• Rolling Stone interviews Sacha Baron Cohen as Sacha Baron Cohen, not Borat. Turns out his 91-year old Jewish grandmother actually loved the movie.

• Kids these days are having a hell of a time getting into college, says New York mag—unless you've come up with a method for dating crocodile teeth or are a "minority, socioeconomically disadvantaged student," in which case you're probably not reading New York magazine.

• The New Republic minces no words on Iraq: "All the study groups, all the Council on Foreign Relations white papers, and all the magazine symposia in the world won't change the equation: There is no policy for Iraq that will provide moral and strategic satisfaction and no reason to believe that we might achieve something that could be plausibly described as victory...."

• And the New Yorker flops onto the monkeypile, adding that national security expert Andrew Marshall is just as much to blame as Donald Rumsfeld for the Middle East mess.