The AP reports that Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, is dead. More after the jump....

You've really got to hand it to fringe candidates, indeed, to loons, quacks, charlatans, mountebanks, and crazies everywhere: not only do their odd deeds and odder statements cause surprise, shock, and alarm, but they even, by some trick of warping the space-time continuum, operate in a crazy universe all their own, attracting to themselves all kinds of related insanity. A real overperformer in this category is Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, this year's Energizer Bunny of batshit-crazy ideas, rhetoric, platforms, you name it, Ron Paul's got it all. So check this out:

Hello, bibliophilic, literature-loving Kossacks! Timmyk here with the latest installment of Tuesday’s Literature for Kossacks series. Up this week is American novelist Thomas Pynchon (b. 8 May 1937–), a titan of late twentieth-century postmodern literature, whose masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), is a central document of our times, a landmark work of art, a serious candidate for The Great American Novel, an epic encyclopedia, etc.: like other great works, there really aren’t enough superlatives to describe its presence, its totalizing energies, its ambition and scope, its formal innovation, and its cultish, totemic status among critics and fans.

You've all had this coming for a long time now. In fact, you've been wanting, asking for it, you lazy-fingered slackjawed pajamas-in-your-mom's-garage-wearing keyboard monkeys. Too long the nimbly typing denizens of the Great Orange Satan have blithely ushered into digital print an entire host of malapropisms, mistypes, howlers, and boners too numerous to count or even name. Until now. That's right, suckas,* it's clobbering time: sit back as I fly my twin jetplanes of Knowledge and Awesomeness into your looming towers of Agrammaticality and Ignorance. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, accompanied, one hopes, by much frenzied thumbing of dust-covered grammatical primers and style guides, and much looking-up of difficult words in various dictionaries, online and off-. That's right Kossacks: school's in session, and y'all* are gettin' skooled.*

If you're looking for an excellent fictional look at the paranoid, media-addled, security-obsessed post-9/11 state that the terrorists and their enablers in the West have wrought, you can do no better than Richard Flanagan's blistering new novel The Unknown Terrorist. Torn seemingly from tomorrow's headlines, the book is an intense, unremittingly grim, and wholly compelling account of a few days in the life of an Australian woman whose world is turned upside down, not by an actual act of terror, but by the specter of terror itself: by the image of terror, by fears of terror, and by a government and media's coldblooded manipulation of terror as a political tool. Intrigued? You'd better be! Learn more after the jump....