On my "about me" page, one of the reasons I give for blogging is that "since the New York Times op-ed page mysteriously refuses to solicit my views, the blog lets me scratch that itch."

Well, that still holds. But a different section of the paper -- the New York Times Book Review -- decided, in its infinite wisdom, to solicit my view on Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization. The result is in this Sunday's Times. Here's the first paragraph:

Globalization impoverishes developing countries while undercutting middle-class living standards in the United States. The reduction of trade barriers encourages the exploitation of child labor, fosters a race to the bottom in environmental standards, tears women in third-world nations away from their families, homogenizes disparate indigenous cultures and strips the gears of democracy in favor of rapacious multinational corporations. It also causes cancer in puppies.

Take that, Gail Collins!

[Hey, wasn't In Defense of Globalization one of your March books of the month? Isn't there a conflict of interest here?--ed. I'd finished the review back in February -- the NYT Book Review had built up a slight backlog.]

It should be noted for the record that despite strong temptation, I elected not to mention the fact that Bhagwati misspelled my name in the book (though, weirdly, he gets it right in the footnote, even though it gets screwed up again in the index).

[Foreign Affairs and the New York Times in just the past month. You're becoming quite the public intellectual!--ed. Oh, yes, if it wasn't for that Jessica Simpson, I'd be racking up the magazine covers. Racking, I tell ya.]