1977 Sadat in Israel

This is from Sadat’s historic state visit to Jerusalem. They are at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.

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Sadat silently moved through the somber memorial, with the tools of genocide starkly displayed. There was the gate to Auschwitz, with its grotesquely ironic motto, Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you free), through which more than a million Jews passed on their way to death. The Hall of Names contained brief biographies of two million of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. In the middle of the room there was a great cone lined with images of the victims; it rose skyward like the smokestacks of the death camps. “All this befell us because we had no state of our own,” Begin told Sadat.

-- Lawrence Wright, “Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David”

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Sleep

I can't believe myself. I almost slept the clock round. I went to bed at nine and slept almost until eight. Of course, it was a typical night with a number of bathroom runs and cat yowlings. However, I always fell asleep again pretty readily. Really, it was a good, relatively continuous sleep. I liked it, too. My days are such empty, fruitless affairs that an extra couple of hours of sleep sounds like a good prescription - less day, less mental pain, just letting my time run out on me without putting up a fight. I'll even get in another round of television with my breakfast, no longer feeling eager to fire up the laptop, not really feeling that much interest in e-life. There is no one that I kind of hunger to hear from and no one who has the least interest in me. So empty.

I suspect I have suffered something like a small relapse of that illness. Oh, I am still going to go about my daily routine as well as eat my usual rich, sweet stuff, but instead of continuing to feel better and stronger, I feel like I slipped down five or ten percent. That cough is asserting itself a little more and will not be ignored, and I just simply feel a little weaker, a little more fever, more nasal stuffage. It is proving a challenge to shake off this mean little flu-monkey from my back. It keeps on riding me, laughing in my ear.

Leibniz

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During his lifetime and after, speculation ran wild over Leibniz’s theological leanings. Some suspected he might have been a deist or an atheist. Neither label is correct. He did not accept the deists’ rejection of revelation and mysteries, holding instead that revelation needed not to involve proven contradictions and that mysteries were above reason but not against it. And while he rarely attended church services and took communion irregularly at best, he was far from being an agnostic, and he was certainly not an atheist. But the townspeople and the aristocrats in Hanover looked at him with suspicion, calling him a “Löwenix” — one who “believes nothing.” When he died in 1716, rumors circulated that on his deathbed, he spoke of alchemy and refused religious blessings. His funeral was sparsely attended, supposedly due to his reputed agnosticism.

-- Marc E. Bobro in The New Atlantis

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Jay Leno

“I was a comedian who was lucky enough to get a talk show. Dave is a broadcaster who is also a comedian.”

-- Jay Leno