Unexpectedly busy day yesterday. Here are some links.

* One of Flashforward's creators has apparently been fired, suggesting the show might get better soon. Nerds may also rejoice at the news that Brannon Braga isn't actually involved with Flashforward at the moment, as he's off driving 24 further into the ground.

* "Good Ol' Gregor Brown" and other "Masterpiece Comics."



* The future of academia? UNC Chapel Hill has made Spanish 101 online-only.

* More bad news for NJ's Chris Christie in advance of next month's election: federal prosecutors gave the New York Times specifics on how one of his former assistants, to whom he made a large, undisclosed loan, may have improperly helped his campaign. Lautenberg isn't an independent observer by any means, but for what it's worth he's called for a federal investigation.

* Columbia has suspended its environmental journalism program. Because the environmental crisis is so 2008.

* A new book called Manthropology makes a lot of claims about the "inadequate modern male" that don't seem right.

Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

Also, "manthropology"? Really?

Reading Kafka makes you smarter, says a headline at Science Daily. Does this mean English departments matter again?

Quick links.

* Is McCain's unvetted VP pick really associated with the Alaskan Independence Party (actual self-description: "No longer a fringe party")? Really? Is this a joke?

* Johann Hari tries to game out the partisan political implications of Hurricane Gustav. I'm reserving judgment—you can't underestimate how much Americans love kitsch, and I think McCain's political opportunism in heading to the disaster zone could play really well among low-information voters. You and I know that a high-profile visit like this draws needed resources away from rescue efforts, but sad to say most swing voters just aren't that savvy.

* So what if Kafka enjoyed porn?

* And, via Cynical-C, Steve Buscemi on The Big Lebowski.

Who was the dominant writer of the twentieth century, if indeed such a question even makes any sense at all? In rejecting Alexander Solzhenitsyn's claim on the title, the Paper Cuts blog nominates George Orwell. As you might expect from the last time we played this game, I don't think anyone can really challenge Joyce, unless it's Kafka or (maybe) Gabriel García Márquez.

Late night.

* 'Our Phony Economy': Why measuring GDP doesn't tell us much of anything we need to know. In Harper's, via MeFi.

The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 to 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.

* Springfield Punx Simpsonizes celebrities and superheroes. At right: Tobias Fünke.

* Al Giordano says Tim Kaine is growing on him for VP.

The number one rule in choosing a vice presidential nominee is "first, do no harm." If you're a presidential nominee, you don't want a running mate that will distract from you, commit gaffes, speak off-message, or that secretly thinks he or she is too good to be number two.

And the second rule is, "then, do some good." You want a VP that will reinforce your messages and make voters more comfortable with you.

Kaine is so far passing both tests with flying colors.

I'm not there yet—as I've mentioned before, just about everything I hear about Kaine turns me off—but Al's instincts have never steered me wrong. I guess we'll see.

* What are the essential reads in literary fantasy? Personally I'd have to start my list with heavy-hitters from the twentieth century (and my bookshelf) like Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, and Calvino...

* Mission accomplished, corporations! Wal-Mart employee voluntarily enforces her entirely false belief that "copyright lasts forever."

* And will Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers comedy, be the new greatest movie of all time? All signs point to yes:

In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith considers Kafka.

Recent years have seen some Kafka revisionism although what's up for grabs is not the quality of the work,[2] but rather its precise nature. What kind of a writer is Kafka? Above all, it's a revision of Kafka's biographical aura. From a witty essay of this kind, by the young novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell:

It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Franz Kafka, and the Kafkaesque.... Kafka's work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of the history of European fiction. He has no predecessors—his work appears as if from nowhere—and he has no true successors.... These fictions express the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish mysticism, a non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs.... It is crucial to know the facts of Kafka's emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of literature, and a saint, outside ordinary limits of human behaviour. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.

Thirlwell blames the banality of the Kafkaesque on Max Brod, Kafka's friend, first biographer, and literary executor, in which latter capacity he defied Kafka's will (Kafka wanted his work burned), a fact that continues to stain Brod, however faintly, with bad faith. For his part, Brod always maintained that Kafka knew there would be no bonfire: if his friend were serious, he would have chosen another executor. Far harder to defend is Brod's subsequent decision to publish the correspondence,[4] the diaries, and the acutely personal Letter to My Father (though posthumous literary morality is a slippery thing: if what is found in a drawer is very bad, the shame of it outlives both reader and publisher; when it's as good as Letter to My Father, the world winks at it).