A historical joke  

Here's an interesting thesis (via Bookslut) about why J.M. Coetzee got the Nobel Prize in Literature this year.

Coetzee doesn't write realism: His novels cannot be pinned down to a history, be it apartheid South Africa or Bush's increasingly authoritarian America. Yet it's hard to believe that the Nobel committee, in coming to its judgment, wasn't moved by the way Coetzee's most astute writing speaks to this moment. A moment when an ill-conceived campaign against an ill-defined enemy risks creating in its wake a culture of surveillance, military hubris, anonymous internment, torture, more violence and counter-violence, and, among America's citizenry, an immobilizing paranoia.