As Super Tuesday approaches, three prominent Jewish writers get political in their personal essays. In The Washington Post, Michael Chabon and Erica Jong set out a point-counterpoint of sorts, with each one trying to out-hyperbole the other.

First, Michael Chabon chides us all on being a nation full of fear:

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

Then Erica Jong justifies Hillary Clinton’s centrism with an appeal to baby boomer women who identify with her struggle:

As a senator she has learned compromise and negotiation. She has gotten to know red America as well as blue. If she could win over the rednecks in upstate New York, she can win over any American. She knows this country is full of "security" moms as well as soccer moms. Since she is a woman, she has to show she's ready to be commander in chief. Hence her "triangulation" on Iraq and her signing the absurd Lieberman-Kyl resolution, which calls on our government to use "military instruments" to "combat, contain and [stop]" Iran's meddling in Iraq.

By the time it came up she must have known the Cheney-Bush war profiteers would never embrace even partial peace. She had to win over her America and theirs.

Shalom Auslander, our third prominent Jewish author, forgoes these emotional pleas for votes and instead talks about politics the way they’re lived among news-cycle junkies in the days before the primary. He admits that he’s never voted before, but now that he’s “downloaded pretty much all the pornography on the internet,” obsessing about the election has become his new favorite way to procrastinate. Also his wife found a lump in her breast, and maybe he needs distractions more that he’s willing to confront head-on. His essay won’t convince anyone to vote for Obama, his candidate of choice, or to vote at all for that matter, but it’s the most realistic evocation of the 2008 race I’ve seen so far.

You can stand under my umbrella: Bandmates Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips Good first-person writing online is an endangered species. A personal essay needs at least thousand words to really get into the nuances of whatever probably-humiliating story you’re choosing to share, but the Internet, being full of distractions, doesn’t reward length. And a personal essay needs honesty to be interesting, but the Internet is meaner to personal essayists than a school bus full of seventh-graders to a kid with bird shit on his shoulder -- the more honest you are, the more abuse you’ll take.

So today's roundup celebrates the good, the honest, and the long.

In this Men’s Vogue excerpt from former Luna frontman Dean Wareham's memoir, he tells the story of how he wound up leaving his wife of seven years for his band’s high-cheekboned bassist. His recounting is the opposite of cavalier, and reading it, you wind up sympathetic to everyone involved. (NB: I’m pretty sure I was at the Philadelphia show where Dean and Britta first made out, but I’d eaten an entire bag of Valentine’s Day candy hearts and spent most of the night outside trying not to puke. Rock and roll!)

There's an exceptionally weird story on Fresh Yarn – always a font of weird stories – by a theater kid whose crush on her fellow Gypsy cast member ended when he stabbed a friend of her parents. OK, yes, total spoiler, but aren’t you curious about the road from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to murder in the first degree?

The Morning News has a lovely, simple, raw tale about the overpowering urge to protect one’s children, and what happens when that urge leads one man – an author of kids’ books, no less – to kick a stranger’s dog.