In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

It's difficult not to color our perception of author's product with his personality. There are so many examples of this. What do we think of Ezra Pound - clearly a great poet and clearly kind of an asshole? You can say the same thing about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who clearly was a Nazi sympathizer, and yet one of the great writers of the 20th century. It is tough, but there are enough examples around where we have to somehow find a way of separating the work from the artist and seeing what there is to see in the work, while also condemning the thoughts we see in the man.

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear.

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.