I just made a mixtape for a friend of mine. Which is something I should never do. Because I become obsessed with the choosing of songs and end up not getting anything else done for a week and losing sleep and making myself crazy with second guessing and internal back-and-forth-and-back-again. It's not healthy.

Truly senseless acts make for poor sloganeering. Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who killed six people at a Tucson congressional town meeting, while gravely wounding his apparent target, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, seems to have been not at all working from any traditional set of motivations. His now-infamous cache of YouTube videos throws around theories of a new currency and the illegitimate seizure of private property, together with a barely intelligible discussion of himself as a terrorist. He also announced plans to introduce a new number and letter to the alphabet, both represented as bursts of incoherent scribbling—a fair depiction, it seems, of the thought process involved in producing [...]