Midday.

* Scott McCloud introduces the world to Google Chrome.

* Philip Pullman's Top 40 books.

* Writing tips from Walter Benjamin.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

...

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

* FailureToVet-gate hits the New York Times. And Daily Kos has a round-up of pundit reactions, including David Brooks giving up the ghost and Richard Cohen invoking Incitatus, the horse Caligula made consul.

* And Dark Roasted Blend visits the fantastic megastructures of Paolo Soleri, the thinker behind arcology.

Ryan's got a second arcology post up over at culturemonkey, built around photographs and reflections from his trip last month to Arcosanti, Arizona. It puts my post last night to shame. Definitely check it out.

As promised, I threw up a brief culturemonkey post with links and pictures about arcology, a central concept for our study of Utopian architecture this week. Don't miss the fifth culturemonkey's first post, either, Google Video of a talk with Kim Stanley Robinson on climate change—it's been open in my browser for half a week now, but I definitely plan to watch it tomorrow morning...