There are several sites that have linked to us in the past couple of days on an interestingly wide variety of subjects. I wouldn’t have thought we were all that various. I’d have thought we were focused rather than wide-ranging; narrow rather than broad. But maybe not. Maybe our subject covers more ground than I had quite realized. That’s good, if so. I like a judicious blend of breadth and depth – with just a pinch of coriander.

It was thanks to one such link that I found the articles on the assault on Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo and his wife Mary Njeeri, which Robin Varghese of 3 Quarks Daily connects to Martha Nussbaum on Gujarat and the threats to historian James Laine, and to B&W on that whole large subject. One could also mention Salman Rushdie, and Naguib Mahfouz, and Rushdie’s Japanese translator. So…yes, of course all these things are connected. So the more people who see the connections and join the dots, the better. Greetings, 3 Quarks.

And there’s a new blog called No Credentials (hey, that’s my name), which mentions B&W in the same breath with Alan Sokal, which I take to be one of the best compliments we’ve ever had. There’s a lot of excellent stuff on that blog – too much to summarize or quote briefly: scroll down and read. Read Quackademism #2, and Michael Drout responds, and My favorite Marxist – here’s a bit from that last one:

Berman is different from, say, a David Harvey or a Frederic Jameson, in that he writes fluently and beautifully. Not incidentally, he is also a humane writer: The human heart–even the human soul, as he acknowledges in Adventures–is his real subject; it’s just that for his entire adult life he has believed that Marx’s vision offers the soul its best solace, its greatest hope, and so he commits all of his worldly efforts to that vision.

Well just read them all. Greetings, No Credentials.

And there’s the one at Philosophy et cetera that I mentioned below. Okay, maybe three is not several. But it’s almost several. Well maybe I just thought it was several because each one was so interesting – yes that must be it.