Our Cliopatrician in uniform, Chris Bray, e-mailed an update to me yesterday. After a four day leave to visit his wife and family in California, he is back at Camp Shelby outside Hattiesburg, Mississippi. There, two months after his re-induction, time-consuming training has begun in earnest.

Scott McLemee,"Reading Left to Right, Inside Higher Ed, 16 August, interviews Alfredo Perez, the omnivore genius behind Political Theory Daily Review.

Paul Brewer's"Thoughts on Reviewing," Public Brewing, 10 August, is a helpful piece about reviewing articles for publication in a journal, but don't get me started on peer review and gate-keeping. Someone will have to lead me firmly off the stage. Thanks to Sharon Howard for the tip.

At Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, Mark Grimsley posts his Preliminary Graduate Student Reading List in Military History and asks for suggestions about it. He's particularly interested in getting recommendations for Section IV, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Matt Tabai,"Four Amendments & a Funeral: A Month Inside the House of Horrors That is Congress," Rolling Stone, 10 August, looks at the"legislative process" through the eyes of Vermont's independent/ socialist, Bernie Sanders. Representative"democracy" is an even messier process than you thought it was. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

Finally, guess who carved out this pigeon hole?"Gary [sic] Wills ... is a ... ‘Stalinist Liberal'". There are so many things wrong with that, where do you begin? You could begin with the fact that, unlike D**** H*******, Wills is a conservative.