Transatlantic.

“I once played Francis Bacon on his deathbed, tended by nuns.” Paul Gallagher’s notes towards a portrait at Dangerous Minds.

Edmund White selects and comments on his top 10 New York books for the Guardian and his #1 is Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage. “The best New York memoir, an ebullient and exquisitely written account of Greenwich Village in the 1940s during the immediate post-war period.” I’ll second that.

Max Feeney’s piece in Slate on why guys like Jared Lee Loughner are drawn to Nietzsche only to misread him will be a helpful primer for some, a brisk refresher for others (like me, for example, for whom it’s been literally decades since I was anywhere near my old copy of Walter Kaufmann’s anthology). And I can’t imagine I’m the only one reminded of this:

“Apes don’t read philosophy.”

“Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.”

“Sometimes the obsessive memorialising gets even Berliners down. You begin to wonder whether the end wouldn’t be served by a single all-purpose memorial to everyone the Germans have pissed off, including other Germans.”

Glen Newey at the LRB blog, where he also succinctly nails the essential wrongness of Potsdamer Platz, where many of us will be spending too many hours during next month’s Berlinale.

And here’s Palin’s hit list, crosshairs and all, in case you were looking for confirmation. Yes, Congresswoman Giffords was on it.