In case you need some divertissements to distract you from the abyss this evening:

Did Susan Sontag ghostwrite Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of a Moralist?  Whatever you think of that, the book looks to have engaged in some plagiarism, at least according to this piece.  (I'm not convinced that one example of this sort cannot be chalked up to a mistake in citation, especially since, as the author reports, the book cites the reference in the notes.) 

A warm introductory article about Wendell Berry.  

Pinball!  Dicing!  Somersaults!  Games have corrupted us since the dawn of time.  Or so some say.  (The image of the four thousand year old Akkadian die--which looks just like a die we would use--provokes a lot of thoughts in me.)

Neat piece on English words you didn't realize derived from Arabic!  Or at least, I didn't.  Very cool.

May you have a quiet evening.  Here in Virginia, it's the beginning of real autumn, and while tomorrow promises to be warm, in a few days we'll begin to be able to have fires in our fireplace, which is just about the best thing in the world.  May you have something similar in your life.