The winning plan for the new US embassy at Nine Elms, South London, was unveiled two days ago. ‘Not inelegant,’ was the cagey reaction of one architectural critic to illustrations of the new building, which has resemblances to a non-turreted Norman keep, a white version of the Kaaba at Mecca, the base of one of the towers of the World Trade Center, the central stack at Yale’s Beineke Library and the Richard Desmond Children’s Eye Centre at Moorfields. Which is to say that it’s a cube with something of a moat and a colonnaded ground floor, and exterior walls that resemble shards of glass.

The old embassy’s neighbours in Mayfair are hedge funds and the shops of Bond Street. The new embassy will have Battersea Power Station and New Covent Garden, as well as the inhabitants of the colossal residential redevelopment of the south bank of the Thames from Wandsworth to Putney. On Bond St, there’s a bronze statue of Churchill and Roosevelt  sitting together on a bench; in Battersea, the Anglo-American alliance is memorialised in St Mary’s church by a stained-glass window to Benedict Arnold, who’s buried in the crypt.

The window was installed to mark the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence in 1976, and it depicts Arnold as a model Anglo-American. He fought first for George Washington, then for George III. What American would consider the original turncoat a model for anything other than treason? When he came to live in London after the revolutionary wars Arnold was widely despised and then ignored. He was no one’s friend. So far, the plans for the new embassy haven’t won many friends, either.

To think of Jerry’s life in terms of his immense contribution to public health overlooks his fanatical interest in culture. He read widely, a subscriber to the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the British Medical Journal. He was also an insomniac and would read two to three thrillers every week.

Intelligent and racy reading may keep you and your heart going. The obituary goes on to mention Morris’s enthusiasm for going out: in September and October he went to the theatre 14 times, the opera four times and the concert hall twice. Whether he travelled by bus or not, the obituary doesn’t say, but he did like to be on the town.

Yesterday my colleague posted on the partisanship of Fox News, suggesting we shouldn’t take the network seriously.

For the first time so far in my career, I briefly fell for a hoax.

I’ve long believed that Mongolia, among wild countries, is the Last Best Place, to steal the slogan for Montana.

I have real problems with the idea that because Europe is in relative decline, we have no right to promote our values.

Whoever he or she is, whatever their colleague may have posted and whether they fell (so unfortunately) for a hoax; regardless of what they make of Mongolia or of European ‘values’ – why is it such a struggle to say who they are? What do ‘our values’ and your ‘real problems’ mean if we don’t know who you are?

Still, in the annals of right-wingers shooting themselves in the foot (quite a phenomenon in the US), Palin’s book title doesn’t quite match a song Bob Dole chose for his campaign in 1996. That was a rendition of the Sam & Dave song, ‘Soul Man’ – the words of the chorus were changed from ‘I’m a Soul Man’ to ‘I’m a Dole Man’. I heard the song at a field in San Diego, the scene of that year’s Republican convention, as Dole disembarked from a paddle steamer to address the crowd. When ‘I’m a Dole Man’ was amplified through open-air loudspeakers the words became ‘I’m a Dull Man’. And so he was.

New research shows water present across the moon’s surface – It turns out the moon is a lot wetter than we ever thought.

We must remember our umbrellas.

Or, in the Guardian:

Piracy may be the bane of the music industry but according to a new study, it may also be its engine. A report from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don’t.

So property really does begin with theft.

The newness of the research makes it newsworthy (obviously) but also makes it sound more truthful. And yet most research is more often work in progress than anything more definitive – except for reports cited in, say, the pages of the National Enquirer, which more than decade ago said that according to new research the Hubble Telescope had discovered Heaven.