http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2009/07/the_painting_an.shtml

Wexler's new novel maintains a focus on character and on the surrealism of place, but breaks from the past in rejecting escape and in encompassing a scope greater than its individual protagonist.

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Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We will be updating the Facebook page more frequently and including content that you will only be able to find there, so get your Gabfest fix during the week by joining us there.

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The history of dream interpretation goes back to the very earliest human civilizations—the ancient Greek diviner Artemidorus put together a five-volume treatise on the subject about 17 centuries before Freud—but I like to think that it's reached new heights this year at my apartment. My girlfriend, you see, has a gift. Every morning, without fail, she awakes with exhaustively detailed memories of multiple dreams—which, naturally, are a favorite topic of speculation and debate around the breakfast table.

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1) "What a Waste: The Sotomayor hearings were a mass of missed opportunities for Republicans and Democrats alike," by Dahlia Lithwick. Republican senators turned nuanced discussions of diversity into a bitter fight over race. Democrats failed to use their airtime to articulate a real judicial philosophy for the left. Why didn't anyone put these four days to better use? (See Slate's complete coverage of Sonia Sotomayor.)

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In the July 15 "Movies," Dana Stevens misidentified Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as the ante-antepenultimate movie in the Harry Potter series. It is the antepenultimate movie.

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The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office creating a huge uproar among lawmakers yesterday when he declared that none of the health care plans being discussed in Congress would slow down the growth of government spending on medical care. In fact, Douglas Elmendorf suggested that the bills could make the problem worse. Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats, who had been pushing for more savings, immediately seized on the comments to explain why they're not ready to support the plans that are emerging from congressional committees. The New York Times leads with a look at how JPMorgan Chase's quarterly earnings of $2.7 billion, coming days after Goldman Sachs also reported huge numbers, reveals how new titans of Wall Street are emerging after the financial crisis. The government's efforts to prevent a financial meltdown "has also set the stage for a narrowing concentration of financial power," declares the paper.

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When the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee passed its health care bill Wednesday, the Obama administration hailed it as a "bipartisan" effort. No matter that it passed the panel on a strictly party-line vote, with all 13 Democrats voting for and all 10 Republicans voting against. It was bipartisan, administration officials explained, because it contained 160 Republican amendments. Republican senators said that characterization was absurd. After all, they said, most of the 160 amendments were technical, rather than substantive changes. Lisa Murkowsi of Alaska told the New York Times that, while it was "pretty impressive" that 20 of her amendments were accepted, "they were all technical."

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Now that we have tweeted, dialogued, podcast, analyzed, and live-blogged these hearings into oblivion, we can finally step back ask ourselves: What have we learned? That Sonia Sotomayor's 17-year judicial record is almost completely without blemish. That she comes across very smart on all things legal. That her "wise Latina" comment was probably regrettable. That she had nothing even close to a "complete meltdown." That she will certainly be confirmed. That, in short, she did well if not brilliantly. (We also learned that she likes Perry Mason and that Al Franken is funny. But we knew that already.)

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(500) Days of Summer (Fox Searchlight Pictures), the feature film debut of director Mark Webb, is to a great romantic comedy as sparkling wine is to real Champagne. Both are sweet, effervescent, and tasty on the way down, but the real thing comes by its bubbles honestly, through long fermentation in the bottle, while the lesser stuff gets its sparkle from artificial injections of CO2. Real Champagne is a rare and lasting joy; inexpensive sparkling wine tends to go flat quickly and leave behind a sugary hangover.

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Much of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's hearings for confirmation to the Supreme Court have focused on the role of legal precedent. She repeatedly used the P-word to justify her more controversial rulings, in the face of senators who excoriated her for failing to follow it. If Sotomayor really ignored precedent while serving as a federal judge, could she have gotten in trouble?

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Have British kids stopped stealing music? A recent survey of 1,000 music fans in the United Kingdom found that about 26 percent of teenagers admitted to using file-sharing networks during the previous month. That number is surprisingly small—a year and a half ago, the same poll found that nearly half of teenagers were regularly pilfering songs. The survey suggests that instead of hitting BitTorrent for music, kids are now hooked on streaming. More than two-thirds of the teenagers said they use sites like MySpace Music regularly; 31 percent said they listen to music at their computers every day.

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Rory Stewart has been one of those most intelligently as well as passionately engaged with the liberation of Afghanistan, so when he writes as soberly as he does in the essay "The Irresistible Illusion" in the July 9 London Review of Books, he makes one want to pay close attention. Let me quote his statement of the problem, as it is commonly propounded by our leaders:

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Isn't it wonderful when science and religion come together? My Slate colleague William Saletan points out that a recent paper has laid the groundwork for a pro-life defense of onanism. According to obstetrician David Greening, a rigorous program of daily masturbation can actually improve sperm quality in men with fertility problems. (Samples collected at the end of the program showed less DNA damage and higher sperm motility than samples from control subjects.) Since masturbation can help you have babies, Saletan argues, it must also serve the "procreative and unitive purposes" described in the Catechism.

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Emily, I think the "new" definition of bipartisanship John explores is clearly at work in the Sotomayor spectacle, with respect not so much to vote-counting but to the extent that this hearing has shown "how many ideas from the opposition party are included" in a Democratic president's nominee. By that measure, this has to be the most bipartisan hearing in history. Sotomayor has touted the virtue of neutral umpires and thrown Obama's newly minted empathy standard under the bus. I haven't heard a word from her or much from committee Democrats that lays out a theory of liberal jurisprudence. The resounding bipartisan lesson from these hearings is that the only thing missing from the John Roberts Court is a few more John Robertses.

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The Wendy Williams Show, a new weekday chatfest, goes out live at 10 a.m. on the East Coast, but, like many other daytime shows, it's syndicated, and its airtimes are various. I'm supposed to tell you to check your local listings, an advisory that seems slightly superfluous: If you are neither working during the day nor too busy trying to keep Junior from teething on a box of fabric softener, then you know damn well what is on television, probably better than the people who input the local listings.

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A daily video from Slate V.

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Our critics discuss Thy Neighbor's Wife.

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