It's always impressive when someone puts in enough work to change your mind. Like many Brits, a residual adoration of Bill Clinton - the second most popular man on earth, I'd guess, after Mandela - had me backing Hillary for 08. Then I found out more about Mr Penn, her cheif advisor. In a past life, I worked in the Burston-Marsteller group that he's CEO of, and there is no way on God's Green Earth a political leader of vision and principle would listen to the advice of the man that runs that shop. Seriously, working for the smoking lobby, while pitching universal healthcare to America? An insoluble paradox. Ari Berman in the Nation gets the plaudits, read on...

Probably my favourite feature article of the last couple of years, this - about Bolivian lady-wrestling! And check out the slide-show of incredible photos. On the spot reporting, brave commissioning: "Right, boss, I've got a story about lady wrestling in the La Paz shanty towns...." and great quotes. The writer, of course, speaks Spanish - in a different life, had I known I was going to be a journalist, I'd have stuck to a language up to degree level, but I thought I was going to be an international rugby player, dumped them all at 16! Damn and blast, what an advantage a second language would be... perhaps journo schools should offer refresher courses? Anyway... read and enjoy.

It's the classic 1975 John lennon interview for Rolling Stone magazine. Not all of it makes sense unless you know your Beatles history well (I don't particularly) but it's still fantastic, and instructive. The golden days of rare but unfettered access to celebrities has long gone, now they're everywhere, saying nothing. The best thing about this piece, though, is that a reasonably pretentious writer gets to show off in the intro, then gets tied down to the Q&A format, and you get to hear Lennon's voice. Very odd that so few national papers in the UK do their arts and culture interviews this way - perhaps because the stars say nothing of substance, the writer has to waffle on about the leather sofas in the Groucho Club for the 875th time, rather than just print the words the artist spoke..... Anyway, enjoy.

A beautiful example of how newspapers nuture great writing, and then turn promptly great writers into bad ones, in today's Guardian.

Ed Jones, whom I've never heard of, produces a harrowing account of his life in a run-down estate in Salford, Manchester, demonstrating one of the trickiest truths about Modern Britain - you get the neighbours you pay for. His house in Salford cost around twice the national average annual income - a sane proportion, roughly what it was when my Dad bought his first house - but today that secured him a life of grime and crime.

And a few pages on, one of the most talented writers of her generation, Julie Burchill, has frittered out a rant about fellow jounalists she hates (specifically targetting, if not naming, Liz Jones, and obliquely attacking colleague Marina Hyde, which is a bit harsh), with, um, no research. She might have watched a film, once. As Ms Burchill loves to tell interviewers, "writing my column only takes half an hour a week... All right, make it an hour. " We all have to do our fair share of hack-work (please refer to the upcoming FHM Travel Handbook for yet another of my finest hours), but the shame is, it's the filla, not the fibre, that get's celebrated. Well, not here! The 100 visitors I've had so far are getting the good stuff!

Did you know there was a puddle of plastic the size of Britian in the centre of the Pacific? It's one of those facts you'd almost want NOT to know, because it's so affecting - my wife's response was to unilateraly declare a 'no presents' rule for next Christmas! An excellent job by Amanda Woods in the Sydney Morning Herald, painting a terrifying portrait of a place she's never seen. Gripping stuff.

In today's New York Times, the geographer Jared Diamond demostrates the power of a single killer fact. It's all about the number 32 - the number that, he contends, will define our time on earth... Required reading for global citizens, I'd say.

If you're vaguely aware of the rules of baseball (or, if you're a fan - basicall anyone except a total beginner on the sport) I've just finished and can heartily promote Summer of 49 by David Halberstam. As a lesson in the first rule of great non-fiction it's ideal - do a tonne of interviews. And then another tonne. And then another. The me-me-me masturbatory vibe of the modern blogosphere, combined with inherent shyness that we all have to overcome, can obscure that rule, but it's priceless. If you don't do the interviews, you'll end upwriting about yourself - a subject about which nobody cares.