Daily Bafflements

• Let’s start this Friday off right. A Philadelphia craft brewery is releasing a new beer made with, among other ingredients, smoked goat brains. Okay!

• Over at The Billfold, an interview with Melissa Gira Grant, the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. The Billfold piece is titled “Our Feelings Aside, Sex Work is a Labor Issue,” which sums it up nicely. They talk about the financial aspects of this complicated profession. “[E]veryone has different things that they’re concerned about,” says Grant. “For some people, an [IRS] audit is a lot more frightening than having your family find out.”

• Malaysian college professor Rahinah Ibrahim has finally been removed from the U.S. government’s no-fly list, after a legal battle that began when she sued the government in 2006.* According to Ars Technica, “the Ibrahim case marks the first and only successful challenge to the terrorist watch-listing program, which arose following the 9/11 attacks.”

• Here is The Nation‘s tribute to Jonathan Schell, who passed away earlier this week. For almost twenty years, Schell was the magazine’s peace and disarmament correspondent—a wonderful job title if we’ve ever heard one. “Jonathan’s outlook was never bitter, cynical or angry about the state of our country or the world,” writes Katrina vanden Heuvel. “He was more the citizen-philosopher who believed his readers would find their way if they had all the information necessary to deduce the answer.” The Nation collection is worth reading to remember, again, the incredible scope and importance of his work.

*Correction: This post previously, erroneously, referred to Dr. Ibrahim as “he.” The sentence has now been corrected. We apologize for the error.