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rollerboogie reminded me, I keep watching movies that seem to have accidental companion books, and forgetting to mention the books here. So: If you like movies about spelling bees, you might also like Myla Goldberg's deep, weird novel Bee Season, about a family that becomes fragmentedly obsessed with, among other things, spelling. Times review, publisher's excerpt and interview, Powell's order page.

And if you like stories about women playing punk rock in L.A. but Prey for Rock and Roll's angst isn't lighthearted enough for you, I recommend Jen Sincero's Don't Sleep with Your Drummer, about a 28-year-old who quits her job to form a band misnamed after a PJ Harvey song. It's funny and fun and makes you get how music might be worth all the indignities and iniquities of the music business. No Times review for this one, but here's some review I found with Google, and here's Powell's. You can buy a downloadable version to read on your PDA, which sounds like a terrible idea to me, but if you want to experiment, this might be a good book for it.

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Courtesy of Slate's "Today's Papers": Russia's "government shut down the country's last large independent television station Sunday". And the lower house of its Parliament "voted overwhelmingly last week to amend Russia's campaign laws to allow the authorities to shut down news organizations for campaign coverage deemed to be biased."

On a lighter note:

Howard Dean is running for president, The Washington Post has learned.

The former Vermont governor will announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination today in his home town of Burlington.

In addition, The Post has learned that Dean has in fact been running for president for more than a year. This finding is based on numerous statements from Dean, including "I'm running for president," "I want to be president," "I intend to be the nominee of this party" and "I'm going to beat George Bush."