Obviously the syllables in the greeting "Welcome to bangkok" mean something extremely insulting in Icelandic -- perhaps "You are smaller than even our child prostitutes" or "I liked you much better when you were with the Sugarcubes."

I don't know how long you researched this, but I wish you had taken longer and come up with some real conclusions. As it is, you seem to be hoping that one of your readers will look at this and run with it, do their own research, and publish a more substantial story with real facts and conclusions. All this does is illustrate the limitations of journalism being squeezed into a blog.

I see that Marlowe is also the author of a memoir about heroin addiction. As we should have learned by now from the James Frey, there's one thing to keep in mind when reading a memoir written by an addict: addicts always lie.

That is one of the saddest things ever -- a guy who's glad an anti-depressant took his libido away. If he's this pathetic now, imagine what he was like before he started taking the drug.

Dude, you live in Detroit -- how could you not be depressed?

Sandip Roy's piece has the theme "... relief that finally we can fail, that we can screw up spectacularly and live to tell the tale."

First of all, the jury is still out on whether Kaavya will "live to tell the tale" -- after all, Harvard has not yet decided whether it will discipline her, as it has other plagarists.

More importantly, Roy seems to be saying that high-achieving immigrants need role-models in failure as well as success. Taken this way, Kaavya Viswanathan is still an over-achiever. Her book was pulled from distribution, her publisher has cancelled her contract, and people are still discovering "similarities" between her book and others. Just about everything has happened to her except a public spanking on Oprah. A more spectacular flame-out can hardly be imagined.

I have the feeling that the writer's relief has less to do with finally having a role model for failure and more to do with the sense that she got caught -- not the writer. Not that Sandip Roy can be accused of anything underhanded -- but who among us has not harbored a secret fear that our faults and screw-ups will be exposed in the harsh light of day, and relief when it happens not to us, but to someone else?

As a liberal Christian, I tend to cringe at a lot of talk by evangelicals, even more because of the smugness and superiority they betray than their politics. Cizik's statements show that, despite being somewhat agog at their abandonment by the Republican Party, evangelicals continue to insist only their way is correct. Rather than look for common ground with others, they insist the mountain come to them. "We don't need to go like supplicants to the political parties. We say, consider what our agenda is and join us." So much for the respectful discussion and compromise which is at the root of representative democracy.

Sunita Williams rocks for being a fantastic role model in many ways. I wish one-tenth of the attention paid to this psycho love story had been given her achievement -- less the spacewalk record itself than being an Indian-American woman who has reached the pinnacle of her profession.

Without even reading this article or even responding to its thesis, I was irked by the headline. Where did this phrase "needs to" come from? Other than being more pretentious and presumptuous -- can anyone really says what another person "needs to do"? -- does it mean anything other than "should"?

In the article the writer takes a general fact -- the economy is getting worse for everybody -- and a number of incidents that look the same on the surface -- angry demonstrations, heavy police response -- and equates them. He implies that all these incidents of civil unrest happened for the same reason: a lack of confidence in business and governmental institutions.

But this is not the case at all. European youths in Athens angry about police brutality are not the same as Russians in the far east angry about trade tariffs; rioters panicking about bread prices in Cairo are not the same as political claques indulging in street theater in India. Demonstrations by disenfranchised Chinese factory workers are not the same as "such incidents" in Riga. The only thing they have in common is a brutal police over-reaction.

All the incidents cited by the author happened for different, and strictly local, reasons. They may have been ginned up by political opportunists; they may have been genuine demonstrations of desperation by poor people; they may have simply been incidents of thugs and young people blowing off steam. To suggest that there is some rising tide of desperation ready to sweep away civilization is the epitome of alarmism, and it serves no one.

This article seems to me a classic example of a writer cherry-picking disparate news events in order to fit a hypothesis. It doesn't meet your usual standards.