Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks.‬ The U.S. government doesn't think so, of course. It is frantic about today's "expected release of up to three million confidential diplomatic communiques by the Wikileaks website." (Scroll down for continuing updates.) Update: "US embassy cables: browse the database" -- via The Guardian WASHINGTON -- A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, … [Read more...]

It's the week of Thanksgiving, after all: Words of Gratitude. And here's more Burroughs ... on Jesus ... the A-Bomb ... the Titanic ... Doctor Benway ... you get the idea. It's a 1989 reading. He was doing perfected shtick by then. The automatic audience adulation, which was unavoidable under the circumstances -- he was reading at the Naropa Institute -- is a little sickening. But what the hell. Toward the end of the reading, about 43 minutes in, Burroughs adlibs, "I think we might all believe in a magical universe, because that's about the … [Read more...]

This report from Athens under the Greek military junta 42 years ago turned up in a batch of old letters and postcards that a friend found the other day in a forgotten file. "How I come to have it," he writes, "is a mystery." Well, mystery solved: He and I were doing VDRSVP at the time, and we had published several other Sinclair Beiles pieces in it. We must've put this one away for future use. So here 'tiz, nearly half a century later. Sinclair is a cherished memory. Postscript: Nov. 20 -- From the Will Wonders Never Cease Dept.: Sinclair … [Read more...]

Kant was also born in 1724, a coincidence not lost on Editions Silverbridge, the French publisher of Birth of the Cunt. The video was recorded Nov. 5, 2010, at the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair, taking place this weekend at MoMA P.S. 1 in Queens, New York. On the soundtrack that's Spike Wilner noodling on piano, live at Smalls, a great little jazz club in Manhattan. … [Read more...]

...and Matt Lauer is his enabler. "I really don't care about perceptions at this point in time. ... I'm a content man."-- George W. Bush Postscript: Nov. 7 -- It's worth mentioning Robert Fisk's perceptions in this context. He writes almost daily, and his stuff is incomparable. These two recent columns are just two back-to-back examples: They're trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge again and The shaming of America. … [Read more...]