Coming soon in this space: reflections on Peter Beagle's *The Folk of the Air*

This post is here to remind me to write about Peter Beagle's extraordinary The Folk of the Air. The short version. If you have never read it, read it, especially if you are interested in California in the 70s, the SCA, or just enjoy really good writing. If you have read it, pick it up aga...

Aljazeera: They are refugees from war, not migrants seeking jobs

Barry Malone in Aljazeera: Imagine waking your children in the morning. Imagine feeding and dressing them. Imagine pulling a little girl’s hair into a ponytail, arguing with a little boy about which pair of shoes he wants to wear. Now imagine, as you are doing that, you know later today you will strap their vulnerable bodies into enveloping life jackets and take them with you...

Josh Marshall: kick those cans down the road

Talking Points Memo: I think the biggest lesson of the Iraq War is that if the alternative is war, it is almost always better to kick cans down the road rather than “resolve” them now. Not always. But almost always. Because wars destroy a lot of stuff and kill lots of people and create mammoth collateral damage - human, diplomatic, economic, everything - the consequences of which...

Juan Cole criticizes partitioning as a way of dealing with Iraq's problems

And other conflicts, too:But partitions are rare in in the post-war era. And the few that have occurred don’t offer encouraging examples. The United States was all enthusiastic to break South Sudan off from Sudan proper, in order to weaken one of Africa’s larger states and given that the Christian and animist population there had long chafed under northern Muslim Arabophone rule.But...

Phil Paine on Twain's Mysterious Stranger

Excerpts: The story is set in the year 1490, in a fic­tional Aus­trian vil­lage (Essendorf [= “Ass Town”]). The nar­ra­tor is a sixteen-year-old vil­lage boy named August Feld­ner, an appren­tice in a print-shop. Twain, who was him­self a printer’s appren­tice in Han­ni­bal, Mis­souri when he was the same age as August, fills the nar­ra­tive with the arcana of the print­ing trade....