Oh God No!

Things appear to have been headed this way for a while now. And Jews are, unsurprisingly, at the forefront.

This essay about book reviewing is by the wife of former Washington Monthly editor and general nice guy Danny Franklin, and its really really interesting. Cameos by Dale Peck, Heidi Julavits, Hornby, Philip Roth, and all the other favorites of people writing essays about book reviwing.

No blogging for a while because we're on the road (a tip: do not hire ABF U-Pack to transfer your possessions), but I wanted to point this out: Robert Wright is the author of Nonzero, a favorite of both myself and Bill Clinton. Now he has a foreign-policy blueprint on the NYT's op-ed page, and everyone should read it because he's right. Talk to you soon.

If this excerpt in the Guardian is any indication, Tom McCarthy's new book on Tintin will be awesome:

The supporting characters, from fiery sub-Guevaran General Alcazar to bitter and twisted multi-millionaire Laszlo Carreidas, billow off the page in all their awkwardness, their childishness, capriciousness. Even the most minor among them exude a presence far beyond that which we might expect from a novelist, let alone a cartoonist: the girthy, thunderous but frightened Americanist Hercules Tarragon of The Seven Crystal Balls; the neatly perverted kleptomaniac civil servant Aristides Silk of The Secret of the Unicorn; right down to the nameless airport official whose constant fiddling with rubber bands so irritates the captain in Tintin in Tibet.... People misunderstand one another. Discussions are shown taking place behind the main conversations, dialogues whose content we can infer from the context. Exegeses vital to the plot are offset by, for example, one participant's continuous attempts to prompt another into offering him wine, as in the sequence in Professor Topolino's kitchen in The Calculus Affair.

Really? Worse than gays? From the Minnesota Daily:

Based on a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households and in-depth interviews with more than 140 people, researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as "sharing their vision of American society." Americans are also least willing to let their children marry atheists.

I had wondered what it's like for Mark Waid, Geoff Johns, and Greg Rucka to collaborate with Grant Morrison, who is, artistically speaking, in a different league. I don't mean any disrespect here -- Waid's Legion of Super-Heroes is one of my favorite comics currently being published. (Rucka's OK; Johns is kind of a hack.) But Morrison wrote Doom Patrol and New X-Men and We3 and Flex fucking Mentallo, which are among my favorite works of anything ever.

Anyway, here's an interesting tidbit from 52 cover artist J. G. Jones, courtesy of Newsarama (and, unfortunately, transcribed in that site's characteristically sparkling prose):

J.G. Jones commented that, during the editorial meetings on 52, despite the fact that he speaks somewhat quietly and with a heavy accent, whenever Morrison talks, everyone stops and listens – a courtesy that the other writers rarely allow themselves when one of the others is talking.