Week of April 29, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

TEARS OF A CLONE? Brink Lindsey has an excellent, thoughtful post sorting out his ideas about cloning and related issues. [Posted 5/3.]

PETITION UPDATE: The Franklin Society petition has a new-and-improved interface, thanks to the volunteer programming efforts of Franklin Society Associate Member Jeff Wolfe. Check it out, sign the petition if you haven't already, and let me know if you run into any glitches. Thanks. [Posted 5/3.]

ANTI-FUKUYAMA: Happy Fun Pundit delivers a serious assessment of Francis Fukuyama's half-baked attack on libertarians. It includes the following:

Let me re-state Fukuyama's paragraph in a way which might be more illuminating:

We are at the beginning of a new phase of history where technology will give us power to create people born without genes that doom them to early painful deaths. To say, with the libertarians, that individual freedom should encompass the freedom to eliminate horrible, debilitating diseases which are part of human nature, that nature on which our very system of rights is based, is not to appeal to anything in the American political tradition.

That doesn't sound quite the same, does it? And yet, this is by far the most likely outcome of the biological revolution, and not the genetic freak show he envisions. But this is a future much harder to oppose, which is why Fukuyama didn't offer it as an example.

On a related note: Writing in The Corner, Jonathan Adler makes an important point about the historical tyrannies of "eugenics" versus the contemporary promise of genetic enhancement: The early 20th-century eugenics movement was aimed at "improving the race," not giving individuals better prospects for the sake of individual well-being. Subordination of the individual was built into the goals of the movement, so it's not surprised that it turned to forced sterilization (the American approach) and mass murder (the Nazi approach). This is a point I'd planned to make in response to a posting by Glenn Reynolds yesterday, but Jonathan beat me to the punch. (Via InstaPundit.) [Posted 5/3.]

EMBARRASSING: There is nothing worse than trying to be funny and failing miserably. As The Weekly Standard's Parody page often demonstrates, political parady is particularly prone to that embarrassment. Good parody requires both a deft touch and a nuanced knowledge of the parody's object. That's one reason The Onion is so funny. The writers consistently nail the forms and content of the typical daily newspaper and the foibles and attitudes of the general American public.

Politics, however, tends to bring out the desire to Drive the Point Home. Unfunny political parody also generally demonstrates a superficial understanding of the object. Consider Tim Cavanaugh's heavy-handed attempt to mock NRO's The Corner. It's bad. Really, really bad. Reader's Digest bad. Herblock bad. The Corner looks like it should be easy to parody, but apparently that's not the case. To paraphrase UThant might say, "Just like Mark Russell. Only not as funny." [Posted 5/3.]

WHAT FUKUYAMA MISSED: Want to prove libertarians are having a bad week, month, year? Stop blabbering about foreign policy and biotech. Look at the farm bill. As MSNBC.com puts it:

With both Democrats and Republicans eager to please farm-state voters in an election year, the House of Representatives approved a massive $72 billion agriculture subsidy bill Thursday. The Senate was likely to follow suit, and President Bush reaffirmed that heÿd sign the legislation into law. The bill is a final repudiation of the free-market approach Congress tried to implement in the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, which was aimed at curtailing and eventually ending taxpayer subsidies to farmers.

Break out the champagne, Weekly Standard! You may be losing on biotech, but you've got farm subsidies (and steel tariffs) to show the greatness of revitalized big government. [Posted 5/2.]

WANNABE SHILL: I didn't think there was anything new to say about Enron's many financial contributions, let alone anything amusing, but Steve "Club for Growth" Moore's little piece in The American Spectator made me smile. See Steve squirm under tough questioning from Washington Post and Roling Stone reporters, only to confess the embarrassing truth: "I'm not a shill for companies like Enron; I'm still just a wannabe." [Posted 5/2.]

WHO LOST WASHINGTON? Over at Kausfiles, Mickey Kaus discusses Ralph Nader's claim that his 2000 candidacy helped win the Senate for Democrats (with an assist from Jumpin' Jim Jeffords, of course). Nader claims he brought out energized leftists to vote for Democrats in down-ballot races, and he specifically cites the Washington State Senate race, where Democrat Maria Cantwell beat Republican Slade Gorton by just 2,229.

But it wasn't Ralph who won that seat for the Dems. It was the Libertarian Party, whose candidate pulled at least 2 percent of the vote. Almost all LP voters fall into one of two camps: people who'd otherwise not vote at all and people who'd otherwise vote Republican. I'd be willing to be there were well over 2,229 people in the latter category.

For those who are new to the site and may be confused between small-l and capital-L libertarians, I've never been associated with the Libertarian Party and have occasionally leveled some pretty tough criticisms at it, on the basis of both platform and strategy. I have no strong opinion, however, of the results in Washington State. I am merely noting them. [Posted 5/2.]

THE END OF LIBERTARIANS? In today's WSJ, Francis Fukuyama argues that libertarianism, incorrectly defined as "an ideological hostility to the state in all its manifestations," is "fighting rearguard actions on two fronts: foreign policy and biotechnology." He's wrong about the rearguard actions. His own article, which says almost nothing about foreign policy (and inaccurately portrays libertarians on that subject), demonstrates that on biotech libertarians are driving the intellectual debate.

Brink Lindsey and Josh Chafetz of OxBlog have already posted excellent replies. (While I was writing, Glenn Reynolds alerted me to his response, which includes links to several others.) Instead of repeating their points-you should read them yourself—I'd like to address Fukuyama's strongest argument:

Libertarians argue that the freedom to design one's own children genetically-not just to clone them, but to give them more intelligence or better looks-should be seen as no more than a technological extension of the personal autonomy we already enjoy. By this view, the problem with the eugenics practiced by Nazi Germany was not its effort to select genetic qualities per se, but rather the fact that it was done by the state and enforced coercively. There is no cause for worry if eugenics is practiced by individuals. The latter could be counted on to make sound judgments about what is in their own and their children's best interests.

Even if one does not share the view of religious conservatives that embryos have the moral status of infants, and are therefore entitled to the same legal rights, there are reasons to be skeptical of arguments that say that genetic engineering is just another choice. To begin with, the community of interest that is presumed to exist between parents and children cannot be taken for granted, which is after all why we have laws against child abuse, incest etc. A deaf lesbian couple recently sought to implant an embryo to produce a child who they hoped would also be deaf. Children do not ask to be born, of course, but it is a stretch to assume the informed consent of a child to be born deaf, or a clone, or genetically redesigned in a risky experiment.

I have certainly made the argument that it's reprehensible to equate state-sanctioned mass murder with prenatal medical intervention by parents on behalf of their children. The mere fact that you can label both "eugenics" blurs some rather significant differences that you shouldn't have to be a Hayek devotee to recognize.

Fukuyama's more interesting and important argument is the one that says parents don't always act in the best interests of their children, which is true; that therefore state intervention is justified to protect children from abuse, which is also true; so therefore (the big leap) the state rather than parents should control all prenatal choices concerning children's genetic heritage.

You don't have to be a libertarian to think there might be a problem with that argument. Indeed, I would expect traditional conservatives to object more strenuously than libertarians to Fukuyama's vision of activist intervention in family life. (Libertarians are somewhat more likely to worry about children's autonomy than parental control.)

Contrary to Fukuyama's claim, I for one have never said there is "no cause for worry if eugenics is practiced by individuals." There is always some cause for worry about any action performed by anyone. There is a cause for worry when people are allowed to have children without some certifying authority verifying that they'd be good parents. But, of course, there's plenty of cause for worry that such a certifying authority would be oppressive, foolish, or corrupt. We don't get to choose utopia. We get to choose among less-than-perfect alternatives.

Despite the many risks, U.S. law assumes that in most cases parents, rather than outsiders, are the best agents for their children. Parents are considered good, or at least acceptable, agents until proven otherwise, and the burden of proof is very high—for good reason. Parents know more about their children's circumstances and have deep and ongoing connections with their children, connections that are unmatched by necessarily bureaucratic authorities. Fukuyama may appear to be attacking genetic engineering, but he's actually attacking the liberal (and, for that matter, conservative) legal approach to family life: that as a rule family, not state authorities, get to decide what's best for their kids.

Parents make all sorts of medical decisions that affect their children's futures, and the law generally allows them to do so without coercion. Many of those decisions leave (as Fukuyama says of genetic changes) an "indelible" stamp on those children. As a teenage volunteer at a center for preschoolers with cerebral palsy, I heard plenty of kids scream their objections to the physical therapy their parents forced on them. (My job was to assist the physical therapist.) And I heard lots of stories of parents kept up all night by little children screaming in pain from the aftermath of surgeries designed to give their legs a better chance to walk. Those children had no choice in the matter, and the muscles and tendons the surgeons had cut were permanently severed.

Of course, Fukuyama would respond that those surgeries were for the kids' benefit, and that most observers would agree they were a good idea. True enough. But the surgeries were also risky, and they didn't always work. More to the point, most people would agree that a better memory or clear, smooth skin would be beneficial to a child. Yet intelligence and good looks are exactly the enhancements Fukuyama argues libertarians are "overreaching" to say parents should be able to give their children. And while opinions differ about all sorts of cosmetic attributes—which is another good reason for not giving centralized regulators authority over genetic decisions—surely nobody sensible thinks it would be child abuse to give a kid blond hair or brown skin.

Through subtly changing the subject, Fukuyama argues for prohibiting well-recognized good things, as well as innocuous matters of taste, on the grounds that some parents are abusive. He advances his anti-family argument by pulling out a horror story: the deaf lesbian couple who wanted to select the in vitro embryo that would have the highest chance of producing a deaf child. Note that in this case, there was no genetic intervention. The question was which fertilized egg would be implanted. The genes for deafness came from the biological mother. It's unclear whether Fukuyama would consider it a form of child abuse for a heterosexual couple who both carried genes for deafness to reproduce, knowing that their child would have a high chance of inheriting their deafness.

As it happens, in various interviews over the years, I have specifically raised the problem of deaf parents who want to have deaf children as a potential example of the abusive use of genetic technology. Given attitudes in some quarters of the deaf community, that desire was predictable. I agree that genetic intervention to create a deaf child would constitutes a form of child abuse that would in theory justify state action to protect the child. But, and this is the important question, what are the policy alternatives for enforcing that theoretical point? And are they really better?

In his WSJ piece, Fukuyama does not explicitly state the policy that he thinks would be better. He does make clear that his policy ideal wouldn't leave prenatal medical decisions to parents or allow room for individual choice over genetic heritage. (He assumes such interventions would affect the germline, passing on the new genetic patterns to future generations. For purposes of argument, that's a reasonable assumption. As Greg Stock often notes, however, it's quite likely that genetic changes will be made in more easily revised forms.) Fukuyama strongly implies that the best alternative is to allow no prenatal genetic intervention at all-to make it illegal. To cripple research on genetic intervention, he backs measures to ban therapeutic cloning, even though many of that technique's applications would not involve prenatal genetics at all (and even though many pro-life opponents of embryo cloning would have no objection to genetic therapies that didn't involve embryo destruction).

Fukuyama's favored policies would clearly leave many, many prospective children worse off genetically. Along the way, he would give the government control over family life, and medical research and practice, to a degree that is unprecedented in a liberal society. He'd also eliminate medical research that could lead to non-genetic therapies for disease.

Under the rhetorical cover of preventing child abuse, his policies would require what amounts to child neglect. They would force parents to accept a worse-than-necessary fate for their children. As Fukuyama says, no child asks to be born deaf, but he's arguing that we should deny parents accesss to technologies that might avoid that condition—that, indeed, we should avoid even the knowledge of how such technologies might be developed. To avoid voluntary, decentralized eugenics, Fukuyama wants to mandate involuntary, centralized dysgenics. That is not, to put it mildly, a benevolent policy option. It's deeply inhumane.

So what to do about deaf parents who want deaf kids? I'm not sure. It's extremely dangerous to give state authorities power over reproductive decisions, and prohibiting parents from introducing genetically abusive traits in their children would require prenatal screening that could easily lead to mandatory eugenics. Ample historical experience, the kind conservatives generally value, tells us that it's wise to err on the side of preserving familial autonomy rather than looking for reasons to expand government regulation of family life. Respecting the family is a good general principle, even if in some cases (e.g., Andrea Yates) that respect has awful results.

The best approach is probably an indirect one, such as some sort of liability for the doctors and others who perform prenatal genetic alterations. If the doctor who deliberately creates a deaf child has to pay for the youngster's special education, I don't think we'll see a lot of medically assisted child abuse. It would also help in the long run (though at the cost of considerable pain in the short run) to eliminate the many protections and privileges accorded disabled individuals. These may be less than perfect policies, but this is a less than perfect world. The alternatives are worse, and the alternatives Fukuyama favors are much, much worse.

Finally, on a less weighty point, it is hilarious to see Fukuyama try to discredit libertarians who "join hands with the New York Times and important parts of the American left in opposing restrictions on human cloning currently under debate in the U.S. Senate." It takes amazing chutzpah for conservatives who brag their alliances with the likes of Jeremy Rifkin, Stuart Newman, Judy Norsigian, and the most radical elements of the anti-technology environmental movement—and who not only adopt leftist anti-commerce rhetoric but get it inserted into presidential speeches—to criticize libertarians for agreeing with The New York Times.

Sorry to keep repeating myself, but this is a clash between dynamism and stasis, with Fukuyama combining a technocrat's instincts for central control with an appeal to reactionary fears of change. Conservative opponents of abortion have gotten swept along on the cloning issue. But when the debate shifts from embryo cloning to prenatal genetic interventions by parents on behalf of their children's welfare, Fukuyama will find that the vast majority of his allies are, in fact, on the anti-technology, anti-market, anti-family left. No wonder he wants to outlaw research now. [Posted 5/2.]

MANDARIN TRAITS: The following response to Fukuyama, from reader Raymund Eich, is worth sharing:

First, he fears that if parents make a mistake in their choice of genes they engineer in their children: "[T]he genetic stamp is indelible, and would be handed down not just to one's children but to all of one's subsequent descendants."

This is clearly an absurd concern. If you can genetically engineer your children, when they grow up they could genetically engineer your grandchildren. If your kids think you made a mistake regarding which genes you imparted in them, they can undo it. So why did Fukuyama pretend they couldn't? It looks like he was scrounging for rhetorical ammunition and didn't bother to think through the ramifications of his premise.

Second, he says, "Cloning itself may not be a large issue, since there are few who would want to clone children at present. But it is the first step in a series of technologies that may lead to genetic engineering of humans."

Actually, it isn't. The human genetic engineering I can most easily envision would start with in vitro fertilization, and then add or subtract DNA to the nucleus of the fertilized egg. Enucleation (removal of all the DNA) from an unfertilized egg and transfer of all the DNA from a human non-egg cell, which are the two techniques that define cloning, would not be used in this approach to human genetic engineering. A ban on cloning (which Fukuyama is shilling for) would not close off human genetic engineering.

Summing up, it looks like Fukuyama doesn't understand the science and will ignore his own premises to make a point. Just the qualities I'm looking for in a self-appointed mandarin...

[Posted 5/2.]

"CLONING TREVOR:" The brand new Atlantic Monthly (June 2002) has a well-told cover story with that title, tracking the work of Advanced Cell Technology as it pursues therapeutic cloning for the treatment of a one-year-old boy ("Trevor") who shares with his older brothers the genes that will eventually give him a terrible degenerative disease.

The difficult scientific work author Kyla Dunn describes takes place against a background of financial and political peril and, reading the piece, you wish that the environment were more benign. But while the article does a good job of explaining the political threats, it's about science, not politics. The most memorable parts are the perils-of-Pauline descriptions of working with human eggs, which are incredibly rare and difficult to obtain. "You have no idea how difficult it is to do this whole thing," Jose Cibelli, ACT's vp for research tells Dunn. "We need to find an alternative to human eggs."

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the tale of an ACT technician's attempts to transplant Trevor's skin cells into two precious eggs:

Kate released the egg from the holding pipette and, using the needle, rotated it, trying to find the most direct path to its chromosomes. After anchoring the egg again, she gently nudged the tip of the needle up to the zona pellucida. The sound of the piezo device filled the room—a tinny, mechanical buzzing. On the monitor we watched the needle advance, drilling a plug out of the zona. Kate hit the UV pedal intermittently, checking for the position of the chromosomes while also trying to minimize the egg's exposure to potentially damaging UV rays. Soon the needle was through the zona and poised at the surface of the egg itself, just across the outer membrane from the chromosomes. She applied a little suction. We all held our breath. It was a moment when things could go terribly wrong.

In theory, at this point in the procedure the suction draws a small portion of the egg up into the needle, bringing the chromosomes along with it. That small portion then buds off, leaving the egg's outer membrane (greasy and fluid, like all cell membranes) to flow together and repair the hold. With cow eggs the bud pinches off rather cleanly. But human eggs are trickier. Their membranes stretch, trailing a thin thread behind. ("It's like a string of mozzarella on a pizza that doesn't break and doesn't break," Cibelli told me.) A tiny mistake with the joystick, and the needle will leave a gaping tear in the egg.

This emphasis reminds me of the first feature I wrote for the WSJ way back when I was a rookie reporter in 1982. It was about surrogate mothers and my interviews with the prospective parents found an emphasis ignored by the public debates: the horrible ordeal of waiting and hoping that the surrogate would get pregnant, only to be disappointed.

The piece probably won't be online for a month, so buy the magazine on the newsstand. In addition to Dunn's article, biologist Robert Weinberg writes "Of Clones and Clowns," explaining why biologists didn't take the cloning debate seriously until (my view) it was nearly too late. [Posted 5/2.]

PETITION NEWS: Milton Friedman just became, coincidentally enough, the 500th person to sign the Franklin Society's petition against a ban on "therapeutic cloning." (Yes, I should have asked him long before now.) [Posted 5/1.]

THE NEW ME: Since some people seemed to think that my hair looked red in the photo on this page, I've substituted a new image with blonder tresses. Thanks to reader Fritz Anderson for the Mac wisdom. (For a larger image, and an alternative persona, click here.) [Posted 5/1.]

SHOES, SHOES, SHOES: Following up on my clothes and closets posts, Dr. Weevil has a great story that puts Imelda Marcos in middle-America context. [Posted 5/1.]

SAUDI ADS: Happy Fun Pundit is happy (and having fun) at the news that cable networks are turning down the $10 million in "We are so nice" propaganda ad that our good friends the Saudis want to run. There's certainly an argument for turning down propaganda from evil governments. But here's a question worth considering: If that $10 million didn't go to U.S. cable networks, exactly what sort of mischief might it be used for? The more the Saudis spend buying innocuous American goods, the less they have to pay off the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or spread totalitarian Wahhabist ideas to Muslims around the world. [Posted 5/1.]

BIG LIES: Glenn Reynolds has already done a number on the ads Bill Kristol and friends are running in support of the bill to ban cell nucleus transplantation, a.k.a., therapeutic cloning. I particularly like Glenn's apt comparison of the Kristol clique's anti-market rhetoric to Bob Shrum-style populism. (Who is funding these anti-research people anyway? They are rolling in dough.)

The pro-research Harry and Louise ads were arguably misleading, depending on what you think the word clone means to people. But the Kristol ads tell outright falsehoods.

The first, most obvious lie, is this bit:

HARRIET: Well, there is a Senate bill that bans all human cloning.

LOUIS: But not lifesaving research?

HARRIET: Of course not. It's the bill President Bush supports.

To say that a bill that would put scientists in federal prison for 10 years for transferring a human cell into enucleated egg would not ban "lifesaving research" is a crock. That's exactly what the bill would do: ban research intended to save lives. (An even more blatant form of this Big Lie appeared in a Fred Barnes article in The Weekly Standard, which unfortunately isn't online to nonsubscribers: "The head of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research claimed the anti-cloning side is 'talking about jailing doctors.' No, what they're talking about is preventing human cloning." Right, Fred. Those 10-year prison terms in the legislation are just a figment of our imaginations.)

No, we don't know for sure that this particular procedure will produce lifesaving results. That's why they call it "research." But regardless of whether therapies result directly from this research, the knowledge derived from it will almost certainly save lives. More to the point, making cell research a crime will inevitably stifle research in general. There are, as Freeman Dyson has pointed out, "hidden costs of saying no."

The ad's second big lie is one that has become incredibly popular among conservatives:

LOUIS: But they also say cloning is needed to cure terrible diseases.

HARRIET: Look, if they were really interested in cures, they'd be talking about adult stem cell research, which shows far more promise—not creating embryos to destroy them for medical experiments.

There are two questions here: a scientific question and a policy question. As a scientific matter, it's great to have research on all sorts of approaches to curing diseases. Here's a report on yet another cool-sounding possibility. Different scientists will have strong views about the promise of various approaches, and they should slug it out in the hospitals and labs. (They are all interested in cures, and there's no reason except demagoguery and demonization to suggest otherwise.) Adult stem cell research looks good as far as it goes, and some early clinical applications appear promising. But Charles Murtaugh is right to describe as "stupid, unscientific criticism" the "contention made endlessly by Wesley Smith, Michael Fumento and David Prentice: because we don't yet know how to use ES cells in the clinic, we shouldn't even bother doing the research." I don't know the other guys, but Mike Fumento surely knows better. While the adult-cells point is arguably relevant to the debate over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, it is irrelevant to the debate over criminalizing nucleus transfer. As Charlie has also noted, there are good reasons to think embryonic stem cell research shows greater promise.

That's the scientific argument. But the more important policy point is that scientific debates should not be decided by throwing one side in prison for testing its hypotheses. If you think embryonic stem cell research is murder, have the guts to say so. Don't pretend that putting cell biologists in prison will have no serious effect on biomedical research.

In other news on this front, Senator Orrin Hatch came out, as expected, against a ban on nucleus transplantation and endorsed a ban on reproductive cloning. This position is consistent with his position on funding for embryonic stem cell research and, as reader Allen Thorpe noted here and Slate Drew Clark reported for Slate, is also consisten with the Mormon theology on which Hatch's pro-life beliefs are presumably based.

If you haven't done so yet, please sign the petition against a ban on "therapeutic cloning." [Posted 5/1.]

WHO WROTE THE HEADLINE? "Far left, far right unite on cloning bill." Maybe if you're talking about Jeremy Rifkin and Sam Brownback (even there, the "far" is a stretch). But that's a pretty odd headline for a CNN.com/Reuters headline about the press conference held by Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch, Ted Kennedy, and Dianne Feinstein—none of them exactly extremists. [Posted 5/1.]

THE WALL: Readers interested in the debate over whether the answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what's known in shorthand as "the Wall" can check out posts in response to Steve's anti-Wall email at Unqualified Offerings and Tres Producers. Brink Lindsey, whose blog you should be reading already, also returns to the subject. [Posted 5/1.]

ASHCROFT DEMENTIA: I don't like John Ashcroft, but, unlike a certain sort of left-leaning commentator, I don't let my distaste for his policies and persona make my brains fall out of my head.

Over at MSNBC.com Eric Alterman seems to think he's writing for foreigners who know nothing about American politics (or maybe nothing about French politics) and can therefore be convinced that John Ashcroft and Jean-Marie Le Pen have a lot in common. Revising history, he describes Ashcroft as "a far-right ex-senator who was so extreme that he managed to lose an election to a dead man." Alterman doesn't mention, of course, that the election in question was (no pun intended) a dead heat and that the death of his opponent probably hurt Ashcroft more than it helped him. More important, the views that put Ashcroft on the right flank of the Republican are nothing like Le Pen's socialistic nationalism.

Then there's Frank Rich's hysterical Sunday NYT column, which included this extraordinarily ignorant denunciation of Ashcroft's religiosity: "In a February speech he declared, 'We are a nation called to defend freedom—a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God.' So much, then, for that trifling document that defines our freedoms, a k a the Constitution."

Rich has apparently never heard of Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, natural rights theory, or the Declaration of Independence. You don't have to be a fundamentalist Christian, or even to believe in God, to think government exists to protect, not to grant, freedoms. And, whether or not you agree with it, you have to be completely ignorant of American history and government not to get the reference. [Posted 5/1.]

WHAT'S WRONG WITH NYC PUBLISHING: Lisa DePaulo has a story in New York magazine about Harvard Business Review, where the disgraced editor quit after her affair with Jack Welch became public. DePaulo claims, without providing any evidence, that "During her year-and-a-half tenure at the top of the masthead, the magazine—already prestigious and hugely profitable to Harvard—got better and buzzier." I'll leave it to the New York slicks to judge buzz, which is pretty much all they care about, but I doubt that anyone who actually reads HBR would term the vapid product of the past couple years "better."

HBR should be to business magazines like Fortune and Forbes what the foreign policy journals are to the newsweeklies or the NYT. Ideally, it would be the publication where business intellectuals—academics, consultants, and a few unusual journalists—hash out controversies and test ideas. In its recent dumbed-down form, HBR has provided neither business reporting (the job of the WSJ and the business magazines) nor serious treatment of new ideas. The world does not need another magazine repackaging buzzword-filled PowerPoint presentations, no matter how much publicity it gets. Besides, before the sex scandal, where exactly was the buzz?

As a professional aside, I beg to differ with the conventional journalistic wisdom that says it's unethical to allow interview subjects to review edited Q&A transcripts like the ones that run in HBR. Such interviews are designed to elicit the person's actual thoughts in the person's own words. The interviewee is more like the writer of the resulting article than like the subject or source of a typical feature. The transcription and editing process—and the nature of oral communication—can introduce errors. Errors are bad journalism, and good journalists want to avoid them.

It is therefore perfectly correct, and was my practice at Reason, to allow interviewees to review the edited Q&A to correct factual errors and occasionally to elaborate points (sometimes in response to queries). The editor simply has to make it clear that such a review is limited to fact-checking, not rewriting, and is there to serve the reader and the truth, not the interviewee's ego or p.r. needs. It's not that difficult to convey implicitly the idea that improper demands for changes will not be met. (It's also a good idea to keep the introduction and headline to yourself.) This process assumes that the interview is valuable for the ideas presented, not for making news, which would present other sorts of issues. HBR interviews, like Reason interviews, explore ideas; they do not break news.

In my years at Reason, I edited many interviews, some of which I conducted, and in most of those instances the interviewee had a chance to review the edited transcript for accuracy. I never had a problem with that procedure; the changes requested were generally small, and all those we made improved the final product. Of course, in a million years it never would have occurred to me to sleep with an interview subject, although I did become friends with some. (Links to my Reason interviews are at the bottom of this page. A full list of Reason interviews, going back to at least 1994, is here.) [Posted 5/1.]

WHERE'S PAGLIA? Speaking of former interview subjects, several readers have written to ask if I know what Camille Paglia is up to now that she isn't writing for Salon. I inquired, and she sent the following letter "to post in full on your site":

Hi, Virginia,

Thanks for your message. It's always great to hear from America's preeminent libertarian thinker! Your legions of fans are ever-expanding.

In response to the queries from your readers about what I'm doing these days, here's a summary. People often forget that I'm a full-time teacher. I've been teaching for nearly 20 years at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where my current title is University Professor as well as Professor of Humanities and Media Studies. For two years I've been developing a big new course on gender and media that we hope to open eventually, in high-tech form, to the public.

After six years as a columnist with Salon.com (beginning with its inaugural issue), I resigned last year to focus on my book projects. Right now, I'm completing a study of poetry that will be published by Pantheon Books next year. My third essay collection is under contract to Vintage Books, and I'm also working on the second volume of "Sexual Personae", to be published by Yale University Press. I've also promised the British Film Institute another contribution to their Film Classics Series, after my 1998 study of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds".

Last fall I became a contributing editor and occasional columnist for Interview magazine, founded by Andy Warhol, of whose aesthetics I have been a fervent disciple since college. Aside from that, I've been refusing invitations to comment on current events in other periodicals or on TV and have been researching and writing academic lectures instead.

For example, my lecture at Santa Clara University last spring on multiculturalism and education was published by Arion in its Fall 2001 issue: http://www.bu.edu/arion/paglia~1.htm. This fall, Arion will also be publishing a lecture I gave at Yale University last month on American religion in the 1960s.

I hope these details will suffice!

Many best wishes,
Camille

[Posted 5/1.]

HERO MACHINE: Lots of other bloggers are having fun posting pictures of the superheroic alter egos they've generated with using Hero Machine's software. (See Jackass Newspaper Man, who got the idea from, among others, SuperVodkaPundit, who got the idea from Sekimori.) It's a lot of fun, but because the graphic workarounds are unfriendly to Mac users who don't own Photoshop, I can't show you a picture of the glamorous DynaMyst.

I post these things, so Brink can impress his kids with what he learns from his friends' websites. [Posted 4/29.]

CLOTHES THANKS: Thanks to the many readers who've sent in ideas in answer to my query about how many clothes Americans own. Rob Hoblit proved demonstrated why McKinsey consultants make the big bucks by turning up an estimate of the number of jeans in a woman's wardrobe and some information on how many clothes American women buy compared to their European counterparts. "This seems quite like a consulting interview estimation question," he wrote, after finding the cotton industry's Lifestyle Monitor in five minutes of googling. (I'd already spent a lot more than five minutes with Google.)

My friend David Link, author of several excellent Reason articles before he took to full-time lawyering, sent the following related info:

When I was looking for apartments in Pasadena when I moved back from Sacramento, I saw an awful lot of extremely charming cottages and duplexes from the 20s, 30s and 40s, none of which had anything like adequate closet space even for my modest collection of attire. In fact, a couple of places didn't have bedroom closets at all, with the original owners apparently relying on what then would have been the more common option of owning a piece of furiture actually called a "wardrobe." Now, of course, you can't buy a suburban tract home built since 1990 that doesn't have a bedroom closet the size of a decent-sized 20s bedroom. I would think that it might be possible for homebuilders or some such to have access to how bedroom closets have increased in size over the last century, which might give you the basis for an educated guess as to what you're digging for.

David wondered what in the world I wanted with this information. As it happens, his closet comparison is highly relevant, since I'm looking for a contrast to the following tidbit (from chapter two of my book in progress):

In the late twenties and early thirties, a typical office clerk in the San Francisco area owned just three suits, eight shirts, and one extra pair of pants, while his wife had nine dresses. That was it—all their outer garments, for work and play, summer and winter, leisure and formality. These were not impoverished, unemployed, or rural people; they were the white-collar urban middle class. Yet they replaced their clothes only when the garments wore out, once a year for house dresses and every four years for men's suits, and their small wardrobes offered little opportunity for aesthetic variety or stylistic playfulness. "The more expensive items of clothing must have been worn until they were fairly shabby," concluded contemporary researchers, adding that "these families did not buy extravagant amounts of clothing, nor did they pay high prices. Their expenditures must have allowed little attention to fashion and certainly no ostentation in dress."

[Posted 4/29.]