Soccer fans will want to read this preview by Sports Illustrated's Gabriele Marcotti on the upcoming Chelsea-Barcelona quarterfinals home-and-home playoff in the Champions' League. I've been watching this year's Barcelona team and I've never seen a better Barça squad, even with organizing midfielder Xavi out for the rest of the season. The team is young, fit, and still hungry.

Aesthetic note: Rafa Marquez needs a haircut. He looks like a cross between Steven Seagal and a Tijuana pimp. Thiago Motta needs a haircut, too. He looks like a pallid Ronaldinho, and only Ronaldinho is cool enough to get away with hair like that. However, Madrid leads Barça 3-2 in guys who need better haircuts, as Guti, Sergio Ramos, and Beckham all look like girls with their stringy blond dos pulled back over their foreheads. Give them manly haircuts and watch Madrid play better.

This is Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal on how we're indirectly funding North Korea's nuclear bomb program. And here is Victor Davis Hanson on Iran's nuclear program from National Review.

Also from National Review is this Jonah Goldberg piece, one of whose themes is that in American politics when the Democrats move left, the Republicans move left too and take up a larger piece of the center. This is precisely the opposite of what the PP is doing here in Spain, and why I am convinced the PP is in error with its strategy of moving to the right. What the PP is doing is giving up the center to the Socialists, and that is not smart. About the only good strategy reason I can see for the PP's rightward trend is that they're trying to nail down their conservative base and will move toward the center after they feel that their hardcore conservatives are sufficiently loyal and active, since the next election is coming up at the beginning of 2008 and there is plenty of time left.

Arts and Letters Daily links to several very interesting articles, including this one from the Financial Times on the importance of blogs. My opinion here is that while blogging's importance has been overrated since about 2003, this piece makes the error of underrating it. And most bloggers aren't in it for the money. Check out this paragraph:

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

First, what makes blog posts more evanescent than newspaper stories? And I would argue that blog posts are considerably more concrete than the broadcast media, whose reports literally vanish into the air. My personal comment is that by far the most looked-up Iberian Notes archived posts are those from March 11, 2004 and the following couple of weeks or so. Several people look at them every day. For good or ill, those posts will probably be read as long as there is an interest in the subject.

Also on blogs, there's this piece from New York magazine on people who are actually trying to make money off it.

This is an article from the New York Times magazine by Francis Fukuyama on neoconservative idealism vs. realism. Fukuyama, of course, would prefer some kind of synthesis.

Here's one on Rembrandt by Robert Hughes from the Guardian. I love this kind of article.

This is a Kurt Andersen piece from New York magazine on those damn cartoons, including a very erroneous moral equivalence between religious Americans and the Muslims who have burned down embassies.