Politics, words, ideas, and their possibilities - A roundup

The force of arguments meets the argument of force. From Lorenzo at Linkage:

Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa on the corruptions of dictatorship and the power of words. A (murdered) Russian journalist and an African and (murdered) Turkish writer are honoured with (pdf) International Publisher Associations awards.

On the career and posthumous post-modernist triumphs of Mikhail Bakhtin. (Though I wish Terry Eagleton would stop using that wank term late capitalism: we have no idea how far into the history of capitalism we are. A term which, in various incarnations, has been around for 160 years or so, it is getting really tired.)
[....]
Reminiscences and retrospectives on philosopher Richard Rorty.

--Jeff Weintraub