Laila Lalami

I was going to comment on the new Israeli law (see here and here) that prevents Palestinians who marry Israelis from living in Israel or acquiring Israeli citizenship, but Jonathan Edelstein puts it in much better terms than I could.

Dr. Zhivago and other books critical of the Soviet era are being removed from Russian schoolchildren’s reading lists.

Boulder-area librarians are joining others in the country: they will stop keeping records on patrons’ reading habits in an effort to thwart the PATRIOT act.

If the Defense Department’s policies in the Middle-East often sound like a big game, well, maybe there’s a reason:
“The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. (…) The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts

The New York Times has an interesting article about foreign literature in translation. Why are there so few foreign books in translation in the US? Even with highly acclaimed writers, sales are dismal. The article also covers the weird mechanics by which a lack of translation into English affects a book’s sales in all other languages but its own:
“‘Since English is the lingua franca, translating a book into English puts it in a position to be translated into many different languages,’ said Esther Allen, a translator who is chairwoman of the PEN translation committee. ‘We’re the clogged artery that prevents authors from reaching readers anywhere outside their own country.’ ‘It’s a great paradox of American life,’ Ms. Allen said, ‘that on the one hand we feel very cosmopolitan, with Mexican restaurants and cab drivers who speak Swahili, and we feel that we inhabit a mind-boggling multicultural universe, but at the end of the day, it breaks down to different ways of being American.’”
Read America Yawns at Foreign Fiction.

John Le Carre’s next book, Absolute Friends, due out in 2004, is the story of rival spies during the Cold War who become “caught up in the fallout of the American war against Iraq.”

except it isn’t. Jayson Blair has landed two assignments, one for Esquire and one for Jane magazine, the latter an article about “workplace pressures.” I wonder if those pressures include the pressure to actually do your job.
Link via Moby.

Neal Pollack throws in his two cents on the Believer vs. ULA feud. And who better than him can distill the fight to its essentials?

No surprise there. The 800-page report on 9/11 released by the joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence yesterday finds a number of intelligence failures and miscommunications between the FBI and the CIA. It also asserts that Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. More interestingly, it confirms what many had long suspected (see this old Moorishgirl post): that the Saudi government provided logistical and financial support to the 9/11 hijackers. But you’ll have to wait a while to know the details of Saudi involvement, since the 28 pages or so that discuss this were classified prior to the release of the report because it could “upset a key U.S. ally.” We wouldn’t want the Saudis to be upset.
Read the full 800-page report. Excerpts from the Washington Post.

The Guardian has an edited version of Ahdaf Soueif’s introduction to Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love.