THIS COLUMN BY NEAL POLLACK has almost Lileks-like moments, and there’s no higher praise:

A young man approached me on the quad. He wore a Leonard Peltier for President t-shirt, and a lovely pair of acid-washed Che Guevara for Men jeans.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you Noam Chomsky?”

“No,” I said. “I just look like him.”

“Oh, that’s cool. Well, do you support Palestinian liberation?”

“I dunno,” I said. “What’s in it for me?”

“Nothing. You just should.”

“Why?”

“Because Israel,” he said, “is stupid.”

I thought about his penetrating statement. The last time I’d visited Israel, Amos Oz and I had taken ecstasy at a disco in Haifa and had met these three Spanish architecture students and we had a crazy gang-bang on the beach until dawn. The next day, I interviewed Yitzak Rabin, which also went pretty well. But that was nearly 10 years ago. What if Israel had become stupid since then? What a story!

I whipped out my cell and called The New Yorker.

The adventure continues well beyond this point.