Barbara Comyns is always being compared to writers X, Y or Z “on acid.” The acid part is a cop-out; her voice is clear and direct, even when describing surreal or hyperreal situations, and her crisp descriptions are not kaleidoscopic or druggy in the least. The comparisons to other writers, apt or not, are never a list of her formative influences; she didn’t have any.

Comyns was born in 1909 in a big house on the Avon, fourth of the six children of a drunk father and an indifferent mother. The family managed to be aristocratic and poor at once, but like many aristocrats they became increasingly poor as the 20th century wore on. Third-rate governesses came and went sporadically, none making much of an impact. Sheltered thus from any received ideas about literature, Comyns wrote and illustrated stories constantly.

Her father died when Comyns was in her late teens; the big crumbling house was sold to pay his massive debts. She went to art school in London where, for the first time, she discovered public libraries. “[I] read until I was almost drunk on books, but my own writing became imitative and self-conscious. In the end, with great strength of mind, I destroyed all the stories and half-written novels I’d written over the years,” Comyns wrote near the end of her life.

Her first novel, Sisters by a River, a barely fictionalized account of her strange childhood, wasn’t written until ten years later. She conceived of it mostly as an amusement for her own children. She was at that point living outside London, working as a cook on a country estate to escape the Blitz.

“It was in the middle of a snowstorm I was born, Palmer’s brother’s wedding night, Palmer went to the wedding and got snowbound, and when he arrived very late in the morning he had to bury my packing under the walnut tree, he always had to do this when we were born — six times in all and none of us died, Mary said Granny used to give us manna to eat and that’s why we didn’t, but manna is stuff in the bible, perhaps they have it in Fortnum & Mason, but I’ve never seen it, or maybe Jews’ shops.” That is the book’s first sentence and paragraph.

The way Comyns delivers information seems scattershot, but the questions it raises addict the reader. Who is Palmer, who is Mary, and who is this narrator who imagines that you can buy manna in a jar? “One of our butler’s duties was to bury the placenta after each of my mother’s children were born” wouldn’t have anything like the same effect.

Comyn’s voice has childlike qualities; she looks at everything in the world as though seeing it for the first time. In later books, though, her narrators’ naivety is deployed in order to provoke horror; the gap between what the reader knows and the narrator doesn’t serves to make the reader fascinated and fearful. Often the reader is horrified and amused simultaneously: “I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said ‘I won’t have any babies’ very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come. I thought that was what was meant by birth-control, but by this time I knew that idea was quite wrong,” the narrator of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths confesses to the reader. At this point in the novel she is pregnant, 21 and married to an artist who has no interest in supporting her or a child. This novel, a lightly fictionalized account of Comyns’ first marriage and early years in London, contains casually grotesque descriptions of the dawn of medicalized childbirth and the grisly death of an infant, in between a lot of whimsical descriptions of pets and furniture.

There are always lots of pets around in Comyns’ stories. She loved animals but wasn’t sentimental about them; in her books they tend to symbolize happiness, luck and hope, which is often dashed. Sisters by a River is full of dead pigs floating down the Avon, drowned kittens and angora rabbits getting their legs chewed off by dogs. The doomed marriage at the outset of Our Spoons is inaugurated by a chorus of birdsong: “I saw all up in the roof there were masses of little birds, all singing and chirping in the most delightful manner, I felt so glad we hadn’t paid extra for the beastly organ and hoped so much we would make a success of our marriage after the birds being so nice about it.” (They didn’t.)

The Vet’s Daughter is Comyns’ least autobiographical, though its heroine retains Comyns’ eye for bizarre and otherworldly detail. Alice Rowlands is the titular daughter; her father abuses both the animals in his care and his wife. The latter quickly dies and is replaced by an evil ersatz-stepmother. Alice can only escape her wretched life by developing magical powers, but when her cruel relatives discover her abilities they try to exploit them for profit. This ends badly for everyone.

The onset of Alice’s powers is at first indistinguishable from the onset of madness; one of the novel’s most vivid scenes combines the quotidian and the supernatural seamlessly as Alice’s gorgeous visions transport her from her grim reality.

“It was Sunday morning, and old people passed me like sad grey waves on their way to church. The streets smelt of roasting meat cooked by mothers; and the pavement was wet, with crushed brown leaves upon it,” Alice reports, then describes standing in her kitchen cooking her terrible father and his consort a meal of boiled beef and being overcome by steam, which resolves itself into fantastical shapes.

“The dumplings swelled up huge and danced in the boiling gravy, and the kitchen was filled with steam. Water poured down the windows like rain inside out. I began to think I could hear water pouring and falling. Then I thought I could see it, and it was as if floods had come, and everywhere there was water very grey and silvery, and I seemed to be floating above it. I came to a mountain made of very dark water but when I reached the top it was a water garden where everything sparkled. Although the water was rushing very fast, it always stayed in the same beautiful shapes, and there were fountains and trees and flowers all shimmering as if made of moving ice. It was so unbelievably beautiful I felt how privileged I was to see it. Then the birds came, enormous birds slowly flying, and they were made of water, too. Sometimes clouds covered them, but they would appear again, very proud and heavy, and each keeping to his appointed route.”

The reader emerges from a book like The Vet’s Daughter refreshed but crippled; contemporary novels, with their over-deliberate virtuosity and self-referential tricks, are unreadable for a time. Ordinary experience, however, is overlaid with a degree of dazzle. Like Alice Rowlands dreaming in her steamy kitchen, we feel how privileged we are to glimpse Comyns’ visions.

* * *

“The Smartest Thing She Ever Said” is a Tumblr based digital storytelling art project featuring four teams of two-one artist and one story editor-between now and the end of the year. The teams were asked to interpret the phrase “The Smartest Thing She’s Ever Said.” ArtSheSaid.com and its artists are entirely supported by Ann Taylor in collaboration with Flavorpill.

Emily Gould runs the Internet’s only cooking book-chat TV show and enjoys both food and cats.

My first thought when I woke up last Friday was that the media was making far too much of LeBron James’ “return” to New York, because in virtually every way measurable, he was never actually here in the first place.

Granted, someone at Nike had assured me before he’d signed his last three-year deal in Cleveland in 2007 that he would use his freedom to take his talents to New York, thereby enjoying a 30% escalator in his Nike deal.

But that clearly didn’t happen, and, he subsequently left both of our reputations in relative tatters. Sadly, if I had a dollar for every person I told my scoop to over the years (sorry, friend at Nike who has subsequently — and perhaps deservedly — been terminated), I would have enough money to purchase the block of ESPN time directly after “The Decision” to announce my views on popular culture and its unfortunate lack of black metal iconography. And I’m sure that the network, which appears to have entered into an era of time-share programming with outside entities, would’ve been only too happy to oblige me.

Besides, forget the weeks of sweaty headlines, the Knicks were never really in the LeBron sweepstakes, and they knew it. Or at least team president Donnie Walsh, as savvy a basketball guy as has ever been through town, did. For the past few seasons, the team was dreadful and filled with failed rocket scientists like Al Harrington and professional suit wearers like Eddy Curry. The Knicks had been so depressing to watch, I’m sure even Coach Mike D’Antoni’s not-as-giant-as-Bill-Cowher’s-but-still-too-big-for-his-head fake teeth tried to run away on numerous occasions. Still, New York fans like to hate players who we feel cannot “deal” with coming here and our bitterness oozes.

Unfortunately, the entire season has been a testament to the fact that LeBron plays extra-extra well when he’s booed. Therefore, I personally wasn’t expecting him to take the night off, with the Knicks finally playing professional basketball again, and so many famous people in attendance. And…he didn’t. Knicks fans seemed shocked, but they shouldn’t have been. Clevelanders did everything short of sacrifice the guy’s dog and he performed amazing feats of skill, with a side of cruelty. So the results of the game — Heat: 1004, Knicks: 17 — were both commonplace and predictable. Ho-hum. Thirteen wins in a row, probably fourteen by the time you read this.

But the day after that game, I realized that LeBron’s grim payback tour is over. He has now faced and demolished every team that he pretended had a chance to sign him. And so the manufactured drama that we have all fed upon has dissipated and we can focus on…basketball. And Miami’s fake cheesiness.

So here goes nothing: The Boston Celtics appear to be keeping the Heat close enough, believing (as some folks do) that eventually, the Heat’s lack of depth and serviceable role players will catch up to the team and they will fall back into the pack. The Celtics are resourceful and deep and, let’s face it, Tang dynasty favorite Heat forward Juwan Howard (who was part of the original Fab Five that included Moses and Ramses II), won’t be able to guard whichever Celtics big man that Chris Bosh isn’t pretending to check. And watching LeBron chasing Rajon Rondo for 40 minutes is like an episode of “Tom & Jerry.”

But in the past week, the Knicks have been force-fed their glass slipper and the Bulls can’t seem to shed their “mercurial in a bad way” label. No one in their right mind believes that the Hawks are for real and, the Pacers? Yeah, not so much. There are a few other middling-to-crummy teams (Sixers, Wizards, Bucks) that are as dangerous as one of those toothless river catfish. The only threat the Nets pose is the spreading of germs.

But another power in the East — an intra-state one, no less — made two relatively blockbuster-y trades last weekend that has reshuffled the East’s deck, two full months before the trading deadline.

On any level, other than future salary ouchiness (by accepting two grossly overpaid players), the trade makes a world of sense for the Orlando Magic, a team that possesses the game most dominant interior force — Dwight Howard, a guy who almost no one has an answer for. Now that the Heat have proven that it’s okay to accept less money to play for rings, team president Otis Smith wants to keep Howard happy, and in the swamps of Florida.

The players the team added (Jason Richardson, Gilbert Arenas and Hedo Turkoglu) can all create their own shots and score in bunches. Gilbert Arenas is an amazing talent, a fearless big-shot taker, and an occasionally unhinged doofus. But it wasn’t too long ago that Arenas was considered one of the games’ five best players. You know, before the weapon’s show-and-tell that derailed his career.

By his first stint in Orlando, Turkoglu had already proven he could run an effective pick-and-role with Howard. And he can get to the line, which is how a team is going to combat the Heat’s talent: by putting their starters in foul trouble.

Best of all, the team rid itself of Vince Carter, who has played his entire career with a kind of concussed indifference.

Although the Heat have tried their best to brush it off with a “Huh, did someone make a trade?” this move will have certainly caught Pat Riley’s attention and, from anyone’s perspective, the NBA season just got a whole lot more interesting.

Which is my coy way of saying: the season just got interesting.

Tony Gervino is a New York City-based editor and writer obsessed with honing his bio to make him sound quirky. He can also be found here.

Photo by Keith Allison, from Flickr.

If you’re sitting at your desk wondering how you’re going to make it through the day, why not take a minute and watch these fractal animations from the Electric Sheep project. (“Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It’s run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers ‘sleep,’ the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep.” The result is a collective ‘android dream,’ an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”) I mean, they’re not going to give you any ideas on how to make it to 5 PM, but they’re pretty cool and kind of soothing, and sometimes that helps.

Do you know why investment banks and hedge funds and insurance companies actually work? If you just said “LAWYERS” or “THE FED WINDOW,” you are technically correct. But on a more fundamental level, it’s because there are thousands of Ivy League children assiduously doing math all day. These firms are the nation’s number one consumer of nerds, and that is why, in the end, great amounts of money are made. (Though it’s never the nerds that get the big bonuses, which is a shame.) So when businesses try to rip off a model — for instance, the fine people who mixed viatical settlements with derivative instruments, that is to say, who buy life insurance policies and spread them among investors, hedging against death — they often fail because they don’t have enough kids doing math. This is what happened to “Life Partners Holdings Inc., which, by the way, really gay name much? But yeah, they got hosed on the math because their “life partners” (LOL!) just keep not dying: “In policies old enough to provide a measure, the insured people usually haven’t died within the life expectancy Life Partners gave its clients, and often were still living beyond double or triple their projected span.” Bam! Math does it again.

“National embarrassment deepened to abject humiliation last night as more than half a million Christmas travellers remained stranded in the UK. Major arterial roads and the Channel Rail Link ground to a standstill, unable to cope with drifting snow, black ice and “refugees” from Heathrow. Temperatures were expected to drop to -13C last night and snow is expected across much of the country again today, particularly in southern England, Wales, the Midlands and Scotland. There is little prospect of all the marooned reaching their intended destinations in time for Christmas, even if the airports could be run for 24 hours a day.”

“I favour the hypothesis that stick carrying is practice for the adult role of motherhood. perhaps similar to functions of other kinds of play, being practice for adult roles … It was striking that this behaviour was seen in some adult females, but never after they became mothers.”
 — Zoologists Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates College, who, with her colleague Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, observed juvenile chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park playing with sticks “like children play with dolls, cradling them and even making nests for them to sleep in at night.” I wish I had some juvenile chimps in my family. They seem very easy to please. (“Merry Christmas! Here, I got you a stick.”) Of course, it would make punishing the naughty ones more difficult. Since they’d probably be all like, “Yay! Coal! Look, it’s my new coal doll!” And, of course, when they’re older, they want video games.

Photo by Piotr Jaczewski, from Flickr.

“No, no, no: Don’t even try to take away Amy Winehouse’s booze and dope. The Jewish woman as immovable object.” Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” comes in at number 83 on Tablet’s list of the 100 greatest Jewish songs ever. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Kinky Friedman all make appearances, although the omission of anything from the Steely Dan catalog is somewhat suspect.

Skip ahead to about the 2:00 mark to see last night’s lunar eclipse. It is INCREDIBLY LAME, and do you want to know why? Because it’s THE FUCKING MOON. Of course it’s going to be lame. Can you think of anything more boring than the goddamn moon? Of course not. I hope you get pelted by a non-stop barrage of asteroids until you beg for mercy, moon! Fuck you and your family. Also, it is now officially winter. Bah.

by Matt Dodge

[With 12 seconds remaining in last night’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles, rookie punter Matt Dodge was instructed by New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin to kick the ball out of bounds, which would have likely given the Eagles poor field position, and possibly put the 31–31 game into overtime. A bungled snap resulted in a direct punt to the Eagles’ DeSean Jackson, who scored a 65-yard punt return for a TD as time expired, handing the Eagles a 38–31 victory. Following the Giant’s loss, my Twitter account bearing the name @mattdodge, was flooded by fake ReTweets, vitriolic messages from passionate fans and sarcastic job offers.]

Heyyyy buddy,

How you holding up?

I know we’ve had our differences in the past. I’ve said a lot of nasty things about you to my friends, vowed to outshine you and pursued a career in journalism largely to close the gap in how many times our name appears in print.

But that all changed last night when I saw you getting your head chewed off by Tom Coughlin and I started receiving a slew of hate mail via Twitter and a steady stream of calls from news organizations who thinks this case of mistaken identity is a hilarious “our modern times” kind-of bit.

I mean sure, you have a history of fumbled snaps, something the Fox sportscasters were kind enough to point out shortly before your punt.

And yeah, you couldn’t really have sent a more direct kick to Jackson if you had used FedEx Same Day shipping, which you think someone might have mentioned, brand integration-wise at least.

But does that justify @nick_salvapapi’s characterization of you as a “chode blaster”? Or @InDaMixRadio’s suggestion that “you need to go into witness protection…NOOOOW!!!!”?

As @MzBrownSugah “gathers lynching mob”, let’s look at how all this started, and try to figure out a game plan going forward — one that you’ll stick to this time.

As near as I can tell, it began when @MrEkay267 posted a fake ReTweet shortly after The Punt reading “RT @MattDodge: Who’s Hiring?”.

Clever and topical, if ill-researched, but ultimately something I’m used to in managing the Twitter account for a Maine-based free daily that shares a name with South Africa’s largest newspaper.

Now, I always intended on offering to sell you my Twitter handle. I was just going to wait until you were making a little more than the pittance they call a rookie salary in the NFL. I’m glad to hear Coughlin plans to keep you on, so keep me in mind.

I mean, I’m not some screen name hoarder out to make a buck, I’m just a 23-year-old journalist named Matthew Dodge who has always enjoyed the monosyllabic appeal of our shortened name and is slightly more in tune with trends in social media.

As my friend Jimmie Connors (who is not the tennis star, but yeah, I get the joke) advised, citing the recent firing of Redskins punter Hunter Smith, “@MattDodge sell now, every punter is just one bungled snap away from unemployment.”

I’m also not interested in your job, so no worries about me taking up the innumerable offers from people whose involvement with the Giants is probably limited to the amount of licensed fan apparel they own.

And while I don’t have the whole Greater New York City area calling for my head, leg and slippery fingers on a plate, as a journalist I can sort of sympathize with the rigors of the special teams lifestyle — we are largely ignored when the jobs goes right, but make one mistake and they’re all over you.

So listen, man, if you want my Twitter handle, I’ll set a fair price. If not, we need to get together and run some drills, because this ruined my whole day.

THIS Matt Dodge is a journalist and photographer in Portland, Maine and blogs here. Follow him on Twitter before he sells out.

As anybody who has read a John le Carré novel knows, the spooks, many of whom work with or as diplomats, are in the habit of putting false information about in order to achieve this or that noble or nefarious end. Which raises a number of subtle questions regarding the recent WikiLeaks cable disclosures: how much of this stuff is exaggerated or untrue? Is it even possible to untangle the web of deceit and counter-deceit (and incompetence and foolishness) woven by our diplomats and their masters? Exactly what methods are El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and the Guardian — the newspapers called on to vet and disseminate this tsunami of official tongue-wagging — employing in order to verify the truth or falsity of each document released? Who is really controlling the publication of this information, and to what purpose?

A closer look at these matters brings us to the real value of WikiLeaks. Over and above their oft-stated goal of scaring the bejesus out of any would-be misbehaving varmints in power is an even simpler and more valuable message for the public: don’t believe anything you read. No seriously, not one single thing.

On Saturday morning, Michael Moore reported on his blog that one of the WikiLeaks cables concerns the fate in Cuba of Sicko, the movie in which Moore took pains to praise the Cuban healthcare system with his usual mixture of naivete, incisiveness and spin.

Sicko makes the (reasonable) point that if a poor third-world country can offer its citizens universal free health care, it is crazy that the United States can’t, not even in the case of those injured while helping in the 9/11 emergency. In the January 2008 cable in question, an American diplomat alleged that Cuban authorities were planning to ban the public showing of Sicko; they were afraid that regular Cubans would get all stroppy if they saw this movie, because the quality of care shown therein is so very not available to most Cubans. The appearance of this cable was greeted with joy by a number of the many right-wing journalists who detest Michael Moore; the story also appeared in The Guardian (mysteriously, only a cached copy is available (Update: And now gone; the cable itself is here)) and The Nation and on BoingBoing.

So then Moore went nuts on his blog because, he said, Sicko was shown on Cuban state television, and there were also several screenings around Cuba, apparently contradicting the cable’s claim that the film had been banned. He pointed out that anybody with an Internet connection could have checked these facts. He claimed all this as proof of “the Orwellian nature of how bureaucrats for the State spin their lies.”

In his usual clever way, though, Moore left out a lot of important facts himself. For starters, Sicko wasn’t shown on Cuban state television until April 2008; the allegations may or may not have been true in January, when the cable was written. There’s no explicit reason to doubt that Cuban authorities initially intended to ban it, but by April had figured that there was more to be gained by showing an Oscar-nominated American film praising the Cuban health care system than there was to be lost through a display of the best Cuban medical facilities — facilities available only to Party mucky-mucks and foreigners, it is said (unless you have money for bribes).

What’s more, Moore didn’t much make notice but the subject cable isn’t really about Sicko at all; the movie is discussed in just one paragraph out of thirty-nine. The cable is really about the sad state of health care in Cuba, the lack of OTC medicines — even aspirin or Tylenol — the corruption among doctors, the terrible conditions in general. (I am Cuban, and these are things that anyone with the remotest ties to Cuban citizens hears about all the time. In case you want to know more about the Cuban medical system, Iván García writes a good blog that appears to honor every side soberly; his is the most credible analysis I have read.) Moore’s blog post mentions nothing and offers no opinion regarding the veracity or otherwise of the bulk of the information contained in the cable; this omission weakens his case enormously. But how many readers of Moore’s blog, and of Daily Kos, where Moore also posted his version of events, even bothered to read the original cable?

Elsewhere, most of the attempts to disavow the contents of the cables appear to have come from those most liable to be harmed by said contents being true. As Emmanuel Gyezaho pointed out with bewitching vim

in Uganda’s Daily Monitor, for example:

For governments and officials named in the leaks, the new storyline has been to say that the information in the cables was somewhat exaggerated by the diplomats in their meetings with sources. Perhaps that is true but the reverse may well be true. Just ask yourself, how come the authors of these damning cables are still silent. Have you heard any of them come out and say, I didn’t write that damn document? Ambassador Jerry Lanier is here in Kampala and posted some of that stuff that has got all these top shots on tenterhooks. Where does the burden of proof lie with these cables?

The burden of proof lies with the public, in the end. It is our own responsibility to question every single source of information we have. Because really, it is just one tissue of lies after another.

Formerly-respectable Pakistani newspapers the News and Jang recently reported a heap of slurs against the Indian government, claiming the WikiLeaks cable dump as a source. So then the Guardian went and looked through all the cables and lo, there was no such information in there at all; some eager beaver had just made it up. (Not that the Indian government is getting off scot-free, by any means, where the WikiLeaks cables are concerned.)

So now there are all kinds of lying liars making up lies about these other packs of lies, some of which may not even be lies.

And all of this is actually a really good thing, on the whole. Julian Assange and his ex-partner, German hacker Daniel “Sobersides” Domscheit-Berg, have often explained the very simple motive behind WikiLeaks, namely to create a fear of exposure among those who are about to do something wrong. Which, yes. They should fear exposure! (And by the way, this Swedish documentary provides a terrific capsule history of WikiLeaks: just one hour long, densely informative and super-recommended.)

Sobersides D.-B., also by the way, has written a book to be published in Germany in January of 2011; the English translation of Inside WikiLeaks: My Time at the World’s Most Dangerous Website won’t be out until next April. His new site, OpenLeaks, should be launched any day now; it’s kind of an alternative WikiLeaks, except that OpenLeaks won’t concern itself with publication directly; instead, those providing information will be asked to specify where they’d like their information to be forwarded. Ideally we would have a ton of similar venues that can never be shut down, despite the ludicrous headlines claiming that these sites are in some kind of competition (e.g. “OpenLeaks to launch, rivals WikiLeaks.”) As Assange and Domscheit-Berg have themselves pointed out over and over, what we really need is many, many WikiLeakses in order to minimize the exposure of any particular group to the kind of state-sponsored vendettas and craziness we are seeing now — as the publishing history of the Pentagon Papers demonstrated decades ago.

There was a widely-publicized falling-out between Assange and Domscheit-Berg, but close attention to the reporting on this story, particularly to Domscheit-Berg’s interview with Der Spiegel, indicates a radical and honest difference of opinion regarding the methods by which the information gathered should best be disseminated; there are solid arguments for both approaches. Assange believed that making the biggest possible splash in the mainstream media served their purposes best, but this left WikiLeaks vulnerable to accusations of editorializing (amply justified, in the case of the Collateral Murder video; yet (a) can we really regret the publication of that video? And (b) didn’t the “editorializing” and “sensationalizing” nature of the edit create a far more compelling story for the conventional media to run with? Would any mainstream outlet have had the balls or the inclination to parse the story in this way?).

In contrast to the Assange approach, Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s feeling is that leak sites such as these should grow slowly, carefully, quietly. There is a lot to be said for that philosophy, too, particularly in view of what has happened to Bradley Manning.

There’s been no explicit confirmation that the recent WikiLeaks cables were leaked by Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army intelligence officer who was shopped to the Feds by big jerk Adrian Lamo, and who is now spending 23 of every 24 hours in solitary confinement in the Quantico military prison. Still, the general consensus appears to be that Manning provided the cables we’ve all been reading, plus the raw footage edited by WikiLeaks in order to produce the Collateral Murder video.

Had Assange not put himself forward as a hacker rockstar, it is questionable whether any toadying little grass such as Adrian Lamo would have felt a lure of self-aggrandizement sufficient to betray Manning.

When pressed to give particular examples of the harm that might be done by WikiLeaks, U.S. officials have failed to come up with remotely satisfactory answers. U.S. military authorities have argued, for example, that WikiLeaks endangered Afghan collaborators named in leaked documents, but without producing or even naming a single Afghan collaborator who was actually harmed. Plus, please. The US military has amply demonstrated its own tender care of Afghan civilians (and no, I do not believe that all the military behaves in this disgraceful manner). But is it more likely that the government is concerned with protecting Afghans, or saving their own sorry hides from exposure?

To be fair, on the other hand, you don’t have to look far to find a lesser but still legitimate reason for the government’s attempt stop WikiLeaks: will it now become impossible for diplomats to express themselves frankly to their bosses in Washington for fear of their communications becoming public? That would not be so great, either.

What is now in question for WikiLeaks and for Assange, as was reported on BBC TV Friday night, is this: if Manning ever contacted Assange personally with a view to learning how to acquire and submit the information he appears to have leaked, then it will become much easier to prosecute Assange in the U.S.

But no such evidence has yet appeared; if Manning hadn’t confided in lowlife jerkface Adrian Lamo, he might have been our generation’s Deep Throat. All the attention on Julian Assange, who spent a few days in solitary confinement as against Bradley Manning’s seven months plus, has evidently taken a lot of people’s eyes off the ball. It seems likely that Manning is being crushed so that he in his turn will shop Assange. But maybe the authorities at Quantico will figure out that the public is not at all likely to believe a word Manning says now, given the circumstances, because the public will believe that in these circumstances Manning, who, again, is all of 23 years old, will eventually confess to being the reincarnated spirit of Maria Callas if that is what they want him to say. What possible justification is there for keeping him in these conditions, except that this psychological torture will break him down?

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.