Junot Diaz on what disasters can teach us (the whole essay is amazing):

If, as Roethke writes, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see,” apocalypse is a darkness that gives us light.

But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance, practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

Wonderful essay today on Pale Fire by Arthur Phillips. I feel exactly, exactly like this about Nabokov’s masterpiece.

I don’t know how he did it. I can play the technician. I can tweeze out the twenty ways his characters inadvertently disclose secrets, or the like. But this is no more impressive than counting his adjectives or identifying his font. Pale Fire is, for me, the one that resists all professional inspection, and, finer still, envy. The novel has burned in me so long that it is now just an object of purest beauty and wonder.

And this, from John Cole at Balloon Juice, on the legality of killing Bin Laden. Yes, I feel exactly like this:

I know I’m being a hypocrite and…I am ok with it in this case. I’ll promise to do a better job sticking to my principles and caring about the law when it comes to someone who hasn’t murdered thousands of people. I swear.

From Dave about his goals for the blog:

…there’s no shortage of news about the right. There is, I think, a shortage of coverage that puts the movement in context. This is where “Right Now” comes in. I’ve spent most of my reporting career covering the conservative movement, from the we-had-it-coming midterms of 2006 through the “Ron Paul Revolution” of 2008 through Sen. Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) upset victory this year. If you stayed close to conservative activists and strategists throughout that period, you knew that something like the Tea Party movement — some massive rejection of George W. Bush’s legacy, some force that drove the GOP further to the right — was inevitable. You weren’t surprised to hear people once again bashing the Federal Reserve rhetoric or talking about how the 10th Amendment could give states some defense against liberal policies.

The goal of this blog will be to explain what the right is doing, thinking, and planning as it hurtles toward the possible salvation of the 2010 midterm elections. That’s going to mean a lot of on-the-scene reporting, interviews with the people driving this movement, and close reading of the arguments making headway among the people trying to bring the Obama era to the quickest possible end.

He’s already got some great, timely posts up. Get over there and check ‘em out.

This is a good list

I haven’t read a lot of these, though, and I intend to check a lot of the unread pieces out. They sound fascinating.

h/t Bookslut.