While President Obama and the Democratic congress have made it clear that “they would block for now any effort to establish an independent commission to investigate the Bush administration’s approval of harsh interrogation techniques,” the announcement comes at a time when the debate is as frenzied as ever (Mark Benjamin of Salon posted a solid briefing of last week’s revelations) and supporters and enablers of the policy are as brazen as ever (Elizabeth Cheney, for one, declared she was “very proud” of this program); there are rays of optimism that transparency will triumph (Obama will, for example, “release more photos of Bush era prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan to satisfy demands from an ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request”); few writers have focused as much attention on this topic as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, whom STOP SMILING spoke with in the recent issue of the magazine (the complete interview is available here).

The Pulitzer winners were announced today, with the New York Times shelving the most medals (5): There were some usual suspects (another book about Sally Hemings wins an award?), some pleasant surprises (Steve Reich for music, Damon Winter‘s Usher-esque photograph of Obama in Pennsylvania) and some oddities (two of the winners for were recent layoff victims) — a minority report by Jack Shafer at Slate fills in the rest of the blanks. View the complete list of winners here.

The cover of this week’s print edition of The Economist, which imagines a world free from nuclear weapons, pays homage to Gregory Corso‘s poem Bomb, published by City Lights Books in 1958, in which the type is arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud (view an online reproduction of Corso’s poem here): Annie Nocenti, a regular contributor to STOP SMILING and guest editor of The Gambling Issue in 2008, wrote an eloquent remembrance of Corso, the beat poet who passed away in 2001, in the Downfall of American Publishing issue, which also features a tribute to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. Click here to view a YouTube clip of Corso reading his work.

Having published a fair amount of interviews — 60 of which are compiled in these three 20 Interviews issues — we understand the complexities of navigating a recorded conversation, particularly when the subjects are musicians forced to discuss the abstract nature of their art: So our condolences go out to the host of the Canadian talk show Q, who became the latest victim to receive intentionally antagonistic replies to the softest of softball questions (“When did the band form?”) when speaking live on air to Billy Bob Thornton, who was promoting his “cosmic cowboy music”; this clip immediately joins the ranks of recent cringe-worthy Q&As with rapper Joaquin Phoenix (view here) and the laconic Icelanders Sigur Ros (view here). Oh dear…

It’s Jack Johnson, 1 — Scooter Libby, zero. Senator John McCain delivers some straight talk we can believe in with the announcement this week that he is seeking a presidential pardon for the late Jack Johnson, the nation’s first black heavyweight boxing champion, who he “feels was wronged by a 1913 conviction of violating the Mann Act by having a consensual relationship with a white woman” (read more about the story at AP); STOP SMILING featured Johnson on the cover of our Boxing Issue back in 2005, timing with the release of Ken Burn‘s extraordinary documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. The final bell will be rung by President Obama.

While President Obama’s proclamation yesterday that the United States is not a Christian nation may have riled those who stand staunchly by the idea that the Bible has guided this country since its inception, and while thousands pore over this week’s Newsweek cover story that explores the decline of Christianity in America, potentially the most poignant threat to the Western World’s dominant religion may be soon to come: Underground comic legend and premier provocateur R Crumb, whom STOP SMILING interviewed for a cover story in the current issue, has finished his illustrated version of the King James Bible’s Genesis and will release it in October, undoubtedly to the delight of religious cartoon fans worldwide. -SS.

Two pieces by STOP SMILING contributors Alexander Provan and Hua Hsu appear in the current issues of Bidoun and the Atlantic, respectively; Provan, who is a SS editor-at-large, provides for the Mid-Eastern art and culture quarterly a deep and imaginative history of Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger of the two “Beltway snipers,” that weaves together the sniper’s past in Kingston, his militant training by the older of the pair in the US, and an array of pop culture influences that are further brought to life by drawings found in Malvo’s cell — of Neo from the Matrix (see above), Hannibal the Barbarian and Tupac, among others — which are presented on the website with Provan’s piece; meanwhile, Hsu provides the Atlantic‘s Jan-Feb cover story, which explores the gradual de-whitening of the United States through the lenses of hip-hop, blogs, academia and even The Great Gatsby. Both are must-reads.

Slate makes two art-and-culture-related requests this week: First, Paris Review editor Nathaniel Rich, who interviewed his grandfather, Frank Rich Sr., in the STOP SMILING DC Issue, asks film critics to cease with the facile comparison of two Robert Altman classics — Nashville and Short Cuts — simply because they both have huge casts, interweaving story lines and take place in a single American city (an extended version of the SS interview with Altman that appeared in the Auteur Issue is available online here); the second plea comes from Slate‘s Ron Rosenbaum, who implores that the world recognize how actually awful Billy Joel is — Rosenbaum’s piece is a delight to read in tandem with a short work on the McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: “What I Would Be Thinking About if I Were Billy Joel Driving Toward a Holiday Party Where I Knew There was Going to be a Piano”. -SS

On the New York Times site, filmmaker and part-time NYT columnist Errol Morris hosts a roundtable discussion with Associated Press and Reuters photographers to examine the Bush presidency in pictures — it’s a startling batch of images, a must-see; Morris appeared on the cover of our Documentary Issue in 2006 and recalled, during a lengthy conversation (an excerpt of which is available here), instances in which he’s conducted interviews long enough to provoke hallucinations.

“This is probably the most sinless president we’re likely to get in the foreseeable millennium, and yet he’s already got the health Nazis on his tail,” writes Slate.com‘s Ron Rosenbaum, in a defense against recent assaults by Barbara Walters and Tom Brokaw on Obama’s smoking habit; dependence on vices is always a dangerous game for people so prominently placed in the public eye, as Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security and the nation’s top immigration official, surely feels since the Washington Post reported he’s been depending upon illegal immigrants to clean his house for years; but those outside the political realm often get off the hook much easier: A STOP SMILING interview with Chan Marshall (Cat Power) in our first 20 Interviews issue shows just how endearing a bit of addiction can make a conversation.