From the you-don't-say files: Tom Ridge admits in his new book to succumbing to political pressure to raise the terror alert level on the eve of George Bush's re-election, claiming he was so angry he almost resigned over it. How almost brave of him.

Monday!

* The trailer for the SF-infused Paul-Giamatti-as-Paul-Giamatti comedy Cold Souls causes io9 to ask whether "Charlie Kaufman" is officially a genre yet.

* Kari in the comments directs us to a defense of Holden Caulfield against the spurious assertions of irrelevance I blogged about yesterday.

* Bruce Schneier: SF Writers Aren't a Useful Aspect of National Defense—a followup to an article I posted last month. Via Boing Boing.

* Also not useful: classifying "protests" as "low-level terrorism activity."

* The Art of the Title Sequence considers the end of Wall-E. Via Kottke.

* What's wrong with the American essay? I'm not sure anything is, but certainly not this:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer, the first American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a good sermon we hear our own “discarded thoughts brought back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. And this is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas.

It doesn't seem to me at all that American letters suffers from a lack of hypotheses confused for certainties.

* And Shia Labeouf may live to ruin Y: The Last Man after all.

Krugman: There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

A 88-year-old gunman— by reports a white supremacist and birther—opened fire earlier today at the Holocaust Museum. (Early reports that no one was killed have become inaccurate; a security guard has now died. TPM has running updates.) The suspect was arrested twenty-eight years ago for attempting to perform a citizen's arrest of the Federal Reserve Board. His writings have been widely circulating on the Internet.

In light of today's shooting and the George Tiller assassination, both Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias remember the Homeland Security report from earlier this year that caused so much manufactured controversy, which had warned against the threat of precisely this sort of violence from political extremists.

Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.

* Swine flu in NC! PANIC!

* Another article on Homeland Security's use of science fiction writers for brainstorming.

* Test your knowledge of literature with the Amazon Statistically Improbable Phrase Quiz. Via MeFi.

* New Yankee Stadium homerun theories.

* 'The Making of Rushmore.'

* Two from Steve Benen: on the improbable discovery of Democrats at Liberty University and a roundup of recent misogynistic attacks on Nancy Pelosi.

* And our friend Tim Morton has a new video on YouTube: The Mesh.

Napolitano to DHS? I thought she was going to run for McCain's Senate seat.

Midday links.

* MTV cut down a rainforest to film a series of the world's most trivial show, Road Rules/Real Word Challenge.

* Will the collapse of the financial markets delay professorial retirements and thereby destroy my chances of tenured employment? Phil Gramm will pay for this.

* The Department of Homeland Security has partnered with Sesame Street in a desperate bid to completely evacuate its last shred of credibility. Godspeed.

* The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation's aesthetic-industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

* That one was a joke, but the NEH has announced grants of $25,000 for the development of multidisciplinary courses on the "Enduring Questions."

* Toronto may ban the coffee cup, or else tax it into oblivion.

* 'Showdown or Shutdown at the Star-Ledger.' Who mourns for Northern New Jersey's finest journalistic institution?

* A brief history of the Cylons.

A few more while I'm feeling fiery.

* Speaking of our entrenched class of professional morons, there's been a lot of good commentary today on the strikingly poor job Brokaw did interviewing Gore last Sunday. Just for starters, here's Grist and OpenLeft.

* For some reason, The Nation now has a sex column. The subject of this and presumably every edition: How hot does Barack Obama make you?

Pretty hot, I guess.

* Inside Homeland Security Hell: Nine-Months-Pregnant Edition. More at Daily Kos.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.