Martin Schneider writes:

A week or two ago, Jonathan Taylor flagged an interesting post by Tyler Cowen, in which he remarked that

In the longer run I expect "annotated" books will be available for full public review, though Kindle-like technologies. You'll be reading Rousseau's Social Contract and be able to call up the five most popular sets of annotations, the three most popular condensations, J.K. Rowling's nomination for "favorite page," a YouTube of Harold Bloom gushing about it, and so on.

I note for the record that Amazon has started to make users' favorite passages in its Kindle books available on the Internet. (Hat tip: Kottke.)

(* Having written that title, I must now put on my "reader" hat and object that it makes no sense whatsoever—Cowen never objected to this future, after all. It was Benjamin Chambers who expressed worries about this, in the comments to Jonathan's post. With any luck, future readers of this post will pick up on my gloss down here. —MCS) (continued)

Martin Schneider writes:

I am indebted to "SEK" at Lawyers, Guns, and Money for directing my attention to the comic stylings of Chris Muir. SEK pivots from some observations on Garry Trudeau (I almost wrote "Marshall"; there are only so many people named "Garry" around) to pick Muir's work apart. That post is worth reading.

If you don't know—I didn't—Muir writes comics that are similar to Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoons, except that they represent the conservative point of view; they're all "Sunday format," as far as I can tell. SEK points out two important things about Muir's work (for which, see here). First, each strip is a transparent attempt to dress up the wingnut talking point of the moment in a wry, witty package (and generally fails); and second, Muir crams in as many unmotivated images of pretty young women in a state of undress as he can. (They're sexualized in a way that Trudeau's Boopsie—who is, after all, a Playboy Playmate—never was; Boopsie has levels, man....)

I'm sure I'm not the first person to point this out, but It's interesting that the inhabitants of Muir's Obama-hostile world appear to be, demographically speaking, Obama voters. Everyone is young and slim; everyone looks like a sleek urban professional; and one guy is (continued)