ON BUGS AND BIOTERRORISM: It’s feasible. You can even do it by mail. My brother mailed me a mosquito from Nigeria once, which he had lightly slapped in order to preserve evidence of its mammoth size. When I opened the airmail envelope, it came drunkenly fluttering out and I reflexively smacked it, producing a nasty smear of probably-malaria-infested blood.

And there’s some evidence that Al Qaeda was working harder on bioweapons before the invasion of Afghanistan than anybody in the “intelligence community” had realized. Since then, it seems, they’ve had other things to worry about, but that’s no reason to get complacent.