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.

Wednesday 1.

* A dissenting view: as someone who has recently taken up smoking in order to be more like Barack Obama, I require regular fluff stories on the president's cigarette habit to know whether I should smoke on any given day.

* An anti-bullying measure has passed the North Carolina House, a big win for the LGBT activists who pressed for it. Triangulator notes that the bill was opposed by nearly every Republican in the chamber.

* Why we need to criticize Obama from the left: "Lawyers for President Obama are quietly drafting first-of-their kind guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees, officials said Tuesday.

* The Tampa Bay Times has a huge expose on the Church of Scientology, via MeFi.

* And did you know Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common?

Friday night links.

* Gingrich: "If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything," Sotomayor must be barred from the Supreme Court. Who does he think won the Civil War?

* Tom Tancredo: "I don't know" if the Obama administration hates white people.

* Sonia Sotomayor, notorious racist, ruled against people claiming illegal discrimination in 45 out of 50 cases. This goes along with Dave Sirin's piece on Sotomayor in The Nation to demonstrate that she is a moderate—likely too moderate—not some leftist firebrand. Anyone Obama picked to replace her would, from Newt's perspective anyway, likely be significantly worse.

* Earlier this month, a Twitter user in Guatemala was arrested, jailed, and fined the equivalent of a year's salary for having posted a 96-character thought to Twitter. @jeanfer faces ten years in prison.

* Nuclear power, too cheap to meter.

* Uhura, Dualla, and "Blacks in Space." I really think some nuance is being lost here; to take up just one point, Uhura isn't marginalized in the new Star Trek; if anything she replaces McCoy as the third lead.

* Jason Schwartzman's (fake) new sitcom on NBC, "Yo Teach," a viral ad for Judd Apatow's Funny People.

* Wikipedia has barred edits from known Scientologist IP addresses. Xenu weeps.

Atheist Media Blog has what looks like a bootleg Scientology orientation film. Hail Xenu.

Since Scientology is relatively new, you may hear the question asked: Is Scientology a bonafide religion? Let me assure you, it is, according to more than 65 court decisions around the world.

Bookmark this for later: WGA Theater presents a few hours of Deadwood creator David Milch lecturing on the idea of the writer.

* Advice for academic job talks. Not that there are any jobs out there anyway... Via MeFi.

* At Atheist Media Blog, the scabtastic* Colbert Report mocks Will Smith for joining the Church of Scientology. My vague, never-really-voiced intention not to watch The Daily Show or Colbert in solidarity with the writers' strike never really panned out, by the way—I cracked pretty much on the first day. But I do watch with scorn now. Scorn.

Here's Salon on the state of these now-writerless shows. I agree that the magic is missing somewhat, especially with regard to Stewart, but I'm also amazed by how well they've both been able to fake it thus far.

* My understanding is that Colbert and Stewart came back because Viacom threatened to fire everyone, writers and crew included, if they didn't. I cling to this justification, true or not, for dear life.

* Frank Pringle has found a way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything; it's a little something I call Mr. Fusion. Via MeFi. We're saved!