Ah, the holier-than-thou brigade of media criticism has shown up already! I, for one, am happy that Jill Carroll is safe and mostly sound. Sandra M, I hope that if you are held hostage in a room in a war zone for months, that someone will worry about you too and rejoice when you're freed.

Here's a story for Broadsheet, though: Inexplicably, the (male) right wing of the blogosphere has let loose with all kinds of speculations about Carroll because she apparently wasn't one of them. The best of them seem to think that she must have been part of a hoax/extortion scheme (http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2006/03/jill-carroll-christian-science-monitor.html).

Some of them, in their infinite 101 Fighting Keyboarder wisdom, think that a silly girl who has spent the last two years regularly putting herself in all kinds of danger must be incredibly naive if she doesn't share their views: "Her father was just interviewed on FNC. He seems like a really nice guy. Sounds like a rebellious daughter."

But what's truly, jaw-droppingly horrifying is that the worst of them appear to be using her to fulfill their vilest fantasies, arguing that she must have been "treated well" in exchange for sexual favors to her captors (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/30/144840/465). Where the hell is all this coming from?

Shame on you, Salon! I came here looking for pictures of dogs attacking naked Iraqi prisoners and sober analysis of why the Democrats should not run Hillary, and instead, I think I must have logged on to National Lampoon by mistake! This is not a "humor" site! This is a SERIOUS, SERIOUS site for SERIOUS SERIOUS people, like me and the Poster Above, who are too smart to fall for such "jokes" as Bradsheet!

I, too, saw this before Inside Man, and it took everything I had to keep from jumping up and running out of the theatre. I didn't expect to break into a cold sweat sitting there. Looks like I won't be going to the cineplex for a while.

That isn't to say that a movie like Flight 93 couldn't be a good movie. I found Munich deeply moving (and I was only two when the events occurred that served as the movie's premise) and thought-provoking, a significant foreshadowing of what we would undergo in 2001, but when I recommended it to an older friend, she said that more than thirty years later the memory of what happened was not something she wanted to relive.

Maybe a movie like Flight 93 isn't really for us. But then, it should have been made later--and like Munich, it should take the long view for a generation facing its own monsters and learning from the mistakes of the past.

Lefty blog readers know that not all readers of lefty blogs are, in fact, lefties. Someone who wears a handle like "bootedbydailykos" as a badge of honor? Probly wasn't booted for being a card-carrying Communist. Someone probably checked out his comment history and realized he had a record of spouting GOP astroturf.

And there are conservative trolls who show up regularly in the comments of blogs like Eschaton (Atrios) in the guise of liberals spouting ugly language. They are generally outed immediately and virtually tarred-and-feathered.

This doesn't mean that there aren't misogynists who consider themselves liberal, but these folks are out there, and it's worth knowing how to tell the difference between someone with a valid, dissenting point of view, a clueless jackass, and a troll bent on dragging the level of discourse into the mud and smearing us all by association.

Julie Powell separated from her husband? As a longtime follower of her Julie/Julia blog, I'm sorry to hear that, whatever their reasons. I wish her all the best.

...in the same way, as Yeats said, that poets' mouths should be silent in times of war; both have their hands full with other more mundane, and, in the end, possibly far more effective pursuits. I'm not sure I completely agree with both, but I understand the impulse.

Before I was thirty I didn't think we were going to survive. When I was fourteen, at the height of the Cold War standoff in the mid-1980s, I didn't even think I would even make it to thirty. We thought we were pretty clear-eyed, having seen Carl Sagan's The Nuclear Winter and knowing that no amount of ducking and covering was going to save us.

Now, at age thirty-seven, I read all kinds of things that do strike fear into my heart and threaten to send me over the edge into permanent misanthropy, and sit with my husband at dinner and formulate all sorts of plans for dealing with crises and emergencies to which the government is turning a blind eye, and stock up on potable water and canned soups and propane canisters, and ride my bicycle to work and the grocery store a lot more often, and wonder what the world will be like for my neighbor's children and my nieces, and yet it all seems like deja vu.

I have no idea what machine of the gods will descend to save us this time (something cleverly designed by scientists and technologists, I'm sure), and there's a possibility certainly, that this time nothing can save us.

But in the meantime...look, daffodils! And I rediscovered a couple days ago that there is nothing better than sitting on a sunny university quadrangle on a breezy spring day holding hands with someone who loves you and eating ice cream after lunch to make you forget all the problems of the world, for a little while, at least.

And I believe we will survive.