RAISING THE DEAD
The remains of famed atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair , who vanished in 1995, were found at a Texas ranch at the end of January. The formal identification of the body was made yesterday. David Waters, who once worked as an office manager for O'Hair's American Atheists organization, is the man believed to have planned the kidnappings and murders of O'Hair, her son Jon Garth Murray, and her granddaughter, Robin Murray. As the New York Times explains, he "pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy charges and agreed to lead investigators to the bodies, officials said. As part of his plea bargain, Mr. Waters will reportedly get immunity for his role in the killings but receive a 20-year sentence for the conspiracy charges." The mystery of O'Hair's disappearence is therefore over, but as the Austin American-Statesman reports, the story is not at an end: "'There's a small war going on over who gets the body,' U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg said. 'That will be decided by the Texas courts.' O'Hair's only surviving relative, son William Murray, wants to bury his family in what he promises will be a private, nonreligious ceremony with no prayers. … But Murray, a Christian evangelist, was a harsh disappointment to his mother, and fellow atheists will make their own claims to the bodies. 'He doesn't deserve the remains,' said Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, which O'Hair founded in Austin." In 1965, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in her favor and argued that prayer was not an essential part of the American classroom, O'Hair was asked by Playboy to explain her atheism. "Because religion is a crutch, and only the crippled need crutches. … Atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. … It's about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: 'Well, we are men. Let's start acting like it.' "

AGAINST CRITICISM
In the introduction to his forthcoming book, The War Against Cliché—Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, Martin Amis says that today's critics do not even pretend to be interested in literature. "Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics—his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorisation' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, at the other end of the business, everyone has become a literary critic—or at least a book-reviewer."

THE PUSUIT OF IRVING
British publisher Heinemann has dropped a book about David Irving and the failed libel case he pursued against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt (she had described Irving as a Holocaust denier). As the Guardian reports: "The decision apparently sprang from fears that publication might provoke further libel action from David Irving, despite his humiliating defeat last July in a libel action which cost the publisher contesting it, Penguin Books, more than £2m in legal costs, which are still unpaid." Irving gloats about the decision on his Web site. DD Guttenplan's book about the Irving trial, The Holocaust on Trial, will appear in May. (To read a Slate"Dialogue" on the trial, click here.)

THE KILLING FIELDS
The onward march of foot-and-mouth disease continues across Europe. So does the slaughter  of livestock.(Outbreaks of the virus have has also been detected in Argentina, Colombia, and Mongolia .) Writing in London's Evening Standard, Brian Sewell questions the procedures chosen to eradicate foot-and-mouth. "For a century the disease has been cut off by slaughter and we have no statistics by which to measure the potential economic loss; moreover, the current breeding of all farm animals for milk, meat or other specific purpose means that they are significantly different from those of even the recent past and we have no notion how they may respond to the virus or what level of immunity they may develop.  … This outbreak … may bring us to our senses, may compel us to reconsider every complacent aspect of our agriculture and our treatment of the rural landscape and environment, the horrors of this holocaust perhaps at last convincing us that we have a moral responsibility of sorts for the animals we eat."

WHO WAS ON THE STREETS FIRST?
According to Slate Book Clubber Christopher Caldwell, Rick Perlstein's study of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, Before the Storm, "sees the Goldwater debacle as a lost battle in a won war. … Other historians have noted that democracy went into the streets in the 1960's, but Mr. Perlstein is the first to suggest that Republicans got there first. This was not simply a triumph of reactionaries. By the time of Goldwater's Presidential run, the conservative movement had been wrested from the control of the John Birch Society and delivered to the young activists around William F. Buckley Jr., who sought [Perlstein says] 'to articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.' "

ANOTHER BELL CURVE
The people of Philadelphia, if the mayor of the city is to be believed, have become as bulbous as the Liberty Bell. "We're too fat," John Street tells the New York Times. "I just believe that people in order to lead productive lives need to take charge of their health." To convert his fellow Philadelphians to the virtues of a little less weight, Street has appointed a "fat czar," Gwen Foster, who has, with great speed, launched a health and fitness campaign, "76 Tons of Fun." Penalties for recalcitrant members of the citizenry have yet to be announced, but one can soon expect the war on fat to be compared to the comic battle described by André Maurois in his children's novel Fattypuffs and Thinifers. Perhaps persistent offenders could be asked to assist the curators of the Barnes Collection, which R.C. Baker recommends should moved from its current home in suburban Merion, Pa. and rebuilt in downtown Philly.

A FAIR CONVENTION
Franklin Foer's article about conventional wisdom appears in the New Republic—of all places. In Foer's view, not only has the wisdom about conventional wisdom become lazy and conventional, but it assumes that what passes for conventional wisdom is wrong. "By definition, conventional wisdom is conventional," he writes. "But it has the great virtue of being right." (So much for the famous assertion made by one of the founders of the magazine, Walter Lippman that when all think alike, no one is thinking very much.) Foer argues that the attacks mounted on "CW" in the 1950s and 1960s by, say J.K. Galbraith (who indeed coined the term in his book The Affluent Society), have had their day—that it's now "possible to exaggerate CW's tyranny. Galbraith … caricatured CW as not just conservative but reactionary—unyielding in its defense of inherited values. This criticism, however, misunderstands CW's careful regulation of the marketplace of ideas. Yes, CW is conservative. It makes it difficult for faddish ideas to win popular acceptance quickly. … But compared with other methods of regulating ideas … CW is remarkably open-minded."

THE JOY OF SELF

Peter Conrad's assessment of the spat between Dave Eggers and David Kirkpatrick appeared in the Observer. "In fact, both Dave and David were case-hardened harlots. This was no feckless fling, but a shrewd commercial transaction. Celebrities only give interviews when they have something to sell. Dave was under pressure from his publisher to help them earn back the $1.4 million advance they'd paid him. And David, with cynical candor, conceded during the wooing process that he too had economic reasons for obtaining a commission from the New York Times: 'I have an occupational obligation to try to talk you into talking with me.' What was the value, then, of the fulsome compliments he paid Dave? This was the hooker's unfelt rhetoric of solicitation and encouragement." In the New York Times Book Review, Slate's Jack Shafer wrote about another McSweenyite, Neil Pollack, whose The Neal Pollock Anthology of American Literature has recently been published. "If I read the young Pollack right," Shafer says, "he means more than to cripple hacks with the mace of parody. Like Dave Eggers and the other literary monkey-wrenchers at McSweeney's Quarterly, where some of these pieces first appeared and which published this book, Pollack longs to make literary noise of his own. … Generous readers will give [him] credit for attempting to sustain the preening persona of his alter ego at book length. But stingy readers, having gotten the book's joke halfway through, will ask why Pollack squanders his comic gifts with writing that is every bit as self-indulgent as the bloviations he wants to take down."

A HANGING OFFENSE

"Henry Blodget, Wall Street's loudest cheerleader for Internet stocks, made it to the front page of the New York Times last week. And thereby hangs a tale about the media and the bubble." So begins Howard Kurtz's article about a Merrill Lynch analyst's enthusiasm for the Internet—an article that is listed in the " Style Section" of the Washington Post—beneath a story about the goings-on at various Parisian fashion houses, but above the so-called "Daily Dose" and articles about "The Marriage of Figaro," "Carmina Burana," and Isaac Stern. And thereby hangs another tale about the media and the bubble. Or just another tale about the media. Or just a tale about Howard Kurtz, the Post's media reporter and author of The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation (a book James Surowiecki said "exaggerates the influence of both the financial media and Wall Street on stock prices"). Why has a business story ended up in the style section of a major newspaper? Because it's about "cheerleading"? Would a story about Isaac Stern's enthusiasm for New York's Carnegie Hall be better hung if it appeared in a real-estate section?

FOREIGN BOOM

As Inside reports, talks between the Writers Guild of America and the Hollywood studios have not produced an agreement of any kind. A strike is therefore likely. In a New York Times op-ed, Salman Rushdie argues that a strike may have some beneficial consequences—fewer bad films on screens and an opportunity for Americans to see more films from abroad. "In the 1960's and early 1970's, a flood of great non-American filmmakers pried Hollywood's fingers off the cinema's throat for a few years. The result was a golden age, the time of the great films of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray; of the French New Wave; of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. Now, once again, world cinema is blossoming—in China, in Iran, in Britain. And it may just be that the mass audience is ready, at long last, to enjoy rather more diversity in its cultural diet. After all, there are plenty of dreadful American films we could all cheerfully do without."