Christopher Caldwell

New York

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

*1*

Here he goes again--a second, more desperate Hugh Hewitt column referring to me, the supposed antiwar, leftist professor who bullied two freshmen (Blacklist Envy). And the second he has written without calling me first to ask whether anything he was writing was true.

Paris

LAST WEEK, the semi-governmental French foundation IDDRI summoned 40 people to Paris to discuss "sustainable development," international relations, and the Third World.

IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, the pictures Americans saw on every news network Wednesday morning will be the ones we see on the covers of newsweeklies when they run their year-end wrap-ups next December: jubilant Iraqis dancing around the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, citizens of all stripes wiping their shoes on torn-down propaganda posters. After September 11, this cannot be the story of the decade, but it will be the story of the year--because it is an historic event.

Paris

ON THE FIRST semi-drivable day of the mid-February snowstorm here in Washington, I got a reminder of how membrane-thin can be the line that divides private property from public. My neighbor, Otto Snowden, called to complain that our babysitter was parked in his space. By "his space," Mr. Snowden meant the one on the street right in front of his house. In ordinary weather, one would have told him the street was public property and that he should go find an unfrozen lake to jump in.

But under blizzard conditions, he was in the right. I had seen Mr.

Cincinnati

SOMETIME IN THE SECOND WEEK of January, Ed Stern, artistic director at Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park, called Glyn O'Malley with an apology. "I don't think I've ever f--d a playwright over," Stern said, "the way I've f--d you." Five months earlier, the Playhouse, flagship of Cincinnati's arts establishment, had announced O'Malley as the winner of its Lazarus New Play Prize for Young Audiences. For several years the Playhouse had staged a traveling drama for high school students.

ENOUGH TERRORISTS have been arrested in Europe in recent days--three in Edinburgh, four in London, four in Paris--to make this one of the bigger police weeks since September 11. The French arrests, which took place in the north Paris suburb of La Courneuve, are particularly unsettling for two reasons:

First, because early indications are that the group there was at an advanced stage of carrying out a chemical-weapons attack.

LAST WEEK I was driving through Paris with a bunch of American journalists. One of them mentioned that the last time he'd been in Paris, there had been a big Ferris wheel in the Tuileries gardens, as there is every summer.

AFTER AN ELECTORAL LOSS, sour grapes is a normal response. Few politicians are big enough to manage a nobler one. A political candidacy puts forward a set of ideas about how a decent society ought to be run; a political defeat hands power to people who don't share the losing candidate's goals, and may not even understand them. That is why politicians so often react to defeat with outright incomprehension.

THE BOARD of the Schumann Foundation (president, Bill Moyers) met on Thursday to settle on a strategy that would allow one of its most expensive projects--the leftish American Prospect magazine--to survive in the current political climate. Perhaps the Schumann Foundation wants to cut costs so that it can continue to shower largesse on TomPaine.com (Executive Director, John Moyers, Bill's son).