Yeah, the server crashed and we were down for two days. I don’t want to talk about it.

Here are some links I’ve been saving up …

1. How would Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, vote today? His daughter Erica Heller tells us her guess, charmingly.

2. Sean Quinn of FiveThirtyEight.com sneaks in a neat On The Road reference.

3. A new device, the Pony E-Reader, via Ed.

4. Dancing, dancing with Mr. K.

5. Keyboardist Merl Saunders, who distinguished himself as a member …

Taxation is an intense, emotional issue in the news and on the streets these days. I had an argument about it with a guy at work who advocated a flat income tax.

“But no politician, not even McCain, is calling for a flat income tax,” I said. “The only person calling for a flat income tax is Joe the Plumber.”

“Well, it’s not fair,” my friend said. “How is it fair that if I make more money than you I have …

Ahh, Updike. He’s the closest thing I’ve got to a favorite living writer, and yet I didn’t bother to read his previous novel Terrorist and I’m not interested in his newest, the sequel Widows of Eastwick. I also don’t care for his so-called “masterpiece”, the Rabbit books, where he places his authorial voice into the body of a furtive and unexceptional suburban car salesman, nor the Bech books, where he parodies Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Joseph Heller by impersonating a famous Jewish-American …

1. When I was 14 and a freshman in high school, we did a production of The Music Man. Before auditions I watched the movie and decided I wanted the part of Eulalie McKecknie Shinn, the mayor’s wife, mainly because there’s a musical number, “Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little” in which the ladies of the town go off on indecent literature, and there’s the famous refrain, “Chaucer! Rabelais! BaaaaalZAC!” and the one who got to bellow “BaaaaalZAC!” was the mayor’s wife. Plus she got to wear great hats. …

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

This bookish comedy has been a recent literary sensation in France, and I imagine it will continue to find satisfied readers around the world. It’s about Renee, an elderly concierge in an expensive Paris apartment who lives in a dowdy servant’s nest, answering to insufferable rich people and carefully maintaining her secret: she is a brilliant self-taught intellectual, smarter than any of the educated people who surround her.

This …

Plato’s Republic is often described as a book about politics, a philosophical discussion of the ideal state. It’s an odd fact, though, that the book only uses politics as a metaphor for the individual human soul, and that the book is intended as a work of psychology rather than politics.

The Republic consists of several long conversations culminating in Socrates (Plato’s mouthpiece) describing five different types of governments, and then describing the five personality types that correspond to each type of government. …

I sometimes enjoy Christopher Buckley’s work more or less (usually less), but there’s no doubt that he proved himself a class act in the public glare this week, coolly explaining how he found himself unwanted at the National Review, the magazine his father founded, after daring to present the conservative case for voting Obama.

The National Review certainly got the worst of this exchange, and a quick look at their own rhetoric on Barack Obama proves that this magazine has ranged …

This week it was reported that in 1950, author Milan Kundera allegedly informed on Miroslav Dvoracek, and as a result, Dvoracek ended up serving 14 years in communist prison camps. (Story here.) In many ways, the news is reminiscent of the story of German author Gunter Grass and his admission that he served in the Nazi Waffen SS as a young man.

So what we know is that there are documents in the Czech Republic’s Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes that name …

John McCain’s been taking a beating lately for, let’s see, his choice of Sarah Palin, his impulsive behavior, his lack of a finely-tuned economic plan. I’m glad Obama’s message is finally breaking through to a critical mass of voters, and I just pray the momentum continues until November 4, when we can rest easy in our choice of a stabilizing leader.

But none of the raging criticisms directed against John McCain address my own biggest beef with him. John McCain’s …

1. Art Spiegelman’s new comic autobiography Breakdowns is out and looks great. I don’t have room for the fairly gigantic book in my apartment, so I’ll have to read it at Barnes and Noble. You’ll find me in the Graphic Novels aisle.

2. Dan Green went and called Fyodor Dostoevsky “a terrible writer” over at his Reading Experience blog, prompting James Wood and many others to respond. Good stuff all around, though it gets a bit unhinged …