To paraphrase Florence King ("If Christopher Hitchens is a Marxist, I want to be one, too"), I hereby pull the lever for Tom Stoppard's "timid libertarianism."

Here's the playwright complaining of nanny-state annoyances in today's Britain:

He describes his politics as "timid libertarian." Yet he can rev up a pretty bold rant on Britain's "highly regulated society," which he thinks is "betraying the principle of parliamentary democracy." There was the garden party he threw recently, for example, where because there was a pond on the property, he was required to hire two lifeguards. "The whole notion that we're all responsible for ourselves and we don't actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that's all going now. And I don't even know in whose interest it's supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It's in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago."

Via the Volokh Conspiracy: I don't want to read too much significance into this. All I'll say is that it's pretty surreal to watch aging punks singing about anarchy on the most mainstream-y of mainstream late-night TV shows — and then shaking hands with libertarian-minded Republican presidential candidate and Congressman Ron Paul!

Corner blogger Kathryn Jean Lopez is incredulous that Jersey residents aren't crying foul at Jon Bon Jovi's move to Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, while maintaining a home in Red Bank, N.J., apparently with the thought of one day running for governor of the Garden State.
I think I speak for many Jerseyites when I say: Good riddance and/or fat chance!

In a review of "Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism," Martin Amis wrote of John Updike:

Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school. On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible; and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes. Whereas Updike, of course, is a psychotic Santa of volubility, emerging from one or another of his studies (he is said to have four of them) with his morning sackful of reviews, speeches, reminiscences, think-pieces, forewords, prefaces, introductions, stories, playlets and poems. Preparing his cup of Sanka over the singing kettle, he wears his usual expression: that of a man beset by embarrassment of delicious drolleries. The telephone starts ringing. A science magazine wants something pithy on the philosophy of subatomic thermodynamics; a fashion magazine wants 10,000 words on his favourite colour. No problem -- but can they hang on? Updike has to go upstairs again and blurt out a novel.

This riff was obviously a comic exaggeration. Or not. Because here comes Updike, for the first time in National Geographic, writing about ... dinosaurs, in all their multitudinous strangeness. Also, here's an interesting Q&A between Updike and National Geographic science editor Jamie Shreeve.

Not only did Updike write eloquently about a largely unfamiliar subject; he turned the piece in six weeks early.

At the end of the interview, Shreeve asks Updike whether Darwinian evolutionary theory is compatible with belief in God. Updike's answer is worth quoting in full:

Just barely, I think. But I, like many people, I live with ambiguity. And that boy David Kern in that story arrived, after wrestling with the reality of death, which is after all the aspect of geological time that we don't really like that it means we too will become extinct and a hand full of dust, he arrived at the argument from design by looking at the feathers of recently slain pigeons and couldn't believe that a universe as beautiful, that made so many beautiful things as this one, could allow him to wink out like a candle in a dark room. So, I am a church going Christian at the same time I certainly am fascinated by science, I get Scientific American for example, and I try and keep up in a way with what science tells us. Increasingly strange things they keep telling us, too, about the subatomic particles and lately about the huge universe that surrounds us. I don't know, I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.