By popular demand, Politics Thursday.

* Health care madness: Olympia Snowe says she won't vote for cloture if there's a public option in the bill, while Ben Nelson says he'll support an opt-out. (By my calculations this once again makes Joe Lieberman the Most Important Person in the country.) It seems clear we'll get some sort of health care reform, but its specific content is still really unpredictable. Fingers crossed.

* Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Daggetmentum has topped 20%, with Jon Corzine now slightly leading Chris Christie as a consequence.

* Nate Silver crunches the numbers on the marriage equality referendum in Maine and concludes it all comes down to turnout.

* When You Marry: a 1962 handbook.

* Ryan's Facebook feed had this link to a random manifesto generator. I now feel ready for any particular revolution that comes along.

* T. Boone Pickens explains why the U.S. is "entitled" to Iraqi oil. Could anyone have doubted it?

* And an increasing number of Americans want to legalize it.

As part of an interblog conversation about the nature of the disciplines, both Timothy Burke and Kugelmass have expressed support for the notion of Everything Studies:

I want to collapse all departments concerned with the interpretation and practice of expressive culture into a single large departmental unit. I’d call it Cultural Studies, but I don’t want it to be Cultural Studies as that term is now understood in the American academy. Call it Department of the Humanities, or of Interpretation, or something more elegant and self-explanatory if you can think of it. I want English, Modern Languages, Dance, Theater, Art History, Music, the hermeneutical portions of philosophy, cultural and media studies, some strands of anthropology, history and sociology, and even a smattering of cognitive science all under one roof. I want what John is calling Everything Studies, except that I want its domain limited to expressive culture.

I've really been moving in this direction as well—I find it increasingly difficult to see the difference between what I do in my so-called Literature department (which, in fairness, is probably already one of the closest things around to Everything Studies), what Tim does in the English department, what other people do in the Religion department, and what still other people do in French, History, and Anthropology. The differences that "professionalize" us are almost to the one differences of canon, which is to say differences in (a) departmental requirements and (b) dissertational focus, which are both external (and largely artificial) pressures designed to make us employable in some traditionally defined department, so that someday if we're lucky we can require future grad students to read far outside their area of interest and thereby justify our scholarly existence. And so these artificial disciplinary boundaries go on self-perpetuatin' themselves down through the generations.

What we need is more academic ecumenism, a recognition that it's become impossible to study philosophy of mind without knowing some cognitive science, impossible to study 19th-century literature without knowing economics, impossible to study contemporary politics without studying literature, impossible to study twentieth-century history without studying film—in short that study in the humanities has become too interstitial and too fluid for the buildings that once housed it. Kugelmass suggests the name "Symbolic Studies" for this new sense of discipline-without-disciplines, and I like that well enough, but in my heart I've always liked the sound of just "Thought."