The recipient wanted to keep the whole thing private, but neighbors who learned of it thought it was wonderful and spread the news through the local email grapevine, which I suppose led to this publicity (although the recipient remains unnamed in the article).

I support your efforts to increase understanding about organ transplants and to urge reforming the system so that more people can be helped. I'm sure that privacy issues will be part of the debate.

More often, the donor is the one who wants to keep the matter private, because people make so much fuss, pro and con, about donations. That was the case with the widely reported instance of former Cowboy cornerback Everson Walls, who has volunteered a kidney to his friend and former teammate Ron Springs. The most shocking thing to me about the Walls case was that, according to the A.P. report, he had to endure a "500-question psychiatric evaluation." That's ridiculously invasive and time-consuming, and a classic example of how too many transplant centers treat living donors. An interview with a social worker is reasonable. A lengthy and deliberately daunting exam is simply calculated to discourage donors--which is, in fact, the point of the process in way too many places. Donors deserve respect, not infantilization. Although it was accidentally disclosed, I applaud Walls and Springs for telling their story. People need to know that the need is there and that donation is not an inconceivable act.

While the huge waiting list for a cadaver organ is horrible enough, some kidney patients don't even have that option. Here's the story of Jennifer Kates, a 29-year-old Boston-area woman who has been on dialysis for seven years and will die without a living donor. Her family members aren't compatible, and her brother has mounted a desperate publicity campaign, especially targeting the local Jewish community, to find a donor with type A or O blood. A Boston-area journalist told me about the case. For more information, see this website.

Jennifer Kates is a perfect example of why an above-board, domestic market for organs, within the legal and medical protections of our very sophisticated transplant system, would be far superior to the current "altruism-only" model. Kates cannot be helped by a deceased donor. She has a tiny family. Yet while affluent professionals can hire egg donors and surrogate mothers to undergo risky medical procedures for pay, neither her family nor an insurance company nor the hospital nor the government can legally compensate the living donor she needs to survive. It's a travesty perpetuated in the name of "justice" and "dignity."

Things could, however, be much worse than they are in the U.S. In Japan, it would have been illegal for me to give my kidney to Sally Satel, because we are not related. So Japanese kidney patients get people to pretend to be relatives, which is illegal, and money sometimes changes hands, which is also illegal. Sean Kinsell explains here. In a high-profile recent case, a couple was just convicted for paying an acquaintance to give the man a kidney, pretending to be the woman's sister. They received one-year prison terms, suspended for three years. "The couple's actions violated the spirit of the Organ Transplants Law, which represents humanity, volunteerism and fairness, and seriously eroded public trust in medical transplant procedures," said the judge. Ah, the humanity.

On a more positive note, next week the Discovery Channel will air a program on a six-person "paired donation" that enabled three people to receive compatible kidneys. Paired donation allows someone whose kidney is incompatible with a loved one in need to give that kidney to another patient who has a loved one with a kidney that's compatible for the first patient. It's a complicated barter system, but right now paired donation--which may or may not be legal under federal law--is the best hope for people with willing but incompatible living donors.

UPDATE: Happy New Year, InstaPundit readers. There is yet more Kidney Blogging on the main page.

The only distinction that truly matters is the one between good art and bad art, accounting for all the shades of gray in between. Jackson Pollock's paintings are better than Robert Motherwell's. "The Ernie Kovacs Show" is better television than "The Adventures of Superman." Arguing the reasons sharpens perception.

By contrast, ranking a painting against a TV show is just dumb--not to mention undemocratic. The measure of moral and intellectual status does not derive from hereditary social station, as if painting is for princes and television is for scullery maids. I'd as soon look at a "Six Feet Under" episode as a Lucian Freud painting any day.

Speaking of Clark Kent, Pop art in the 1960s turned out to be Greenberg's Kryptonite. Edward Ruscha and Andy Warhol, Depression-era babies from Omaha and Pittsburgh, brought their hardscrabble pasts with them when they high-tailed it to opposite coasts as young men. Both knew something crucial: In American art's democratic lexicon, every avant-garde idea could be represented in kitsch terms of popular entertainment.

In a famous 1943 letter to the New York Times, budding Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb wrote "only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." For Greenberg's avant-garde, the tragic and the timeless meant abstract painting. In Warhol's hands it would mean the numinous mystery of Marilyn Monroe's shocking suicide and the national trauma of Jackie Kennedy's widowhood, chronicled in the tabloids.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg, who went very easy on Althouse in a recent Blogginheads.tv appearance has second thoughts: "I should say that while Ron and I have many serious ideological differences, my faith in Ron's honesty and good faith is unshakable. All I will add for now is that I had no idea about the events around the dinner table--when Althouse accused fellow conferees of racism--when I participated in my bloggingheads conversation with her or when I called her original blog post 'odd.' I would have used a different adjective." Like Jonah, I have heard privately from multiple sources confirming Ron's account. Althouse was clearly out of her intellectual depth during the discussions and vented her frustration by lashing out at fellow conferees in person--she even called one female participant who dared to disagree with her an "intellectual lightweight" and an embarrassment to women everywhere--and by using her blog to recast what happened with herself as the martyred star. Now that's a diva. Diana Ross would be jealous.

UPDATE III: After she mentioned this post, I attempted to post the following comment on Ann Althouse's blog. I hadn't planned to say more on this topic, but she's managed to push my buttons:

Since I made my views clear in a previous comment, which Ann Althouse quoted in another post, I can only assume that her question of what my views are is another dramatic pose. Sorry, Ann, you got yourself into this mess not only by blowing up in a hysterical way but by constantly harping on the subject when everyone else would have happily let it drop, with no embarrassment to you. You consistently misrepresented people's views and personalities and the nature of a Liberty Fund conversation. It's a Grande Diva pose, but has nothing to do with civil rights law or libertarian thought. As you know, your entire dinnertime meltdown started after you asked about the previous night's discussion and were told it involved Ron Bailey's vigorous defense of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (He also noted in his blog posting that no one in the discussion around the table agreed with Meyer's position on civil rights laws.) Stop pretending you were an innocent little martyr surrounded by racist ideologues. It's b.s., albeit great for generating attention and blog hits. And, for the record, since you seem to care more about righteous preening than argument, my family was defending civil rights in the South--including Little Rock in 1957--long before it was popular. (I was just a little kid doing my part by attending integrated--25% black--public schools.)

And, yes, like Jonah I've known Ron (who, contrary to Althouse's description, is not my colleague) for years and found him to be a person of enormous integrity and good will--and a vehement supporter of civil rights. So between the diva and the rational reporter, I'll choose to believe the reporter.

While I appreciate the good intent of the folks at GayPatriot.net, I don't aspire to be a diva. It's not all about me.

I should blog more about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and adoption, Janice Dickinson and car accidents, Tawny Kitaen and cocaine, whether Naomi Campbell beats her assistants, Nancy O'Dell (whoever she is), Pamela Anderson's breakup with Kid Rock, Paris Hilton and/or Lindsey Lohan (for whatever it is this time), Star Jones Reynolds' career, Tom Cruise (not that there's anything wrong with that), and because she's still getting press, Princess Diana.

Check out his update for further ideas.

UPDATE: And then there's this from Eugene Volokh:

Sex (or SexLaw) Sells -- Surprise!

Our unique visitor count Monday was 35697, and Tuesday was 38423 -- both near our historic highs. (The norm for a typical weekday is in the low 20000s.) My sense is that most of the extra visits were to the initial Ten Years in Prison for 17-Year-Old Who Had Consensual Oral Sex with 15-Year-Old post.

No, we won't be upping our blogging on SexLaw as a result. (We'd blog about it independently of visitor interest.) But it's interesting, though of course completely unsurprising, that this is indeed what many people want to read.

To get the full story, click through to Eugene's post.

Woman in the Mirror: 1945-2004, is the definitive collection of Richard Avedon's photographs with an extensive essay by the brilliant Anne Hollander.

I read Richard Neutra: And The Search for Modern Architecture by Thomas S. Hines while researching my Atlantic column on Julius Shulman's photography. The book has great photos, mostly by Shulman, but it also tells the story of a fascinating life and career.

Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies by James Sanders demonstrates how our mental images of New York have been created by the movies, beginning with writers who went west to Hollywood to escape the Depression and invented an on-screen New York that was far more glamorous than the city they left. It's a great book for anyone who loves New York or the movies or who (like me) is interested in image-making in popular culture.

Professor Postrel waited two decades for me to finally read Watchmen, the brilliant graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I finally did, as research for my Atlantic column on superhero glamour, and it lived up to the hype. It appeals most to people who've read superhero comics and can fully appreciate how it upends genre conventions, but anyone who is interested in literary genres, the temptations of power, dramatic irony, or a host of other English-major topics ought to read it. For truly impressive gift giving, the oversized the "Absolute Edition" of Watchmen is ideal. But I enjoyed the plain old paperback.

Also on the superhero-glamour beat, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross is a fun, visually impressive tour of Alex Ross's "realistic" painting of iconic superheroes. I enjoyed reading how in fact Ross uses "impossible lighting" and other unrealistic techniques for dramatic effect. The reproductions of his childhood drawings are charming, as is his relationship with his parents.

It has nothing to do with any of the above, and isn't even a book, but I have to put in a plug for the DVDs to Battlestar Galactica: season one, season 2.0 (episodes 1-10), season 2.5 (episodes 10-20)

For those who prefer their DVDs glamorous, Garbo - The Signature Collection, including Anna Christie, Mata Hari, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Camille, Ninotchka, and the silent films Flesh and the Devil, Anna Christie, The Temptress, The Mysterious Lady, and Nothing Ever Happens. The acting is extremely stilted by today's standards, but compelling in its own way.

Finally, the best book I've read recently is Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, by Oliver Sacks, which elegantly combines memoir and history of science with a portrait of a vanished way of life.

From this perspective, Greg Goldin, the LAT magazine's architecture critic does a masterful job of explaining the pleasure and meaning that drive Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles to build the houses dubbed "Persian palaces." These homes, even in their downsized versions, are not at all to my taste. But they clearly fill a strong psychological need, beyond ostentatious status seeking, and Goldin explains it well:

Don't try to assemble these parts into a comprehensible whole. You cannot. At least not in conventional architectural terms. The owners of Persian Palaces aren't striving to keep to formal rules of architecture--not Classical order, Renaissance perspective, Baroque composition or Beaux Arts historicism. There are no hidden symbols in their design choices, either. Nor do many of the owners mean to announce class status by deploying all those columns and balustrades. They merely want to enliven the street, and their own surroundings, by plucking familiar images from the glories of architectural history and turning them into a kind of gold-leafing.

As preposterous as this might sound, a Persian Palace is intended to be a palace in the way that the originals once were. Like Hasht Behesht (the "Eight Paradises"), the 17th century residential masterpiece in Isfahan, or the Taj Mahal (thought to be designed by an Indian of Persian descent), Persian homes and mosques and bazaars were built around ideas largely foreign to the West, and still unsettling to our culture. Persian architecture, like carpet weaving and the poetry of Rumi, was an effort to partake of the sublime. Sumptuousness and inutility were the qualities that found expression in elaborate mosaics, mirrored walls, finely filigreed ironwork. The imagery was abstract, the line sinuous, unending, often confusing foreground with background—and intended to evoke the infinite dimension of God. Upon entering a palace (if you were lucky enough), you would be transported to a place of affection and gentleness, the tender ecstasy of youth. These palaces, like the gilded enchantments in today's Los Angeles, were a celebration of beauty in its own right, and in that way a direct appeal to the senses.

...

Otherwise the house, surprisingly, takes its cues from Southern California Modernism. Although the decor is decidedly Rococo--gold leaf and deep swags of silk curtains abound--the downstairs is one continuous open space, and every wall consists of windows or French doors. The entire house, in effect, can be flung open to the air and sun. With the curtains drawn aside, you can see from front to back--an unobstructed view that is characteristic of most Persian Palaces.

In this way, Persian Palaces relate to the Southern California landscape as much as any Modernist steel-and-glass flattop and, to an extent that few of us care to admit, they giddily reflect an architectural heritage that is considered an American archetype. The homes are all about indoor-outdoor living as, equally, they are about community and what the New Urbanists call "front porches." Persian Palaces are welcoming to the street. They are unabashed and uninhibited, and in their almost constant references to the human form, very nearly licentious. They radiate light and coax interest--sometimes our (offended) prurient interest. Still, if you trouble to walk the length of a block where the homes now compose the design idiom, you may be pleasantly surprised at the luxe decorative nature the block assumes. Drab, middle-class modesty is decidedly outré in these environs. It's as if someone had invited Vargas to paint the ceiling of Beverly Hills Presbyterian on Rodeo Drive.

Pausing by the front door, Yadegar explains: "I wasn't building a house to show off. I built it just to live in. The only crazy things are the columns and the staircase. Before I built this house, I bought a house in a different section of Beverly Hills, below Burton Way. I paid $450,000 for that house, and it was all closed off by trees, and there were no windows. I spent $30,000 to take out the trees and open up the windows. People would pass by and say, 'Where did this house come from?' I didn't do it to have them see me. I did it to see them." By which he means, he wanted to watch people the way one watches people on the streets of New York or Barcelona.

"Every night," Yadegar says as we make our way out to the sidewalk, "I turn all the lights on. We like it to be bright. I like to see the people passing by."

Check out the photos here.

Since it's supposed to be flattering, I assume this is "diva" in the opera sense, not the Diana Ross or (ugh) Mariah Carey sense.

Nothing about Chile’s economic successes excuses or mollifies Pinochet’s crimes. Even Friedman’s staunch libertarian fans can wonder about the ultimate propriety of his association, however brief or tenuous, with the dictator. As Austrian economist Peter Boettke once told me, many economists in his tradition--most of whom are hardcore libertarians--find the notion of working in even something as innocuous as public finance distasteful--like "bean counting for the mafia." Friedman didn’t harbor such visceral disgust for government or those who govern. He was a policy realist, and tried to deal with the world as it was--to mesh his policy radicalism with the gears of power as they existed.

Friedman was ready and willing to tell the people responsible for all the wrong policies of the world what they needed to do to set things right, which meant he had to talk to them, making open assaults on their crimes ill-advised. He tried to move the world in a freer direction from the point reality presented him with.

Read the whole thing.

Brian's piece captures a great divide among libertarians, one that sometimes gets nasty. Some of us--and I'm definitely in the Friedman camp--want a better world, even if the improvements are only incremental. Others, who call themselves "hardcore" or (for the really tendentious) "principled," make no distinctions among different degrees of imperfection--it's all non-utopia and, hence, worthless. Besides, complaining is easy. Change is hard.

The problem here is not free people; the problem is big government. More specifically, it's a big government program set up during the New Deal whose purpose was not to stimulate economic growth and competition but to freeze the economy in place and stifle competition. Remember that the New Dealers believed that the Depression showed that free markets don't work and that economic growth was a mirage.

Franklin Roosevelt on taking office in March 1933 faced a deflationary downward spiral, and, to his credit, he stopped its momentum with an otherwise cockamamie scheme called the National Recovery Act, which set up 700-some industry codes barring price and wage cuts. NRA was foundering in May 1935, since it was obvious that everyone was gaming this ridiculous system, and Congress was uncertain to reauthorize it when the Supreme Court unanimously declared it unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, Congress kept passing freeze-the-economy-in-place legislation, including the dairy provisions of the farm bill. One in four Americans then lived on farms; they were a big constituency, and they were hurting. Things are different now. Only 2 percent of Americans live on farms. Our economy grows and grows and grows, and we realize, thanks in large part to the late Milton Friedman, that the Depression resulted not from the inevitable defects of free markets but from certain specific policy mistakes that we can, unless we take leave of our senses, refuse to remake.

Posted by Virginia at 03:00 PM | TrackBack

On his blog, Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt writes that the NYT and Publishers Weekly didn't get the story quite right. [Via Nashville Scene blog.] Author contracts aren't going to include doctrinal provisions. But the publisher is clearly narrowing its list of authors for essentially secular books. The Nicene Creed requirement excludes Jews and Mormons, for instance, but the real test is the Philippians verse: It's not exactly a prescription for more books from Michael Savage.

UPDATE: Tim Worstall has more here.

Hettinga, who ran a big business and was no political innocent, fought back with his own lobbyists and alliances with lawmakers. But he found he was no match for the dairy lobby.

"I had an awakening," the 64-year-old Dutch-born dairyman said. "It's not totally free enterprise in the United States."

Harry Reid does not come off well. Neither does John Kyl. But the crucial player turns out to be Devin Nunes, a Republican back-bencher from California and the dairy industry.

I wrote about another form of milk protectionism here.

Much of what is wrong with popular attitudes to capitalism comes down to one thing: a lack of wonder at what uncoordinated markets can achieve. Going to a grocery store for the hundredth or thousandth time is a pretty humdrum experience. As a rule it isn't going to elicit much of an intellectual response -- though if it does, the response might be one of two kinds. The commentator Robert Kuttner once wrote of his dismay at the great number of breakfast cereals on offer in his local grocery. What a waste, was his point; who could possibly need all these different cereals? Can't we arrange things more intelligently? This is a leftist kind of response: "Put somebody sensible in charge and plan things better." The liberal response (in the proper sense of "liberal") is different: "How amazing that all these choices are available, so that every taste is catered to, and it's all so cheap."

Most of my work these days derives from this sense of wonder the curiosity it arouses about the specific creative processes behind these results. That's why I write mostly about culture and commerce rather than about government policy.

UPDATE: Take my new LAT Sunday opinion feature on the evolution of shopping malls. The growth of "lifestyle centers" is yet another example of the way markets turn valid social criticism--valid in the sense that it captures real and widespread discontent and identifies unmet needs--into entrepreneurial opportunities. (The customer response to such markets can also make certain social critics look like idiots, as my lead suggests.)

UPDATE: Thanks to the good people at Arts & Letters Daily, my chain stores piece now has a permanent free link here.

We live in an entreprenurial age, not an institutional one. That’s been true of many professions for quite a while, and increasingly (and perhaps somewhat belatedly) it is true of journalism. The people having the most satisfying careers, it seems to me, are those who create a distinct signature for their work--who add value to the public conversation through their individual talents--rather than relying mostly on the reputation and institutional gravity of the organization they work for. In your own way, you are an example of this with PressThink.

There are certainly examples of people fashioning this kind of entreprenurial career within the Post. Woodward is the most famous, but more recently Tom Ricks and Dana Priest are good examples, as are talented writers like Laura Blumenfeld and Dana Milbank.

But in general organizations like the Post or the New York Times have been insulated from the spirit of the age--precisely because they were secure and prestigious places to work. Once people got a job there, they tended to stay for years and even decades. Most of the people in those newsrooms are creative, and in my experience they tend to think of themselves as individualists and even iconoclasts. But the reality for many (including me until two weeks ago) is that they have careers that are more reminiscent of the 1950s, when people got hired at General Motors or IBM and stayed put. I believe that for people who want this type of stability, journalism is not going to remain an attractive profession for much longer. But people who adapt will thrive and end up having more fun than in the old days.

The WaPost has adapted better to this shift than the NYT, which desperately wants to deny it. The interview is full of such truths and worth reading in full.

I wouldn't throw all conservatives overboard, but I've long agreed that alliances are fundamentally shifting. From my 1999 address to the Mont Pelerin Society:

The good news is that just as the breakdown of socialism has created new alliances against markets, it has also created new alliances in support of them. The idea that markets produce not chaos and disruption but positive, emergent order has become common in the same circles where a generation ago socialism, or at least technocratic planning, was all the rage. Some of you may have seen, for instance, this endorsement of market dynamism from a noted economist: "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy." The source of that upbeat assessment of markets was Larry Summers, now U.S. secretary of the treasury and the epitome of a Cambridge economist.

If Schlesinger's hysteria exemplifies the attitudes of centrist stasists, Summers' optimism represents a new centrist coalition on the side of dynamism. That does not mean that Summers is a classical liberal, of course. It simply makes him, and other centrist dynamists, the sort of ally on behalf of markets that anti-socialist conservatives were in an earlier time. The American center (and, I suspect, Britain's New Labour) is full of chastened technocrats who have come to accept the practical limitations of state action and the practical advantages of economic freedom.

There are also many political "moderates"--journalists, scholars, technologists, scientists, artists, and business people, all far less famous than Summers--whose intellectual appreciation for self-organizing systems has come from outside economics: from complexity theory, from the decentralized evolution of the Internet, from the process of scientific discovery, from ecological science, from cross-cultural exchange, from organization theory. These centrist dynamists share an appreciation for dispersed knowledge and trial-and-error evolution that spills over into their attitudes toward markets. They do not always prefer markets to government, but they usually do. They lack the reflex that says a single, government-imposed approach is the best solution to public problems. They are more concerned with finding mechanisms to encourage innovation, competition, choice, and feedback. One thing that makes our political discourse confusing is that the term moderate does not distinguish between those whose moderation implies an appreciation for market processes and those whose moderation suggests just the opposite--a long list of schemes for small-scale government tinkering.

Even more striking is a profound split on what used to be the left. While leftists like Sennett are attacking economic dynamism, their erstwhile allies are finding in markets the values of innovation, openness, and choice. The counterculture has morphed into the business culture--to the consternation of both commerce-hating leftists and cultural conservatives. The left that gave us socialism is not the left that gave us personal computers and Fast Company magazine. Yet both the PC and America's hot new business magazine were unquestionably created by people who, by both personal history and political agenda, saw themselves as left-wing critics of establishment institutions. Individuals who would have no great love of "markets" if that concept implied static, hierarchical, bureaucratic corporate structures have embraced the idea of markets as open systems that foster diversity and self-expression. The very characteristics that make stasists wary of markets lead an emerging coalition of dynamists to defend them.

On the old political spectrum, socialism defined the left. That meant that the more you opposed socialism, for whatever reason, the further right you were. On the old spectrum, therefore, classical liberals were on the right, which makes us the right wing of the dynamist coalition.

It matters a lot whether we define our central challenge today as opposing socialism or as protecting dynamism. If we declare "the left" our enemies and "the right" our allies, based on anti-socialist assumptions, we will ignore the emerging left-right alliance against markets. We will miss the symbolic and practical importance of such cutting-edge issues as biotechnology, popular culture, international trade, and Internet governance. We will sacrifice whole areas of research and innovation to stay friendly with people who'll agree to cut taxes just a little bit, and only for families with children. We will miss the chance to deepen the appreciation for market processes among people who lack the proper political pedigree. We will sacrifice the future of freedom in order to preserve the habits of the past.

At some point, of course, we have to talk about foreign policy. But there is no single "libertarian" or "liberal" foreign policy position to begin with, so alliances will be based mostly on judgment calls in specific situations.

1) A commitment on both sides to a safety net for the poor but not to pursuing economic equality for its own sake. This is the easiest part and has largely happened already, despite protests from both hard-core levellers and anti-transfer libertarians. But many of the loudest Democrats and libertarians (small-l, the relevant ones) won't go along.
2) An abandonment of Herbert Croly-style technocracy as the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party, not only in economics but in social policy, where "centrists" like Hillary Clinton tend to confuse governing with raising children. Technocracy long ago lost its ideological oomph, but Democrats have a knee-jerk commitment to regulation. Today's good government liberals generally pay homage to tolerance, pluralism, and market processes. The trick is to draw connections between those values and specific policies.
3) A deliberate resolve to form a dynamist alliance at a time when "progressives" are increasingly redefining themselves as stasist populists--trade protection has become an ideological position, for instance, rather than a favor for special interests--and many self-styled "small government" supporters argue vociferously for vast expansions of police and planning powers to limit immigration. In this regard, I am more encouraged by the defenses of trade coming out of places like TNR and Slate than I am by the fawning on Jim Webb coming out of Reason. (The guy even wants to bring back the draft, which used to be a deal breaker for libertarians.).

If it's going to happen, such an alliance can only start among honest intellectuals who are not interested in scoring partisan points. How many of those are left, I'm not sure.

UPDATE: Maybe because I did something similar in TFAIE (developed further here), it seems much clearer to me than to other commenters that Brink is proposing an intellectual and policy alliance/debate, along the lines of the fusionism on the postwar right, not a short-term partisan political coalition to win the 2008 election. The stuff about 13 percent of the vote is mostly news-peg boilerplate. That's how you get TNR and the WaPost to pay attention. It's as irrelevant today as it was in the 1950s just how many libertarian-identified voters there are. The point is to talk seriously about policy ends and means and the role of market processes in serving liberal (in all senses of the word) values.

Demonstrate your support for "big books." Pre-order Brink's forthcoming book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. And, of course, there's always The Future and Its Enemies.

Remember when "It's a Small World" was a cute fairytale?

The resignation of John Bolton is as good an excuse as any to share Sandra Tsing Loh's delightful reminiscence of the innocent internationalism I remember so well as part of my 1960s childhood. (I revisited this passage while researching my next Atlantic column, on airline glamour, but the quotation didn't make it into the final version.) From Depth Takes a Holiday

International--what a guileless, friendly world. As a kid in the sixties, I remember drinking up everything international: Expo 67! UNICEF! The five intertwining rings of the Olympics! International…House of Pancakes! "Come in!" international people always seemed to be saying. ‘We don’t care where the hell you’re from. Have some flapjacks!"

Ah, when "looking like the U.N." was a compliment, suggesting a nicely harmonious mix of costumes and skin colors--Star Trek with smoother foreheads.

In his talk McCloud covered the heart of his book, explaining his theoretical position that the comics artist faces five major areas of decision making when creating a new work: choice of moment (which moments of an action to show), choice of frame (how to frame what is being depicted), choice of image, choice of words and choice of flow (how the reader's eye follows the sequence of images). McCloud classifies comics artists in four "tribes": the classicists (like Alex Raymond), who value beauty and mastery of craft; the animists (like Jack Kirby), for whom art serves story content; the formalists (including himself), who experiment with the medium; and the iconoclasts (like Robert Crumb), whose foremost goal is to vividly convey reality. McCloud also narrated an entertaining montage of images illustrating his life story and showed examples of various online comics, demonstrating the new experimental forms that comics can take once freed from the printed page.

McCloud then turned the lectern and the screen over to his teenage daughter, Sky, who used the same words-and-pictures format to deliver an amusing presentation of her family’s nationwide tour, blogging as they go. At one point she explained that each of them only brings two suitcases, one for clothes and one for electronic equipment, which is "pretty much all you need in the McCloud family."