(3 of 3)
Melrose, Mass.
Baron Cohen criticizes all the things Borat pretends to admire and uses Borat's faked attitudes and stories to reveal the hidden resentments within the people he encounters. As a Jew, Baron Cohen carries Borat's anti-Semitism to the extreme, thus making a laughingstock of it while also revealing the bigotry of the unsuspecting people he is fooling. The same goes for Borat's imaginary Kazakhstan: he is making fun not of Kazakhs but of ignorant Westerners who overrate their own cultures.
DOMINIK MAUER
Augsburg, Germany
With Apologies to the Bees
The graphics and all the descriptive information about the honeybee in "The Buzz on Bees" [Nov. 6] were truly magnificent. But there was an enormous blunder in the story's introductory sentence, "We don't give bees much thought unless they're terrorizing us at a picnic." Bees are not the least bit interested in picnickers or their food. Yellow jackets are the insects that take great delight in pirating our food even as it enters our mouths. It is disheartening to hear people blaming the bee for the bothersome foraging of the yellow jacket.
TOM FRENCH-CORBETT, BEEKEEPER
Moorestown, N.J.