Cool shit I've been reading this week, thanks to my continuing unemployment...

Steven Levitt is an ivy-league educated economist at the University of Chicago. Don't hold that against him, though. He's got a way to tell how teachers inflate test scores and how realtors shortchange their clients.

Josef Joffe recently gave the 20th annual John Bonython lecture at Australia's Centre for Independent Studies on the US as Gulliver in a Lilliput world.

Former DoD insider Karen Kwiatkowski slams Rummy and company for cliquishness and groupthink.

James Traub thinks that it might be a good idea for the US to act paternally toward Liberia.

Francis "End of History" Fukuyama blames the failure to find Iraqi WMDs on exaggerations of US and UN intelligence.

Successful, alpha-type women refuse to date men intellectually inferior to them. Behind every great woman, there's a great man.

Whodathunkit: a correspondent from The Nation writing in praise of McDonald's.

Former Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley has given up on the 9 declared Democratic candidates for 2004. Hillary, he sez, is the great Dem hope.

Nobody disputes that the Aral Sea is dying. But the post-industrial wasteland of a lake isn't quite dead yet.

Back in 1953, with the country still shouting "I like Ike," Joseph Clark wrote Can the Liberals Rally? for the Atlantic Monthly. Worth reading again in these illiberal times...

How corrupt is Mexico now? Well it's not squeaky clean, but it's getting there... slowly.