Eliot Weinberger

The New York Times Book Review prides itself on its objectivity: no known lovers or sworn enemies are allowed to review each other. In actual practice, this means that the author of a novel about getting divorced in Pennsylvania will extravagantly praise the author of a novel about getting divorced in Connecticut. A political ‘moderate’ will air and then dismiss the ideas in a book by a left-winger; a right-winger will express some mild reservations about an ultra-right-winger; and a left-winger will only be asked to review something without contemporary content (e.g. a feminist on the biography of a suffragette). Edited by Sam Tanenhaus (biographer of Whittaker Chambers and, in progress, William F. Buckley), the NYTBR is predictably softcore right-of-centre.

1. In the 11th century, Hsiao Kuan dreamed that he was taken to a palace where the women were goddesses or transcendents. All were dressed in green. One of them gave him a piece of paper and said: 'This is ripple paper. Would you please write a poem about a winter morning?' He wrote: The twelve towers of the palace hide women dressed in green. Wine flows from lion-spouts, spiced and fragrant, trickling through tubes called 'thirsty crows'. A servant turns the pulley, red liquid jade spurts out. Incense barely smoking, lotus candles almost gone, the five dragons of the clepsydra overflow with chilly water. Unaccompanied ladies, fish pendants dangling from crimson sashes, stand on tiptoe to watch the sun come up, far off in Fu-sang.

GQ (formerly known as Gentlemen's Quarterly) has just released some mind-boggling artefacts from the Cheney-Bush Era: the covers – like elementary school reports – of the daily intelligence briefings that the Department of Defense prepared for a few eyes only, and that were often personally delivered by Donald Rumsfeld to the Oval Office. (There's also a background article here.) One of the lessons of Watergate and the investigative journalism of the 1970s was that the wildest stoner rumours of the 1960s turned out to be perfectly true (‘Whoa, dude, I heard the CIA tried to put some powder in Castro's shoes that would make his beard fall out . . .').