Links of the Day

Some quick links:

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• The Weekly Standard discusses mystery novels that deal with historic events.
  
• In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews a new Jared Diamond book about how some societies destroy themselves.
  
• The Boston Globe ideas section describes the relationship between A.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse.
  
• In The Times Literary Supplement, Lindsey Hughes reviews a new collection of the correspondence between Grigory Potemkin and "that fornicatress," Catherine the Great.
  
• A New Republic article criticizes the growing liberal nostalgia for George H.W. Bush.
  
• Does Iraq in 2004 look like Vietnam in 1966? Phillip Carter asks this question in Slate.
  

One more for Tuesday:

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• Gregg Easterbrook discusses the filming of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
  

Easterbrook's article is quite underwhelming in most respects. His plot summary, for instance, is rather unconvincing and strongly suggests that he hasn't read the books recently, if at all. They also betray a rather unintelligent political slant--suggesting, for instance, that schoolteachers helped make the books popular in part because of Pullman's anti-religious stance. (In my experience, the series was popular long before it was clear just how unambiguously anti-religion they were going to be.) Still, the article includes a detail I hadn't learned about yet: since I last wrote about this subject, the movies' director--who said that all references to religion would be dropped from the film trilogy--has resigned.

Posted by Ed at December 27, 2004 01:31 PM