James Grimmelman has written a fashinating, thought provoking essay on privacy, democracy and internet, anchored around the Laurie Garrett fracas in mefi. Check it out.

Thanks to the Susan McDougal affair, I now take NYT Book review with a pinch of salt. First, Beverly Lowry reviewed Susan McDougal's book. No one paid it much attention until Gene Lyons published a scathing critique of the NYT review of Susan McDougal's book. Thankfully, it set a lot of tongues wagging in the book industry. NYT published a partial retraction. People still kept talking about it. Then NYT said that well, it is all because of the freelancers who write most of the reviews and who after all aren't trained as journalists. And finally they said alright, we'll publish a letter by Susan McDougal. I guess this is as close to an apology that the paper of record can get.

These days, it is fashionable for liberals to hate Christopher Hitchens. But I think he has one of the most formidable intellects among the essayists writing today and on those occasions when he does get his head away from the bottle, he is an amazing writer. His article on The perils of partition in the new issue of The Atlantic is quite interesting. I have also been meaning to read Stephen Collini's review of Hitchen's book on Orwell for some time.

Guardian has an interesting story on Escape from Taliban, the Hindi movie made about Sushmita Bandhopadhyay's escape. From what I read between the lines, it seems to be standard Bollywood fare which is a pity.

LAT says that Arthur, a contemporary culture magazine is worth checking out (you can download a pdf version of the magazine from the second link). The pdf version looks ungainly. I hope to grab a copy whenever I go to NYT next.