Here is a tale of an American foreign correspondent. Jon Lee Anderson does not know Lebanon and its politics. He has been reporting from Iraq (he does not know Arabic but has a reliable staff of translators, chefs, personal trainers, and potato slicers wherever he travels although his staff is much smaller than that of John Burns of the New York Times), but has not reported from Lebanon, and he does not know about Lebanon, and it shows. So he interviews `Ali Fayyad, and he assumes (or believes) that Fayyad is a senior Hizbullah leader or that he is close to Nasrallah (which he is not). He then interviews Nayla Mu`awwad but does not know that her husband was installed as president by the Syrian regime, and that she was for years very close to the Syrian mukhabarat, and that she used to accuse Michel `Awn of killing her husband. I met her during her pro-Syrian years, and she spoke like a Syrian Ba`thist, and this was no more than 6 years ago. He does not know any of that, so he becomes a "hostage" to his interviewees, and like most Western foreign correspondents he mostly meets and gets along with Westernized Lebanese who like to impress Westerners, and can drink whiskey (notice how many times he mentions that Jamil Muruwwa was drinking whiskey--my father drank whiskey quite regularly, o Jon Lee Anderson, but you don't see me bragging), and who can smoke a cigar. Wow. A cigar. He talks to Jamil Muruwwa and listens to him guessing about Lebanese public opinion trends, while Anderson does not know that there are published public opinion surveys in Lebanon, and that Arabs can even use a fork. Where do I go, and what do I read? Sometimes I wish that I am a professor of chemistry or of potato studies. Where do I go if I want to earn a PhD in potato studies?