The following August 6th news item, from mathworld.wolfram.com, will be of interest to math and/or chess nerds, of whom there are most probably zero among the 4 or 5 readers of Corpse Divine: There are no magic knight's tours on the chessboard. I dig any paper that references a journal article from 1848.

The New Yorker doesn't say who writes the "Briefly Noted" section of one-paragraph book reviews each week, but they're often very good. Here's one from the July 14 & 21, 2003 issue, which I'm typing up myself, and which is, of course, totally and completely the copyright of Conde Nast publications and/or the person who penned it, for the love of Todd:

Treason by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum; $26.95). Coulter's thesis has the force of simplicity: liberals detest America and prefer to side with the "Third World savages" who attack it. In her view, American critics of the War on Terror are the intellectual progeny of the Soviet sympathizers rooted out by Senator McCarthy and HUAC. Joe Stalin may have given way to Osama Bin Laden, but the fellow-travelling habit is unchanged. The result is a strangely lopsided book, which spends a lot of time going over ground -- the Verona transcripts, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs -- that has been well covered in recent years and asserting, for the umpteenth time, the guilt of people whom few liberals today would try to defend. Coulter does better when sending up the post-colonial pieties of liberals and "their cheese-tasting friends," and probably owes her widespread popularity more to her skill as a social satirist than to any real acumen as a political commentator.