I'm starting to get back into thinking about politics after a hiatus of sorts (between the declaration of the war in Iraq and a week or two ago -- the reason for the slow down should be a subject of a future post)

I'm very grateful for The New York Review of Books, which remains my favorite periodical. Two fine articles I can recommend: Which Way to Mecca? by Clifford Geertz and Stanley Hoffman's America Goes Backward
There is a lot to say that I cannot even begin to write out right now but I was really impressed with the fact that Geertz in preparing the article on Islam had read 50 books on the subject -- reflecting the obvious ferment around the topic. "50 books! And just to start to get a feel for how things relate...." Reading about the process and seeing how shallow my own understanding of Islam is (not surprising given how little I read or know in the concrete about Isalm) made me almost stop reading altogether on this topic.
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I'm finally sitting down to pick a film or two or three of Nicholas Ray's to see with my friends. (It seems that we've all been so swamped with life that we still haven't decided what to see.) Alas, as Ray Davis pointed out, many really interesting ones have already come and gone.
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I want to demonstrate the first steps in where I'm planning to go with building better ways for folks to point to books and gather information about books -- and ultimately other digital resources. I now have a little Python script running on this site that takes an ISBN (so far) and display pointers to a number of different "services": amazon.com, BookSense.com, the Library of Congress, my local public library -- the Berkeley Public Library, etc.

Let's use as an example, a book that I mentioned yesterday -- Iris Chang's The Chinese in America. In that blog entry, I already placed four separate links. I wanted to generalize that approach so that I could easily add more links and services. So...now if it you hit

Iris Chang's book

you will get a popup window for the same book entry.
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