By what measure such a result be obtained? It may be possible to find a certain way to make it beat NYC, but that's because NYC ends fairly suddenly, and LA hardly does. If you look at strict city limits, then LA is 3 times as sparse as NYC. If you look at the county level, then the whole of LA County (a very large county) is only 20% more populated than NYC (a land area 12 times smaller). The metropolitan area of LA is less populated than the metropolitan area of NYC, and which area is larger? Well, LA, of course. At first blush, the only way I can see to make the above statement be true is to exclude NYC from the USA. The number mentioned in the article you cite matches the data I can find (~7600 per square mile); it's just that the number I can find for the density of NYC is ~26000 per square mile.

As a social, economic, and cultural unit, New York does not "end suddenly." To the contrary, the local area stretches well into New Jersey and Connecticut. Yes, those places are psychologically and politically different from NYC proper (and even more different from Manhattan), but Manhattan Beach and Pasadena aren't part of L.A., either. And the San Fernando Valley, while politically part of the city, has long been psychologically separate; even the mailing addresses say Tarzana or Van Nuys, not Los Angeles.

In response to my query about the numbers, Bob Bruegmann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History, wrote:

The only good measure of urban densities is the census bureau's "urbanized areas." These include central cities and all of the adjacent land over 1000 people per square mile (which is roughly the limit of the regularly developed suburbs and the exurbs and rural areas beyond). Using this measure the LA urbanized area had a density of over 7,000 people per square mile in 2000 making it at least the densest large urbanized area in the US. In fact, I think it is the densest urbanized area in North America (Toronto comes in at 6800 according to the Canadian census which has a similar definition of urbanized area) but I would want to do some further checking before swearing to that latter.

The problem with every other measure is that it relies on artificial political boundaries. So cities that happen to have large boundaries will appear to be very lightly populated and cities whose boundaries are tightly drawn can appear to have very high densities when, in fact, these figures have very little relationship to the actual densities at the center, at the edge or at any other given point. The same is true for "metropolitan areas" which are based on the arbitrarily drawn county lines. These are particularly useless in California where a county like San Bernardino or Riverside is counted as "urban" by the census because a little piece of it is urbanized whereas the vast majority of the county, stretching all the way to the Nevada border, is almost unpopulated desert.

There is an extremely useful compilation of statistics for urbanized areas and their densities on Wendell Cox's demographia.com.

Most of the problems people attribute to L.A.'s sprawl--notably traffic and long travel times--are actually caused by its density. The same is true in New York, however defined. Forget driving to New Jersey or Connecticut. It can take 45 minutes to travel the roughly five miles from the Upper West Side to Greenwich Village, even if you take the subway. When you pack a lot of people close together, the place tends to get crowded. That's great for culture and commerce, but it ratchets up social stress and makes getting places harder.

In his books, legal commentator Walter Olson has argued that litigation often creates policies that no legislature (or, in the case of employment law, union bargaining) would adopt. Writing in the LAT Sunday magazine, Andy Meisler gives an example:

Mark Pollock is a Napa-based environmental lawyer, a former Bay Area student radical and lover of fine food. Gloria Alvarez is a resident of Culver City who, for the last 33 years, has owned and operated Gloria's Cake & Candy Supplies, a tiny Westside culinary landmark jammed into a former American Legion Hall near the intersection of Sawtelle and Venice. Pollock and the seventysomething Alvarez have more than a little in common.

To be precise, on April 23, 2003, Pollock and his lone associate, Evangeline James, sued Alvarez and a who's who of names from the bakery world: "Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.; Dean & Deluca Inc.; Chefshop.com Inc.; Pfeil & Holing Inc.; Kitchen Etc.; Q.A. Products Inc.; Confectionary House; Beryl's Cake Decorating & Pastry Supplies; American Cake Supply; Albert Uster Imports Inc.; Do It With Icing; Cooking.com Inc.; Candyland Crafts Inc.; Favors by Lisa; Sugarbakers Cake, Candy and Wedding Supplies Inc.; Kitchen Conservatory Inc.; American Gourmet Foods Inc.; Annerose Hess d.b.a. Ohess; Pastry Wiz; Barry Farm Enterprises; GM Cake and Candy Supplies d.b.a. Cybercakes; Babykakes; and Does 1 through 100 inclusive."

Pollock's lawsuit swept through the close-knit world of American cake decorating like a hot knife through icing. Despite no law specifically outlawing dragées, private citizen Pollock took it upon himself to rid every last supermarket shelf, specialty food store and mail-order purveyor in California of those tiny silver-covered sugar balls you've been licking or flicking off the top of your cupcakes since you were a tyke.

Pollock is a fanatic who's determined to stamp out other people's small pleasures in pursuit of his own version of righteous living (and collect lots of money along the way). He succeeds because it costs him almost nothing to sue. His victims settle rather than spend more, in time and money, to fight his claims. Any litigation system that encourages--indeed, rewards--this petty tyranny needs serious reform.

Speaking of Kong, we saw the movie Saturday night and enjoyed it very much. It's definitely Big Screen material. You don't want to wait for the DVD.

Here's a press release from the Institute for Justice. Here's a news article in Crain's Detroit Business.

On Aug. 19, before Hurricane Katrina pounded the sugar-rich gulf region, large users could buy refined beet and cane sugar for up to 28 cents a pound, according to Milling & Baking News. By Dec. 2, that price had climbed to 42 cents a pound--the largest midyear jump since at least 1982, according to Ron Sterk, assistant editor of the trade publication.

Some large buyers locked in the lower prices with long-term contracts earlier in the year. Others were forced to pay spot prices that peaked at 72 cents a pound....

The U.S. scarfs down about 10 million tons of sugar a year among retail, food service and manufacturing uses, according to Jack Roney, director of economics with the American Sugar Alliance in Arlington, Va.

Typically, more than 80 percent of that need – up to 8.5 million tons – is homegrown. Some 40 percent of that comes from Louisiana and Florida, with a smaller amount from Texas. All those states were hit hard by the 2005 hurricanes.

"There's no question that they hit the Louisiana farmers and the Florida farmers pretty hard," Mr. Roney said. "It knocked the cane over and inundated it with water."

He said farmers are still trying to "figure out how to save that crop."

In addition, one of the nation's largest refineries, Domino Foods' plant near New Orleans, sustained heavy damage from Katrina's floods. It is slated to reopen today.

Given the storms and a lower-than-expected yield from Midwest sugar beets, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that sugar production this year will be down to 7.5 million tons. Imports will help pick up the slack.

Unfortunately, that's all DMN reporter Karen Robinson-Jacobs has to say about imports. Sugar is in fact one of the country's most subsidized and protected industries. Here's an earlier post on the topic, with links to previous ones. And here's an old-but-seasonal article by Cato's Dan Griswold on the cost of sugar quotas. Maybe there's a post-Katrina opportunity for a buyout in exchange for phasing out quotas and subsidies.

Bruegmann has always been interested in the built environment and urban change. "When I went to study this," he says by phone from Chicago, "I went to a department of art history, because that's where people talked about architecture. It probably wasn't the most logical place for me to go, because when I got there I had to learn about Nativity scenes and the Madonnas of 15th century Florence.

"However, it gave me something that I think is invaluable: a broad panorama of what people have thought about aesthetics over the last couple of thousand years. And because a lot of social scientists don't have that, they're often very puzzled by arguments that truly are aesthetic and metaphysical in nature but are disguised as being pragmatic and about objective things."

He's a historian of the beautiful, documenting something often taken as the height of ugliness. And the issue, he says, really is aesthetic at base. "And aesthetic judgments are not very susceptible to explanation or argument. That's why it's so hard to talk about."

Part of what's startling about the book is its defiance of the idea that sprawl was birthed in the postwar U.S.: Sprawl is not just bad but "American bad," architecture critic Witold Rybczynski writes in a recent Slate review, blaming it, with tongue in cheek, for everything from McMansions to the disappearance of countryside to an oil-driven Gulf War. "Like expanding waistlines, it's touted around the world as an example of our profligacy and wastefulness as a nation."

But Bruegmann's book is grounded in a history lesson--one that finds the roots of present-day Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles in Augustan Rome or Restoration London. People of means, he writes, have always tried to get some distance from urban centers, often inhabiting villas outside city walls.

"I'm sure you would have found it in the very first city ever established," he says. "Living in cities has almost always been unpleasant and unhealthy--not something most people wanted. If you were in imperial Rome, crowded into dark, dingy, polluted apartment buildings, it would have been a nightmare. Most cities I looked at had just crushing density until about the 18th century."

Timberg's profile also makes the never-repeated-too-often point that the densest metropolis in America is Los Angeles. Just because the city goes on and on and on doesn't mean you can't find just about anything you want, not to mention thousands and thousands of people, within a short walk.

The Future and Its Enemies

Competition provides not only useful criticism but a continuous source of experiments. It gives people...the ideas with which to create still more progress and encourages them, too, to come up with incremental improvements. By picking winners, stasist protectionism eliminates this learning process, which includes learning what does not work.

"Premature choice," warns the physicist Freeman Dyson, "means betting all your money on one horse before you have found out whether she is lame." Protecting established interests from new challengers is one form of premature choice. But technocratic planners also sometimes kill existing alternatives to force their new ideas to "succeed." To protect the space shuttle, NASA not only blocked competition from private space launch companies, it also eliminated its own expendable launchers. Such pre-emptive verdicts often mark public works projects. Planners pick an all-purpose winner, squeeze out alternatives, and eliminate any real chance of experiment and learning.

Consider the infamous Denver International Airport. Aviation officials touted the $4.9 billion project as essential to keep up with the region's growth. They promised it would be a vast improvement over the old Stapleton Airport, which was often socked in by bad weather. But its sponsors foisted DIA on unwilling customers. The airport is 25 miles outside Denver, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, while Stapleton was just 15 minutes from downtown. To make matters worse, there are no hotels near DIA. And the new airport's cost per passenger is somewhere between $11.75 and $18.14, depending on how you count--substantially more than either the $4.59 at Stapleton or the $9.91 promised by former Mayor Federico Pena. Frequent travelers resent the inconvenience and the generally higher ticket prices. "I liked Stapleton better," one told The Denver Post. "You could literally leave about 45 minutes before your plane departed. With DIA, you have to leave an hour and a half before." A flight attendant expressed a common sentiment: "It's a beautiful airport. But we hate it."

On the airport's first anniversary, journalists had trouble reaching a simple verdict on DIA. There were complaints all right--lots of them. But some passengers liked the spiffy new airport, with its marble floors and inviting shops. And flight delays had in fact dropped dramatically. The first-anniversary stories were confused, lacking a central theme.

The reporters had missed the main problem: The city had eliminated the most obvious source of feedback--competition from the old airport. It had made DIA a protected monopoly rather than an experiment subject to competitive trial. By shutting down Stapleton, DIA's political sponsors had made it impossible to rule the new airport a definite error. No matter how many complaints passengers lodge, officials can always point to other advantages. At the same time, however, DIA's monopoly keeps it from becoming an accepted success. Without a genuine trial, we simply have no way to tell whether travelers (or airlines) would rather trade a convenient location for fewer weather-related delays. One airport must fit all: Love it or hate it, if you're flying from Denver you don't have a choice.

UPDATE: Maybe I'll get more votes if I take the similarly-complected Megan McArdle's approach: "Asymmetrical Information has been nominated for best business blog of 2005. Please go vote for us. Because if we don't win, I'll cry. Big, fat tears rolling out of my dewy green eyes, staining my porcelain cheeks as my body racks with sobs. No one wants that."

As Fort Worth Star-Telegram business reporter Mitchell Schnurman notes on his terrific blog, American's threats don't make a whole lot of sense as anything other than a temper tantrum.

I never thought it made much sense for American to take on Southwest at Love, considering AA’s efficiencies and reach at D/FW. But American says too many of its best customers would opt for Love’s closer-in location.

Maybe on trips to New York, Chicago or LA, but St. Louis and KC? My gut tells me there aren’t that many Highland Park Platinum members in danger of being poached on those routes.

But AA is in a box now. It’s been huffing and puffing about having to go to Love, and now it has to make good on the threat, even if it’s for a single state.

Can American make money on this service? No way, unless it's indirect -- if it somehow helps keep Wright in place.

Schnurman's tough-minded coverage of the issue demonstrates the great virtues of distant newspaper owners. His paper is owned by Knight Ridder, which isn't entangled in local crony capitalism. The Dallas Morning News by contrast seems terrified to even voice an opinion on the issue. (And I'm not just annoyed that they turned down this piece on the grounds that they'd already run too much on the topic. In fact, I'm delighted. D Magazine paid me twice the DMN's rate, and I like them better anyway.)

Viewed up close, the whole Wright discussion demonstrates the wisdom of my old boss Bob Poole, who has spent at least two decades arguing for airport privatization. Locally, the only thing any politico seems to care about is what's good for DFW Airport and, secondarily, for the airlines. The traveling public doesn't count--either in the political equation (too diffuse) or, apparently, in airport management. Anyone who's had the misfortune of traveling through DFW knows that, with the exception of its new Terminal D, it's hardly a comfortable or accommodating place. Neither does it seem to maximize revenue. No mall developer would use space so pathetically.

Bob Poole isn't alone. When I interviewed Brookings Institution economist Cliff Winston for this NYT article on the Wright Amendment, he denounced the pernicious effects of government-owned airports. The debate over Wright, he said,

really exposes the weakness of our current public-sector provision of airport infrastructure, where this is allowed to happen--having DFW attempt to block something that would benefit consumers because [the airport] is not set up to be an effective competitor....

What is so troubling about airports is they simply have no experience or effective relationship with their customers, airlines. It's not like they work with these guys actively and say, "What can we do to attract you? What sort of things should we be doing?" It's all political:" What can we do to keep you happy in underwriting our bonds?" And usually what keeps them happy is keeping out other people from the airport. The whole incentive for you to develop an effective relationship between an airline and an airport to become more competitive and efficient is just not there. The incentives are basically to slap each other's back, to limit competition and keep a secure source of revenue.

Our conversation took place almost exactly a year ago. This week, DFW released a study demonstrating just how completely politicized its measures of "success" are. Stores and restaurants owned by women, minorities, and disabled people account for a higher percentage of total retail sales at DFW than at any other airport, just over half. As the Star Telegram reported:

Don O'Bannon, vice president of D/FW's small and emerging business department, said D/FW's success "far exceeds other competing hubs out there."...

"The moment we start talking about moving passengers out of D/FW to Love Field, I think you'll start to see a dramatic impact on concessionaires," he said. "It speaks volumes for what's going on and how important it is."

The airport had no comments on whether the traveling public is satisfied with the rather pathetic choices it offers. Why, after all, should it care? Paying customers aren't organized enough to exert political influence. Minority concessionaires, like Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (always identified in the press as representing Love Field, where she also has concession interests), do. I share Cliff Winston's disgust.

Full disclosure: The article I'm writing on pens is for Spirit, the Southwest Airlines magazine. If that sounds like a conflict, keep in mind that the magazine is published by a subsidiary of American Airlines. Weird. My real conflict is that I'm a consumer who would benefit enormously from repeal of the Wright Amendment.

The DMN's archive of Wright coverage is here.

This burgeoning business provides a microcosm of learning and value-creation in a dynamic economy. For the full picture (and some pretty photos), see my 2003 article.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board I serve, does a wonderful job holding the nation's colleges and universities to their declared principles of academic freedom. After helping to transform FIRE from a startup to a professionally run organization, the current president, David French, is stepping down at the end of the year, with plans to serve his country in the JAG Corps. We're looking for a new president, and I'm on the search committee.

The job has three primary responsibilities: communicating the principles of the organization in a variety of public media; managing FIRE, including both long-term strategy and immediate tactics, personnel, etc.; and fundraising. FIRE's annual budget is about $1.2 million. A detailed job description is here. If you are interested, or know somebody who might be a good candidate, please email me.

An estimated 700 types of nanomaterials are being manufactured at about 800 facilities in this country alone, prompting several federal agencies to focus seriously on nano safety. Yet no agency has developed safety rules specific to nanomaterials. And the approach being taken by the Environmental Protection Agency, arguably the furthest along of any regulatory body, is already facing criticism by some as inadequate.

In documents that are now being finalized for public comment, the agency calls for a "stewardship program" that would be voluntary. Manufacturers would be asked to alert officials about nanoproducts they are making and to provide information about environmental or health risks they have uncovered. But they would not be required to make such reports or to do special studies.

Although the agency may at some point feel the need to impose stricter controls, the voluntary approach has the advantage that it can be implemented more quickly, said Charles Auer, director of the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics. He added that the agency is not sure it understands enough about the new materials to know how best to regulate them.

"This way we can develop something, gain experience and learn more about what we're dealing with," Auer said.

I don't know whether to be glad that front-line regulators are aware of their ignorance or upset that Weiss didn't find anyone outside the government to suggest that maybe slapping controls on a nascent technology isn't the best way to proceed.

Coolness, like any aesthetic response, is (to quote myself in umpteen speeches) "immediate, perceptual, and emotional. It is not cognitive." Trying to make aesthetic value cognitive leads analysts of all sorts to fixate on status and exclusivity, because they're easy to understand.

That said, with enough after-the-fact cognitive effort, I think it's possible to identify elements, like flatness in electronics, that make something cool, at least at a particular moment in time. Graceful ingenuity, like that displayed in Podlowski's rings, is cool. If I work hard enough, I might even be able to articulate some of the factors that make the BCBG bags cool. But this is a blog, and I'm too lazy to make the effort. (I've spent the last year writing thousands of unpublished words analyzing glamour, another powerful, intangible quality that depends on the audience's imagination.)

What's really hard about explaining "cool" isn't analyzing an object you've already decided is cool. It's creating a cool object in the first place. You can't just mix and match known elements to solve a well-defined problem. You have to intuit what will evoke the right emotions.

It's easy to think of cool electronics. Flat-screen TVs are cool. So is the Motorola Razr. Come to think of it, flatness is simply a cool feature in electronic products. Their cool factor doesn't depend on who owns them. That doesn't mean flatness will always seem cool. It could easily become normal and boring. (I remember when silent light switches seemed incredibly cool.) If we get used to the looks of something, if it starts to fade into the background, it loses its cool factor. But it's a mistake to confuse freshness with exclusivity.

Steven Levy asked me to name some non-electronic gadgets that are intrinsically cool. I'm terrible at answering questions like that off the top of my head, especially with no pictures. But here are some examples.

This is the BCBG Max Azria Signature bag, which comes in 16 colors and two or three different sizes. I have it in bright blue. It was just so cool that every time I saw it, whether in a store window or a magazine spread, I did a double take, as though I was seeing it for the first time. Turns out it doesn't just look good. It's also incredibly functional, with pockets for every purpose.

Lots of cars are cool. The classic Jaguar is the example I managed to come up with on the spot, undoubtedly because it's not just cool but glamorous. The Prius is cool, both technically (the hybrid engine) and aesthetically. After the initial boring model, designed to look as Camryish as possible, Toyota wisely gave the Prius a cool wrapping. Every time I see one, I think, "What a cool car. Oh yeah, it's a Prius."

For current cool at, however, it's hard to beat the Chrysler Crossfire.

The coolest thing I own is a lot smaller than a purse or a car or even my Razr. It's an amethyst ring by Polish designer Tomasz Plodowsi. It's not expensive, not exclusive, but really, really cool.

I'm enabling comments on this entry, in case you'd like to add your own. Please limit the discussion to this topic. UPDATE: I don't know why the comments link isn't showing up. I'm trying to figure out the problem. If you know Movable Type and have any theories, please let me know. I have "Allow Comments" set on "Open."

Lately, I've been fretting over The Substance of Style's respectable but unspectacular sales (roughly 18,000 copies in hardback, now out of print, and 12,000 copies so far in paperback). One problem seems to be that, while the book has enthusiastic fans, it has gotten minimal word of mouth. Why? Professor Postrel's cheery explanation: "The people who like your stuff don't have any friends."