So the test case I'd like to see is this: What would Borders do if Vanity Fair, or some equally big title, published the cartoons? Christopher Hitchens, call your editor.

Glenn Garvin's classic 1995 Reason article on the subject infuriated restrictionists with its heart-rending lead. But it's mostly a tough-minded--and still relevant--look at database problems, something nobody's bothering to discuss this time around.

UPDATE: Here's what happened to Lizbet Martinez (via Professor Postrel).

In my latest contribution to D Magazine, I examine how an extraordinarily successful Dallas mall, NorthPark Center, has managed to find the sweet spot for more than 40 years. Its neighborhood has gone from rural to suburban to urban. Retailers have come and gone, as have styles. Yet NorthPark has stayed NorthPark, without major redesigns. The key, as I suggest in TSOS, is figuring out what features constitute the timeless background and which need to be flexible.

*Instapundit's new book

Anti-immigration forces have made great strides politically by cynically conflating terrorists and criminals with dishwashers and construction workers. Any real plan to "secure the borders" should make it easier, not harder, to separate the two. Workers, especially those who want to settle and become citizens (or have their children become citizens), are not threats. They're contributors to American society.

University Medical Center, which is run by the University of Arizona in Tucson, formalized its non-directed kidney donation program almost three years ago. It has transplanted five non-directed kidneys and is scheduled to transplant a sixth one soon.

Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center began its program almost two years ago and since has transplanted three living kidneys, including the one from James last month.

The hope is that others will follow, that the idea will be less hard to fathom as organ-donation agencies grapple with a shortage of kidneys. Individual U.S. transplant centers maintain waiting lists with as many as 500 to 1,500 candidates, according to the National Kidney Foundation.

Why would someone donate a kidney to a stranger (when there's ample pressure not to donate even to a friend)? Here's one man's motivation:

A few years ago, James read a magazine article about an athlete being offered a kidney from relatives, friends and fans, and he thought it sad that many lesser-known people can't find donors.

He then learned that a close friend's mother in Tucson was ill and needed a kidney. James exchanged e-mails with her for months, offering to donate one of his healthy kidneys.

But she died before he could make the donation.

"She never complained, not once. She was amazing, just incredibly brave, just an amazing individual," James said.

After her funeral, he realized he still wanted to donate a kidney.

"Kind of putting money where your mouth is," he said.

As its name suggests, the website MatchingDonors.com helps to match would-be donors with people who need transplants.

The political showdown over a Dubai company's plan to operate terminals at six American ports briefly focused public attention on one of the most significant, yet least noticed, economic developments of the last few decades: the transformation of international shipping.

Just as the computer revolutionized the flow of information, the shipping container revolutionized the flow of goods. As generic as the 1's and 0's of computer code, a container can hold just about anything, from coffee beans to cellphone components. By sharply cutting costs and enhancing reliability, container-based shipping enormously increased the volume of international trade and made complex supply chains possible.

"Low transport costs help make it economically sensible for a factory in China to produce Barbie dolls with Japanese hair, Taiwanese plastics and American colorants, and ship them off to eager girls all over the world," writes Marc Levinson in the new book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton University Press).

My column barely mentions one important part of the story--the regulatory environment. At first, containerization grew through cracks in the rigid regulatory structure of the 1960s. But today's fully integrated systems became possible only after trucking and rail were deregulated in the 1970s and maritime rates were deregulated (to very little fanfare) in 1984. Assumptions about transportation regulation have changed so radically that reading about the bad old days seems like science fiction.

As Levinson said in our interview, "Nobody even remembers what the Interstate Commerce Commission used to do. But you’ve probably been in the old ICC building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. It had a choice spot in Washington. Important agency, important location, big building. This was a key federal agency. And it spent its time hearing arguments about whether this truck line ought to be able to carry cigarettes in the same trucks as it carried textiles or whether the rates that were being charged to carry pretzels were adequate. People have trouble remembering that today."

Levinson's book is terrific--smart, well-written, and thoroughly researched. I highly recommend it. You can read the first chapter and watch an interview with Levinson on the book's Princeton University Press webpage.

My column was supposed to end with the following note, but editors higher in the chain of command than my boss nixed it:

This column, which marks my sixth anniversary in this space, will be my last. I am taking up a new assignment, writing a column on commerce and culture for The Atlantic, but will remain a devoted reader of Economic Scene.

Curators of the Detroit show are Jared Rosenbaum and Rachel Mackow of the Palace of Culture, an online "museum" of futuristic design, and Mark Patrick of the Detroit Library. They reached into a rediscovered cache of images by Arthur Radebaugh, an advertising illustrator best known for dreaming up and painting fantastic vehicles — streamlined flying buses, hovering monorails and other wonders of the future — in advertisements for Bohn Aluminum & Brass. In the 1930's, Radebaugh turned out gleaming images of production-line Dodges and Chryslers set against Buck Rogers backgrounds.

Many paintings in the show come from the collection of Jim Secreto, a photographer in Clarkston, Mich. Mr. Secreto found the images while working in the files of Detroit advertising agencies. "I fell in love with these illustrations for their romantic quality," he said. "They project an ideal lifestyle and fantasy that a lot of thought and effort went into creating."

Mr. Secreto said that his profession, photography, ended that of the auto illustrators. But it took a long time; photography gradually replaced illustration in most print advertising during the 1950's because it was less expensive and more versatile.

In auto advertisements, though, illustration dominated through the 1970's because painters could render effects that photographers could not. Before digital image manipulation existed, painters did a better job of romanticizing the cars, elongating and widening them, emphasizing highlights and shadows to bring out sculptural qualities....

Such manipulation was common. In some cases, the show's curators said, skilled specialists took photos of cars, sliced them up and separated the pieces ever so slightly to produce an elongated image for painters.

The effect of this style was to lend a touch of fantasy and magic to the images, making them touchstones of their era. A 1960 image of a Ford Galaxie cruising through downtown Detroit, by Ross Cousins and John Killmaster — they were among the most respected advertising illustrators — captures a bright morning scene, offering a broadly optimistic vision of life in America.

In his new book, Culture and Consumption II, Grant McCracken has a fascinating essay called "When Cars Could Fly," documenting the connection between jet age imagery, automotive styling, and mid-century metaphors of personal ambition.

Last summer, Steve and I saw plenty of evidence for Grant's thesis at the Petersen Automotive Museum's Driving Through Futures Past, an exhibit that included both illustrations like the one above and a few prototypes like this Bonneville Special.

These exhibits pay tribute to culturally significant artwork that barely escaped the trash. As Phil writes:

The work of the designers was never meant to be saved, Mr. Sharf said. The studios at General Motors and other automakers produced thousands of sketches, of which only a few were spirited away — somewhat illicitly — by the designers. Most of the designers remain anonymous.

Part of Mr. Sharf's collection has been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and some works from the collection will go on display in Japan in September at the Toyota Museum and at the Nagoya Museum. The collection is also documented in a new book, Future Retro: Drawings From the Great Age of American Automobiles (MFA Publications, $27.50 hardcover, $19.95 soft cover).

Mr. Sharf"s collection gives prominence to Richard Arbib, a versatile designer whose work included Packards as well as speedboats, outboard motors and the 1957 Hamilton Electric Ventura watch. Mr. Sharf said his favorites included a set of 20 drawings that show the evolution of Pontiac's Indian hood ornament into a futuristic jet airplane. "They were done in three days in June 1954," he said.

"My hope is that someone will dig into this material in a scholarly sense," Mr. Sharf said. "They didn't realize their importance then, and many still don't, but these men are important."

Phil Patton wrote the industrial design chapter of the SFMOMA catalog Glamour, to which I contributed the lead essay (excerpted here). For more on automotive illustration, check out the links I've added to the article. In addition, the online museum Plan59.com, formerly Ephemera Now, has a nice collection of Bohn ads, including this one, which I bought as a poster.

In "The White Man's Burden," Easterly turns from incentives to the subtler problems of knowledge. If we truly want to help the poor, rather than just congratulate ourselves for generosity, he argues, we rich Westerners have to give up our grand ambitions. Piecemeal problem-solving has the best chance of success.

He contrasts the traditional "Planner" approach of most aid projects with the "Searcher" approach that works so well in the markets and democracies of the West. Searchers treat problem-solving as an incremental discovery process, relying on competition and feedback to figure out what works.

"A Planner thinks he already knows the answers," Easterly writes. "A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors." Planners trust outside experts. Searchers emphasize homegrown solutions.

The new book, while well worth reading, isn't as good as Easterly's earlier The Elusive Quest for Growth, which I highly recommend. As I note in the review, however, that's partly because The White Man's Burden is trying to tackle much more difficult questions.

Dan Drezner reviewed Easterly in Friday's WSJ. (This link does not require a subscription.)

While gearheads will pay more for the extra power off the line, we hybrid owners get our jollies from passing by the pump while guzzlers have to visit the Qwik Stop 3 times per week. Just like Porsches and Mustangs, hybrids aren't going away, so those who don't like them will just have to give it a rest.

I don't think it's coincidental that the Prius took off only after Toyota abandoned its initial design strategy, making the hybrid look like an ordinary Toyota, for something cooler. Who wants a hybrid that looks like this?

At some point, of course, rational calculation does enter the equation. Since I drive my car only about 3,500 miles a year, I didn't even look at hybrids.

But would we be quite so horrified, I wonder, if we were talking about "smart pills" or memory pills instead of steroids? Suppose that a pharmaceutical company was selling a pill that would improve your memory by 30% or your IQ by 30%, with the same sort of side effects as steroids. Would you be willing to take them for 3 or 5 critical years in your career? What if you knew that everyone else was taking them? What if you knew that the Chinese or the French were taking them? And would you be willing to give your kids these pills in, say, the junior year of high school, to increase the odds of getting a good score on the SAT?

The real problem with steroids: They enhance Old Economy capabilities, not New Economy skills. They make us better factory workers, not smarter knowledge workers.

I'd challenge that last dichotomy. "Knowledge work" of the kind Mandel and I do isn't the only New Economy skill. Sports is one of those huge New Economy industries that people with high SATs tend to forget. And it's not just a matter of big-time athletes. The guy who would have been a factory line worker a generation ago is now a personal trainer at the local gym, a job that requires more "professional" people skills and personal discipline but is just as physical. Brainpower isn't the only source of intangible economic value.

Instead of kidney blogging, I should be finishing an essay on George Hurrell's Hollywood glamour photos. Ah, but there's a connection. Hurrell took some amazing photos of Jean Harlow--before she died of kidney failure at the age of 26. Back then, they didn't even have dialysis.

Courtesy of Pancho Barnes Trust Estate

I wrote a Slate slideshow on Hurrell here. My current project is the catalog essay to accompany a major exhibit this summer at the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

Becky Borchert, a Wisconsin nurse, was eager to donate a kidney to her gravely ill friend in New York, but she had type A blood and her friend had type B. Richard Krafton, a school administrator in Massachusetts with advanced kidney disease, had the opposite problem: The friend who wanted to give him a kidney had type B blood, not a match for Krafton's type A.

But last week, Borchert saved her friend's life by giving a kidney to Krafton, a man she did not know, in the first test of a system that brings together strangers to exchange organs for transplant. At the same moment that surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital began removing Borchert's kidney for Krafton, another surgical team at New York Presbyterian Hospital started taking a kidney from Krafton's friend, Steve Proulx, to implant in Borchert's friend, who asked to remain anonymous.

''This transplant could not have happened if we didn't have this program available," said Dr. Dicken Ko, who transplanted the kidney into Krafton. Organizers say the New England Kidney Exchange, a computer system that matches kidney disease patients with compatible organ donors, could eventually arrange 2,000 to 3,000 transplants a year if applied nationally, giving people like Krafton a way to shortcut the current three- to seven-year wait for a transplant. Krafton got his new kidney and a second lease on life in just under a year.

Read the whole thing. Ah, instrumental rationality--so much better at saving lives than blabbering about the "sacredness" of the body.

Kidney donation is a safe procedure, and it's different, I understand, today than it was when I gave one of mine to my brother on 2 June 1997. He and his bean are still going strong, as am I.

I recall watching CNN in the hospital room right around the day of the surgery when Johns Hopkins announced a new method for removing a donor kidney using a laparoscopic procedure, requiring a much smaller incision with a shorter recovery period (and much smaller scar) for the donor. As usual, my timing was a little off.

These days, all a donor actually has to have is a matching blood type; although the better the match, the easier it is for the recipient in terms of managing against tissue rejection.

If you're in good health, under 60, and actually have two kidneys (How do you know? Has anyone ever checked? Some people only have one!), you're a donor candidate. At the time of my donation, all medical costs of the transplant were borne by the government, because transplanted kidneys are orders of magnitude cheaper than ongoing dialysis and managing the health-related issues attendant to dialysis. I believe that remains the case today. I donated mine on active duty while I was a member of the Board of Inspection and Survey, (kind of like the Spanish Inquisition, but not really), and since my surgery was scheduled over our normal two-week summer break, I think I missed only three weeks of work, and a week of that was for the travel and prep work prior to the surgery. I think the recovery time for donors today is even shorter.

Kidney donation is not without risks, and you'll sign a dozen waivers that will scare the hell out of you. Driving a car is not without risk, and will often scare the hell out of you. There are few things in life anyone can ever do that will make as much of a positive difference to someone else, so it's worth the risk, in my opinion. If you know of someone who needs a kidney, consider becoming a donor.

I heartily second that sentiment. While I appreciate all the flattering emails, donating a kidney is not, in fact, an act of supreme courage or sacrifice. People do harder, more dangerous things every day. Thanks to laparoscopic surgery, my biggest incision is a mere two inches long. I'm not 100% better, but I'm at 85-90%, and that's after barely more than a week. Of course, it's a lot easier if you're self-employed, have a spouse with flexible hours, and have no kids to take care of.

A team of researchers in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has managed to imitate the complex structures found in ice and mollusk shells, and the ultra-strong material could lead to everything from stronger artificial bone to airplane parts.

The scientists used the physics of ice formation to develop ceramic composites four times stronger than current technology. "Because we can control the freezing of ice we could get very sophisticated structures," says Eduardo Saiz, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley and one of the authors on a paper published in January in Science....

Ceramic has been the material of choice in joint-replacement surgeries for years because it lasts longer and produces fewer immune reactions than metal or plastic. It also contain millions of tiny pores that the patient's own bone cells can bind to, strengthening the new joint. But the spongelike structure of conventional ceramic is weak, and can fracture....

The breakthrough came after the Berkeley team realized that similar layered structures formed when mineral-rich water froze. So they tried freezing a mixture of water and hydroxyapotite, the mineral component of bone. As the ice formed, the minerals became trapped between the layers of ice crystals. They freeze-dried the material to remove the ice, leaving behind hydroxyapotite layers similar to nacre's. By increasing the speed of the freezing process, they could decrease the layers' thickness to just 1 micron -- nearly reproducing the scale found in nature.

A number of dynamist fans and bloggers have sent me good wishes and praised Virginia -- the Goddess of Renal Fortitude -- for her supreme generosity. When I could answer individually, I did, but for those whose e-mail addresses were elusive, I want to thank you so deeply for your heartfelt encouragement and for, indirectly, calling attention to the desperate organ shortage issue. I will be turning my attention to that for the next big project....Fondly, Sally Satel

You have been a wonderful community of support for both of us. Thank you all very much.

I made her pose with her first post-operative dose of our favorite beverage. (The secret to our tissue compatibility is that our real blood type is Diet Coke.)

Her case manager says Sally has gotten more flowers than any other transplant recipient. She has a lot of friends.

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has quelled the sous vide revolution, for the moment. In the past few weeks inspectors have told some chefs to throw out shrink-wrapped food, forbidden them to use the equipment used to make it and told them to stop cooking and storing food sous vide until they have a government-approved plan for it.

In some cases, inspectors are handing out fines, which start at $300 per offense. The department's actions seem to represent the first time a city agency has singled out the technique, and how chefs use it.

The city health code, which governs the way chefs cook, does not specifically address the way a restaurant should vacuum-pack food. While no health problem has ever been tied to sous vide in restaurant kitchens in New York, officials say they are concerned that food could breed botulism and listeria if it is vacuum-wrapped improperly. [Emphasis added.]

Side note: The one good thing about Times Select is that it gives NYT subscribers free access to the Times archives, including articles like the magazine piece linked above.

The Internet, in contrast, makes possible worldwide, instant distribution, at a nearly negligible cost. MisbahAlHurriyya.org relies heavily on volunteers and donated Web services; its budget, says Palmer, is in the five figures. Thanks to e-mail, conferring and passing manuscripts between Washington, Baghdad, and Amman -- a logistical nightmare in the days of mail and fax -- is a cinch. The site, entirely in Arabic, advertises on the popular Arabic Web sites Albawaba.com and Aljazeera.net. The whole enterprise was impossible a decade ago.

Firmly establishing liberal ideas took centuries in the West, and may yet take decades in the Arab world. Authoritarian and sectarian and tribalist notions are easier to explain than liberal ones, and it is inherently harder to build trust in mercurial markets and flowing democratic coalitions than in charismatic leaders, visionary clerics, and esteemed elders. The liberal world's intellectual underpinnings are as difficult to grasp as its cultural reach is difficult to escape. Thus the disjunction within which Baathism, Islamism, and Arab tribalism have festered.

Yet few who are genuinely intellectually curious can read J.S. Mill or Adam Smith and come away entirely unchanged. The suffocating Arab duopoly of state-controlled media and Islamist pulpits is cracking -- only a little bit so far, but keep watching. In the Arab world, the Enlightenment is going online.

While we're on the subject, let me once again plug Liberty Fund's Library of Economics and Liberty, which offers searchable, full-text editions of classic works in English. The online versions mirror Liberty Fund's authoritative printed texts.

Here are Sally and I on Saturday morning before the kidney transplant. My operation went extremely smoothly. Hers took longer than expected, because a little bit of the kidney was spasming, making it hard for the surgeons to attach the blood vessels. Worse, a couple hours after surgery she started hemorrhaging and had to go back into surgery--an unusual and dangerous complication. Fortunately, she came through OK and is gradually recovering.

I am now out of the hospital and doing fine, recuperating at a friend's nice DC crash pad. I'm a bit weak and not as mobile as usual, but I'm off pain medication and more normal than not. Here I am:

Last fall, my friend Sally Satel wrote about the issue in general and her own search for a kidney donor. Between the time she wrote the article and the time it appeared in the NYT, I heard about her situation and volunteered as a donor. Our tissues turned out to be unusually compatible for nonrelatives and, when her Internet donor dropped out, I moved from backup to actual donor. We have our surgeries tomorrow morning.

As surgeries go, the procedure is safe and straightforward--far more so than people think. A donor can live a completely normal life with one kidney. The recipientis not so lucky, since a foreign organ requires a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs. But that's a lot better than the alternative.

In other writing news, if you're traveling Southwest Airlines this month, check out my article on pens in Spirit, the Southwest magazine. I hope to post the piece on this site eventually, but it's currently unavailable online.