For those of you who like making fine distinctions, which I presume is every reader of this site, Geoff Nunberg’s discussion of the difference between liberty and freedom will be fun. Amusingly, Matthew Yglesias raised the same question Geoff was answering on his blog 36 hours ago. The spirit of the weekend moves in mysterious ways.

There’s been several comments in the blogosphere already on Paul Berman’s mammoth article on Sayyid Qutb. I think I disagree, perhaps strongly, with the conclusion of the piece, but I need a little more time to think about that (and to actually read rather than just skim the article) before posting. But if I have a spare couple of hours to be disagreeable tomorrow, I might try something.

More philosophically significant, I thought, was Daniel Mendelsohn’s article on the fall of irony and the rise of melodrama. Drawing (and probably snapping) a very long bow he suggests that melodrama is a sign of democracy’s decay. Democracy’s preferred genre is perhaps not the allusive ironism of recent years, but tragedy. Still, melodrama is the enemy, and allusive irony is the enemy’s enemy, which makes it our friend for now. So I’m going to spend some time propping up modern democracy by mixing more knowing references to 80’s indie-pop bands into my papers on the foundations of probability.