If one was to accept this proposition, it is also interesting to see how the world around us constantly reiterates it. Forget sweet boxes at weddings, which are supposed to be decorated. Think instead of the tree with red lights enclosed in PVC winding around it. It’s not a universal sign, but it is popular ornamentation for a range of service providers, from dhabas to taxi-stands. In part, it’s there because it meets with the current trend of flashy, bright, bejewelled and sequinned. It attracts attention precisely because many of those who will see it are likely to find it visually appealing and react to it positively. Spray-painted blue carnations invite similar reactions and buyers, no matter how bizarre it seems to have bright blue flowers.

In India, carpenters, metal workers and a host of other similar professionals have traditionally known this anyway, resulting in stylised and ornamented products for daily use. Newer mass products now realise they need to actively invest in the visual. These cater to our fantasies, feed our imagination and make the aesthete in us dig into our pockets.

So then, is this consumerism, the evil vice of the last 100 years? No way, I would say. It’s closer to a worldwide acknowledgement that the human species is a highly sensory one, with a particular affinity for the visual. We turn to our senses intuitively as guides, and many of our judgments are based upon this.

Speaking of reviews, I'm working on an update to this site. If you know of any linkable reviews that aren't on the reviews page (or if you can supply permission and text for any that aren't currently online), please let me know.

Apparently Thomas Sowell agrees. Here's a bit of what he wrote earlier this week in the WSJ:

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.

Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks--not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that--and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture--and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.

The people who take this view may think of themselves as friends of blacks. But they are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.

For understandable reasons, Sowell condemns this "redneck culture" in his new book Black Rednecks And White Liberals. But this often-violent honor culture also gives America much of its backbone. It is, after all, the Jacksonian America that so fascinates bloggers and foreign-policy intellectuals.

The Carnival is illustrated with an image promoting the 1939 World's Fair--hardly "tomorrow" but still a resonantly glamorous image of the future. In my research on glamour, I'm interested in exploring exactly how and why the 1930s produced so many enduringly glamorous images, not only the motifs of Golden Age Hollywood and "the future" but streamlined moderne (a.k.a. American Art Deco) styling, superhero comic books, and all sorts of transportation imagery, among others (feel free to send me additional examples).

Thirties glamour also had a very dark side, in which the aesthetic editing of unruly details turned from propaganda tool into totalitarian reality. Frederic Spotts's 2003 book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics demonstrates that the famous "failed painter" was, in fact, an aesthetic pioneer. Here's Spotts introducing the book's thesis:

It was Hitler's aesthetic talents that also help to explain his mysterious grip on the German people. What Stalin accomplished through terror, Hitler achieved through seduction. Using a new style of politics, mediated through symbols, myths, rites, spectacles and personal dramatics, he reached the masses as did no other leader of his time. Though he took away democratic government, he gave Germans what they clearly found a more meaningful sense of political participation, transforming them from spectators into participants in National Socialist theater.

The book has photos of Hitler rehearsing his speeches, adjusting every gesture for maximum effect. Here's a good review by Jean Bethke Elshtain.

[I actually wrote this post yesterday but forgot to switch it from "draft" to "publish."]

I can't see any serious argument for a government ban, but that doesn't mean I foresee a future of yack-filled air travel. Airlines have ample reason to restrict or segregate cell phone usage, either by policy or suasion. Steve Portigal posts a comprehensive analysis of the various interests involved and concludes with a recommendation airlines could apply to all sorts of issues:

Could the airlines do anything to mitigate the impact of the doofus? [The doofus screaming on his phone, that is.--vp] If the airlines want to start changing behavior, they might take a cue from JetBlue, where the current seat back cards take a positive and humorous approach to creating a common experience. Rather than telling passengers what they are forbidden to do, they seek to engage everyone in a common goal of having a positive experience during the flight. Perhaps the most effective way of creating this type of change is not more warnings and admonishments, but to create a totally different experience, making it clear that the passengers aren't following the standard script for "trip on a plane" but reframing that experience into something new, where new rules, expectations, and social norms can be created from scratch. You might not litter in a small community, but perhaps you would in a big city. You wouldn't introduce yourself to someone in a grocery checkout, but you would at a party. Change the frame, and the behavior can change, too.

JetBlue sets the tone from the moment you board: on most airlines the flight attendants watch while you struggle to find space for your carry-on luggage. On JetBlue, they greet each passenger, take their bag, and hurry ahead of them, finding the next open storage space, optimizing space usage (just like a great grocery packer knows what they are doing, so do these guys), relieving the passenger of a frustrating task, and speeding the boarding process. Already the rules begin to be changed. Once you get to the seatback card (labeled a "guide to how to make the world a better place...one flight at a time.") you may begin to consider the flight experience differently. The card reads "Be nice. Attitude is everything on JetBlue. Kindness, respect and consideration are the way to a nice flight." Amusing graphics that evoke traditional flight safety cards depict passengers creating a common experience, for example introducing themselves to each other. Sure, many of us do that on a plane, but JetBlue takes some ownership of it, and encourages it, with just enough humor. Other graphics discourage people from bringing their own smelly fish on board, or sleeping on the shoulder of their neighbor, or removing their shoes when their feet are too pungent.

JetBlue (and some of the other newer, more innovative, and interestingly cheaper airlines) are rethinking the entire experience they are creating for passengers. A fresh look at air travel won't eliminate turbulence, of course, but they could easily extend this to help people manage their behavior. Rather than a turf war over knees, shoulders, ears, and mouths, creating a common experience could encourage coorperation, establish new social norms (and social sanctions rather than punitive ones) that would allow for polite cell phone usage. Sure, I'm skeptical too. Adding some verbiage to the pre-flight announcement and posting a few stickers isn't going to do it. A new approach to creating a relationship between the passengers and the airline, and between the passengers themselves is the key. The dinosaur airlines aren't capable of this (i.e., United's Ted is a cheaper United, with better graphic design; it's not a re-think of the flight experience the way JetBlue is).

And now, for a little excerpt from the glamour book proposal-in-process:

Treating glamour as a luxurious or nostalgic style, instead of an imaginative process, has more than intellectual consequences. This category error leads to futile efforts to restore lost glamour through aesthetic tinkering.

Thus airlines try to recapture the glamour of air travel by redesigning their flight attendants’ uniforms. But flying is no longer mysterious, nor is it graceful. Fashion tweaks cannot overcome the public’s ample experience with late flights, crowded seats, grumpy crews, crying babies, and minimal service. Giving flight attendants a stylish, slightly retro look may improve crew morale and make flying a little more pleasant, but fashion alone can’t bring the glamour back. Glamour is not a quality that can be created with aesthetics alone.

And one short spell therein he read:
It had much of glamour might;
Could make a ladye seem a knight;
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall
Seem tapestry in lordly hall;
A nut-shell seem a gilded barge,
A sheeling [a shepherd's hut] seem a palace large,
And youth seem age, and age seem youth:
All was delusion, nought was truth.

Scott also used the word glamour in his diary, describing a phenomenon all too familiar to writers and editors:

August 12. -- Wrote a little in the morning; then Duty and I have settled that this is to be a kind of holiday, providing the volume be finished to-morrow. I went to breakfast at Chiefswood, and after that affair was happily transacted, I wended me merrily to the Black Cock Stripe, and there caused Tom Purdie and John Swanston cut out a quantity of firs. Got home about two o'clock, and set to correct a set of proofs. James Ballantyne presages well of this work, but is afraid of inaccuracies -- so am I -- but things must be as they may. There is a kind of glamour about me, which sometimes makes me read dates, etc., in the proof-sheets, not as they actually do stand, but as they ought to stand. I wonder if a pill of holy trefoil would dispel this fascination.

The word glamour is occasionally still used in the old sense, most recently (in my experience, that is) on the penultimate episode of Angel. I'm working on a proposal for a book on glamour, which is why you're getting etymology rather than discussions of means-testing social security. I promise some less esoteric entries (though not necessarily on social security) this evening.

Reader Jim Bailey writes to note that Apple will in fact replace the batteries. For the low, low price of $105.95, that is. Unless you're really worried about batteries in the landfill, and don't trust third-party vendors, that doesn't strike me as a terribly good deal.

Reader Tom Jackson writes to praise the iPod competition:

I couldn't help writing to you after reading your item on the iPod. My wife, who once bought me an autographed copy of THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES, gave me a Dell Jukebox as an anniversary gift last July. (I had noticed that it was cheaper, and the reviews had mentioned that it had a longer battery life than the iPod.) I have been using it it for about nine months now, and it has a really good battery life. I've never run out of power before I recharged it, so I don't know what the maximum battery life is, but I always seem to get many hours of use before I have to recharge it again. Of course, the other test will be how long the battery lasts before it wears out and won't hold a charge anymore. The Dell Jukebox never gets much in the way of praise, but it is reliable and seems to work well.

Unfortunately, Dell has a real problem with aesthetics, which limits the appeal of its products.

Reader Nick Schweitzer recommends the Creative Zen Touch:

I bought mine a few months ago and it is excellent from a hardware perspective... I think just as easy to use as an iPod with a few extra features. The software is not quite as good as iTunes... but the battery is great. I go a couple days between charging, and I have it on all day at work. There is also a smaller Zen very comparable to the iPod mini as well.

There you have it: Plenty of iPod competition, but nobody's got everything. If you're buying an Apple product of any kind, my recommendation from long years of experience, is to always buy the Apple Care extended warranty. You absolutely will need it.

That's what scientists who want to do embryonic stem cell research are trying to do with women's eggs. A new report from the National Academies recommends ethical guidelines for stem cell research, including what Rick Weiss of the WaPost characterized as a surprising call for a ban on paying egg donors.

I'm not so sure we should be surprised. Scientists are as self-interested as anyone else, especially when it comes to stretching scarce research dollars. What the guidelines do is try to set up a buyers' cartel.

Eggs are the scarce resource for producing embryos, including clones, for research. Donating eggs is not the least bit like donating sperm. It's no fun, and involves lots of nasty hormone injections and more than a little risk. (One of my relatives, who was young and otherwise healthy, was once hospitalized because of complications from an attempted egg donation.) Women who donate eggs for fertility treatments are well compensated for their troubles. (This site gives a price of $5,000.) And these women get the psychological compensation of knowing they're helping a couple have a much-wanted child. For most people, contributing to the incremental progress of medical research just doesn't have the same emotional punch.

It's not clear where researchers think free eggs will come from. Either the no-payment plan is a subtle way to sabotage research cloning by depriving it of eggs, or it's an economically naive effort to exploit idealistic young egg donors. Neither motive strikes me as ethical.

The National Academies information page, including a link to the full report, is here.

Q: I have to be a little skeptical. My response to the way Target marketed the line was, "Target doesn't actually think its customers are going to like these things. It's not marketing the things. It's marketing Philippe Starck--oh, you should know who he is, you should be impressed that we have him." How well did those designs actually do?

A: It was definitely marketed to capitalize on the buzz. It was not a huge volume program. But the sippy cup in particular really became an icon for the program. I literally got faxes and emails from people in Germany and Japan and Italy. They were frantic to know how they could get one of these sippy cups. I have two samples of that product left, and I take it with me to some of my talks. I tell you, I could have sold those things 10 times over at a huge markup.

Part of the benefit to Target from the Starck Reality program was that we developed our staff. To get these products executed to the intense specifications of Philippe and his design team, we jumped through lot of hoops. The program gave our designers, young designers pretty new out of school, the opportunity to work with a master for a year, and to feel good about what they did ,and to be challenged constantly: "Not good enough, not good enough. We have to be able to do this." There were so many times when a vendor said, "Sorry we can't do that." Philippe's answer was, "Well, they can if they do it this way or look at it this way." Or, "Then we find somebody who can do it." That was a huge, valuable lesson for us in terms of how we--the design department and trend department--were going to work with merchants in the future. He was all about finding solutions, exploring all the possibilities, getting outside the box, and then finding different ways to do things. It was literally like sending your staff to graduate school.

She was right about one thing. Around the time of our interview, the sippy cup was going for around $15 on Ebay.

And I'm not alone. Here's a protest video, and here's a non-Apple page of FAQ on the problem. Unlike many iPod users, I'm fairly environmentally insensitive and don't mind the disposable approach per se. But, given the price of the product, it should last a lot longer. For now, I'm sticking to plugging my Sony earbuds into my computer.

Now reader Rick Lee, a commercial photographer in Charleston, West Virginia, informs me that McDonald's retro style is apparently going national. He posts the photographic evidence on his blog, along with some other fun entries, including a couple of photographer's tricks for making science look cool, even when you aren't in an actual lab.

Now word comes that Apple stores are pulling all titles published by Wiley, including David Pogue's popular Macs for Dummies, 8th Edition to punish the publisher for the forthcoming book iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business. The company's Control Freak in Charge may have every right to be mad, but does it really serve Apple's customers, or its shareholders, to make Mac info more cumbersome to get? Or to look like a heavy-handed jerk after you've already made the company look bad trying to censor blogs? (Via Good Morning Silicon Valley.) At this writing, iCon Steve Jobs is at 144 on Amazon, with publication more than a month away.

This award is a Very Big Deal, though you'd never know it from National Journal or the anything-but-self-aggrandizing Mr. Rauch. (If you crossed him with Camille Paglia, you'd get a normal level of writerly self-promotion.) The National Magazine Awards are like the Pulitzers or the Oscars--only with a much tighter connection between actual merit and winning.

Demonstrating a refreshing range, the specific columns honored were on gay marriage, McCain-Feingold, and the political risks of the "ownership society".

All of these factors collapse into a single economic metric: The demand elasticity for crude is very low among the ordinary drivers whose behavior is most reviled by people who think they know better. In the short term low elasticity means consumers can't easily change their habits--they are stuck with the car engine and the commuting pattern they had yesterday. In the long term it means that when you buy a car, and the house you've always wanted, the capital costs you are incurring are so large that alongside them the oil is almost too cheap to meter.

I'm not entirely convinced. There's a lot of opportunity for small adjustments, since the vast majority of cars on the road at any given time are there for optional trips. Commuting isn't the only reason people drive. You can save a lot of gas by combining errands more efficiently, walking for short distances, or even staying home. But Peter's column is definitely worth a read.

Maybe it's my imagination, but the traffic in L.A. seems to be getting less horrible as gas prices get closer to $3.00 a gallon.

After his public humiliation--Studebaker unceremoniously fired him--Loewy took out his frustrations in a speech that was later published in The Atlantic. Ranting against the bad taste of his fellow Americans and the car designers who encouraged them, he said things like, "The world will soon forget that under these gaudy shells are concealed masterpieces of inspired technology. What we see today looks more like an orgiastic chrome plated brawl." (Not so long before, Loewy, with his unnecessarily streamlined pencil sharpeners and flair for publicity, had been the epitome of middlebrow not-so-good taste.)

What Grant didn't mention about Loewy's speech/article is that much of it was about what cars will be like in 2005--and that it's online, in the publicly accessible portion of The Atlantic's great web archives.

In predicting the car of the future, Loewy gets some things right, notably the increased emphasis on safety, but he gets a lot wrong, right from the start: "Experts estimate that fifty years from now there will be 120 million automobiles on the roads for approximately 98 million Americans." (There are roughly 300 million Americans, with about the same number of cars.)

If you're a fan of mid-century images, particularly of cars, I recomment Ephemera Now, with running comments here. My favorites aren't the cars, though they're prettier, but the bizarre paintings of televisions in oddly glamorous places.

When most people think about where new or improved products come from, they imagine two kinds of innovators: either engineers and marketers in big companies trying to "find a need and fill it" or garage entrepreneurs hoping to strike it rich by inventing the next big thing.

But a lot of significant innovations do not come from people trying to figure out what customers may want. They come from the users themselves, who know exactly what they want but cannot get it in existing products.

"A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer products," Eric von Hippel, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in "Democratizing Innovation," recently published by MIT Press. (The book can be downloaded at Professor von Hippel's Web site, http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/.)

Innovation by users is not new, but it is growing. Thanks to low-cost computer-based design products, innovators do not have to work in a professional organization to have access to high-quality tools. Even home sewing machines have all sorts of computerized abilities. And once a new design is in digital form, the Internet allows users to share their ideas easily.

Because users are often quite different from each other, their innovation, by definition, accommodates variety. A survey of users of Apache Web server software found that different sites had different security needs: one size definitely did not fit all. Nineteen percent of the users surveyed had written new code to tailor the software to their specific purposes.

"Users are designing exactly what they want for themselves; they have only a market of one to serve," Professor von Hippel said in an interview. "Manufacturers are trying to fit their existing investments and existing solution types to the largest market possible."

Read the whole column here.

In his column a week ago, the WSJ's Holman Jenkins mordantly explained why the company can't invest the bucks that might yield hot new cars:

GM's boss should be the media's darling, running his company to provide job security and health care for its workers first, second and third. Wonder why GM invests just enough in new product to keep the game going, not enough to make its cars really sought after? Because the extra capital that would have to be invested goes instead to doling out gold-plated health care -- no copays, no deductibles -- to workers and to plumping up their pension fund, which two years ago required the largest corporate debt offering in history to top off....

GM made an effort to imply that Zeta resources were being deployed to speed up redesigned pickup trucks and SUVs, which will begin to appear next year. This was smokescreen. Zeta was shelved to free up money in coming years to meet the pension and health-care obligations to workers -- money that manifestly won't be coming from sales of G6s, Cobalts and LaCrosses, the new models that GM had nursed high hopes for.

All these cars are decent or even better than decent by every standard except the best of what GM's competitors have on offer -- such as riskier styling, meatier engines and more advanced transmissions (five- and six-speed automatics are state of the art today, whereas GM has tried to make it through another cycle with stale four-speed automatics).

Deep-sixing Zeta was GM's way of saying it will devote the rest of the decade to non-wow products. Risk taking, after all, is what you do when you're working for diversified shareholders, none of whom will go hungry if you swing for the fences and miss. It's not what you do when the primary goal is to sustain workers, retirees and their dependents in the accustomed manner until nature finally relieves you of the burden....

Mr. Wagoner has decided that GM will go the final laps in its race with the mortality tables without the possibility of any hits that Zeta might have spawned. This may be entirely rational, but the grim reaper had better hold up his end of the bargain. In the meantime, GM shareholders can expect the thrill ride to get only more, er, thrilling.

I'd say, "Read the whole thing," but you can only do that if you have a subscription.

Following my talk at this morning's conference, Grant McCracken--whose blog is almost as good as his books--gave a great talk about how the strange aesthetics of 1950s cars so effectively tapped into the aspirations of that era's culture, confounding the formulas of the famous Raymond Loewy, whose streamlined 1954 Studabaker was an embarrassing flop. The talk was drawn from a fascinating argument developed in Grant's new book, which due in a month or so

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".

I doubt we'll see a "second Renaissance," except in the narrowest sense of recovering ancient texts, but if we do, we can thank the Mormons. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

If you're wondering what a Boohbah is--and I know I was--check out the blog's main page

"Books for soldiers.com" is a website dedicated to sending books to soldiers on active duty. The soldiers log on and make their requests for books, cds, etc. Until recently, all it took to read their requests was a password, requested in the usual relaxed way. Now, however, the website requires that you register by mail, with a notarized letter and a contribution to cover the cost of the new security measures.

This is because people are sending letter bombs to the solders on the website. Its all part of this new kind of warfare.

We do not ask for a contribution, we ask for a processing fee - according to our attorney, one is voluntary and the other is not.

I have no knowledge of letter bombs, but I have had a ton of complaints from families and soldiers concerning abuses of their mailing address. Unwanted political rants, pornography, and other abuses have occurred. However, our main concern was to patch the security hole BEFORE someone sent a dangerous package to a solider.

The DoD does use a complicated system of FPO and APO addresses but one can figure it out if you have enough time.

So, bombs don't get through--I'd hope the military would detect them en route--but obnoxious mail does. (I'm not entirely sure the pornography is unwanted, though it's certainly unauthorized.)

That, my dear readers, is what is known in the trade as reporting--minus the time-consuming part where I actually have to craft a story. (And minus the really annoying part where I call people at pre-arranged times only to find they're not even in the state, much less their offices, or where I wait by the phone for return calls that never come. I've had a lot of experience with that sort of thing lately, reminding me why I don't want to be a regular reporter.)

My name is SSGT Jerry Jeffrey and I'm a Marine currently in Iraq till Oct 05 and have approx 30 Marines that work for me. We really enjoy watching movies and listening to music to help combat the bordom during down time. We work 12-14 hour days and enjoy kicking back and relaxing to a good movie or cd. Please add our unit to your list to recieve dvd's, and cd's.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT

Update: A couple of readers have scolded me for posting the address of a servicemember, saying it puts him in danger. (How that happens with an FPO address I don't quite understand, but then the military mail system is a mystery to me.) If that's the case, SSGT Jeffrey probably shouldn't be writing to random bloggers asking for mail. At any rate, I've taken down the address, so if you'd like to send some entertainment to the troops, email me for the address.

The LAT's coverage is here and here. George Mason law professor and Volokh Conspirator David E. Bernstein has a somewhat outdated webpage devoted to the controversy. Joseph Nocera's category-killing Fortune article on breast implants and toxic torts is posted here, probablyly without permission.

For another point of view, see this review, done in Sin City's graphic style. (Via Design Observer.)

In related news, the best theory for my unknown teen idol photo comes from reader Diana Day, who writes:

The unidentified "celeb" in the last photo is Matt Czuchry, who plays the love interest of Alexis Bledel (Becky in the movie) on the TV show Gilmore Girls. I don't know who his girlfriend is in real life; it's embarassing enough that I can identify him.

Arguably, a contemporary pope need never leave Rome. With television, radio, and the Internet--not to mention plain old ordinary print--why take the trouble to travel? Your message, your voice, your image can be anywhere in the world in an instant. Yet John Paul II left Rome 104 times, "more than all previous popes combined," notes Newsweek in a graphic that unfortunately doesn't appear to be online, and traveled more than 775,000 miles.

The pope understood extraordinarily well was that in an age of pervasive media, personal presence is not less valuable but more so. He didn't need Esther Dyson to teach him. He had Catholic theology--a church that preaches the incarnation of God as man and the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Mass. These doctrines may not be true (I certainly reject them) but they do contain important wisdom: Human beings exist, even in their most spiritual moments, as tactile, physical beings. There is no substitute for personal presence.

A North Dallas High School teacher was arrested and placed on paid administrative leave after an attack last week on a middle school teacher in front of students.

Paulette Baines was charged with assault with bodily injury in connection with the beating Friday, Dallas County Jail records show. Ms. Baines, 45, was released from jail early Saturday after posting $2,500 bail, a jail official said.

She could not be reached for comment. A man who answered the telephone at her home and said he was her husband said they had no comment.

Mary Oliver, a teacher at William B. Travis Academy/Vanguard for the Academically Talented and Gifted, said she suffered several injuries, including bruises to her face, a concussion and two broken ribs. Ms. Oliver, 45, who teaches seventh-grade science, was recovering from her injuries at home Sunday.

The reason for the attack: Ms. Oliver had told Ms. Baines's daughter and other students that they weren't supposed to be at their lockers during class.