Tuesday Notes

Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq has won the 2nd annual Blooker Prize for books that began on a blog. Last year's first winner, Julie and Julia, is currently being adapted for film by Nora Ephron.

Anthony Gottlieb,"Atheists with Attitude," New Yorker, 21 May, and Adam Kotsko,"Hitchens Is Awesome-O," The Weblog, 12 May, respond to Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Wells Tower,"The Last Encore?" Washington Post Magazine, 13 May, wonders whether jazz,"America's music," is a dying form.

Paula Petrik,"There is no millenium generation," History Talk, 4 May, argues that students are fascinated by technology but don't have the skills that would set them apart from previous generations.

Penn's Jeff Weintraub looks at the imprisonment in Teheran of Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Studies Program.

Finally, 1st Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was killed in Iraq on 13 May by an improvised explosive devise. Lieutenant Bacevich's father, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has long been a serious critic of the war in Iraq. See: Andrew J. Bacevich,"What's an Iraqi Life Worth?" Washington Post, 9 July 2006. The son of two veterans of World War II, Professor Bacevich is, himself, a veteran of both the war in Viet Nam and the Gulf war.