The book is supposed to be in bookstores by Tuesday. If you look for it and don't find it in your local bookstore, please drop me a line with the store's name and location. Thanks.

I might disagree with some of his classifications of particular thinkers, but the article is must reading (and the graphic is a lot easier to read when it hasn't been shrunk to fit on my blog).

In related news, Tech Central Station launches a new format on Tuesday.

We think some biological phenomena deserve treatment and sympathy and others don't. If you have chronic migraines, we'll help. If you're ugly, too bad. If we say that being short is treatable and offer medicine to change that biological fate, then we're saying there's something wrong with being short.

We need a new, less pejorative category: ''biological conditions we don't like.'' Not diseases or disabilities, simply dislikes - conditions that keep us from being whom we want to be. We can treat dislikes without shame. Or we can leave them untreated without entitlement. Otherwise, we will label everything we don't like a disease, no matter how absurd the consequences.

For those wondering what The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies have in common, here's one theme.

LAST FALL California Governor Gray Davis vetoed a bill the legislature had presented him--S.B. 1828. The bill would have transferred a large amount of authority over "sacred sites" to the California tribes. The definition of sacred site was broad; so too was the power that was to be transferred to Native American representatives. When the governor vetoed the bill, he proclaimed that it wasn't wise to place such enormous power in the hands of a single interest group.

The tribes have since regrouped and a new bill is moving through the legislature. If passed, it will cover every "site that is associated with the traditional beliefs, practices, lifeways, and ceremonial activities of a Native American tribe." Though dressed up in the dense language of land-use planning, the bill will empower the tribes with huge authority over private property. Consultation, avoidance, and mitigation will become watchwords in the land development process.

Read the whole thing. This sort of land use control, not labeled as such, is one reason housing costs so much in California, which is a major reason--possibly THE major reason--middle class people are leaving the state.

On his blog, Hugh promises a lawsuit if the bill becomes law and predicts that it will be overturned by the courts.

By contrast, just about any reasonable search, including misspellings, will easily find the book on Amazon, which is serious about its information technology and doesn't hide books that haven't yt been officially released. No wonder TSOS's rank on BN.com rank is currently 1,000 times lower than its Amazon rank.

Lots of good example, including several from my neighborhood. The real estate market here is intensely competitive, which means style matters more than ever.

Senate Bill 18 would empower the Native American Heritage Commission to regulate development on any land that includes or is close to an Indian sacred site. This would add a new, lengthy and costly regulatory process onto the already complex California Environmental Quality Act. There's no distance limit between a project and a sacred site, so the Native American Heritage Commission could have power over projects that are quite removed from the sacred site itself.

I saw Mickey and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek on some TV show yesterday, discussing the recall election, and they agreed on one thing: the stupidity of this bill. The question is now whether even the powerful Kausfiles exerts enough influence to stop the madness.

Meanwhile, reader Lawrence Rhodes raises a question better addressed by Eugene Volokh and co-conspirators than me:

How is the Native American Heritage Commission, created by the Sacred Sites bill linked from your Tuesday post 000435, different from Judge Roy Moore wanting the Ten Commandments monument in his court? I would think both are forbidden by the First Amendment, at least in current interpretations. Indeed, I recall a related case in which the National Park Service was prevented from accommodating Native American religious claims by restricting climbing on Devil's Tower in Wyoming.

I have to admit it seems worth it to me to nitpick the not entirely historically irrelevant Ten Commandments if it will protect us against things like the Sacred Sites bill (assuming it does, of course). Now if we could just get environmentalism recognized as the religion it is...

Over to you, Volokh Conspiracy. Or perhaps Professor Reynolds would like to weigh in? Or Professor Hewitt (yes, he does teach law), who knows all about California environmental law?

Marketing and advertising find themselves in a 21st-century bar fight where 60% to 70% of what we buy is discretionary. At the grocery store, at Wal-Mart and at the shopping mall, roughly two-thirds of what we purchase we had no intention of buying when we walked in the door. The bar fight has been made even more fierce by an aging population base that is still recovering from the shopping binge of the 1990s and the revolution in engineering and distribution that have indeed driven the price of many goods down while improving their durability.

The question that merchants and marketers are asking, then, is where to find leverage -- how to get customers to notice, consider and trade-up to a higher-price product. There is a convergence of a global visual language that is evolving faster than the spoken or written word and an affluent, aging, cynical, middle class. The result? What Ms. Postrel argues for -- the increasing importance of design in all its manifestations: from material and form to the graphics of digital media, broadcast and print....

A company in Taiwan makes the flat screens and the guts of Apple's computers, but the design of its iMac, Ms. Postrel writes, "turns the personal computer from a utilitarian, putty-colored box into curvy, translucent eye candy -- blueberry, strawberry, tangerine, grape." A tube of lipstick costs pennies to make but somehow ends up costing us $17 at Sephora. That is all modern magic.

Ms. Postrel makes a persuasive and well-researched case for the value of such magic. Far from being at odds with "substance," as various critics have argued, it has a meaning all its own.

I read your 1999 article "A World With All Kinds Of Music", and it's pretty good.

I only wish that more people realized the seminal work of someone without whom recorded music as we've known it for about a half-century simply would not exist. (Here is one stark example: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was produced on a 4-track tape machine. Technically understood, it becomes a marvel quite beyond its aesthetic impact. It simply would not have been possible without this man's genius, nor would have anything else that we've listened to, all our lives.)

He invented multi-track recording, and if you sat down in the technological marvel of a recording studio, you would look around at his nearly innumerable inventions that augment music production, and which are generally taken for granted by everyone in the industry.

Best of all, he's still alive. He plays his guitar at a little joint in New York called "Iridium", every Monday night.

His name is Les Paul, and he really is an un-sung hero.

A column I wrote on some of Hamermesh's earlier work on the labor economics of beauty is here. You can download all the papers from his website here. (This is the sort of link you can find in my online bibliography for TSOS.)

The study underscores one of the Pew project's key themes, which is that the online world is more diverse and idiosyncratic than it is often portrayed, and users often mold online habits to their interests and needs.

"You can't look at the Internet as a monolithic thing anymore," says Tom Spooner, the report's principal author. "It's more helpful to take a nuanced view."

Only if you use a definition so narrow that Fort Sumter is no longer in the South. For more information, see the Pew site.

Go ahead, say the words "L.A." and "style" together without smirking just a little. The implied regionalism of the term gives the game away. It's so "Me, too!" In Milan, the term is bella figura; in Paris, it's simply "chic"; in London, it's a "look." Our sister to the East, New York, has a million hegemonic expressions for it—one "works" a fashion mood, one "serves [up]" a designer outfit, one "feels" a costumey dress. And whatever "look" is in is guaranteed to be identified, dissected and priced within 30 seconds of its presentation.

L.A. women don't go for that. Sure, they covet, but L.A. style-setters don't get as fixated about "must haves" as women in other cities. "Fashion here is digested in a totally different way," says stylist and costume designer Arianne Phillips, who dresses Madonna, contributes to Italian Vogue, Pop and Harper's Bazaar and costumed actors in films including "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," "Identity" and "Girl, Interrupted." Phillips attributes part of this digestive process to good old California culture: the beach, the mountains, the desert, the climate, the sunshine.

"There really is a casual aesthetic, and it reflects the ease—or perceived ease—of life here," Phillips says. "People aren't quite as fashion literal here. I don't know people who go out and buy, say, the new fall collection. You walk into Fred Segal or Barneys, and that approach is just not there."

L.A. women are "more likely to throw together a Birkin bag, Juicy pants and a Chanel jacket. That's what I see," says boutique owner Tracey Ross. Designer Magda Berliner, whose whimsical dresses are a favorite of fashion editors and connoisseurs, and who counts Chanel among her influences, adds, "We don't have the 'That's last year's Balenciaga' thing. Here it's 'That looks great.' People are not really hung up on what's current right now."

L.A.-born model and style icon Peggy Moffitt, who with designer Rudi Gernreich helped create some of the most enduring fashion of this epoch, says fashion "is predicated on the idea that every six months it's going to change. When you look at something, you have to ask yourself, 'Do I want that because everyone does? Or do I want that because it serves my purposes?' I think people with style might have things 30 or 40 years."

The article is a bit detached from everyday reality, where multi-thousand-dollar Birkin bags aren't exactly normal, but the point is well taken. To quote an idea from my new book, pleasure and aesthetic identity--"I like that" and "I'm like that"--drive L.A. fashion. And, I'd argue, increasingly American fashion in general.

"More Hispanics are leaving California than whites," says demographer William Frey, who linked "white flight" from California and New York in the early 1990s to the surge in immigrants in those states. "Now, it's a middle-class flight motivated by cost and congestion."

This phenomenon means that immigrants in California will be disproportionately poor and unassimilated, adding to the other reasons why immigration is a hotter issue in California than in Texas.

Tragedies like this happen from time to time, but what amazed me about this article, Chirac squirms over heat 'massacre' was the assumption that these deaths were somehow the governments fault.

President Jacques Chirac vowed to fix shortcomings in France's health system Thursday as he battled mounting public anger over his absence and government inaction during a record-breaking heatwave earlier this month that may have killed up to 10,000 people.

Since most heat related deaths are due to dehydration, what was the government supposed to do, force people to drink more water? What rational person would expect the government to protect them from the weather?

He suggests an answer.

I'm blogging from the Westwood Borders, which proclaims itself "a t-Mobile hot spot," but has with no chairs, only OK t-Mobile reception (a neighboring network comes in stronger, but needs a password), and a balky server. It's a Not So Hot Spot, I'm afraid, though better than dial-up. Unfortunately, there's a conflict between the third places strategy and a substantial homeless population.

Because the administration won't say bluntly who and why we're fighting, it tends either to step on its own strategy or to mislead the public about the reasons for U.S. actions. No, I don't think the Bush administration "lied" about weapons of mass destruction; Occam's Razor suggests that officials were in fact worried abou that threat. But I think the administration overemphasized the importance of WMD, compared to other reasons for intervening, to placate the State Department, the "international community," and the Saudis. Getting rid of Saddam reduces the chances of Islamicist terrorism on American soil, but not merely by ending his WMD programs, whatever their status.

I'm sympathetic to the diplomatic reasons for not spelling out certain goals, such as the pressures a U.S-friendly Iraq puts on the Saudis. But Bush's vagueness is maddening to people who are paying attention and confusing to people who aren't. (Unlike Josh, I'm neither a Wilsonian nor a Bush basher--I voted for him once and expect to do so again--but that doesn't mean we can't agree about this.)

Emmanuelle Richard writes:

I hope this horrible French death toll will make France realize how ridiculous it is to shut down for the month of August, and I hope it teaches politicians in power that, no matter how painful it is, the sacred vacation should sometimes be brutally interrupted (the alarm bells, sent from doctors and nurses in the field, were ignored for a long time). When a large proportion of employees in nursing homes are away, when the ministries and other decision-centers are ghost-offices, when the hospitals are even more understaffed than usual, that's the kind of tragedy you get.

People certainly relied too heavily on the State, like they often do, instead of taking the matter in their own hands but I wouln't blame socialism. Southern European countries like Spain and Italy also suffered from the same heat, with much less tragic results, probably because generations live closer (if not together) and care for each other. Germany's good response to this crisis is widely credited to a federal program (financed with a new tax) that provides at-home care for the elderly, as well as the high number of young volunteers in nursing homes thought the civil service.

For some American critics to gleefully condemn the French health care system seems over the top. While old folks shamefully died in France during this crisis, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. remains relatively high -- quite shocking actually for such a prosperous country. This rate is often used as an indicator of the general level of health in a country.

The infant mortality rate in the U.S. is a tough problem, one that enormous resources of thought and money have been focused on, with limited success. It probably does reflect a certain amount of evil individualism--not because prenatal care isn't funded by the state, because it is, but because the responsibility for taking advantage of that service is ultimately that of the pregnant woman. If she doesn't want to go to the doctor, the authorities won't make her. All they'll do is run ads asking her to do so.

BRUSSELS — More than 10,000 people, most elderly and living alone, may have died in France during this month's blistering heat wave, French health officials said Thursday. The revised estimate would make it one of the worst such disasters in modern history....

The estimated death toll has risen steadily in the past week, even as the mercury has dropped. On Aug. 14, the number of dead was estimated to be up to 3,000. Three days later, the figure was put at 5,000. On Thursday, the minister for the elderly, Hubert Falco, said "most probably" 10,000 people died from temperatures as high as 104.

The number of heat-related fatalities is 10 times as large as the record 1,021 recorded in the USA in all of 1995. The figure also dwarfs the losses this summer in Italy, where news reports estimate 2,000 died; Portugal, where an estimated 1,316 died; and Spain, where at least 100 died.

Most of the people who succumbed to the heat were elderly and living alone in apartments that typically do not have air conditioning. Critics turned on the French themselves for going on vacation while leaving aged relatives alone.

"These dramas again shed light on the solitude of many of our aged or handicapped citizens," Chirac said.

At least they have solidarity about when to take vacations--none of that evil American individualism and workaholism.

In efficiency and customer relations, restaurants may have the most to gain from Wi-Fi. Wireless hand-held devices save waiters trips to the kitchen, allowing more time with customers. Errors are reduced because the printed order tickets received in the kitchen are easier to read than the average waiter's scrawl.

Reader Buzz Bruggeman comments:

The fully loaded cost of offering free Wi-Fi access is less than $6/day. Operating a billable hotspot costs over $30/day. Half this cost comes from building or altering billing systems, plus the endless associated customer care. The millions of dollars already spent on systems to charge Wi-Fi users by the megabyte, minute, etc., will never be recuperated. Next year, authentication should become cheap enough to be part of a profitable Wi-Fi offering, but for the foreseeable future, authorization and accounting remain dangerous distractions.

Buzz also sends a link to this discussion of Wi-Fi business models. Like Paul Boutin's Wired article, it mentions that Schlotzky's is installing Wi-Fi. Adding to Paul's piece, reader George Columbo notes that "Panera Bread is one chain that is implementing the approach suggested in this piece and I believe they're doing it somewhat successfully." (Here's an industry item, with comments on Panera's service.)

Panera and Schlotzky's are both examples of the fastest growing segment of the restaurant industry: "fast casual," where you don't get waiter service but you do get good, fresh food in an aesthetic environment. (Schlotzky's is currently revamping its stores to bring the environment in line with the food.) Fast casual places make the food fast--good if you're hungry or just have a short break--but, unlike the traditional McDonald's approach, they charge enough to allow those customers who want to to linger. My favorite example is the Texas chain Cafe Express--highly recommended. For reasons that are hard to articulate, Wi-Fi service fits the "fast casual" atmosphere. Somehow it seems so obvious that technology, communication, free-agent employment, and aesthetics go together.

Correction/update: Buzz points out that the quote above, while it was in his email, was from the article he cited.

One compromise between my proposal and Glenn's would be for traditional shopping malls, which need to find ways to compete with drive-up shopping centers, to install the t-Mobile network or one of its competitors. Malls these days succeed mostly when they become "third places" rather than "machines for shopping," and Wi-Fi access that doesn't require camping outside Starbucks or The Apple Store would be a lure.

Apparent arson fires destroyed or damaged dozens of Hummers and other SUVs early today at a car dealership vandalized by anti-pollution graffiti, and similar slogans were found spray-painted on SUVs at three other dealerships in neighboring cities.

The press office of the radical Earth Liberation Front issued an unsigned e-mail calling the incidents "ELF actions" but adding that it had received no communication from the persons responsible. The ELF claimed responsibility earlier this month for burning down a San Diego apartment construction site....

Investigators found slogans such as "SUVs suck," "I (heart) pollution" and "Fat, Lazy Americans" spray-painted on several Hummers at the dealership. The initials "ELF" were also found....

Read the whole report.

The Great Indoors in Montgomery Co. MD was a wonderous makeover: old, ugly Sears shipping dock transformed into sparkling SubZero and Viking dreamland with a Starbucks up front. The store always seemed packed. But that is a function of the white hot real estate market in the area and the all the cashout re-fis, which is where you get $50K-$100K to spend on a kitchen. This necessary condition for success explains why there was never any hope for 200 Great Indoors outlets, or maybe even 50. Twenty sounds about right.

Home Depot's Design Expo might be a better proxy for the concept, one without Sears' backend problems. Expo's hook is the "custom design" services you get once you agree to spend X thousands of dollars on hardware.

And when will people get that you cannot just try to copy Target's products (Sears Grand?) to get Target's customers? It is (usually) aesthetically pleasing to go to a Target because the floor isn't choked with boxes and junk, and you can actually find what you want without a dozen false starts.

And my favorite strategy professor (whose web page could really use an update) is reassuring:

Any discussion of market trends that refers to particular businesses, especially nascent ones, especially in retailing, is subject to revision as time goes on. It's not like you said The Great Indoors was a model that all businesses should follow. At least it's good news for Expo.

I also note the idiocy expressed in the article that Sears' typical customer isn't interested in fancy housewares. Duh! The whole point of TGI was to tap people who have more money and taste than the typical Sears customer. I also wonder whether tweaking the concept could bring it to profitability.

Also, note that the new hobbyhorse is a Target imitation. As of a few years ago, Target's customers had higher incomes than Sears's. And to emulate Target, they're going to have to do lots of aesthetic things.

As it's likely to be executed by Sears, the "imitate Target" plan will produce a high-priced Wal-Mart. And it's not clear that the market has room for two Targets assuming Sears Grand could figure out how to offer style at a discount.

If I wasn't completely jumping up & down with glee at Powell's statement, it was for two reasons.

The first is my concern that this will put the brakes on some recent efforts to repeal the anti-LPFM law that was passed in 2000. It's great to expedite approval of all those licenses that are currently in limbo, but it would be even better to grant licenses to people in, y'know, cities. (Then again, there's no guarantee that such a law will pass -- and if it does, it'll almost certainly be attached to an effort to restore the status quo ante with the ownership regs.)

The second reason was alluded to briefly in the Times piece: "Mr. Powell said that the panel, which will begin meeting next month, would seek to answer such questions as how many hours stations already devote to local issues and 'what was the nature and the quality of that local news,' with a goal of increasing such coverage." That could mean a lot of things, and I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude for now. But I'm worried that it might end up bringing back the sorts of regulations that were scaled back in the '80s, requiring a certain amount of "public service" programming to keep your license.

He also notes that I used an obsolete title for his book. It's Rebels on the Air, not in it. (Rebels in the Air is to Rebels on the Air as Look and Feel is to The Substance of Style.)

The expert on low-powered radio is Reason's Jesse Walker, author of Rebels in the Air and numerous articles on micro radio. So I was interested in his comments on Powell's announcement yesterday. Reasoners are constitutionally unable to ever say anything nice about any government official, but this comes awfully close. Powell is the most free-market FCC chairman we've had since the Reagan administration. (Regulatory jobs don't usually attract people who distrust regulation.)

Now Sears has a new CEO, who's doing what Sears CEOs always do--thrash around for a successful strategy. The Great Indoors, which was his predecessor's idea, is losing money, and he's thinking about shutting it down, according to this trade mag report. Sears apparently isn't ready to serve the aesthetic economy. Not surprising, but embarrassing since I used The Great Indoors as an example in the book. (Publisher's Weekly, not me, called the place "hugely successful". I took the "show, don't tell" route, cited numbers, and described the store and its customers.)

I'm not convinced any strategy can save Sears. The one Forbes advocated, concentrating on hard goods while getting rid of apparel, makes a lot of marketing sense but apparently wouldn't generate enough revenue. Ignoring aesthetics, as Sears has traditionally done, won't help the company. But paying attention won't necessarily save it.

AS marriage is an engagement entered into by mutual consent, and has for its end the propagation of the species, it is evident, that it must be susceptible of all the variety of conditions, which consent establishes, provided they be not contrary to this end.

A man, in conjoining himself to a woman, is bound to her according to the terms of his engagement: In begetting children, he is bound, by all the ties of nature and humanity, to provide for their subsistence and education. When he has performed these two parts of duty, no one can reproach him with injustice or injury. And as the terms of his engagement, as well as the methods of subsisting his offspring, may be various, it is mere superstition to imagine, that marriage can be entirely uniform, and will admit only of one mode or form. Did not human laws restrain the natural liberty of men, every particular marriage would be as different as contracts or bargains of any other kind or species.

Taking an emprical approach does not imply endorsing every form of marriage--as those who read the whole essay will discover.

The Library of Economics and Liberty, a.k.a. EconLib, in which this appears is a great online resource, including both current essays and a well-presented full-text library of classic books.

"Corben has a very rare genetic disease that we call Wiskott Aldrich syndrome," pediatric hematologist Dr. Carl Lenarsky said.

The deadly disease only strikes baby boys, and only affects three of every one million births.

"Most children with Wiskott Aldrich die before they're teenagers," pediatric hematologist Dr. Stanton Goldman said. Victims die from either bleeding or infection.

After the diagnosis, the Campbells prepared for the worst. "My husband thought we were going to pick out a casket," Holly Campbell said. "We were scared."

However, doctors offered some hope in the form of a cord blood transplant.

"Corben's body is fine, except for his blood cells, so what we need to do is give him a new way of forming blood cells," Lenarsky said....

For a week, Corben received chemotherapy to destroy all the bad cells in his body, which created empty space inside his bone marrow.

During chemo, Corben lost hair, and became irritable while being confined to the hospital room. But his parents and doctors felt the side effects were a small price for life.

"Stem cell transplant has a real chance of a real complete cure," Lenarsky said.

The procedure worked: "Corben developed new bone marrow and a new immune system that functions perfectly."

Umbilical cord blood stem cells may not have the full potential of embryonic stem cells, but there are plenty of diseases they can be used to fight right now.

Just imagine Huffington's deductions for 2003: Since her campaign is designed to give her publicity, which will promote her books and commentary, the whole thing can be written off as a business expense.

I wrote this a couple of days ago but forgot to change "draft" to "publish," so it never appeared. That sort of thing never happened when I rolled my own HTML.

Remember: few would be worried about "outsourcing" if the U.S. unemployment rate were still close to four percent, rather than at the above six percent level that it is. To the extent that a structural cure is being proposed for what is really a macroeconomic problem, do not expect it to end well. And remember: a network-design job artificially kept in Sacramento when it could be done more cheaply in Singapore produces extra income for a network engineer in Sacramento, but has costs as well: in a diminished capital inflow that reduces construction and the earnings of construction workers, in higher costs for businesses installing their networks that shows up in lower salaries they pay their workers, in lower earnings and stock prices for HP. Given the all-thumbs hand the U.S. government has to try to guide industrial development through tools other than maintaining the infrastructure of a market society and the provision of basic research and other public goods, it is hard to imagine that the costs to the country as a whole will not greatly outweigh the benefits.

Sometimes I feel like we're reliving the late '80s/early '90s fad for "declinism," as though nobody had learned anything about how economies work in the intervening years. Every time there's a recession, pundits discover the "end of work." (Looking for the American middle class? Try "red America," where you don't have to make six figures to buy a house and educate your kids.)

I had one this morning. I went into a new cafe in Pasadena to have some breakfast and write stuff for work. I pulled out my brand spanking new 17" PowerBook (long story, but I got a really good deal on it that I couldn't pass up and it arrived on Monday) When the cashier, who was clearly not a computer geek and seemingly not a local student, brought my food over, she gasped when she saw my new paramour powered up.

"That is the most beautiful laptop I've ever seen!" she exclaimed with genuine awe.

"Ain't it?" I replied.

As a matter of fact, I told Evie [her daughter] this morning that I was so in love with it I thought I might marry it. Look and feel, indeed.

The American Express people call that the "clerk double-take" when it happens--as it has to me several times--with the AmEx blue card.

Maybe I'm too far from the action, but it seems remarkable to me how fast the northeast has recovered from such a massive blackout.

On Thursday afternoon when the computers popped off and the lights dimmed -- brownout! -- I said: No prob, I‚ll walk home. Then I said: Wait a minute, what‚ll I do when I get there? I live on the 68th floor. Think I'll stay at the office.

In minutes the place emptied out as everyone ran for their cars, arranged rides, hit the trail. A century ago thousands of people walked to and from work over the East River bridges, but they don't now. Only Bob Jackowitz, who lives way out on Long Island via the LIRR, and I were left.

The emergency lights blinked on, and I stopped cursing the architect for forcing us to install so many. Our office is a renovated townhouse, so we'd have sleeping quarters, breakfast food, even hot water. Our humble altitude, only four stories, runs the plumbing on city water pressure: no pumps.

We stingily kept the doors and windows shut to preserve the conditioned air. At dark we went out. Restaurants were closed but the Chippery, a sandwich bar around the corner, was open, twinkling with candlelight like a Byzantine chapel. Everyone was ordering salad "with everything" to make Salad Man's life easier. The woman behind me on line noticed the candles were guttering down and told the owner, working behind the counter, that she'd run home and fetch more. "That's neighborly," I remarked. "Yeah, they cost $65 apiece," she said. Kidding.

Bob and I took our salads to Madison Square Park where we could watch the crowds hustling by on Broadway. Nine at night and not many cars, but hundreds of pedestrians. We couldn't figure out why they were all walking so purposefully. Where did they have to go?

The intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street held a hint of techno-rave. Lots of people carried glo-sticks: not very illuminative, but festive. Faces were lit blue by cell phones. Red emergency flares writhed on the ground, replenished by the ubiquitous police cadets, dipping into the trunk of a cruiser.

We walked down to Union Square. On the corner of 22nd Street and Broadway, Mr. Softee in his garishly-lit truck provided an oasis of icy brightness. Dozens of people perched nearby on the planters and stoops, enjoying their creamy treats, until the last of even the peanut-butter mocha ripple crunch was gone, at around ten.

Small groups of people sat in battered chairs in office-building doorways, iluminated by glowing cigarette-ends like fireflies, each cluster a cluster of sound: laughter, conversation, the tinny rattle of AM news. People shared warmish six-packs, baggies of grapes, DVD movies on laptops. This party went on for miles.

The missing electricity provided a glimpse into a previous century, especially in this old part of town. Windows glowed brownish with candlelight, voices preceded their owners out of the gloom. Cornices and parapets were silhouetted against the sky--and beyond them, to everyone's amazement, stars!

But it wasn't truly dark. This is still a city. Headlights add up, and emergency lights. Some lobbies and windowed stairwells remained lit, and a few focal points like the observatory deck of the Empire State Building. So the sky still reflected light; you could have seen us from space. Also spoiling the old-world illusion was the noise: buses, helicopters, sirens, generators apparently hooked up to nothing. And voices: the blended, helium-filled sound of mass celebration, blocks away.

We weren't really bereft of electricity. We can't be, ever again. We swim in that excited juice. Within the sea of electromagnetic radiation made perceptible by our radios and TVs, we carry our flashlights and cell phones; the cars creeping along the darkened streets like wary whales are globular masses of shimmying electrons.

Back at our office but reluctant to go inside, we lounged on the stoop like people did in pre-air-conditioning days. A group of girls joined us, laughing at the self-important antics of the neighborhood dogs, who were all, unnecessarily, on high alert.

As were the TV people. Unbelievably snarky. On someone's little portable we watched the blow-dried talking heads turning themselves upside down trying to capture some negative waves. "There's no looting -- yet," they announced lugubriously. "But with the night growing ever darker...." They found one woman worrying about her mother in surgery, another willing to complain about the heat, the inconvenience, the lack of authorities "taking charge." But everybody was taking charge. Tiny acts of heroism, like people looking out for the elderlies and disabled, people handing out water, restaurateurs offering free snacks with half-price drinks.

Continuing the theme of pre-a/c times, we decided to sleep on the roof, where there was a whiff of breeze. Bob set up the deck chairs and we settled down facing the Met Life Tower, where the clock was stuck at 4:20. "If it says anything other than 4:20 when we wake up, we'll know the power is back on," Bob said. But it wasn't.

Friday no one showed up at the office, but Jimmy opened the factory. The sign hangers with their truck-mounted equipment installed billboards; the glass room made neon, since the gas lines were working; service electricians went to Times Square to shut off the timeclocks. Even the tourists might not appreciate all the signs' turning on at once if the demand surge re-blew the fuses.

But despite their good example, it was hard to get much done. It was too disorienting. The missing appliances are like phantom limbs. Just below the conscious level, one keeps reaching for the switches. "It's hot...the a/c's not working...why don't I just turn on the fan?" "Coffeemaker's not working...maybe some tea...how about that electric kettle?" "Can't use the computer...I'll just turn on the light and read."

Our auto-pilots aren't sure what's not working either. Does my money still work? (Yes, but not the plastic.) Does anybody on the next block speak English? Is my husband, wherever he is, still the one I married? (I bet with all that revelry last night and the downed commuter lines, plenty of people got confused on that one.)

The power came back on at 7:15 P.M., accompanied by hootin and hollerin out in the street. Sweet cool juice! The energizer. Instantly everyone dropped their 19th-century languor. The computers popped back on. Coffee began perking. By 8 P.M. most of the restaurants on the block were open, and the ice cubes were tinkling. It's Friday night and we're back in business!

Tama's company builds the lighted signs in Times Square. It's an old family company, three generations, built on electricity.

Remember the old Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," ranked as one of the series' best by those who care about such matters? A minor classic on Cold War hysteria, it takes place on a typical street in a typical American town, where the power goes out for no apparent reason. Within hours, the neighbors are at each other's throats, accusing one another of treachery and worse. As the lights intermittently come back on and the day turns to night, rioting and shooting occur and the whole place goes to hell in a hand basket. Because it's The Twilight Zone, with its mandatory groan-inducing denouement, we learn at the close of the show that two big-headed aliens, an advance team for a planned invasion of the planet, have been playing the Maple Streeters for suckers. What they did here, they'll soon do all over the country.

By all rights, yesterday's record-setting blackout that left some 50 million without electricity should have been a Maple Street moment, at least in terms of rioting and shooting, if not necessarily politically motivated hysteria.

The monsters didn't show up, of course, and Nick speculates on why, especially in contrast to behavior in the 1977 blackout.

It's hard to know all the reasons for the different responses to the '77 and '03 blackouts (one of the great parlor games in New York after the '77 blackout was figuring out why people had acted so much worse than they did during the great '65 blackout). But one of the reasons has to be the far greater communications network that exist today. Information technology is one of the great antidotes to panic and hysteria.

If anything, Postrel sees her role as a bridge between typically male and female schools of thought, bringing both parties to the table for a more compelling discussion. With a chuckle, she says, "The most popular editorial I ever wrote was about how you can understand the whole economy by looking at nail salons."

For other advance press and pre-publication comments about The Substance of Style, go here.

Bingo! Do I love your piece today! This is the great debate in hi fi. Do we want engineering dweebs to tell us what they think is accurate and what they can measure is the only relevant yardstick for judging sound quality? Or do we let consumers say what they like or don't like without getting hung up over whether it's imaginary or mislabeled or irrelevant? Or even possibly something genuinely important that they can't measure yet?

When the CD first came out engineers insisted that it was identical to the real thing. In particular, CDs of old analog recordings were said to have captured everything on those recordings. Audiophiles vehemently disagreed.

Fast forward 20 years: Not only do we now have a superior standard for those who care to pay for SACD high def cds, but it turns out that even those supposedly crappy analog recordings sound even better through the new medium. This despite the fact that old recordings were supposedly so limited in dynamic range that CDs were just "wasting bits".

At the same time, those who don't much care about subtle distinctions have their MP3s and other such compressed music over the net.

Everyone is happy.****

OSCAR WILDE defined a cynic as someone who "knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." To many people, that sounds like an economist or an executive.

But Wilde's witticism ignores what prices do. They convey information about how people value different goods, including the intangibles an aesthete like Wilde would care about most.

Those hard-to-count intangibles are an increasingly important part of the economy. Competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many businesses can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance. To add value, they turn to aesthetics: the look and feel of people, places and things.

The rest is here.

The bibliography for TSOS, which has been consuming much of my web time lately, is almost finished. It's amazing how many online source links you can find if you're really diligent.

These web pages are dedicated to my Dad, Tsien-Chung Chou (1902-2000), who read avidly daily & joyfully The New York Times for over 50 years.

The site also includes an archives of NYT articles mentioning Mark Twain, beginning with a brief book review from May 1, 1867.

What's the difference between Angelyne and Arianna?
1. Angelyne has two fixed positions.
2. You can understand Angelyne.
3. Angelyne has a following.
UPDATE: Peter Robinson, author of the new and wonderful How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, submits:
4. Angelyne is doing the best she can. Arianna knows better.

I'm not so sure about #2, but maybe it's a comment on policy, not accents.

said he was unfamiliar with one of the hottest issues among the state's business leaders, saying he did not know whether he would repeal the state's paid family leave law, the only such state law in the nation.

"I would have to get into that," he said "I'm very much for families, I'm very much for children and children's issues. ... We have to think about the future of the state."

On the other hand, maybe once he "got into that," he'd discover that the law is a really bad idea. But did he really start a campaign without getting some policy briefings beforehand?

I do know that if the best his critics can lob against Schwarzenegger is that he's a soft libertarian, they won't score many points. The criticisms corralled in this Sacramento Bee piece make me want him to win--though I do wish he had Tom McClintock--a fiscal tightwad who knows the budget--as an advisor rather than an opponent.

But there is a real political divide here, and it's not about art. A significant portion of the population, especially in California, believes it is wrong to say, even in fiction, that violence ever solves problems or that violence is necessary to protect the innnocent. Few of these folks have the intellectual or moral rigor to call themselves pacifists, but they impose a pacifist moralism on public discussion: the default assumption is that violence is always wrong. But, of course, the famous Arnold line from True Lies often applies: "But they were all bad guys."

Perhaps an Arnold candidacy will make this sub rosa debate explicit, but I doubt it. For now, he's saying he's a nonviolent man who supports gun control.

This is what you get when you combine the Progressive faith in unmediated democracy--which, in this case, includes mass candidacy--with a state in which "rational ignorance" has reached an all-time high (except on the passionate fringes, including mine): a high probability that Californians will elect a joke candidate or, the next best thing, a celebrity with a lot of glib opinions and minimal nuts-and-bolts knowledge. Yikes.

For continuing coverage of rational ignorance, read The Volokh Conspiracy.

The Bush administration's spring fling to seek new powers against terrorism included something starkly worse than simply arrest