Worth a look

David Horsey is political cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the big paper in one of the big liberal cities in America. So you might expect him to be in sympathy with the European attitude toward Americans these days. He seems to be a bit ambivalent about it, though, especially after getting a first-hand look.

If anything, I think he's got the beginning of an awakening there. Like, he might half have thought, "If I had gone to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and done this exercise in, say 1985, wouldn't the pictures have looked an awful lot like these?"

Christopher Hitchens goes to see "The Passion of Christ." He is disturbed by what he sees, and by what Mel Gibson has been saying off to the side. As always, his writing is vigorous and provocative.

New Perspectives Quarterly is an indispensible publication for anyone who wants to understand the world we inhabit. And Samuel Huntington's thesis about the "clash of civilizations" is that rare event in political science: the theory that may actually shape the future as well as describe it. So the combination of the two is worth a trip.