Get your red-hot Ideas!

Yesterday's Ideas section was, it seems to this reader, one of the strongest in a while. I couldn't put it down, not even for a minute, until I'd read every word of it.

The section's lead story, by staff writer Drake Bennett, takes us inside the "Amero" conspiracy theory. I'd never heard of it, and I'm glad that Bennett clued me in, because this particular paranoid vision (in which the US, Canada, and Mexico fuse into a supranational union, complete with continental-girdling superhighways and a single currency) reveals a tremendous amount about what Americans -- liberals and conservatives alike -- are obsessing over, these days. It's a must-read.

Elsewhere in the section, Donna Freitas, a Catholic theologian currently at BU, argues brilliantly that what Catholics attacking "The Golden Compass" (the sure-to-be-huge movie, opening next month, based on the first book in Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" fantasy trilogy) really fear is not Pullman's supposed atheism, but what Freitas claims is his anti-orthodox yet deeply Christian theology.

PS: I was also pleased to see a Q&A (conducted, edited, and organized -- or however the NYT Magazine now describes its Q&As -- by Kate Bolick) with one of my favorite intellectual historians, Peter Gay. His new book, "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond," is on my Xmas wish list. I'd like to point out that Baudelaire is mentioned not once, but twice in the current issue of Ideas, thanks to a Brainiac item about movies-based-on-poems. (Thanks, Dwight Garner, for the shout-out.)