Things You Should Be Reading

• The world has an oil problem, but the best solution may be the doomsday scenario of a sharp and irrevocable rise in oil prices. At least, so long as it happens before India and China accelerate into huge dependency on cheap oil.

• The president has a problem with his speeches, mainly, that they contradict his actions. While I've already pointed to a few articles offering a general overview of our despotic allies, Steve's rundown of the Uzbeki leader's tyranny is much more viscerally illustrative.

• And so long as we're wonking out, head over to Slate for this critique of Hernando de Soto. I've always found his theories appealing, but it seems the evidence isn't stacking up that way.

• The Nation has a fawning profile of Dick Durbin, which I link to because Durbin might indeed deserve some fawning.

• The NY Review of Books has a longish, wide-ranging profile of Abu Mazen and the likely crosscurrents of his Administration. Well worth the read.

The moral of the first two links, by the way, is that anyone not reading The Washington Note should really start. Probably the widest-ranging and most informative site on my daily trawl.