Donut delirium and animal rights. I'll be on the road today, personally investigating Congressman Ed Markey's claim that Boston's winning the 2004 Democratic National Convention has created "a delirium that is breaking out at every Dunkin' Donuts shop across the state of Massachusetts that would be hard to capture."

But I don't want to let the week go by before urging you to pull last Sunday's New York Times Magazine out of the recycling bin and read the cover story, a critique of the animal-rights movement by Michael Pollan. Pollan does a masterful job not just of describing the moral, environmental, and health-related evils of factory farming (that's easy), but also of showing why vegetarianism is unnatural, harmful to the environment, and even bad for animals. Important, counterintuitive stuff that's left our family wondering where we can buy organic meat.