I highly recommend Clive Davis' blog as a once a week read. No, he is not that Clive who was the great record producer. This Clive was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford in 2003, 2004 and 2005. He's also Oxford etc. As you might expect, his views are wide ranging and usually challenging. A couple of examples:

Western leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair... have recently focused on Muslim women's veils as an obstacle to integration in the West. But to me, it is [verse] 4:34 that poses the much deeper challenge of integration.
Some argue that literalist Wahhabi translations are a major part of the problem. Or is it just down to old fashioned misogyny?

Mahmoud Shalash, an imam from Lexington, Ky., stood at the pulpit of my mosque and offered marital advice to the 100 or so men sitting before him. He repeated the three-step plan, with "beat them" as his final suggestion. Upstairs, in the women's balcony, sat a Muslim friend who had recently left her husband, who she said had abused her; her spouse sat among the men in the main hall.

At the sermon's end, I approached Shalash. "This is America," I protested. "How can you tell men to beat their wives?"

"They should beat them lightly," he explained. "It's in the Koran."

And a wider range includes this one:

All the names suggested for male children were taken from a book she possessed on the generals of antiquity, and the village was full of inoffensive little boys called Julio César, Carlos Magna (Charlemagne), Mambró (Marlborough) and Napoleón. And one luckless child was doomed to go through life bearing the name Esprit de Cor (esprit de corps), who, someone had assured the Grandmother, was the greatest commander of them all.

Entertaining, informative, and also European, but not condescendingly so.

And while I'm tramping on the high ground, here's a link to a great blog on the arts (warning: no naked girls). Mostly reviews and observations on books, movies, and plays. Part of his opinion on that play about Rachael Corrie:

It’s an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop—yet it’s being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better....

He blends these reviews with other observations:

In art, fortunately, one is not compelled to choose sides, one poet at the expense of another. Milosz and Larkin are not mutually exclusive loves. Aesthetic love is promiscuous without being unfaithful. I feel no compulsion to be rigorously consistent in matters of artistic taste. I can love Proust and Raymond Chandler, Schoenberg and Johnny Cash. Only in that sense, I think, is art democratic….