoo! News]
Visitors to the Vatican soon will be able to descend into an ancient world of the dead, a newly unveiled necropolis that was a burial place for the rich and not-so-affluent during Roman imperial rule.

[Poetry 180]
Poem: At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border by William Stafford.

[The Rhetorica Network]
An excellent essay that dispells many of the false ideas held by the public concerning media bias.

[BBC News]
Catholics prepare for more arbitrary theological editing: goodbye to limbo.

[The New York Times]
An analysis by The New York Times of laws passed since 1989 shows that more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into Congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use. The special breaks amount to a sort of religious affirmative action program, said John Witte Jr., Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the Emory University law school. Professor Witte added: Separation of church and state was certainly part of American law when many of today’s public opinion makers were in school. But separation of church and state is no longer the law of the land.

[YouTube]
Why do atheists care about religion? [video]

[AcademicBlogs.net]
A wiki that lists academic blogs across various disciplines.

[ars technica]
The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to a new study at Indiana University.

[The Washington Post]
Stephen King: There is indeed a half-wild beast that lives in the thickets of each writer's imagination. It gorges on a half-cooked stew of suppositions, superstitions and half-finished stories. The place one calls one's study or writing room is really no more than a clearing in the woods where one trains the beast (insofar as it can be trained) to come. One doesn't call it; that doesn't work. One just goes there and picks up the handiest writing implement (or turns it on) and then waits. It usually comes, drawn by the entrancing odor of hopeful ideas. Some days it only comes as far as the edge of the clearing, relieves itself and disappears again. Other days it darts across to the waiting writer, bites him and then turns tail.

[poetryfoundation.org]
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Verse begins in delight and ends in...more delight. The difference between poetry and verse, then, is the difference between an explorer and a tour guide. Verse tells us, finally, that all is well. Poetry, on the contrary, tells us that things are not as we thought they were. Verse does not ask us to change our lives. Poetry does.