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We have hit bottom in Iraq. And you know it because the debates over Iraq (whether the war was just, whether we planned it adequately, whether we have a meaningful exist strategy, etc.) have ground to a halt.

For a little weekend laugh, here is Stephen Colbert speaking at Book Expo America, pumping his new book, I Am America (And So Can You!), sparring with Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns), trashing Cormac McCarthy, and generally likening books to cigarettes.

(Continued from Part II)
The most recent major foray into the world of cultureboxes comes in an entirely different size and market niche: the Apple iPhone. It may look different, but it has all the hallmarks of a culturebox.

The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360.

A quick heads up: You can read an excerpt from J.M. Coetzee’s upcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year, over at The New York Review of Books. The entire novel will be published in January 2008. And, in case you weren’t already aware of it, Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360.

RadioLab, a science radio show created by WNYC in New York, is a little unusual for a public radio show. It comes out in short seasons of about five episodes. Each episode addresses a particular question in science through a wide lens–I found their most recently podcast show, on Morality, to be particularly fascinating.

Here is a new and free course to come out of a Stanford University program that (full disclosure) I help organize. It’s called The Future of the Internet: Architecture and Policy (iTunes), and it’s taught by Ramesh Johari.