Things Noted Here and There

Farewell to the University of Vermont's Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, and to Virginia's pioneering civil rights attorney, Oliver W. Hill. Hat tip.

Harvey Mansfield,"Atheist Tracts: God, They're Predictable," Weekly Standard, 13 August, sizes up recent expertise on that which does not exist. Relatedly, in"Cut God Some Slack," Freakonomics, 2 August, Steven Levitt asks"who buys these books?" That's enough to set off quite a donnybrook in comments, both there and at the CHE's Footnoted, 3 August.

Stefan Schmidt,"Half a Century of Digital Gaming," Technology and Culture, July, reviews Game On, an exhibit that has toured England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States since 2002. Hat tip.

Finally, Keith Phillips,"Popeye the Everyman," Slate, 2 August, looks at how E. C. Segar's workingman's hero in the 1930s got cleaned up for the Saturday morning cartoons. Don't miss the slide show.