"Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious again!"

The Guardian reviews Žižek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.

Your Monkey called has your famous book titles (if they were written today).

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Iain (M.) Banks's new novel, Transition, is being podcast for free on iTunes.

Preparing for my exams, day 10,000.

Kottke highlights a nice Infinite Summer forum thread about mathematics and Infinite Jest that, in a pleasing recursive loop, eventually links back to this blog.

Also in Infinite Summer news, Ezra Klein makes everybody sad by not really liking the book. I agree with Daryl both that (1) it's perfectly okay not to like the book and (2) your not liking the book isn't David Foster Wallace's fault. I often find myself reminding students that "pleasure" isn't necessarily what's most important about literature, or art in general; sometimes reading can and should be hard work.

Just finished Accelerando for my exams and really enjoyed it. The book gets better as it goes, and in accordance with Stross's singularitarian themes it's free on the Internet. What I think I like best about the novel is Stross's unflinching take on the "rapture of the nerds," which is reframed at one point in the book as "the Vinge catastrophe"; what the Singularity is for Stross is not so much the moment A.I. achieves sentience but the moment corporations do.

Monday night 2!

* 61 Essential Postmodern Reads: An Annotated List. (Absalom, Absalom!? Hamlet? Really?)

* Nature's right to exist comes to Shapleigh, Maine. Via MeFi.

* The Harvard Crimson reports that Henry Louis Gates was apparently arrested yesterday for trying to break into his own home. Post-racial America is awesome. (via SEK)

* Also from SEK: scientific proof Powerpoint sucks.

* Inside Blackwater, the corporation so evil they forgot to give it a non-evil name.

Monday night links.

* After a brief flirtation with "top five" status, Brüno is back to being a box-office disappointment.

* Top ten comics cities. #2: Chris Ware's Chicago. Via MetaFilter.

* xkcd tackles the frighteningly addictive power of TV Tropes.

* SF by the numbers. Via Boing Boing.

* Why are we so fat?

* Also in the New Yorker: profiles of Al Franken and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, last seen ratifying nature's right to exist.

* And allow me to offer my heartiest gerrycanavan.blogspot.com welcome to North Carolina's newest resident.

Acephalous tackles the inescapable telos of back-cover plot summaries.

Monday night roundup.

* Best news ever: LucasArts will be rereleasing its classic games over Steam. Highlight of the first round, coming Wednesday: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Dare we hope, at last, for X-Wing? Also: Day of the Tentacle? A little more at Slashdot.

* io9 highlights ugly SF covers. I sort of love them all.

* Also at io9: teaser photos for Harry Potter 6.

* A world without nukes? Obama and Medvedev have reached an agreement to cut nuclear arsenals by a third. It's something Obama's had on his mind a long time.

* 13 Facts about Dollhouse episode 13. Minor spoiler alert.

* And the world's worst airline, last seen trying to make people pay to use the bathroom, just got a little worse.

More!

* Summer book reviews from both me and Jaimee in the Independent.

* As ubiquitous as pollution has become in the industrialized West, it remains largely invisible. That is not the case elsewhere in the world.

* Mitt Romney is a tool. A huge tool.

* "ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens." Via MeFi.

* Everyone is reading Infinite Jest this summer. Are you? I really didn't like it the first time through, but DFW died and made me sad, so maybe I'll give it another shot.

* And, as always, morality is impossible without God.

Classic sci-fi covers: the art of Penguin SF.

I've got another book review in the Indy this week, this one of Dalton Conley's Elsewhere, U.S.A.

If video games were books. For more video game nostalgia there's this link with poster-size images of old LucasArts box covers.

UPDATE: I see from the MetaFilter thread there's more here and here.

The Indy's special issue on Abe Lincoln came out today and I had a small piece in it trying to make sense of the recent explosion of "popular Lincolnology" read against the Obama and Bush presidencies.

There's a lot of good stuff in the issue, from twelve ways of looking at Abraham Lincoln to Lincoln in music to Lincoln in film to Lincoln on Facebook. Even Gore Vidal gets his shout-out...

One thousand novels everyone must read. Via Bookninja.

Why one thousand?
Why novels?
Why everyone?
Why "must"?
Why (yes) read?

What Barack Obama should read. At Washington Monthly, via Steve Benen.

RACHEL MADDOW

The new president should read The Edge of Disaster, by Stephen Flynn, despite its generic Chicken Little title. Flynn has the politics and the strategy exactly right for the two big business-of-government tasks facing the new administration: (1) annulling the previous politics of "homeland security" and getting it right this time; and (2) massively upscaling our investment in infrastructure. It’s hard to be rational and rigorous and constructive when thinking about catastrophe—but that’s exactly what we need.

America is a country that no longer reads: Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series currently occupies all four of the top four spots on the New York Times a bestseller list. In other news, America is a deeply unserious place. [UPDATE: See the comments for some correction on this. The Freakonomics posted is actually fairly lightly sourced and he never actually says which bestseller list he saw.]

Jaimee and I both have capsule reviews in the Indy's end-of-the-year booklist. I wrote about Bolaño and Jaimee about Aravind Adiga's Booker-Prize winning The White Tiger, but here's Jaimee on the book everyone's talking about.

Goodnight Bush
By Erich Origen and Gan Golan
Little, Brown & Company

Many a child may be fooled by the cover of this "unauthorized parody" of the classic children's story Goodnight Moon; upon closer inspection, however, the cover of Goodnight Bush, by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, portrays a nightmare world of factory smokestacks, oil drilling and Florida 2000 ballots roasting on an open fire.

Accompanied by a simple text in a rhyming series of good nights ("Goodnight Constitution, goodnight evolution"), it is with a careful eye one must read the pictures full of visual puns. We are led into a child's room, Little Georgie about to go to bed in his flight-cadet jammies. Lines of cocaine are on one nightstand, My Pet Goat on the other, surrounded by the dollhouse White House, little soldier men, the fox, the rocking chair, the blocks, the ballots and "a quiet Dick Cheney whispering hush." Is that yellow cake that sits on the bedside table or is that a slice of the American dream in the form of apple pie? As the story progresses, the toys move and change to document another facet of the Bush years: another grievance, another mistake, another disaster.

If this book has a moment in time, it is now. George Bush's legacy is bandied about on political talk shows and is soon to be stamped into history books, and here is a tiny sardonic snapshot that captures all that went wrong; it is only here, in a child's world, where we can laugh at the worst that has happened in a kind of catharsis. The book ends with both good and bad goodbyes: "Goodnight Earth? Goodnight heir? Goodnight failures everywhere." As a large percentage of the country looks forward to a New Year and a new administration, this clever little book is worth a look. —Jaimee Hills

If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing. Eight years is an eternity in the life of a culture, and when we look back on an era, we do it through pinholes: a movie here, a book there. What will stand out, decades from now, as the singular emblems of this moment in history? Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Battlestar Galactica
American Idol
Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart
The Corrections
Black Hawk Down
Cohen’s Borat
Green Day’s American Idiot
Far Away
Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life

Battlestar is a decent if limited pick, and Idol a fairly inspired one, though not for the reasons given—but the exclusion of The Wire is simply criminal, not to mention Sopranos and Deadwood, and (yes) 24. For film, it might actually be The Dark Knight, or else There Will Be Blood. (Maybe Children of Men?) For books—surely the hardest category—it's probably The Road, for a few reasons. I'm too illiterate in music to even begin to answer: the best I could manage would be a half-serious suggestion of Gnarls Barkley, or else just name a Springsteen album because that's how I roll.

Via The Chutry Experiment, who points (among other things) to the unforgivable omission of viral video.