• Writing on school wall gets Katy sixth-grader pulled—The Houston Chronicle reports on the premature demise of common sense in Katy, Texas, as yet another school system overreacts to a student’s misbehavior.

• Mental Malpractice—Writing in the New York Times, Jerome Groopman thoughtfully offers personal and professional reflections on an often overlooked “deficiency” that afflicts this nation’s health care system: “the way in which doctors are trained to think.”

• Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity—In the Washington Post, Shankar Vedantam reports on some fascinating research that suggests that “lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States.”

• Powell tried to talk Bush out of war—As reported by the Sunday Times (UK), “former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.”