A Progressive on the Prairie

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes

Torturer’s Apprentice (“… the [Bush] administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.”)

10 Reasons The U.S. Is No Longer The Land Of The Free (“Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers [...]

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes

Why you don’t really have free will (“Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.”) (via)

The death of the celebrity memoir (“If we really wanted these annoying figures [...]

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes

How Thomas Jefferson Created His Own Bible (“…he eschewed anything that he perceived as ‘contrary to reason.’”) (via)

Christmassy (?) Linkage

Maybe it’s going to be a Christmas present for the Pope. “The Vatican said on Wednesday an unknown buyer had snapped up the internet address vatican.xxx, a domain [...]

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes

Apocalypse Soon (“It is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, weary, and crushingly sad. In this context, the idea of the Apocalypse can be comforting.”) (via)

Bookish Linkage

Truly a lot of hoohah over nothing.

On writing and jazz

The Library of America starts offering e-versions of its [...]

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes

George’s God (“Well into his forties he kept swinging between the poles of his double life as only a true Manichean can, a rock star buried in a pile of cocaine one minute and a sadhu renunciant fingering his beads the next. But by his fifties he had abandoned [...]