Yes indeed, the link is to a Hit and Run post titled, "Bailey tackles touchy subjects." Very funny, to an elite audience.

No longer must we book geeks troll dusty old shops (mostly to no avail) for particular sentimental favorites. Several years ago I began to easily find most of McKenney's and Bracken's books online for just a few dollars each, along with those of another out-of-print author I'd often fruitlessly searched for, Judy Van Der Veer. Information about obscure and forgotten writers like Van Der Veer, whose atmospheric tales of ranch life in the San Diego backcountry have been described as "lyrically minimalist" by California state historian Kevin Starr, is another great gift from the Internet.

One Van Der Veer novel, November Grass, was recently reissued as part of Heyday Press's California Legacy Series. What I consider her best, though (because it's the only one with a real plot), is the 1966 children's classic Hold the Rein Free, about two ranch children who steal a thoroughbred mare from her heartless owner. It's still out of print but available used online for as little as a dollar or two, plus shipping. Even rereading this story as an adult I found it such a page-turner that I'm surprised it's never been optioned by Hollywood.

As prices get bid up, online auctions reveal just how much customers want out-of-print books. And that information has brought some once-lost books back into print. Tiny Purple House Press has flourished by bringing back old children's books. The press is named for Mr. Pine's Purple House, founder Jill Morgan's favorite book as a child.

Turns out the book was also Jeff Bezos's favorite, leading to an unexpected plug on an Amazon promotional email. "Within a day, the book's sales rank leapt from 50,000 to 15," report Beth Kwon and Maccabee Montandon in a Fortune Small Business feature. "'I was ecstatic,' says Morgan."

Recently reissued in a 40th anniversary edition, Mr. Pine's Purple House would make a fun gift for the nonconformist child in your life. As a child, I particularly enjoyed its characters' colorful surnames.

With Netflix, I have access to just about all the movies in the world. But, given my subscription model, they come to me only 2 at a time.

Two movies are not a lot. In a world of nearly limitless access, this should be irksome. But it ain't, of course, because these are almost always exactly the movies that interest me. Two movies has a deeper virtue. "Two movies" is an elimination of all the movies that might otherwise bid for my attention, damaging my sense of value and, God knows, even my identity formation.

Grant's analysis adds another dimension to some of my thoughts on the challenges and opportunities presented by proliferating choices.

"As more and more retailers have given less and less information, you are in search of the Holy Grail, the statistic that will give you some insight," says Michael Niemira, chief economist and director of research for the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group based in New York. "No single statistic out there is totally comprehensive."...

"Hardly any companies comment on how they did on Black Friday," says Merrill Lynch analyst Stacy Turnof, who covers department stores. "It used to be like that years ago, that you called them Monday and they gave you information." Those large companies that have shared information have reported increases well below the 22% cited by NRF (the Online Journal has assembled updates in its Holiday-Sales News Tracker).

Without hard sales data, there's a lot of room for different estimates, using everything from credit card sales to online surveys to videos of mall crowds.

Cheap chic is not a new concept, but it's now more foolproof than ever, according to Aaron Keller, cofounder of Capsule, a brand development firm in Minneapolis. ''Low-cost retailers are no longer a season behind," he said. ''They're side by side with the designers."

Keller credits a combination of technology, overseas manufacturing, and the fierce competition that exists among discount retailers for faster production cycles and lower prices. ''For instance, China is getting smarter about quality and product. A lot of retailers have been tapping into these and other countries where labor is cheaper," he said.

As a result, innovative design isn't the competitive advantage it once was. Also, since low-cost retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart, H&M, and Old Navy have such a large presence, they have the financial capital to negotiate for increasingly better quality, he said.

In other words, knockoffs don't look like knockoffs anymore.

Today, a shopper can buy a Marc Jacobs velvet beaded shrug for $440 at Saks or go to Old Navy and pick up a similar version for $26.50. ''It may not be the most premium quality, but if it's a trendy piece that will be out of rotation in a few weeks, even the most moneyed shopper is going to choose the less expensive option," Keller said.

According to the Cotton Incorporated Lifestyle Monitor newsletter, 58 percent of women surveyed said they're more likely to shop the apparel department at Target today than they were two years ago, citing better styles and low prices.

In TSOS, I define fashion as aesthetic changes purely for their own sake, without underlying functional reasons. (You could broaden that definition to change for change's sake.) Fashion in this sense isn't limited to personal appearance. So, for instance, baby names go through fashion cycles, even though there's no commercial market for them.

The "fashion industries" traditionally bundle several different values together in their goods. One is freshness, novelty, or trendiness. Suddenly some new style or color just looks right. It offers a new, timely source of aesthetic pleasure.

Until recently, however, that pleasure came attached to a particular meaning. Not everyone had access to the latest looks. Fresh styles were expensive, available at a limited number of retailers, and in many cases unknown to anyone but the cognoscenti until a year or so after they'd been introduced. So wearing the latest styles marked a fashionista as wealthy, well-connected, and well-informed.

Since this limited audience could pay high prices, new fashions also tended to be made with expensive materials and workmanship. Although they were often ephemeral, they tended to be made to last. That's still true at the highest end of the market, but the coming of "fast fashion" means that if all you want is the right look, you can buy it cheaply. If the style will be dead in a year, why buy a piece that will last any longer?

If being stylish means having the look of the moment, fast fashion is truly democratizing style. That creates an uncomfortable situation for businesses and individuals who depend on trendiness to create customer value and maintain personal status.

Over time, we can expect other sources of value to become more important. These may include quirky personal expression and style setting (think fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker), classic elegance and sprezzatura, fine detail and craftsmanship, and customization.

The survey asks you to rate the looks of various people in head shots, on characteristics including beauty, trustworthiness, intelligence, and age. To participate, go to this link and write DYNAMIST as your city of residence. All replies are anonymous. The deadline for participation is December 8.

You can email questions to niclas.berggren-at-ratio.se.

Postell Carter, a database manager for the New Israel Fund in the District, squeezes online shopping trips into his day in bits and pieces. "Generally every couple of hours I'll take a little break," he said, adding that he might go online to buy clothes for his kids or flowers for his wife. It rarely takes more than 10 minutes, he said.

He plans to start his Christmas shopping in earnest this week.

Carter said his boss is easygoing about online shopping, as employers increasingly are. Several major local companies said they are fine with employees doing personal errands on the job as long as they do not abuse the privilege.

"We actually think it's productive if they do it that way instead of running out to a suburban mall and stretching the one-hour lunch into two," said Bob Dobkin, a spokesman for Pepco, which has 2,500 employees in the area. "We do think it promotes a better employee relationship."

Workplace consultants say employers' attitudes about online shopping are evolving, generally in favor of giving more leeway to employees. Where many companies once blocked access to high-volume shopping sites, for example, they now use threshold software that simply limits an employee's time on such sites, said Susan Larson, vice president of global threat analysis and research for SurfControl, which makes filtering software for workplaces. Today, she said, companies are more worried about employees bringing viruses into an office network by shopping online than they are about reduced productivity.

One of the first books to examine how different employees draw the boundaries between work and home was sociologist Chris Nippert-Eng's fascinating Home and Work, which I wrote about in Forbes ASAP.

Blurring home and work can make work much more pleasant. But it can also make people feel like they're always at work. Social critics (and harried employees) who complain about the "overworked American" rarely consider how much personal time employees are consuming on the job.

Compared to service workers, manufacturing employees have far less flexibility on the job, because each has to integrate his or her production with everyone else's, and with an often-continuous flow of material. When I interviewed managers at American Leather for my NYT feature on the company, they noted that the American-born children of their immigrant factory employees rarely wanted to work in the plant and, when they did take jobs at American Leather, second-generation plant employees quit. Even when they have no white-collar options, they prefer lower-paid but less structured positions in retailing.

In an article on the new book Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair, the NYT's Guy Trebay delves a bit into the complex relationship between pleasure and meaning in the styling of black women's hair.

"Black people perhaps have always pushed the boundaries of creativity in this country," explained [Queens author] Mr. [George] Alexander, whose book is also the subject of an exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. "During the slave era there were obvious limits in terms of what you could do, since you were considered property. Basically, ever since, there has been this expanding desire to express oneself." That expression now takes the form of hairstyles that may involve the chemical processes that continue to stoke the multibillion-dollar, so-called ethnic personal-care market, but that equally results in Macy Gray Afros or the microbraids popularized by African immigrants, or else corn rows or Bantu knots or Bolga braids or the Barbie-style hair extension favored by Naomi Campbell and Beyoncé Knowles.

Most surprising perhaps, among the styles now popular among African-American women is dreadlocks (now called locks), an ancient coiffure often exclusively associated with the Rastafarians and now an ordinary hair-care option at many black hair salons.

"Fifteen years ago locks were still a heavily politicized thing," explained Shannon Ayers, the proprietor of the Harlem salon and day spa Turning Heads, who appears in "Queens" with her locked hair plaited into braids as thick as hawsers.

A decade ago, when Ms. Ayers decided to abandon her corporate job in publishing, she stopped processing her hair and let it lock naturally. Her early experiments involved nothing more radical than prim little twists. Even at that, "my family thought I had lost my mind," she said. "And if I met a Mr. Banker or Lawyer, the reaction was, 'I can't be bringing somebody with these little Buckwheat things in her head to my corporate functions.' "

Now about half the clients at Ms. Ayers's salon come to have their hair styled in the locks, twists and coils worn by women as disparate as Ms. Morrison and Lauryn Hill.

"It's not radical anymore," said Cherare Robertson, a police officer in Washington, whose rust-tinged and restyled locks were set to dry one afternoon last week beneath a cap dryer that anomalously brought the Donna Reed 1950's to mind. "A couple years ago I just stopped worrying about satisfying society and started to enjoy my own beauty," she said.

Queens, which I haven't seen, includes glamorous black-and-white portraits by Michael Cunningham, whose earlier book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats is a favorite of mine.

The part of Almost Girl's post that you left out in the middle of that paragraph actually interested me a great deal. You know, about arts patronage. The sort of socialite who's going to drop $20,000 for a handbag is, after all, exactly the sort who probably also sits on opera and orchestra boards and may have donated a wing to the art museum with her husband. That's not the same as shoving a briefcase full of cash at an individual starving artist, but buying artworks is; rich people do that, too.

Actually, I think that for those of us who are affluent but not super-loaded--a much larger segment of the population--Almost Girl's calculations are still somewhat off. I decided to splurge and spent $600 on two credit card wallets last week. (That's not a frequent event in my life, just so you know--though I did smirk and think, Take that, Anna Quindlen, as I handed over my credit card.) But I did so after I'd planned my holiday season budget, including what I was going to donate to charitable organizations. If I hadn't spent that $600 at Vuitton, it would have sat in my bank account. Of course, it would have been invested from there, anyway, but this way part of it goes directly to the wages of not only leatherworkers and vice presidents of marketing but also saleswomen, janitors, and security guards. I don't see why helping them make a living is wasteful.

Those markets don't always behave the way fashionistas would like, leading to some contradictory blogging on Julie's part. In this post, she bemoans the latest trend in luxury markets, quoting a WWD article:

In a buoyant luxury market, ultraexpensive items--from $6,000 Azzedine Alaïa shearling jackets to $21,000 Bottega Veneta handbags--have become a surprise hit, selling briskly to a superrich clientele in search of the exceptional.

Julie has understandable sticker shock. What a waste of money! "I'll tell you what, you want to get something exceptional? Fund me for an entire year! I can easily live off of $21,000 (I live off of about $1,000 a month now and quite comfortably I might add, not including the cost of my college tuition). For the cost of one of your hand bags you could send me to New York City so that I could have the resources to pursue my dream in the glossies....So if anyone out there is reading this blog I would like a patron please! I promise to provide compelling articles, do valuable research, and add a needed dose of intellectualism to the fashion scene! Will you really miss the handbag?"

As an equally bourgeois person who considers my $400 purse (bought when I was 45 and had been self-supporting for more than two decades) a huge splurge, I sympathize. But this attitude directly contradicts an earlier posting on how the trendy but cheaply constructed "fast fashion" (analogous to fast food) at stores like H&M has eroded the public's appreciation of craftsmanship and fine design. Julie and other fashion bloggers also worry that big chains, with their mass merchandising, make it hard for young designers to find a market.

The "fast fashion" post mixes a lot of different issues, but the economic bottom line is that people should buy more expensive clothes, at more expensive stores, and keep them longer. "Let’s appreciate everything that goes into our clothing, have less of it but make it better," she writes.

Here we have a classically bourgeois attitude, with an elitist twist. Cheap is bad, and so is expensive. The right price is the one I'm willing to pay. The right priorities are mine.

But those Bottega Veneta bags are expensive for a reason. They not only use luxurious, expensive materials, but require meticulous, time-consuming craftsmanship. Only a few people in Italy have the necessary skills. And since the "production runs" are quite small, distribution and logistic costs are quite high per bag. I'm not saying that everyone should lust after a $21,000 purse (my car didn't cost that much, and I bought it new), only that rare design and craftsmanship have a cost. You can't have Bottega Veneta quality at H&M prices. The ultra-high end market is preserving artisanal skills.

And luxury companies know that in a world of fast fashion, they need to sell the intrinsic qualities of their merchandise. "We are back to luxury as an indulgence, not a show," said Bottega Veneta CEO Patrizio di Marco at the World Luxury Congress, a conference last month in Paris. (I was one of the speakers, the only one who talked not about luxury per se but about the increasingly aesthetic economy in which luxury goods compete.)

The great thing about fashion markets today is how diverse they are, even outside of major metro areas. Many different styles coexist and there isn't a simple, price-based status hierarchy. You can buy trendy but disposable clothes--"fast fashion"--or classic, enduring pieces. Basic jeans, sweaters, and T-shirts cost about the same, in nominal dollars, as they did when I was a teenager in the late 1970s, and their materials and construction are generally much better. Those cheap clothes are also helping a billion Chinese climb out of abject poverty.

The bad thing about fashion markets today is how many empire-waist tops and dresses they sell. I don't care how cute, young, and skinny you are. Those things make you look pregnant.

In a recent article in Economics Letters, University of Missouri economist Emek Basker examines whether sales increase if there are more days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Basker finds "a statistically significant increase in per-capita retail sales in November and December (combined) of approximately $6.50 per additional day over the relevant range." That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up: "The implied difference between the shortest and longest shopping seasons is $39 in spending per capita, or 20% of holiday spending in an average year."

Thus I am inviting you to participate in a fashion blogging event. Next Friday is Black Friday, the biggest shopping day in America. I am asking other fashion bloggers to join me in blogging about their own views on fashion, consumption, individuality, and the importance of fashion in our lives. I am encouraging any other fashion bloggers to join me in this endeavor, just make your own political fashion statements about your view on consumption and fashion and I will link up and we can hopefully dialogue about the importance of individuality in fashion! I would like this to grow organically so please email your fashion blogging friends to join the fun!

A slew of blogs are participating, and I will add my own thoughts over the next few days. For starters, I have to say that Julie's blog slogan, "Where Plato and Prada Meet," makes me feel really old. Back in the Dark Ages, when I was in school, girls who read philosophy did not follow fashion. (This essay suggests things may not have changed as much as I thought. For the record, it takes me 30 minutes to get ready in the morning, 45 minutes if I'm incredibly slow and do something complicated with my hair. But then I'm a nerd at heart.)

Authors in need of websites--or improved websites--should check out the site's designer, who specializes in authors at very affordable rates.

The orange zester sounds like just the thing for my favorite new cake trick--chocolate orange. You take a regular chocolate cake mix, add zest from three oranges, and substitute orange juice for water. I use Duncan Hines devils food cake mix, and three oranges produce almost enough juice to replace the water the mix calls for. I usually make up the difference with Minute Maid, but you can just fill in with water if you don't have prepared juice handy. Or you can use four oranges. Yum.

UPDATE: On Thanksgiving, the orange-chocolate cake was a big hit with the extended Postrel clan. And I even got to give my sister-in-law's zester its first use ever.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov. 11--Márcia Regina da Cruz, a 40-year-old janitor and mother of three, decided to splurge.

Ms. da Cruz, who lives in São Vicente, a coastal town an hour's bus ride from São Paulo, made a purchase in September equal to one-fifth of her monthly salary. She bought three irons--one for herself and two as gifts for her mother and sister - for 72 reais, or just over $32.

"It was a big purchase," she said. "I normally couldn't pay for it."

She could, though, because of a new policy at CompreBem, a supermarket chain owned by Grupo Pão de Açúcar, Brazil's biggest retailer. The plan allows her to pay for the purchase in 10 interest-free monthly installments of about $3.20 a month.

Big retailers in Brazil are lowering the bar for what they will sell on credit. Though the country's shops and department stores have long sold big-ticket items on installment plans, Brazilian and multinational retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour of France, have begun offering purchase plans with monthly payments that come to no more than one or two reais--about 45 to 90 cents.

The shift is an effort by retailers here to squeeze more spending from the big, but cash-short, bottom of the consumer base in Brazil, South America's biggest economy. Amid a tepid recovery that has yet to blossom into strong, sustained growth in retail demand, vendors are going to new lengths to help low-income Brazilians pay for everything from their weekly rice and beans to inexpensive items like clothes, radios, blenders and other goods. The installments are interest-free until a payment is missed, and then interest of at least 3 percent a month is charged....

Efficient information technology and credit screening make this trend possible, but they wouldn't work without sound monetary policy. Lenders have to be able to count on tolerable rates of inflation.

Slower inflation enabled stores to introduce payment plans for retail goods that many consumers once strained to finance--from tennis shoes and televisions, to refrigerators and home computers. So successful was retail credit, especially among the middle class, that price tags in many stores now highlight the cost of the monthly installment, with the total price in much smaller print below.

Yet a big portion of the consumer base still struggles with bare necessities. That is why vendors recently began applying their credit plans to low-cost items, too.

"You want to make it easy for even basic purchases," said João Carlos de Oliveira, president of the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets in São Paulo.

The approach was evident one recent Saturday evening at a Wal-Mart in southern Rio. Price tags offer telephones in 12 monthly installments of 3.57 reais. A plug-in electric grill sold for 12 monthly payments of 1.87 reais. Wines, domestic or imported, were offered for three interest-free monthly installments.

Wal-Mart and other big retailers use one central tool for such promotions: internal, or "private label," credit cards.

Because many low-income Brazilians do not have bank accounts, retailers offer their own cards to provide credit to customers unable to meet the conditions for traditional bank cards. With no annual fees and low salary requirements--stores compute card limits using monthly income stub--the cards offer many consumers their first experience with credit. They also give stores a platform to offer special card-only promotions, which foster user loyalty.

While items like irons and electric grills may seem like cheap consumer goods to Americans, they are actually household capital equipment--the sort of goods that represent accumulated wealth over time. This newly available credit thus enables not only short-term consumption but a higher standard of living over the long-term.

A lot of professionals are frustrated in their jobs because of what they see as corruption or incompetence in their field. Do you use your column to vent your frustration with your own field of work, the criminal-justice system?

Absolutely, and I'd say that's the main thing that I do with my column. What I find particularly galling is the extent to which reporters are taken in by prosecutors, to which they're taken in by courts. A court writes an extremely dishonest opinion where it mischaracterizes the facts of what happened, and the reporters never go to the record. They simply take the appeals court's word for it or the prosecutor's word for it, and I find that to be extremely aggravating.

When the Supreme Court came down with its Guantanamo "enemy combatant" opinions, in all the newspapers, I didn't read any reports that dissented from the judgment that the Supreme Court had struck down the Bush administration and rebuked it by insisting that it had to hold hearings for these "enemy combatants"; that they couldn't just snatch them off the street and put them away forever without any kind of hearing, trial, charges, nothing. If you read the controlling opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor closely, you saw that the nature of the hearing was a complete illusion and that under the rules that the Supreme Court set for what these hearings were supposed to be, no defendant could ever possibly win, ever.

Harvey's publications archive is on his website here.

Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave Macmillan) tells the story of a San Jose charter school that prepares students who are "failing but not in jail"  for four-year colleges.    

It really is an inspiring story. The average Downtown College Prep student comes from a Mexican immigrant family and enters ninth grade reading at a fifth grade level; 100 percent of graduates have been accepted at four-year colleges and 97 percent are on track to earn a bachelor's degree.  DCP now scores well above the state average on the Academic Performance Index, ranking in the top third compared to all high schools, including affluent suburban schools.  DCP follows what I call the work-your-butt-off philosophy of education. Its leaders analyze what's not working, adapt quickly and waste no time on esteem inflation or excuses.

While I discuss the charter school movement as a whole, Our School isn’t written for wonks. I think it's a good read, sort of Tracy Kidder meets Up the Down Staircase.  

My favorite part of the book is the part I didn't write.  The book includes Pedro’s rap, essays by Gil and Emilia,  Roberto’s speech, a discipline report on Hector, a teachers’ list of DCP jargon, the principal’s e-mail conversations with teachers, a phony field trip permission slip created by a girl who wanted a parent-free weekend, and a copy of the school’s budget. 

I'm looking forward to reading it. Now if Joanne can only sell the film rights...

Since Texas already defines marriage by statute as the union of one man and one woman, Prop 2 is nothing more than a gratuitous attempt to build Gov. Rick Perry's social-conservative voting base by attacking gays. Supporters say an amendment is necessary to control "activist judges." But the only judges the amendment would bind are Texas state judges. Texas state judges, including the state's Supreme Court, are elected by Texas voters. Texas state judges are quite conservative. They are, to put it mildly, highly unlikely to find a right to same-sex marriage in the state constitution.

Why are you still giving us only links to your NYT columns?

Now that we have to pay for access to the Times on line, most of us do not do so, and can no longer read Times stories or columns.

If you want us to read them, you'll have to post them on another server. If the Times won't let you, then I for one have no reason to read your stuff, anyway.

I know that you get paid for your writing, so my demanding to read it for free can sound churlish. But you were being paid before; the only difference now is the NYT on-line policy.

If the Times had in fact put my columns behind its pay-only wall, that would reduce the value of the column to me and essentially cut my pay. But that hasn't happened. My columns, like the vast, vast majority of NYT articles, are still available for free. And that, apparently, is exactly what they're worth to some people. (With my editor's permission, I do maintain an archive of columns on this site. The Times, however, owns all the reprint rights.)

It turns out the doomsayers were partly right: Nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, floods of East Europeans have washed into Britain.

Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain's decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the EU last year.

They work as bus drivers, farmhands and dentists, as waitresses, builders, and saleswomen; they are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English.

But the doomsayers were also wrong: Multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers like a sponge. Unemployment is still rock-bottom at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace.

Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected, in what is shaping up to be one of the great migrations of recent decades.

Yet the government says it still has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction.

"They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers," said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. "The U.K. is pleased with the way it's progressed over the first 16 months, and we're confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future."

Tens of thousands of East Europeans have also moved to Ireland and Sweden, the only other West European countries that opened their labor markets to the new EU members.

With nearly full employment, Ireland's booming economy still needs workers, and immigration is actively encouraged. More than 128,000 East Europeans from the new EU member states registered to work in Ireland from May 2004 to August this year.

Irish society seems to be adjusting to the newcomers, 45,000 of whom come from Poland. A newspaper in Limerick now runs a column in Polish; last summer the national bus company began a daily service from Dublin to Warsaw.

The phenomenon is more subdued in Sweden, where about 16,000 workers from the new EU countries registered with the authorities between May 2004 and early October this year. A substantial majority, about two thirds, were Poles, followed by Lithuanians and Estonians.

Fearing a massive influx of East Europeans after enlargement, other West European countries threw up barriers that will be lowered only gradually over the next decade. A Pole seeking to work in France, for example, still needs to apply for a work permit. France issued 737 such permits to Poles in the 10 months after enlargement; that is the number of Poles who arrive in Britain every two days.

Poles who go to Britain, in contrast, do not need any special permission.

In fact, Britain is so eager to recruit more Poles, by far the largest group of entrants since May last year, that British embassy officials in Warsaw have distributed brochures at Polish unemployment offices "so that if people wanted to go to the United Kingdom they had good information," Thompson said.

My latest NYT column looks at scholarly research suggesting that the wave of immigration in the 1990s did not, in fact, depress overall wages of American-born workers. What both stories share in common is a dynamic perspective. Over time, immigrant workers don't just fill existing job openings. In aggregate, they add to the total resources available for economic growth, making new capital investment more profitable and native-born labor more potentially productive.

It is pleasant traveling in France in the summer, which based on longitude should be on Greenwich time along with England, but instead is an hour ahead of London; the sun often goes down after 9:30pm. In effect, France and Spain are on double Daylight Saving Time in the summer and single Daylight Saving Time in the winter.

Peter Galison's book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time details the intense Anglo-French rivalries over where to draw the time-establishing prime meridian.

In other Buffy news, I've enjoyed dipping into Why Buffy Matters, a book of literary criticism.