I highly recommend essays related to the "war" in the current issue of the New York Review (I have no idea how long they will remain freely available online.):

• Tony Judt. America and the War
• Pankaj Mishra. The Making of Afghanistan
• Tim Judah. The Making of the Northern Alliance
• Orhan Pamuk. The Anger of the Damned

Better yet -- buy a copy of the current issue.  (One of my favorite activities on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon is to curl up with the latest issue in a big, comfy armchair.).  I've read Judt's and Pamuk's essays so far. 

An essay recommended by a friend on our response to terror: The Challenge of Terror: A Traveling Essay. "To face the reality of well organized, decentralized, self-perpetuating sources of terror, we need to think differently about the challenges. If indeed this is a new war it will not be won with a traditional military plan. The key does not lie in finding and destroying territories, camps, and certainly not the civilian populations that supposedly house them. Paradoxically, that will only feed the phenomenon and assure that it lives into a new generation. The key is to think about how a small virus in a system affects the whole and how to improve the immunity of the system. We should take extreme care not to provide the movements we deplore with gratuitous fuel for self-regeneration. Let us not fulfill their prophecy by providing them with martyrs and justifications. The power of their action is the simplicity with which they pursue the fight with global power. They have understood the power of the powerless. They have understood that melding and meshing with the enemy creates a base from within. They have not faced down the enemy with a bigger stick. They did the more powerful thing: They changed the game. They entered our lives, our homes and turned our own tools into our demise."  

Review of Morimur in the Guardian. Yes, I'm still listening to Morimur.  I spent a lot of time this morning trying to see how the central theory behind this recording is played out.  The article has a nice paragraph about the theory:  "Thoene's theories for the Chaconne that ends the D minor Partita go even further. She claims that the work is concerned with death and resurrection, and that the death of Bach's first wife, Maria Barbara, in 1720 (the year in which the set of sonatas and partitas was published), was his impulse for making such connections. Maria Barbara's name is encrypted on the first page of the manuscript of the Chaconne and, according to Thoene, each variation in the movement is an embellishment of a chorale melody, framed by Martin Luther's Easter Hymn."

Wouldn't it great if there were a web presentation of Morimur.  I spent an hour tracking down texts (both the German and English translations) for all the chorales referenced by the recording.  I wish I had the sheet music for BWV 1004 to make better sense of Theone's commentary -- too bad that's not on the web (and even if it is, it's not likely to be in any highly usable hypmedia format).  Prof. Theone's commentary refers to entry points for various hymns -- but it would have made life easier for musical semi-literates like me if she laid all the references out in a table with the time in the recording (in addition to measure number). 

I'm happy to see CY write again on her blog, this time about the role played by the analysts in her training.  I'm wondering what her current take on whether such a training system would work at Berkeley.  I'm sure that not many IS&T staffers have formal training in pedagogy or have the intuitive knack for it.