Here's Christopher Hitchens in Slate on Hamas and the Palestinians. Hitch links to this long (12-page) but very worthwhile piece from the Atlantic Monthly on Arafat's corruption.

This piece from the Wall Street Journal explains very clearly why Al Qaeda is much more dangerous than the Patriot Act. Europeans not understanding what the Patriot Act means need to read this one. Hint: Under the act, civil liberties in the US are considerably wider than in most of Europe.

I love Malcolm Gladwell but I'm not at all convinced by this New Yorker article on pit bulls and bad dogs.

For movie fans, here's Edward Jay Epstein's column from Slate on Hollywood economics. This time it's on Disney's purchase of Pixar.

Here's Mark Steyn on America's latest media scandal, a guy who faked a massively best-selling autobiography as a drug-addicted criminal. Shades of our Enric Marco, an impostor who pretended for years to have been an inmate in Mauthausen. Here's another Steyn piece, this one on gay politicians. I dunno. Steyn writes an awful lot of dance criticism, Hollywood gossip, and reminiscences about Thirties songwriters for someone who is so aggressively heterosexual.