Sigh: "Before his death in 1924, Franz Kafka left his papers to Max Brod who rushed them out of Czechoslovakia ahead of the advancing Nazis. Now, the daughter of Brod's late secretary wants to sell them to a German institute. But the legal battle in Israel has become Kafka-esque." Presumably in the same way that Amazon's Kindle deletion of 1984 was Orwellian.

As we head into the holiday weekend, let's take a brief moment to remember Franz Kafka, the Bohemian writer whose dystopian chronicles of an all-powerful state where the hopeless are unfairly persecuted for crimes of which they are accused but never quite made aware served as a blueprint for the Bush administration's terrorist detention programs. Author of, among others, The Trial, The Castle and The Metamorphosis, Kafka's bleak vision of life as an unwinnable existential struggle against unidentified forces has resulted in his name being turned into an adjective, used to describe situations similar to those in his work. He was also really into porn. He was born on this day in 1883.