From TNR, Adam Thirwell reviews Charles Dickens by Michael Slater. Does late night still matter?: Michael Brett on Jon Stewart, Will Rogers and Mark Twain. Sceptics expected a whitewash, but Britain’s Iraq war inquiry has fatally wounded the case for liberal interventions past and future. The Mona Lisa and Abraham Lincoln: What do the famous portrait and the former U.S. president have in common? Let us now praise jingles: Insidious, annoying, and — just maybe — tiny works of art. The novel is dead: I’m writing an essay! A look at how the Wikileaks website offers promising outlet for fighting corruption. Online support group Women Against Fantasy Sports is a hit with dispossessed wives and girlfriends. A review of A Literary Bible by David Rosenberg. Peter Preston is that rarest of all big media breeds: the expert who can’t decide. The inside man: Can every aspect of our personality be explained on the basis of our upbringing? The 1960s, Refracted: While published decades ago, the works of writers like Stanley Crouch and Lisa Jones are still ferociously in the present. From Vanity Fair, Darrell Hartman on fashion’s game changers: Are athletes out to conquer Seventh Avenue? Being "overtly gay" is still a liability (i.e. Adam Lambert's maligned AMAs performance), but if you're a hot, seemingly harmless female (Tila Tequila, Rihanna, and even Britney and Madge), playing gay can pay off big-time. The wake-up call: A dream about Bartok brought Malcolm Gillies his conceptual breakthrough, although it would take him another five years to finish writing it down.
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