The gold stereo stretches out the sound

* David Berman has a short story in the current issue of Jane magazine. You can read "Lady in Gunsmoke" here.

* FactCheck.Org has summarized the distortions of Kerry's record that Bush is pushing in his campaign ads.

* One of the Olsen sisters sports a Velvet Underground t-shirt in a milk ad.

* Kafka may be the most important writer of the twentieth century, far more important than James Joyce. He describes the fate of the isolated man who is surrounded by a vast and impenetrable bureaucracy, and begins to accept himself on the terms the bureaucracy imposes. Human beings today are in a very similar postition. We are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment empires. They've made themselves more user-friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subserviant tyrannies, but no less sinister for that.

-- J.G. Ballard in the (London) Sunday Times, 1993.