A few other late-night links.

* Philip Roth has surrendered to television on behalf of the novel.

"I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it's going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range."

* Chris Ware in the New Yorker.

* If Harry Potter Was Made in the 1980s, and Starred David Bowie.

* 'Man who threw feces in courtroom draws 31-year sentence for robbery.' Live and learn.

* The Telegraph covers the laws of internet discourse.

7. Pommer’s Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

* Scientology convicted of fraud in France. See also.

* Will D.C. let J.J. Abrams have a crack at Superman? After the success of the Star Trek reboot this seems like an obvious move—and it would certainly be better than all their other attempts so far.

* Is your city recession-proof?

* Why your dryer sucks. More here.

* And Ezra Klein puts the politics behind the public option very well:

For the real liberals, the public option was already a compromise from single-payer. For the slightly less radical folks, the public option that's barred from partnering with Medicare to maximize the government's buying power was a compromise down from a Medicare-like insurance plan. For the folks even less radical than that, the public option that states can "opt out" of is a compromise from the straight public option. Access to the public option will be a political question settled at the state level. It is not a settled matter of national policy.

In many ways, this is a fundamentally conservative approach to a liberal policy experiment. It's only offered to individuals eligible for the insurance exchanges, which is a small minority of the population. The majority of Americans who rely on employer-based insurance would not be allowed to choose the exchanges. From there, it is only one of many options on the exchange, and only in states that choose to have it. In other words, it has been designed to preserve the status quo and be decided on the state level. Philosophically, these are major compromises liberals have made on this plan. They should get credit for that.

Against Updike.

Has the reputation of any novelist fallen quite so far and so quickly as that of John Updike? Thirty years ago, he was at least the equal of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and maybe even a good few notches above Roth. Bellow’s matt-grey seriousness, to be fair, has also fallen quite sharply as a commodity — whereas Roth keeps on rising with every novel, perhaps because his best work has been written since he hit pensionable age. Updike has been prolific of late, for sure, but his novels, for the past quarter of a century, have been greeted by the critics with a sigh and a knowing nod of the head: uh-oh, it’s him again.

A few more.

* Acephalous explains what it is to write a dissertation.

* Is college a waste of time for most people? Ask Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve! Better yet, read Matt "Harvard" Yglesias on the subject, whose opinions have the advantage of furthering academia as a growth industry and therefore, by extension, my job prospects.

The real answer, of course, has to do with how you define "waste," "time," "most people," and "college." In the contemporary American context, a college degree by and large is the price of admission to the middle class, and "worth it" on that basis alone—but there are other possible cultural and economic contexts, with no guarantees that ours is either optimal or permanent. College is also, again by and large, a pretty enjoyable way to spend a few years figuring out what sort of person you're going to want to be. The latter will remain true even if the former subsides, though it does seem to me unlikely that people will be willing to shell out quite so much money just for critical thinking skills and parties on the weekend.

* The works of Philip Roth, Chuck Palahniuk, and Haruki Marukami demonstrate in the New York Times how to tell a book by its cover.