Obama campaign established web site to debunk smears.

Quoted: Amazon.com: The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America: Louis P. Masur: Books

Blog by Bill McCoy of Adobe on ebooks. The beta version of Adobe Digital Editions he describes finally allowed me to rescue 17 ebooks I bought from Amazon from an old laptop computer, to which they had been tied for a couple of years. NB: Microsoft has to share blame for that as well. I tried to restore a backup of the laptop to run in VMWare, but the activation restrictions on the OEM version of Windows XP wouldn't allow it to start up.

Quoted: She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!

Quoted: My new policy, more or less, is to get rid of most books once I’ve read them, keeping only those that I’m pretty sure I’ll ...

Quoted: A few years ago, I was working on a column on Iraq recalled reading in Gertrude Bell’s biography a brilliant quote from a letter that the British adventurer-diplomat wrote to her father in 1922 (I think). I spent 10 minutes Googling and found that the University of Newcastle in Great Britain had put the entire Getrude Bell archive up on the Web. In 20 minutes, I had the actual letter on my screen. When I was in graduate school, getting that letter would have taken three months of inter-library loans and searching through microfiches.

Recommended. Focuses on the history and development of Al Quaeda.

Quoted: Amazon.com: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11: Books: Lawrence Wright by Lawrence Wright

Reading this now. Familiar territory to anyone who has read his prior works.

Quoted: Amazon.com: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature: Books: Steven Pinker by Steven Pinker

Argues (among other things) that the "Great Separation," which allows western countries to discuss political issues without reference to what "God's will" might require, is not as well established and enduring as we might think.

Quoted: Amazon.com: The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West: Books: Mark Lilla by Mark Lilla