Amitava Kumar, "Academic Blogging," Bookslut, June, interviews Cliopatria's friend, Manan Ahmed, about academic blogging and his new book, Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination.

Joseph Epstein, "Duh, Bor-ing," Commentary, June, and Scott McLemee, "Full Bore," IHE, 8 June, review Peter Toohey's Boredom: A Lively History.

John Noble Wilford, "After 90 Years, a Dictionary of an Ancient World," NYT, 6 June, assesses the importance of the 21 volume Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

In Franco Moretti, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," New Left Review, March/April, the Stanford scholar applies his quantitative analysis of literature to Shakespeare's "Hamlet." It's available here to nonsubscribers. Richard Beck, "Hamlet and the region of death," Boston Globe, 29 May, interviews Moretti.

Alexander Bevilacqua, "Beyond Orientalism," n+1, 6 June, reviews Nabil I. Matar's Islam in Britain, 1558-1685, Alastair Hamilton's and Francis Richard's André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France, Paula Sutter Fichtner's Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526-1850, Ziad Elmarsafy's The Enlightenment Qur'an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam, and Jürgen Osterhammel's Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert.

Michael J. Ybarra, "Man on a Quest," WSJ, 2 June, reviews Frank McLynn's Captain Cook: Master of the Seas.

Finally, farewell to UC, Berkeley's historian of science, Roger Hahn. He taught at Berkeley for 50 years. See the tributes by Susan Mari Groppi at west of the moon and Will Thomas at Whewell's Ghost.