Noting that John Locke and Charlie Parker shared a birthday on 29 August, The Hedgehog Review's zb and his readers debate whether, among post-World War II jazz musicians, Parker was"the reasonable man." Where's Caleb when we need him? He would also appreciate"Bush: ‘History Cannot Judge Me If I End It Soon'," The Onion, 7 September. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

From the World War II department: a) Gilberto Villahermosa, ed.,"Lost Prison Interview with Hermann Göring: The Reichsmarschall's Revelations," HistoryNet.com, n.d.; and b)"Files Reveal Leaked D-Day Plans," BBC News, 4 September, indicates that the military historian Basil Liddell Hart had the plans for D-Day in hand three months before it took place, thus angering Winston Churchill. Thanks to Anthony Cormack at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age for the tip.

Roger Sandall,"Dereliction Express," The Culture Cult, August, reviews Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist: Exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor -- and why you can never buy a decent used car!, Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari, and V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft,"Tireless on the Left, the Great I. F. Stone," New York Observer, 11 September, reviews Myra MacPherson's All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone.

Patrick Garrity,"The Long Twilight Struggle," Claremont Review, 5 September, reviews the work of John Lewis Gaddis. Thanks to Tom Brucino at Big Tent for the tip.

Fareed Zakaria,"The Year of Living Fearfully," Newsweek, 11 September, on why, despite the claims of commentators from Richard Cohen to Newt Gingrich and Bernard Lewis, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not Adolph Hitler. [Did we really need Zakaria to tell us that? I'm afraid we did.] Thanks to Alfredo Perez at Political Theory Daily Review for the tip.

Finally,"Defense Department News Briefing on Detainee Policies," Washington Post, 6 September. The whole transcript is worth reading, but at the heart of it, Lieutenant General John Kimmons, Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, says:

No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.
Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't afford to go there.
Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been -- in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them, have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices in clever ways, that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual.

See also: Adam Liptak,"Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush's Support," NYTimes, 8 September. Thanks to Chris Bray for the tip.