I just remembered this email from Donald Rumsfeld and it has brought me joy again.

Seymour Hersh on covert military operations overseen by George H.W. Bush as vice president under Reagan, cutting out the president, Congress and even the CIA. At the heart of it all the shadowy figure of Admiral Art Moreau, who was "just like [Bond's] 'M'" lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/seymou…

Christopher Hitchens and the great derangement lrb.co.uk/v41/n06/daniel…

Sometimes I feel really sorry for the characters in books. Novelists can be bullies and control freaks! So you have to love the great Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, whose latest book I reviewed here lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/…

These NSA slides explain how the MUSCULAR program collects too much data from Yahoo & Google wapo.st/1aDIy8d

Sound advice from Ann Webb's The Proper Care of Tarantulas

Impressively, Christian Bok is trying "to write, genetically encode and implant a poem into the DNA of a bacterium" universityaffairs.ca/incredibly-ori…

Didn't realize the name for Palantir, the huge-data sorting company comes (with the accent left off the "I") from Tolkien's Palantír stone.

Top apology in this morning's FT.

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill's new online magazine, the Intercept, now launched, with NSA pics! firstlook.org/theintercept/

What matters more, the leaker or the leak? Edward Snowden and the war over the news lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/daniel…

CIA audiobook: Intelligence Briefings of Presidential Candidates 1952-2004. gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-…

Syria peace talks end without agreement. Nice legs, though.

Greenwald "says he is not yet halfway through the tens of thousands of documents that Snowden gave him" ft.com/cms/s/2/221d11…

One of the eight assistants who watched 2900 films for 16 hours a week for Christian Marclay's The Clock ameobatube.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/a-l… (@kg_ubu)

The 4 Ds of online covert action at GCHQ: "Deny Disrupt Degrade Deceive" - scary new story by Glenn Greenwald firstlook.org/theintercept/2…

"Chapter 6: I consider the differences between myself and Kafka": CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN's huge memoir on a napkin lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/christ…

A classic

The 3D illusions of Kokichi Sugihara, an engineering professor at the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences.

Come hear the brilliant Francis Spufford London Review Bookshop tomorrow eve: ice, adventurers, the Soviets, atheists and more lrb.me/2fk