There’s another reason why this story won’t get much play: it involves the LA Times. No offense meant to those who labor there; I’m sure there are fine talents at the paper, as there are at any paper. But no one cares about the LA Times. The NYT, the WaPo and the WSJ set the the agenda and shape the discussion. The very phrase "The Los Angeles Times reports . . ." has the same impact as "Cheryl Crow remarked."

Needless to say, Bill O'Reilly doesn't like that argument. More to the point, he didn't actually let Jacob make it. Contrary to his image as some kind of conservative ideologue, O'Reilly is just a long-winded cab driver with a TV show and no real interest in policy, ideas, or facts. (At one point he declared that the government statistics everyone in the drug policy world relies on, regardless of their policy preferences, are "just your opinion.) Now Sam Smith of The Progressive Review has used Jacob's appearance to produce a Mathematical Model of Bill O'Reilly, graphing exactly how many words each person got to say. "In the first mathematical analysis of Bill O'Reilly ever done, the Review has incontrovertibly proved what was previously believed only anecdotally: O'Reilly is a bully and a jerk," he writes. Take a look. (Thanks to Mike Snell for the tip.)

Speaking of Jacob, he has a good op-ed in today's NYT, explaining why the new anti-Rave act is likely to result in more fatalities. Jacob would never make this point, but this law, a gift to the nation from Joe Biden and Pat Leahy, is the sort of thing that explains why libertarians who engage in politics lean toward the Republican party. We all know the problems of the social right, but Democrats are largely useless, and often awful, on the issues where their supposed respect for tolerance and civil liberties might make a difference.

In case you Meyers-Briggs fans are wondering, I am a classic ENTJ.

I'll just add a strategic point, the kind of thing they teach in business school. If you are going to adopt a strategy to be a national newspaper, you must add the capabilities to be a national newspaper. That doesn't mean parachuting in reporters from Manhattan to interview a few natives and report back on their peculiar habits. It means having lots of well-staffed bureaus and, if necessary, credited stringers. It also means breaking out of a worldview that considers Manhattan normal and every other place weird.

The truth is that the NYT is not a national newspaper. It is the New York Times (more accurately, The Manhattan South of Harlem Times). It assumes its readers have the prejudices of well-educated, affluent Manhattanites, and it staffs, writes, and edits accordingly. To take an apolitical example, from a national perspective, the Times business pages grossly overcover the media business. From a Manhattan perspective, that makes perfect sense.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy, but it is a different strategy from the stated one of being a national paper. The mismatch between strategy and capabilities seems to account for many of the paper's current managerial problems, including the seeming inability of editors to keep track of exactly when and where reporters travel.

A "national" newspaper written for Manhattanites inevitably has blindspots, which show up particularly in its feature coverage. The great Lileks put it oh-so-well in yesterday's must-read Bleat:

Right before I woke up I dreamed I had an assignment: write a bad feature story in the style of the New York Times. When I woke I had the last sentence still in my head; I stumbled next door to the studio, woke up the Mac, and typed this sentence:

Over in the field, a hound was hunched over excreting a "striver," the local's [sic] term for the hard, elegantly tapered stools for which the wild dogs are renowned.

It has it all! It has a field, which is always a sign that the urban reporter is braving the flat & empty lands of America. It has a word known only to the locals, and the locals are always the real subject of the piece. Every East Coast story on Midwestern people feels like they're writing about pygmies. Doesn't matter if the story's about clothing, or music, or nose-bones; beneath it all is the writer's underlying inability to forget that these are pygmies, for God’s sake. And they're so cute!

Which brings me to the mostly unrelated question of why so many Times watchers are harping on Rick Bragg's relation to Howell Raines as a "fellow southerner." Are there really only two southerners at the Times? If so, there's something wrong with the paper. (Southerners have, if anything, a disproportionate tendency to pursue journalism careers.) If not, there's something wrong with the people who harp on that connection. Would they have written "fellow Jew" or "fellow Irish Catholic," or "fellow Harvard grad"? Ethnicity can be a common bond, but only to a limited degree. There are millions of people in the South. They don't all know each other or even get along.

The mechanism for genetic tyranny, according to McKibben, is cells pumping out proteins specified by the genes selected by a child's parents. As an example, he asks us to imagine "duplicating the effects of Prozac but permanently, by altering the serotonin balance in the brain with DNA alteration." Does a person who is "naturally" serotonin deficient choose to be depressed? Does a high-serotonin person choose to be happy?

Given that all human brains have some level of serotonin that influences their moods and outlook on life, the question is what balance a reasonable child would want. Applying our reasonable person standard, would a child consent to being endowed with a gene that prevents her from becoming morbidly depressed? I think yes. This is no more tyrannical than a randomly conferred gene that boosts the production of serotonin, giving a person a naturally sunny outlook on life. Again, freedom cannot consist of random genes.

But as far as I'm concerned, the "real" me is the sunny one, not the depressed one, just as the "real" me is the one without a fever or blurred vision or a sharp pain through my left eye. Prozac (or, to be precise, its cheaper generic equivalent, fluoxetine) does not, to use McKibben's words, nag at my sense of identity. Prozac doesn't make me happy. Steve makes me happy. Writing makes me happy. Walking in the sunshine makes me happy. Prozac simply makes it easier to remember that I am happy and to continue to do the things that make me happy rather than becoming paralyzed with despair.

That people who are supposedly criticizing genetic alterations constantly bring up Prozac suggests that their objection isn't to genetic medicine at all. What really creeps them out--and this is particularly true among conservatives--is the notion that human consciousness emerges from the complex interplay of chemicals in the brain. They want a humunculus, an authentic self we alter only at the peril of losing our identity.

This is an oddly modern desire, Freudian perhaps. Back in the days of the four humors, people had no problem believing that temperaments emerged from the balance, or imbalance, of chemicals in the body. The people who gave us Hamlet and the Reformation believed that melancholy came from too much black bile. That belief didn't stop them from having identities.

But a lot of the recent babble about "deflation," especially that coming from Wall Street types, isn't about deflation at all. It's about tough price competition in some industries. I take up the issue in my latest NYT column. There are many complicated and contentious aspects to macro policy, but I tried to stick to the issues where the division is between ignorance and knowledge, not, say, monetarists and neo-Keynesians.

For more on fighting deflation, Ben Bernanke's November speech is well worth reading.

A couple of comments are worth passing on. Richard Gayle, who writes Corante's Living Code blog, writes:

I have been trying to figure out what has been happening with the NYT archives for some time. I used a lot of links to science articles for my Corante blog and noticed that I was getting abstracts instead of links when I examined old blog entries.

I think some of it depends on the browser. I use Safari on a Mac. If I go to one of your archive links in Safari, I get the abstract page. If I go to the same page using Internet Explorer, I get the article.

So, my guess is that the servers at the NYT are looking at what browser is being used and give the abstract or the article depending on which is used. I certainly do not think this is on purpose but it is very frustrating.

Anyway, that is what I have found. I am using much fewer links to NYT science articles because of this. Many articles in scientific journals require payment for immediate access but access is free for any article more than 6 months or a year old. Plus, if you read Science, Nature or PNAS a lot, simply getting a subscription gives you total access. As far as I can tell, having a subscription to the NYT does not get you free access to the archives. If it did, I would be recommending that everyone get a subscription!

Organizations, such as newspapers or scientific journals, that live by the dispersal of information are undergoing a lot of change right now and many are trying different approaches in response. It does make for interesting times.

Reader Scott Sendrow sends along a virtual clip from an ancient issue:

For what it's worth, I think the Times is more than fair in disseminating its body of work. Attached is an E-mail with a .pdf attachment of a Times article from way back when. This is a new feature that the New York Public Library has available to any person using a special electronic resources computer terminal in their microfilm reader room. The way it works is one browses the index, which works like Nexis (and it's easier than the Times' web archive feature, in my opinion), and a list of articles in reverse chronological order comes up (one can narrow down dates, too). These articles are viewable at the terminal in the library and there is an option available to E-mail the .pdf file directly to your E-mail account. In the attached instance, I was doing some research for work, and had this article sent to my account at work. I love it - it's how the article actually appeared in print and it's available for any article that has appeared through 1999 - that means from 1857 on! Of course, you have to go to the NYPL's main library at 42nd and Fifth, but I have to believe that it's just a matter of time before technology like this becomes available in many places.

If such a policy exists, I'm sure it's driven by profit-seeking, not paranoia. After all, most people seriously investigating the Times would have access to Nexis, which has NYT archives going back much longer than the Web. Mickey Kaus, for instance, routinely uses Nexis to check the NYT record. (D Magazine adopted a similar policy a while back, making all my links to old columns bad. Nobody is muck-raking about D. Since I own the rights, I've since moved the columns onto this site.)

I'm as baffled by these claims of new policies as I am concerned. (The Times owns electronic rights to my articles and all rights in the universe for all time. For that contract, we can thank the folks who sued it over Nexis rights.) When I check links in my column archives, they all go to full columns. But Glenn claims they go to abstracts. Readers?

Like Tim Russert, Chris [Matthews] and I got into political journalism by taking the road less traveled. We went the non-Harvard Crimson route, by way of Catholic school, sentence diagramming, and our parents' pride in JFK.

Greg is wrong, however, that economics is not about individual behavior. Sometimes it is. Here's a somewhat trivial example. The broader point, which Paul Krugman makes in an article on evolution and economics analyzed by Jason Soon, is simply that economics is about individual human action, not impersonal forces--a concept as central to Austrian economists like Hayek as to neoclassical economists like Krugman.

The relation between evolutionary theory and economics is quite tricky. Joel Mokyr tells me he left out a whole book's worth on the subject when he published his terrific Gifts of Athena, which I wrote about here. I hope Joel eventually turns his careful thinking on the subject into another book.

I don't like Bennett, but I don't see it as particularly scandalous that he gambles away significant portions of his fortune. It's his money, and he's rich. Plus the losses being reported are gross, not net.

Bennett's gambling is expensive entertainment and, to my mind, pretty boring, but there's no sign that it's destroying his life--or that he's hypocritical. Nineteenth-century entertainments are taboo among some conservative Protestants, but Bennett is a Catholic, not an evangelical. Last time I checked Catholics didn't have any problem with gambling (or drinking or dancing). Neither do most of the critics who are making heavy weather of his hobby.

The argument that he must be a hypocrite because some of his moralizing allies oppose gambling is silly. I certainly wouldn't want to be held responsible for every opinion voiced by someone who agreed with me on, say, the importance of scientific freedom. Bennett speaks for himself, not for Gary Bauer. Besides, he's either wrong or right on the merits, regardless of his personal behavior.

This story is old news in Washington, even though everyone is acting shocked, shocked. Michael Lynch told me years ago, when he was Reason's DC editor, that Bennett was well known for his high-stakes trips to Vegas. Nobody including us reported it, most likely because nobody, definitely including us, thought his gambling was that interesting. He isn't, after all, opposed to the practice.

But, then, my assessments of Bill Bennett's ethics seem to represent a minority opinion. I thought it was an ethical offense for a public intellectual with a Ph.D.--as opposed to, say, a professional athlete or even a presidential candidate--to use other anonymous twentysomethings to write "his" books and articles. The general reader response was that I was making a big deal of nothing. (For background, go here and scroll down.) Obviously ethical standards vary--which, of course, doesn't make mine wrong!

As a design-catalog addict, I've noticed that they almost never show the cords on lamps. (See here and here). The lamps look sleeker and more flexible without cords but, alas, electricity does not just come out of the air. You still need a wire.

I'll be in the Chicago from September 18-23; in New York City on November 12-13 and possibly surrounding dates; and in St. Louis on November 20 and possibly surrounding dates. If you have a group in any of these cities that would be interested in having me speak around these dates, please drop me a line at virginia-at-dynamist.com as soon as possible. Thanks for all the interest.

Science blogger David Appell reviews the book here.