The Oprah-approved author of harrowing, sparse-prose mastery such as The Road, No Country for Old Men, and Blood Meridian has taken on a special project in editing the paperback version of last year's well-received biography of famed scientist Richard Feynman, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.

As it turns out, Mr. McCarthy was a huge fan of the book, and offered his services to Quantum Man author Lawrence M. Krauss unprompted. With them, however, he also offered some distinct, Cormac McCarthy-esque adjustments.

Via Pageview:

"To start with," Krauss writes, "he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature." The novelist, he adds, "went through the book in detail and made suggestions for rephrasing in certain points as well."

And so it was. Question, though: For what it's worth, Richard Feynman was an exclamation point of a scientist. For example, would McCarthy have taken out the exclamation point in the title of Richard Feynman's most famous work?

In the mean time, as a biography of Richard Feynman becomes a tribute to the minimal elements that the man may have lived, that distant tapping sound you hear is the furious deletion of the aforementioned punctuation marks by many an MFA candidate. Previously: Cormac McCarthy, playwright, brute-force killer of euphemistic racial-tension in theater. Hopefully he'll next emerge on Madison Avenue and tell every menswear fashion buyer in the world why non-effeminate bracelets have no place in their stores.

[Via ArtsBeat]

One panelist readily agreed this was the main front in the ideological wars. Author Douglas Murray said there is now a "big lie" that Israel/Palestine is at the root of troubles between radical Islam and the west. The so-called occupied territories, he said, was one of those lies.

These are glad tidings. For one thing, it's nice to get noticed by the neocons. They have had the only big idea of the last ten years. Now they're hearing footsteps—the western critics of Israel/Palestine policy. And it is good when neocons baldly put their money down on the supposed lie of there being occupied territories. Taking such an absurd position can only help to elevate the occupation as an issue in the news, which is where it belongs. The more that Americans learn of the deprivation of civil rights to Palestinians under apartheid conditions in the West Bank, the more likely it is that an American sense of fairness will at last come to bear, politically, on this issue.

Here is the sensible take of cab-driver/blogger Denis Drew: