Extinctathon - I just finished reading a lovely, uplifting book about the end of the world via bioterrorism. It's Margaret Atwood's latest, Oryx and Crake. Largely written before 9/11 and the anthrax mailer, the book's eponymous villain is not a Muslim extremist but rather a bored, hyperintelligent biotech geek who decides that humanity's done with and splices together a genetically superior race as a hobby. While many aspects of the story are intended as satire against capitalist technocracy run-amok, as Richard Posner put it in his review for The New Republic: "There have always been Crakes; only now they are much more dangerous, and there are more of them. And the more scientific brainpower that is deployed to fight them, the more scientists there will be who, like Crake, know how to use technology to commit terrorist acts of appalling magnitude." Cheery thought for a Monday.