No one seems to remember or care much about the Northeast Boundary Dispute: the United States almost went to war with Canada back in the nineteenth century over the potato fields of northern Maine. A filmic representation of this lost nugget of North American history could be good.

As Judith Butler notes elsewhere in this issue, the New York Times obituaries of the victims of the 9/11 attacks were deeply affecting; they were so straightforward, kind, and put human faces on the incomprehensible number of dead. Until now, we haven’t seen the Americans killed in action in Iraq memorialized this way. If the Times doesn’t do it, someone should. And, as Butler points out, in a just world, the Iraqi dead—military and civilian— would be given the same treatment, in the American press. If we hold Bush and Blair to their word, that we are “friends of the Iraqi people,” then it makes all the more sense that we honor their victims in a way similar to our own countrymen.

There should be more novels about sentient animals.

There is a new magazine called The Week, which is sort of a mainstream Utne Reader, in that it distills articles from the nation’s magazines and newspapers and puts them all in one place. There should be an international version of this idea, which would reprint the best of periodicals around the world, every week. There are some extraordinary magazines in just about every part of the world, and it’s curious that while we’re aware on...