UPDATE: Sally's article is in the archives here, mine is here, and the sidebar is here.

Sally and I will be on C-Span's Washington Journal Friday morning at 8:00 Eastern to discuss the articles.

A collision of meanings: The words say LDS, but the font says WSJ.

The problem is that architecture tends toward permanence, while security threats change much faster. Something that seemed a good idea when a building was designed might make little sense a century--or even a decade--later. But by then it's hard to undo those architectural decisions.

When Syracuse University built a new campus in the mid-1970s, the student protests of the late 1960s were fresh on everybody's mind. So the architects designed a college without the open greens of traditional college campuses. It's now 30 years later, but Syracuse University is stuck defending itself against an obsolete threat.

Similarly, hotel entries in Montreal were elevated above street level in the 1970s, in response to security worries about Quebecois separatists. Today the threat is gone, but those older hotels continue to be maddeningly difficult to navigate.

Security isn't the only factor that dates quickly. I recently read Alastair Gordon's lively history, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. Again and again, airports have been designed to solve the problems of one era, only to confront completely different problems almost as soon as construction is complete. DFW Airport is no aesthetic treasure, for instance, but it ingeniously solved the problem of its design era: how to get people from their cars to the plane without a long walk down a corridor to the gates. Then came deregulation and hub-and-spoke systems, DFW became American's major hub, and passengers had to walk Texas-size distances to change planes. What Gordon doesn't note, and couldn't given the timing of his book, is that post-9/11, DFW is again one of the nation's more efficient airports, at least for passengers originating here. Its many entries allow security checkpoints to be spread closer to the gates, instead of routing passengers through a few chokepoints and then forcing them to travel long distances to their gates.

Entrepreneurs who live in Silicon Valley also find the technical talent they need faster than they can in any other place; they pay more for that talent, but speed is the sine qua non for success. Seth J. Sternberg, the chief executive of Meebo, an instant-messaging company in Palo Alto that is backed by Sequoia, described Silicon Valley with the fervent appreciation of a recent transplant from New York, where he had suffered three separate bad experiences with start-ups, none of which had attracted venture funding.

The ecosystem in Silicon Valley, Mr. Sternberg said, includes “incredible techies, who live here because this is the epicenter, where they can find the most interesting projects to work on.” The ecosystem also includes real estate agents, accountants, head hunters and lawyers who understand an entrepreneur’s situation--that is, emptied bank accounts and maxed-out credit cards.

As it happens, last night Professor Postrel read me Paul Graham's excellent essay, "How to Make Wealth", whose emphasis on speed complements the Stross piece. For those who prefer their essays in bound form, I recommend Graham's Hackers and Painters, which is definitely not of interest only to geeks. My mother (a sometime painter, but mostly a literary writer) picked it up on a visit to our house and, after reading a few essays, declared that they should use it in college composition classes. She should know, since she used to teach them.

In fact, he has portrayed something more powerful: an ideal of what it’s like to live in a modern house. Shulman’s photographs are not simply beautiful objects in themselves or re-creations of striking buildings; they are psychologically compelling images that invite viewers to project themselves into the scene. An architectural photograph can conjure three possible desires: “I want that photograph,” “I want that building,” or “I want that life.” Shulman’s best work evokes all three. At a time when the public thought of modernism as a cold, impersonal style suited only for office buildings, he made its houses look seductively human. His photos do not merely record modern architecture, California style; they sell it. “You make people want to say, ‘Gosh, I could lie down on that couch and take a nap.’ Or, ‘I’d love to sit at that table and have dinner there. Or entertain company around the fireplace,’” he recently told an audience at the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C.

Shulman was discussing an eighty-three-piece retrospective of his work, “Julius Shulman, Modernity and the Metropolis.” Organized by the Getty Research Institute, which in January 2004 bought his enormous archive, the exhibition opened first in Los Angeles on October 11, 2005, the day after the photographer’s ninety-fifth birthday. (It is at the Art Institute of Chicago through December 3.) More than a survey of a great photographer’s work, or of the architecture he documented, the exhibition is a glamorous composite portrait of the city that defined twentieth-century urban form. As modernity’s metropolis, Los Angeles looks nothing like Fritz Lang’s futuristic vision. Here are low-rise office buildings and backyard patios, car dealerships and gas stations, poolside chaises and sliding glass doors—a horizontal metropolis of private space. Here even Ayn Rand, whose Fountainhead celebrated skyscrapers as “the shapes of man’s achievement on earth,” socializes within the curving aluminum wall of her Neutra-designed patio.

Shulman is a busy man, with a steady flow of visitors at his home office, where he answers his own phone, juggles future appointments, and writes captions for a massive forthcoming volume of his photos. (For a detailed, if a little blurry, version, click on the photo.)

So here's an assignment for an enterprising LAT reporter: Whatever became of Scorsese's documentary? Between the weekend success of The Departed (two thumbs up from the Postrels) and Streiff's resignation, you won't lack for news pegs.

Just last week, I interviewed Phelps for my next Forbes column, which focuses on his more recent research on the importance of dynamism to sustained economic growth. His new work touches on many of the same themes, as well as the same language, as The Future and Its Enemies. (Now he'll be too busy fielding media calls and answering congratulatory notes to read the book I sent him.) A good sample is the working paper, "The Economic Prosperity of Nations Depends on Dynamism, Dynamism on Institutions," available here.

For the record, Professor Postrel and I spent quite a bit of time with BHL during his visit to Dallas, explaining such bizarre Americana as state flags and why Southern Methodist University hires Jewish professors. Fortunately, we didn't make it into the book. The truest line in Keillor's review is "Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food." Not if they're eating with BHL anyway, since he's always either sending the food back because he doesn't like it or about to bolt away to another engagement.

Forget engineers starting companies because they want to "change the world." Today's tech entrepreneurs seem to have a simpler goal: fame and fortune.

A few months ago, I interviewed Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, who have raised $6 million to build Yelp, a Web site of amateur restaurant and bar reviews. (The two founders are in their late 20s, both single. They wear beat-up designer jeans with ironic T-shirts, and they have the kind of hair that forces them to flip their heads in order to see. In other words, rock stars.) At the end of the interview, I asked them where they thought they would be in five years. This is what they said:

Stoppelman: Sitting on top of a pile of money ... [in unison with Simmons] ... surrounded by women! Yeah! [high five]

According to Brown, they've already achieved one out of two.

CORRECTION: The gracious Robert George notes that "the recent post about Terrell Owens was the work of this site's 'gridiron designated hitter' (to mix sports metaphors), Ed McGonigal!"

ADDENDUM: This is the libertarian New York Post editorialist Robert George, not the natural-law Princeton philospher Robert George. But surely you knew I wouldn't recommend the latter (not to mention the unlikelihood of Professor George blogging about comic books).

Obama's cover status is noteworthy. Senators are rarely style icons, and once upon a time the otherness of racial difference precluded glamour for a mass (i.e., white) American audience. "No white American, the [movie] industry maintains, would ever make his escape personality black," wrote Margaret Farrand Thorp in her 1939 book America at the Movies, one of the earliest analyses of modern glamour. As two out of three of the Men's Vogue covers illustrate, that has changed, mostly within the past decade. Nowadays, racial distance intensifies glamour by preserving the bit of mystery that true glamour requires. The distance is not so great to preclude projection, but it's great enough to prevent the intimacy (real or imagined) that would break the spell.

Writing in the New York Sun, John McWhorter considers why Obama's race is so central to his political appeal: "What gives people a jolt in their gut about the idea of President Obama is the idea that it would be a ringing symbol that racism no longer rules our land. President Obama might be, for instance, a substitute for that national apology for slavery that some consider so urgent. Surely a nation with a black president would be one no longer hung up on race." McWhorter's argument is correct as far as it goes, but it misses the apolitical glamour about Obama--and the mysterious Condoleezza Rice. That glamour depends on their race but is not solely about race, just as Jack Kennedy's glamour was not solely about wealth and Catholicism, though those characteristics made him a bit exotic to most Americans.

That article mentioned the appeal of tilt-shift photography: there are several flickr photo sets devoted to taking photos of real cityscapes and photoshopping them to look like scale models. The photoshopping reproduces what an antique tilting bellows/accordian type camera would do: it removes perspective distortion. That effect makes it looks like it was taken up close. Oversaturating the colors makes it look artificial.

Here are some good ones:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/miwo76/120735433/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcsixth/106792657/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnw/111587843/

And here's a delightful website devoted to "Little hand-painted people, left in London to fend for themselves." (Via CNet's Esoterica blog.)

The cover story of Reason's October issue is a first-person account by an egg donor, the magazine's associate editor Kerry Howley. Her story focuses less on regulation, which is minimal for U.S. fertility treatments, and more on the contradictory rhetoric surrounding "donation"--rhetoric that, I believe, helps explain why it's so easy to ban compensation when the ban won't run afoul of noisy, well-educated, affluent would-be parents. Here's a bit of the story's conclusion:

The strongest response to such opponents is not that IVF is natural or altruistic, but that it can be neither of those things without detracting from the dignity of the child-to-be. My experiences bear no resemblance to the nightmarish scenarios thrown out by those who portray egg donation as a clumsy eugenics scheme. Strip away the nexus of fertility doctor, donor agency, and donor, and two would-be parents were hoping for a kid who would look something like them. They weren’t looking for a “designer baby,” so much as a close approximation of the homegrown variety.

Before we ask IVF opponents to accept the implications of new reproductive technologies, though, we might ask the same of IVF supporters. From the recipient’s side, the egg donor process can be an extended effort to pretend that the donation never occurred. Straddling the natural and the artificial, egg donation embodies a contradiction. It glorifies the experience of natural pregnancy and the gift of biological children, while it in fact produces neither: Egg donor babies are the product of foreign genetic codes, and the “natural” pregnancy is manufactured in the lab. The approximation of natural pregnancy also entails a studied psychological distance from the donor who made the pregnancy possible.

Opponents of IVF have long warned that the bond between mother and child will be eroded by further advances in assisted reproduction, the implication being that mothers will eschew the time and labor of traditional pregnancies once they can outsource to the lab. In practice, IVF seems to demonstrate the opposite extreme: Women value pregnancy to such a degree that they will spend lavishly to approximate the experience, adding expense, discomfort, and ethical quandary to the already burdensome ordeal of childbirth. The desire to stick to the traditional script of family is surprisingly robust, and reproductive technologies allow potential parents to follow that script even when nature erects barriers. Though IVF entails risk, discomfort, and the prospect of having to abort multiple fetuses, many parent apparently prefer it to what might seem a far less ethically complex response to infertility: adoption. Natural motherhood is not obsolescent, as The Atlantic once predicted, but ascendant, in vogue to an almost disturbing degree.

Those who worry reproductive technologies will destroy the family probably haven’t had much contact with parents who will spend many thousands of dollars to create one. If there is a risk, it is that IVF might instead ossify the definition of family, stressing insularity above openness, the appearance of a “natural” pregnancy over adoption, genetic legacy over less rigidly defined familial bonds. For all the otherworldliness of egg donation, parents who choose the process cling to the traditional: children who appear to be their own, who are born through what appears to be a natural pregnancy. It’s a bold new path to very familiar territory.