Did you see this? How could you not? It was frontpage NYT -- front and center above the fold -- the kind of news that sends the mind reeling: Wounded Soldiers Return to Iraq, Seeking Solace.

Really.

Americans wounded in the Iraq war are being ferried back to the...

The artist Malcolm Mc Neill animated Televolution 20 years ago. "I redid it for Charles Darwin," he said the other day, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and to pay tribute to On the Origin of Species. The 19th-century naturalist's masterwork was published in November...

The last time I saw Burt Britton it must have been more than 20 years ago. He simply disappeared. I'm not sure why.

He told me, as I gather he told others, that if I ever wanted to contact him I could dial a special phone number, which he...

Just as she did last month, she has published the best op-ed read of the day, this time with an assist from Dedrick Muhammad.

Their lede asks, "What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president?" And...

This comes from an internist. He has had a primary care practice in the New York metropolitan area for more than 20 years. For obvious reasons, he asks to remain anonymous. I've met him and can vouch for his identity.

Right now, I have dropped my participation in every insurance...

The counter below oughta put the cost of U.S. healthcare reform into perspective. At the moment the cost of U.S. wars over the past nine years is closing in on $900 billion. Health care reform would cost an estimated $900 billion to $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

I know, because I live in one, and I'm doing fine. I haven't been arrested for jaywalking, littering, loitering, begging, or sleeping under a bridge. I haven't been arrested for sleeping in a homeless shelter when there's an outstanding warrant against me for sleeping on a suburban sidewalk. I haven't...

Our old amigo has written a stunning new book, Death in Paris, which realitystudio.org has just posted online. It's wild. The epigraph (from Raymond Chandler) sets the tone: "There must be idealism, but there must also be contempt."

Jed Birmingham discusses the importance of little magazines to William Burroughs and their role in the publication and reception of Naked Lunch. I recorded the video in Paris on July 3, 2009, at the Naked Lunch@50 conference sponsored by the University of London Institute. The conference marked the original...

For the 50th anniversary celebration of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, which begins any minute now -- it's scheduled for July 1-3 at the University of London Institute in Paris -- have a look at the cover of the original edition brought out in 1959 by French...

He died in San Francisco just short of his 93rd birthday. I met him on a bitterly cold winter day in Paris, in 1962. I was keeping warm sitting in a seedy little cafe behind the Place de l'Odeon. It was a neighborhood hangout where you could buy pot...

Spent a few hours listening to the performances at the BANG ON A CAN Marathon 2009 with a friend of mine who has little patience for la sonorité artistique. She described much of what she heard as "beehive music." I had to laugh. She wasn't wrong.

(One composer,...

In London The Guardian posted its obituary Sunday at 9 p.m., which means it went live in New York at 4 p.m. But this morning's print edition of The New York Times makes no mention of Ballard's death.

OK, print is slow -- but not that slow. And how...

All the Hemingways I saw were going for stratospheric prices. Well, not exactly going. More like asking. If I remember correctly, a signed presentation copy of the rare Paris edition of in our time had a price tag of $465,000. Signed firsts of Ulysses by James Joyce and...

...from Hassan Sabbah:

Listen to my last words, anywhere!
Listen all you boards, governments, syndicates, nations of the world,
And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory,
To take what is not yours ...

Henry Kisor has posted on his news blog an item called The 'Inept Blob' vs. the 'Inhuman Turd,' about the nasty friction between the novelist Nelson Algren (a literary great, in my opinion) and the editor William Targ (a not-so-great, in Algren's opinion).

Which reminds me: Dan Simon's...

The classical music editor of The New York Times takes up his longtime role once again as chief media apologist for the Vienna Philharmonic. In a promotional article about the orchestra, James Oestreich plants a big wet kiss on Clemens Hellsberg, its chairman and archivist, lauding him as...

A laid-back tune for a lazy afternoon. It's by Fats Waller for a song he wrote with lyricist Andy Razaf. That's Dick Hyman playing.

The video was recorded by yours truly on Feb. 18, 2009, at the Living Room of Saint Peter's Church in Manhattan (Lexington Avenue...

Obama knocked it out of the park at the Abe Lincoln bicentennial dinner in Springfield, Illinois. Stunning.

He created an unexpected word picture:

Here in Springfield, it is easier, perhaps, to reflect on Lincoln the man rather than the marble giant, before Gettysburg and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Bull...

The one-stop shop for all things William Burroughs, RealityStudio, has had a design overhaul. "I was really anxious not only to spruce up the site a bit, but to make the range of content more apparent," RS godfather Supervert says. "With the old site, a random visitor would have...