The news in Tibet: BBC, Reuters. Tricycle has some coverage, too. I’m reading the new Philip Roth novel right now, Exit Ghost, and am back into Nathan Zuckerman mode: not wanting to know anything about the outside world at all, when there’s news like this.

Sometimes the best presence is absence. Here’s something posted on Free Williamsburg recently – a softer, better version of the outside world: Garfield Minus Garfield – a series of the original comic strips with the cat himself cut out. All we’re left with is poor John Arbuckle, alone in his suburban hell. Realizing how unhappily isolated he was.

When I’m at work I check the front page of NYTimes.com every five minutes. Partly out of distraction, and partly to make sure the world’s still there. Not that the Times would always know. But it seems like something solid and reliable, reassuring me. There’s another flu outbreak in China but it’s okay – the Times is on top of it. And every hour or so this week they’ve had new pictures of Spitzer making that same face. So, in distract-able office mode, I’m painfully in touch, skimming every article about every crisis near and far, in a fake kind of non-isolation. Do we read the news because it makes us feel connected to the world? Or maybe because we want to sound smart when we talk to anyone other than our houseplants and cats? To look at pictures like this, maybe. To feel connected with people on the other side of the world.

This is me going back to Roth-land. Plugging out.