Perhaps the most depressing news came from the magazines read by supposedly smart people. The worst-selling issues of BusinessWeek, the Economist, Fortune, Forbes and the Canadian L'actualite concerned, respectively, "How Business Trounced the Trial Lawyers," George W. Bush's destructive obsession with Palestinian statecraft, the revival of the nuclear power industry in America, "Will You Get Cancer?" and refugees from North Korea — all topics I'd like to know more about!

The bestselling covers for those titles are almost too lame to go into, but: "Where to Invest", "International Investing", "100 Best Companies To Work For" and "Being French Canadian In North America" gives an idea.

I'd be depressed for myself, since this would seem to suggest I have absolutely no clue what it takes to bait you all, but I already knew that thanks to this helpful pageview counter thing, and anyway, having worked for magazines I know for a fact everyone who worked on the above packages totally fucking loathed every minute of it. Meanwhile, North Korean refugees are always interesting. Is it possible editors and writers just share no interests with their readers?

Anyway, Isaac Cohen. I know, you don't give a shit, but I'm telling you because it's good for you: he ...seems to have appeared in a Payless commercial and may have been using Britney to "further his career." Nice try!

But it's a scary reminder of how prohibitively expensive basic needs have become in the Third World, thanks to famine, oil prices and our fucking ethanol subsidies (which I'll remind you again, only McCain seems to oppose.) Two cups of rice at the market in Haiti cost sixty cents these days, which is awfully high, but Haiti is an island and a net importer of food. Bangladesh is suffering a similar fate, though the government has stepped in to lower the cost of basic food commodities.

And with that I suppose I should tell you that if you just started jonesing for a Mississippi mud pie with a side order of Rocky Road, um, you're a terrible person but you are not alone.

Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt
Kevin Sites In The Hot Zone: Haitian Mud Pies [Yahoo]
Related: Why Is Haiti So Poor?
Bangladesh Steps Up Food Aid For Poor
Next Power Antibiotic Born From Haitian Dirt [Boston]
Pica and Pregnancy
Earlier: Will The 'End Of Cheap Food' Make Us Thin Again?

Oh, uh, well actually maybe yeah. (Thanks Dave Eggers!):

Then, what might very well be the most effective tactic yet was unveiled by none other than Mia Farrow. I was aware of Farrow's work as an ambassador with the UN over the years, but I was unprepared for the editorial she wrote in the Wall Street Journal, on March 28, in which she made a connection that I had not heard before, and one that, at first, seemed a bit extreme. Because China is the major buyer of Sudan's oil, and supplies the Sudanese government with cash and weapons, it has been a focus of Darfur activists for a long time. Farrow knew that the Chinese are very much looking forward to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. They even asked Steven Spielberg to film the opening ceremonies. So Farrow wrote an open letter to Spielberg in the Wall Street Journal, noting that if he continued to work with the Chinese without holding them partially to account, he might "go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games".

It seemed like an almost cruel gambit, but it worked. Spielberg was unaware of the connection between China and Darfur, and he was outraged. He wrote a letter to President Hu, urging action. President Hu dispatched his foreign minister, Zhai Jun, to meet with Sudan's president, Omar al- Bashir. No one knows what was said behind closed doors, but the meeting revealed China's Achilles heel. Khartoum has now agreed in theory to accept UN peacekeepers in Darfur, and there are other encouraging developments. If the temperature was at 101 a few months ago, it's certainly at 102 now. And I was happy to be reminded, by the cumulative effect of all these efforts, public and private, obvious and cunning, that every one of them matters.