Wes Phillips

I read Slate primarily to catch my colleague Fred Kaplan's "War Stories" column, but whenever I read Fred, I also go to Garry Trudeau's "The Sandbox," a milblog that allows military personnel stationed in Iraq and Afganistan to "vent, rhapsodize, and [inform] the folks on the home front . . . what is going on from their point of view."

Taking a really close look at Leonardo's portrait.

Haven't heard of it yet? You will. It's an opportunistic pathogen that is extremely resistant to antibiotics—some people call it a super bacterium. Jon Carroll writes about it in his columnhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/…; today, which, like all of his columns, is a great read.

Philip K. Dick has become a huge success 25 years after his death. He'd have seen the humor in that.

This is your brain on advertising.

We might have neighbors—and they could be closer than we thought.

Sean O'Hagan asks, "where are the heirs to awkward buggers like Robert Wyatt?"