Last night, on my way to dinner in Westwood Village, I ran across the premiere of Sin City. It wasn't exactly Hell's Angels, but there were definitely screaming fans, mostly of the young, female persuasion--not what I expected for a Frank Miller movie. Standing in the crowd, I realized what a Latino cast the movie has, and what a huge appeal Robert Rodriguez and these actors have for the Americanized Latinos who make up much of younger Los Angeles. (Not that they aren't impressed by the non-Latino actors--though a young woman near me did lose interest in Rutger Hauer when she realized he wasn't Donald Trump.)

In his 2002 book American Skin, Leon Wynter highlights a scene in Rodriguez's Spy Kids where it suddenly becomes unmistakably clear that the kids are not just played by Latino actors but are, in fact, Mexican-American characters in a movie clearly intended for a mainstream audience. The movie simply assumes that its audience will see the family not as Other but as Us--only better. When, he wondered, will African-Americans have a similar Everyman experience?

Back in 1939, Margaret Farrand Thorp's America at the Movies examined the movies' appeal to their audience, an appeal based largely on escape and identification--on glamour. The movies then didn't feature black characters in sympathetic leading roles, she suggested, because the mostly white 85 million [!] Americans who went to the movies weekly neither identified with blacks nor fantasized about enjoying their lives:

Then there is the case of the screen negro. The eighty-five million are primarily white and no white American, the industry maintains, would ever make his escape personality black. "Stardom," Terry Ramsaye wrote in the Motion Picture Herald (July 8, 1939) is

a job of vicarious attainment for the customers. The staring player becomes the agent-in-adventure for the box-office customer. The spectator tends to identify himself with the glamorous and triumphant player, just as the tense, weakling little ribbon clerk in the last rim of seats clenches his fists and wins with the winner at the prize fight.

Inevitably the motion picture tends to place the negro in the screen drama in the same relation as that which he occupies in the nation's social and economic picture. In other words the screen public takes the negro as the average of 135,000,000 takes him.

With all due respect to Eddie Murphy's Dr. Dolittle, I think the movie that actually broke the Wynter-Thorp barrier was last year's Collateral, in which Jamie Foxx played Everyman, in a very, very bad situation but not one where race was crucial. That Foxx so dominated the Oscars this year--"It's Jamie Foxx's world. We just live in it," was a common commentary--drove home the point. Race is slowly but surely turning into ethnicity, a cultural, personal identity but not a barrier to empathy. And, to take things back to Rodriguez, despite the best efforts of race-mongers left and right, Mexican-Americans are just another ethnic group.

I took some photos, but the lighting you see on TV, which is daylight bright, was only available to credentialed press. The rest of us had to make do with digital camera flash in the dark and a little photo manipulation after the fact:

Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez posed for the crowd just as a car drove by and blocked the view. If you think the quality of this photo is bad, you should have seen it before I fooled with it. Frank Miller has a big, happy smile, and Robert Rodriguez is holding the video camera that he was using earlier to shoot his adoring fans.

Robert Rodriguez gives an interview.

This guy came by and signed autographs and talked to the crowd, to the delight of fans. From the conversation, I take it that his girlfriend is more famous than he is. But I have no idea who he is--thus demonstrating my extreme age.

According to Shaw, regular journalists strive harder than bloggers for accuracy because of their greater legal exposure. He writes: "If I'm careless—if I am guilty of what the courts call a 'reckless disregard for the truth'--The Times could be sued for libel...and could lose a lot of money." Doesn't Shaw appreciate that Joe Blogger can be sued, too, and that if he loses his case could be forced to forfeit his house, his bank account, his car, and his Fiestaware collection? On the face of it, Joe Blogger would seem to have a greater incentive to avoid libel than Shaw, whose employer will cover his legal bills and take the financial hit in case of a legal judgment.

The chances of the LAT or any big newspaper losing a libel suit are virtually nil, given the difficulty of proving a reckless disregard for the truth. The cost is in fighting the suit, something the typical blogger couldn't afford.

To carry the theme of your hotel upgrade column, yards and parks aren't equivalent goods, particularly fenced yards. Even if the park is across the street. While you could take your unfolded laundry or your domestic paperwork down to the park, it's a lot easier in your own yard. Your kids can leave their toys out overnight in your yard. You can watch your kids out the kitchen window while you wash dishes, cook a meal, or work on your computer.

Finally, it's not acceptable for adult or teenage strangers to be in your yard, particularly the living-in-the-park sort of strangers common to urban parks in some cities.

Not to mention the dog poop you find in our local park, thanks to dog owners who are only half-civilized.

More than just a fly-on-the-classroom-wall peek at an exceptional educator, however, Greatness serves as a cautionary tale about our nation's current education system, and the way in which policymakers' ongoing efforts to tinker with the process may be, at best, heavy-handed or, at worst, wrongheaded.

For instance, in the past year, the debate over social promotion reached high decibels in school districts across the nation, most notably in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg instituted rigid policies to hold back third-graders who aren't keeping up with their classmates. But it wasn't until I watched Greatness that I truly understood how counterproductive such a policy can be. After all, classrooms are simply microcosms of families, and no family I know of jettisons its lesser members.

"I see (the classroom) as a wagon," Cullum explains early on in the film. "Your thoroughbreds of the class are going to pull the wagon--they're the leaders. But everyone is on that wagon, and everyone reaches the goal. No one is left out."

Granted, Cullum called roll in his classroom more than a generation before slashed budgets, plummeting scores and hallway metal detectors would become the stuff of modern education. But building a child's mind is inarguably as daunting a task as building a new system, and in this regard, Cullum made the grade.

The film also offers a decent argument about the potential myopia of modern-day standardized testing, which customarily cleaves to math and grammar as the true litmus of our kids' smarts. Though Cullum certainly didn't abandon these areas of study, he devoted an extraordinary amount of energy to the arts--and it paid off.

Leaving aside the questions of whether a classroom is in fact like a family and whether it's good policy to expect good students to "pull the wagon" for others, focusing on a single outstanding teacher misses the real dynamic of what's going on with education policy. It's a struggle created by the demand for objective, articulable standards.

If you want teachers to be judged on subjective qualities like their ability to inspire students, you have to let schools hire, fire, promote, and demote their teachers accordingly. That means paying not by objective criteria like degrees and seniority but by a boss's professional evaluation. It means allowing into the classroom great teachers who have subject knowledge but not a lot of idiotic education courses on their transcripts.

Of course, teachers as a group don't want to give their bosses the power to evaluate them. Certainly, the teachers' unions don't want that. So to create any connection between classroom performance and professional evaluations, we're stuck with objective criteria, notably test scores. The alternative, beloved by teachers' advocates, is to have objective measures of teacher "quality," including seniority and acadmic credentials, and no measures of teaching quality. Standardized tests and prescribed curricula are far from perfect, but they're better than no accountability at all.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: The Times suggests the reasons for moving are strictly economic, and in hugely expensive places like San Francisco that may be true. But my Uptown Dallas neighbors generally hightail it to the suburbs as soon as their kids start walking, and these are people who already own spacious three-bedroom townhouses. They want yards (even though there's a park two blocks away), less traffic, and less crime. They want suburbia.

Earlier this month, Marriott International unveiled new designs for the rooms in its various hotel chains. These are not routine updates to replace worn-out furniture or carpets. They represent a significant shift from the cookie-cutter standardization that built Marriott into one of the world's largest hotel companies, to a new emphasis on aesthetics and personalization.

"It's a makeover," said a company spokesman, John Wolf.

From granite countertops and aromatherapy shampoos in the bathrooms to piles of pillows on the beds, the rooms aim to please a style-conscious new generation of travelers. The floral bedspreads once ubiquitous in hotel rooms are out. After all, says Mr. Wolf, "Who has one of those at home?"

Marriott is following an industry trend. Over the last several years, hotel chains have been competing ever more intensely to upgrade the look and feel of their rooms. That competition was set off by Starwood Hotels and Resorts with its stylish redesigns of Westin and Sheraton rooms beginning in 1999.

This emphasis on aesthetics goes beyond hotels to all sorts of products and commercial environments, from the design of cellphones and trash cans to the look and feel of stores and restaurants. The quality of goods and services is increasingly judged not only by function but also by style.

These upgrades present real problems for economists charged with tracking inflation. Hotels hope to sell their redesigned rooms at higher rates. If they succeed, should economists count those higher rates as contributing to inflation or simply as consumers' paying for more to get more value?

The rest is here.

Reminder: You can get notices of my TV appearances and copies of (or links to) my articles via email by sending an email to postrel-list-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Suzanne points me to this profile of Thaler, which includes a discussion of what his research on the Swedish experience suggests about private social security accounts in the U.S. It does not suggest we shouldn't have them:

Although Thaler and Cronqvist acknowledge that "three years of returns does not prove anything," they believe the United States can draw several lessons from Sweden’s experience. First, a default fund must be devised carefully, because human nature dictates a large portion of investors’ money will go there. With a U.S. economy 30 times the size of Sweden’s, free-market entry for funds could result in thousands of choices, paralyzing the average consumer. Instead, the authors recommend offering a small number of funds, perhaps three, investing in index funds and bonds, with varying levels of risk. The funds would be managed by private firms subject to competitive bidding.

President Bush’s proposal for Social Security reform, a 256-page document titled "Strengthening Social Security and Creating Personal Wealth for All Americans" (available for downloading at csss.gov) offers evidence of behavioral economics’ move into the mainstream. Though no behavioralists sit on the bipartisan commission that wrote the report, its plan, Thaler admits, "is not much different from what we would propose." The document outlines three possible models through which 2 to 4 percent of a worker’s wages would be invested in private accounts. Each model includes a "standard fund," akin to the Swedish default. A two-tier system allows initial contributions, say up to $5,000, to be invested in a limited number of funds, between three and five; once the first-tier threshold is reached, a still-to-be-determined number of second-tier funds will be available for investment. Fund managers must meet certain standards and compete to be included in the second tier. A governing board would be created to provide workers with "informative advice, and to implement reasonable changes in either tier that it believes is in the best interest of workers and retirees."

In the early 20th century critics attacked product variety as being wasteful--a sign that markets were less efficient than central planning. Hence, the Chinese wore Mao suits, Americans got uniformly round automobile headlights and British authorities "rationalized" furniture designs.

A famous scene in the film Moscow on the Hudson has Robin Williams as a Soviet immigrant collapsing at the sight of an American coffee aisle, circa 1984. Imagine what would happen in Starbucks.

A free economy multiplies variety, the better to serve buyers with different tastes and different needs and to give people the chance to experience different goods at different times. Arguing that this plenitude is inefficient went out decades ago. The problem with markets, the detractors now say, is that all these choices make us unhappy.

To understand why there's a photo of jams here, and what they might (or might not) have to do with private retirement accounts, read the rest of the column.

I'm also at work--hard at work right this minute, Nick, just taking a small blogging break--on a more-extended Reason essay on the anti-choice critique.

In related news, this site will soon feature two new sections, representing my current areas of research: Variety and Glamour. Watch for them.

REMINDER: To receive my articles by email, send an email message to postrel-list-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

The whole silly brouhaha reminds me of how the LAT used to handle this question: through rigid, numerical quotas. I remember visiting Bob Berger, the op-ed editor, back in the early '90s. An old-style newspaperman, Bob didn't like the paper's demands that he demonstrate "diversity" on the op-ed pages. I especially remember his complaint that he not only had to find gay writers but gay writers who would mention that they were gay. No gay foreign policy experts need apply.

Of course, you don't get to be an editor in a giant, bureaucratic newspaper if you don't do what you're told. Bob not only complied but posted a chart on his door to prove what a good job he was doing. It showed each day's op-ed page as a line of five boxes, one for each article slot. The boxes were colored either blue or pink.

Is Boston good for aspiring models?
Is Manhattan a good place to raise children?
Is San Francisco good for conservatives?
Is Chicago good for vegetarians?
Is Silicon Valley good for artists?
Is Washington good for fashionistas?
Is Los Angeles good for pedestrians? (I may write in the affirmative.)

The funniest thing about the discussion in Dallas is how everyone assumes that the city should be good for intellectuals. (It's fine for "smart people.") Dallas is a city for normal people--people who focus on the reality at hand, not its deeper meaning; people who like their women pretty, their men successful, their children near at hand, their work productive, their religion inspiring. Intellectuals are weird. The only way to be an intellectual haven is either to have a very large population--large enough so that even a small percentage can constitute a critical mass--or to be a pretty strange city.

UPDATE: Problem solved, though with a side trip through Austin.

The recent bankruptcy filing of Winn-Dixie Stores, the supermarket chain, would seem to be the latest evidence that Wal-Mart, dreaded by competitors as retailing's 24-hour-a-day death star, has lost none of its price-cutting potency. The company's apparent invincibility is part of what galls its critics, whose opposition led to the cancellation of a proposed Wal-Mart in Queens.

The conventional criticism of Wal-Mart is that it's an insatiable capitalist juggernaut, reaping private benefit at the expense of the public good. The view retains some currency, I suspect, because many of Wal-Mart's critics haven't really shopped there.

The funny thing is that, for quite a while, this view has had the situation almost exactly backward. Instead of producing private benefit at public expense, Wal-Mart has been producing public benefit at private expense. And the equation is likely to become ever more lopsided.

Like the airlines, whose investors generously provide low fares and convenient service while forgoing gains for themselves, Wal-Mart has kindly mustered considerable capital from investors with the goal of providing all kinds of basic goods under one roof at convenient locations and amazingly low prices. These investors must be charitably minded because they aren't the main beneficiaries of Wal-Mart's business.

For several years now, the shareholders, who have more than $200 billion tied up in the company, have not done especially well. Since the end of 1999, Wal-Mart stock is off 23 percent, while Target is up 43 percent and Lowe's is up 95 percent.

The big winners during this period were the juggernaut's customers, who gained by having Wal-Mart drive down the price of consumer goods. Assuming that Wal-Mart investors are more affluent than its shoppers, the system offers a progressive transfer from rich to poor--from capital owners to less prosperous American consumers and hard-working Chinese factory hands. It's like Robin Hood, only with parking.

If that sounds like unalloyed praise, you should really read the whole thing. This piece is, after all, by someone who actually shops at Wal-Mart from time to time.

Four years ago, I told my New York literary agent that I was moving from Los Angeles to Dallas. He replied, "You have my condolences."

Keep in mind that New Yorkers look down on L.A. Dallas is certainly not an obvious place to be an independent writer of serious nonfiction–a so-called public intellectual. You're an oddball here. Without a university job, you won't have colleagues to talk to. The closest real research library is in Austin. The bookstores' "new nonfiction" tables offer mostly talk show tie-ins and theology lite. The local paper runs short, boring book reviews.

"Provocative" is not a compliment in Dallas, except maybe to strippers. Few interesting, as opposed to merely famous, speakers come to town. People actually pay money to hear David Gergen on the platform with Bob Dole and Al Gore.

Condolences indeed.

The professional intellectual could do a lot worse than Dallas, however. You could, for instance, be stuck in the provincial ghettos of New York or San Francisco. There you'd have lots of other writers to talk to. The newspaper would report publishing gossip as major business news. You'd go to book parties and free lectures. You'd know who was arguing with whom about what.

But unless you traveled a lot, you'd have no idea what the rest of American culture is like. Reporters in New York have called me up to ask about the business significance of Whole Foods Market and the cultural meaning of the Left Behind series–both ancient news everywhere but The New York Times. New York is an intellectual cave, and San Francisco is even worse.

Read all three entries here. And, for the record, I think Dallas, while no Silicon Valley, is a fine place for "smart people," a group that is much, much bigger than professional intellectuals. The folks at American Leather are incredibly smart.

For interesting news on the evolution of blog ads--which are increasingly not just print ads online--see the Blogads blog. How meta is that?

One reason there are so few women in science is very simple -- at least for math sciences and engineering fields -- it has to do with the status of women internationally, not here in the USA.

[*] men from every society on earth are applying in large numbers for graduate schools in the USA.

[*] women not from the US are very much less likely than men from the same country to be applying for graduate schools here in the USA.

[*] in many research universities there is a very small fraction of americans among the applicants.

Here's a concrete example: There are many Iranians in better Electrical Engineering departments nationwide. And Iranians are known to be among the best students of EE. However, very few of these prospective students are women.

I recognize that PRC Chinese women make an exception. In some departments there are as many PRC Chinese women students as Chinese men. That may be partly to do with the fact that it's an only-child society that has gone post-traditional at gunpoint. But I have the impression that there are not nearly as many Singaporean or Taiwanese women as men in US graduate programs. So I don't think that descent from Confucian civilization can be credited with the gender equity of PRC applicants; the only-child hypothesis is a better explanation.

I reach the conclusion that as long as there are traditional societies supplying ambitious young men to science careers, there will be imbalances. Globalization and gender equity are just in conflict.

Actually, globalization and gender equity are not in conflict, over the long run, because globalization works both ways. The most powerful, and frightening to many, idea exported from the United States and other Western country is the equality of women. Aside from its social implications, that ideal has practical economic advantages for societies that adopt it.

A lot of elite universities, and some not-so-elite ones, could use a good dose of Project Runway-style tough talk. If design and architecture students can routinely put up with nasty criticisms, some justified, some less so, surely Ivy Leaguers could stand the occasional B. But all the incentives for professors cut against setting high standards.

We hear the same about beautiful people, especially if they got that way not through sheer luck but through discipline and technology. The better other people look, the more pressure you feel to get better looking yourself. Seth Stevenson explored those competitive pressures in his delightful Slate article on tooth whiteners: "Tooth whiteners are primed to be the next deodorant: a once-optional form of personal hygiene that's now simply an obligation. It's only a matter of time because the more of us who get whitened, the grungier your unwhitened teeth will appear in contrast."

But LAT car critic Dan Neil reminds us that not all the spillovers from costly, beauty are negative. He drove a Bentley Continental GT (that's the "affordable" non-stodgy model) and discovered that beautiful luxuries can provide public goods as well as private pleasures.

Why, when I drive a car like the $170,000 Bentley Continental GT, don't the valet parkers, the carwash rag men, the predawn pop can harvesters in their rusty swayback pickups — why don't they lynch me with their looks?...

Who could be more disenchanted with cars than the men who work at the carwash at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado? But when I pull the Bentley in, the workers eagerly scrimmage for positions around it. These are guys who are standing in rubber boots half filled with cold, soapy water, whose hands must hurt from the biting detergent. Why are they so happy to see me?

The crew foreman scoffs at the Lexus waiting in line. "This is a true car," he says in Spanish....

While it may seem foolish to lump pro basketball players and Malibu real estate developers in with the likes of the Medicis, it's nonetheless true that without rich patrons the Bentley would not exist. And that would leave us all a little poorer.

Spiffy Badges: Donald Sensing blogs on the changing prestige and meaning of the Combat Infantry Badge and (notes reader George Jong in an email to me) makes a style point toward the end: "I have always had the suspicion that the CIB is so highly coveted because it is a very attractive, handsome badge and stands out on the class A uniform. I bet that if the Army took the wreath away from the CIB and gave it to the EIB, the prestige pecking order would change, too."