Sunday's NYT TimesSelect roundup

-- John Tierney: The Idiots Abroad

If President Bush wants to know what went wrong on his trip south, I recommend a book by three Latin American journalists. Their "Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot," a best seller when it was published nine years ago, remains indispensable for understanding phenomena like Diego Maradona.

-- Thomas Friedman: How To Look at China

Tiger Leaping Gorge, China

My friend Nayan Chanda, the editor of YaleGlobal magazine and a longtime reporter in Asia, recently shared with me a conversation he'd had with an Asian diplomat regarding India and China: India, he said, always looks as if it is boiling on the surface, but underneath it is very stable because of a 50-year-old democratic foundation. China looks very stable on the surface, but underneath it is actually boiling - an overheated economy under a tightly sealed political lid.

-- Thomas Friedman: From Gunpowder to the Next Big Bang

There is a techie adage that goes like this: In China or Japan the nail that stands up gets hammered, while in Silicon Valley the nail that stands up drives a Ferrari and has stock options. Underlying that adage is a certain American confidence that whatever we lack in preparing our kids with strong fundamentals in math and science, we make up for by encouraging our best students to be independent, creative thinkers.

-- Nicholas Kristof: The Rosa Parks for the 21st Century

She may be the bravest woman in the world, but Mukhtaran Bibi was finally looking intimidated.

Mukhtaran is the Pakistani peasant woman who was gang-raped on the order of a local council, and then forced to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd. Instead of killing herself, as rape victims routinely do in such places, she prosecuted her attackers and became a women's rights leader in Pakistan.