LETTERMAN AND THE CHILDREN
Here's the text of David Letterman's amazing opening monologue on Monday night. Not that David Letterman is (or should be) the barometer of modern American thought or anything, but I was genuinely impressed with his candor, and, well, I long suspected he did many of the things he does on the show for purely personal and therapeutic reasons, and here we have stark, lovely, utterly human proof of it. (You can hear it in Realaudio if you missed it.)

Remember the often-played footage of those Palestinian kids 'celebrating' the attacks? Well, these pictures of Palestinians in mourning show what I hope and guess is a slightly more prevalent viewpoint. (You know, if we held vigils every time a Palestinian town got bombed, let alone literally any other individual people in the Middle East or South Asia or anywhere else in the Third World, we'd never get to have a Union Square without candles again.)