Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

America is insanely close to one-party system again
For the last six months I've been predicting that the same thing would happen with the GOP as happened with the old Federalist party after the War of 1812 (in which New England liberals collaborated with the British enemy and almost seceded from the Union): that the party would completely fall apart, with all the moderates and non-crazies either defecting en-masse to the other party (the "Democratic Republicans," which eventually split into our modern Democrats and Republicans) or simply starting a new one (the "Whigs," who won four presidential elections before falling apart due to infighting over slavery). This is exactly how American politics worked from roughly 1820 to 1860, a forty-year period of only one party having a truly national presence, challenged only on a regional level by a series of specialty parties (the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, the Anti-Masons, the "Know Nothings"); and as the newest polls show, support for Republicans nationally has dropped to a pathetic 20 percent (20 percent!), moving us insanely close again to the situation I just described. Will we see a GOP in 2010 that can only win in the southeast?

People are freaking out about new 'Star Trek' movie
JJ Abrams and the producers of the new 'Star Trek' are slowly starting to let more and more advanced screeners check out the completed film, and people have been going nuts: As Harry Knowles of Aint It Cool News points out today, there are now 18 reviews officially posted at RottenTomatoes.com, and every single one of them is a rave. Here, yet another dozen reviews from AICN readers spread around the planet, all of them offering the same effusive praise.

Warner Music accidentally threatens itself for copyright infringement
Unbelievable: Sire Records, a division of Warner Music, has received a cease-and-desist takedown notice concerning THEIR OWN VIDEOS, sent by lawyers from THEIR OWN COMPANY, because of them being offered at YouTube and no one on the Warner legal staff knowing that it was Sire employees who uploaded them to begin with. What a giant ball of catastrof-ck the music industry has turned into this decade, huh? What a shining example of your entertainment dollars at work.

Time Warner to officially let AOL finally die
I don't know why this didn't generate bigger headlines, but last week Time Warner officially announced that they are spinning off America Online back to its own standalone company; and since AOL has been bleeding money for years, this effectively means the end of the group, with bankruptcy and liquidation by the end of the year virtually assured. Here, an utterly fascinating look by "The Daily Beast" at what went wrong, starting with the deal being forced on thousands of suspicious employees by a handful of senior execs, who were the only ones who really ended up benefiting from the merger. See, content is king at Time Warner, with a 'publish or perish' mindset that clashed with dot-com-era AOL; back in the '90s, according to this article, they considered customers "technological prisoners" of the service, so didn't see the point in delivering decent content ("They'll watch what we FORCE them to watch"), concentrating instead on simply signing more and more people. What a disaster.

Romney to Palin: "Please shut the f-ck up now"
So as mentioned below, a wing of the Republican Party has decided to launch a brand-new image overhaul campaign, called "The National Council for a New America" and arguably headed up by Mitt Romney (or at least, he's the senior exec with the highest public profile); and while on CNN's "State of the Union" this weekend to promote it, he took a swipe at GOP trainwreck Sarah Palin, commenting about her recent appearance in Time magazine's list of most influential Americans (and this is an actual quote), "Was that the issue on the most beautiful people or the most influential people?" A tame insult to be sure, but it highlights a huge problem the GOP has right now when it comes to overhauling their image: namely, a party base of backwards, uneducated, racist small-town Caucasians who don't want ANY overhauling of their image, thankyouverymuch, and who count such monsters as Palin and Rush Limbaugh as the party's TRUE spokespeople. The GOP Civil War? I'm looking forward to that.

Chicago's Olympics chances just dropped another notch
The International Olympic Committee just finished up their tour of Rio de Janeiro, one of the half-dozen cities competing with Chicago for hosting rights to the 2016 Olympics; and it apparently went much better than expected, with the group "highly impressed" at the end and with many of the city's nagging issues (high crime, not enough hotels) apparently answered in a satisfactory way. And meanwhile, Chicago's bid just keeps picking up more problems -- lack of money, system-wide corruption of the construction crews, and now a growing amount of small-minded local protesters, the same kind of visionless proles who always argue that a city should never take on something big as long as there are little problems still to be solved. Combine this with worldwide resentment over everything American, the global fascination over the BRIC countries right now, and the IOC's habit of using the Olympics to boost emerging populations, and you're left with not very good chances at all for Chicago.

Clinton: State Dept is "like running a medium-sized city"
A fascinating long article from the NYT this weekend, examining how Hillary Clinton is getting along in her first couple of months as Secretary of State, looking not only at the unexpected challenges (she was apparently overwhelmed at first with the sheer size of the bureaucracy at the State Department, likening it to becoming "mayor of a good-sized small city"), but also how the influence of her once-rival Obama is literally changing her into a different kind of politician than she was before. Is Hillary finally developing a Presidential temper? We'll see in 2016, won't we?

GOP officially goes 24 hours without attacking Obama
I don't know which is more pathetic: that the Republican Party's "major new campaign" to redefine their image to the public officially kicked off in a sad little strip-mall pizza place in suburban Virginia, or that the fact that they went one entire day without viciously attacking President Obama was unusual enough to inspire national headlines. No, wait, they're both EQUALLY pathetic, that's right.

CBS: "Thank God John Edwards isn't actually President right now"
Interesting if not exactly surprising news concerning one-time Presidential front-runner John Edwards: Federal investigators are now examining whether his campaign used donations from nonprofits in order to shuttle his mistress off to the Caribbean, right when the story broke last year that he was having an affair (and during his wife's cancer treatments no less), which means he could be looking at felony charges and time in a federal penitentiary. Here, a snarky editorial from CBS, imagining what would be happening in the US right now if Edwards had actually gotten elected President before all this news broke.

Newest British poet laureate is Scottish, female and gay
So, three big new official firsts in the 341-year history of the British poet laureate this week, after Carol Ann Duffy received the appointment: She's the first-ever female to hold the post, the first-ever Scottish citizen, and the first-ever publicly 'out' member of the gay community. Plus how can you not like a person who responds this way to the rather arcane bylines of the position, which apparently promises poet laureates 600 bottles of sherry as part of their payment: "[My predecessor] hasn't had his yet, so I've asked for mine up front."

Disgraced Bush has become unwelcome Texas pariah
A fascinating article from "The Daily Beast" today, on how the disgraced George W. Bush has become a virtual pariah back in Texas where he's now living as a private citizen again, with no active Republican wanting to get even within a hundred feet of the man most there now blame directly for the mess the country is currently in. The article also compares this to LBJ's disgraceful slink back to Texas in the late '60s, but then also adds this brilliant quote from a local politician: "But at least Johnson had his record on civil rights. Can you say Bush has a record on ANYTHING that's positive?"