on his article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine on Shakira and her nonprofit educational mission in Latin America; it occurs to me, however, that this was probably not the most disagreeable assignment in third world journalism that Scott has ever undertaken. Scott is the foreign affairs editor of the Magazine, and the author of a couple of splendid books - particularly One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race. Apart from being a journalist, he was also a senior advisor at the UN to the late Sergio Vieira de Mello on complex humanitarian emergencies in the 1990s.