I'm off for the weekend. Good weather means light blogging. But here are a couple of snippets for pre-weekend reading, although hopefully readers will get out and about as well.

Eric A. shows cautious signs of optimism over an emerging liberal media. Real liberals this time.

And go brave the Salon Day Pass for this piece on reading for Black Geeks. ZZ Packer is on my reading list and I read this book by E.L. Konigsberg over and over when I was 9. Not mentioned but also worth a look-see are The Egypt Game for kids and Octavia Butler for the sci-fi subset of Black Geek bookworms.

And just so we all keep our eyes on the ball, there's still a war going on.

Good piece on the legacy of Strom Thurmond. I can't pretend to grieve for a segregationist who "first came to national attention in 1948 as the States' Rights candidate after Southerners walked out of the Democratic convention to protest the party's new commitment to civil rights." Nor will I dance on his grave. Suffice to say it marks the end of an era and the beginning of something else.