First, I want to thank everyone for your expressions of sympathy. I’m sad, but I’m not stressed about being sad. This is the stuff life is made of.

Anyway — here are some things to read while I catch up on other things.

Sean Wilentz, “Cofounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” in the New Yorker.

“Blockage of Nobel prizewinner exposes Senate’s dysfunction,” editorial, Boston Globe.

Remember Veronique de Rugy, the genius who declared last April that Democratic districts got more stimulus money than Republican ones? And a quickie analysis by Nate Silver showed that the “Democratic districts” nearly all were state capitals? Stimulus money to the states went to agencies of the state governments, which were nearly always located in the same district as the state capital, and for some reason districts surrounding state capitals tend to vote Democratic. Well, she’s back, and now she’s arguing that President Bush was far stronger at job creation that is President Obama. “There were more jobs created monthly under President Bush than under President Obama,” she says.

If that’s not how you remember things, you are not alone; see Joe Weisenthal and especially Ezra Klein. I’ll let you try to sort out where Veronique went off the rails, if you wish, but the best rebuttal to her column is the first comment: “I hope you’re pretending not to understand this.”

On the other blog, I am taking on a part of the Academic Establishment that is making a name for itself by slandering Buddhism; see “Murderous Mahayana?” and “Where Religion Ends and Sociopathy Begins.” This may not interest all of you, but the second post in particular is more about Assholes of Academia than Buddhism.