I've not been posting much this year mainly because the new year began with my being ill, and it took a while for me to recover. A visit to the otolaryngologist today brought welcome relief. Now I won't have to lean in quite so closely to my friends and colleagues to hear conversation, and I might feel well enough to begin my garden planting and landscaping.
Offline, I've been reading a lot of poetry lately--Margaret Gibson, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Elizabeth Bishop (the new Library of America collection of her poems, prose, and letters)--some nonfiction (began Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words, a Christmas gift from a friend; have almost finished reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time, a Christmas gift from Mary-Margaret) and some fiction (reread Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac and am a chapter and a half from finishing A Friend from England; am about 100 pages into Marcel Proust's Swann's Way).
Meanwhile, here are some links to what others are saying online:
James Fallows on the charges of plagiarism against Barrack Obama
Jack Shafer on charges of plagiarism against Obama
Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo's military commissions, on trials at Guantanamo (in an interview with The Nation--and hat tip to Kevin Drum)
Nicholas Kristof on torture and Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held for more than six years at Guantanamo Bay
Paul Kramer on earlier American use of the "water cure"--and an earlier Atlantic article on torture and rendition by Jane Mayer
The BBC on learning English
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