When I first heard the news about soldiers anally raping children in Abu Ghraib last night (Seymour Hersh says that the Pentagon is sitting on the tapes), I hoped to hell that it was a rumor. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of disgust that something this barbaric was allowed to go down. But I was left speechless. Fortunately, Stavros has weighed in on the matter. We’ll see how the White House and the Pentagon respond to this one (if they respond at all) and what, if anything, Hersh manages to ferret out of his military contacts.

Holy frijole! Looks like Elvis Costello’s first orchestral work, Il Sogno, has the endorsement of Terry Teachout.

New York Post: “The full manuscript of ‘Charlotte Simmons’ has not been turned in, sources say, but The Post obtained about 100 unedited manuscript pages. The pages indicate that the novel will be more straightforward and concerned with a smaller world than either ‘Bonfire’ or ‘A Man in Full,’ but typically Wolfian in its keen, if disturbing, observations.” (via Gawker)

[UPDATE: Rolling Stone has an excerpt, which is….well, just plain goofy. “A gale was blowing in his head?”]

My review of Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft is now up at January. Reviews of The Coma and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas are forthcoming at various places.

WNBC: “A 36-year-old man led police on a short car chase, driving against traffic on a busy boulevard so he wouldn’t get caught with a stolen library book…. The chase lasted about 10 minutes, with about a dozen police cruisers involved. During the chase, officers saw the suspect toss a backpack out the car window, Connellan said. When they recovered it, they found the stolen book, Connellan said.”