Some recent entries on other people's blogs have made me feel as if there really is the possibility of intelligent discourse. Michael O'Sullivan continues to inform us of his delight in English and American and European cinema of the 1940s through the 1960s. Ed Howard (on his blog Only the Cinema, i.e., www.seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com) has written with great relish about Franju's "Nuits Rouges" and it made that film's (seemingly obvious) flaws into crazy virtues. Plus a while ago, he wrote a great piece about Ron Rice's "Chumlum".

I just came back from a conference on Identity Politics held at the Dahlem Humanities Center here at the Freie Universitat Berlin. It was sometimes lively, but mostly dreary. Why does academia tend to dry up the lifeblood of even the most impassioned topics?

The news has been startling: landslides in Brazil, an earthquake in Peru, mining disasters in China and the US, and the dissolution of Parliament in Great Britain. I'm sure there's more. But it makes you realize that BBC News does cover the world in a way that news in the US no longer does. What does that insularity mean for the US?