- The state of literature, to put it bluntly, is a mess.
- Once again, Michele Bachmann (something called the “Polar Vortex-Mex Hotdish”) did not win Sen. Al Franken’s annual hot dish cookoff.
- Life as a distraction—Joan Didion’s 1979 review of Woody Allen’s cinema of self-absorption.
- Disney knows what you’re doing, and where.
- Georgia: Guns everywhere, everywhere!
- More reasons why San Francisco is in the middle of an unsustainable tech-yuppie-jerkface bubble.
- “Our lazy embrace of [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards.”
- Even if Putin wanted to tell the truth, he might not remember how.
- Keith Richards is writing a children’s book.
- This is how Philip K. Dick thought 1992 would turn out.
- The coming GOP 2014 wave.
- Los Angeles spent $1 billion buying iPads for schoolkids, but can’t repair the school buildings.
- Print and read: The Sandy Hook killer’s father on what his son did and whether he could have been stopped.
Chris Barsanti 
I just want to take a few pokes at the Baffler, I agree that Stewart and Colbert are massively overrated. But the Baffler (Steve Almond) gets a bit lost in the weeds.
“The twin towers may have symbolized ‘ingenuity’ and ‘imagination’ to Americans such as Stewart and his brother, Larry, the chief operating officer of the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company. But to most people in the world, the WTC embodied the global reach of U.S.-backed corporate cartels.”
I think my skepticism stems from the worry that the Twin Towers did not represent much of anything to anyone. AQ saw a big target that could be spun a certain way… But there is a real paucity of evidence that portions of the world identified the Towers as anything (or even knew they existed) related to capitalism other than Mr. Almond. I think it’s a case of his own confirmation bias projecting onto those acts.
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