On The Atlantic's Aspen blog (where, demonstrating the organization's dedication to impeccable honesty, they've cross-posted my rant about the opening session), my colleague Clive Crook has an interesting account of two sessions on energy. Chevron's Peter Robertson made a good point in response to an audience member's question about oil spills: "Hurricanes Rita and Katrina had destroyed more than 100 oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and not a drop of oil leaked." That's progress.
The Aspen audience is, as Clive notes, very green, at least in the style sense. But, as the photo illustrates, that doesn't mean the place hates oil companies.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 03, 2007 • Comments
Speaking of Professor Postrel, he has a new post on Organizations and Markets, continuing a very popular earlier discussion on design puzzles, in this case the question of why grocery stores use "pick a horse" multiple lines rather than a single queue with multiple checkers. Comments are open.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 03, 2007 • Comments
Busy writing my previous blog rant, and answering editorial queries and other emails, I missed most of the morning Aspen sessions. I did, however, catch part of the session titled, "Nuclear Proliferation: Armageddon or Balance of Power?" with Jane Harman, Graham Allison, Ashton Carter, and James Woolsey. (Professor Postrel, ever the student of strategy, was there for the whole thing.) What a contrast to last night! The subject was focused, the panelists deeply knowledgeable and thoughtful about the tradeoffs and possible dynamic effects of any given policy course. Nobody was using vague policy pronouncements to make a statement about taste, style, or identity. But, alas, the problem with a serious discussion of a difficult problem, especially one that potentially involves mass fatalities, is that you don't come away feeling that you've found THE solution.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 03, 2007 • Comments
With the notable exception of Anna Deveare Smith's hilarious channeling of Ann Richards (a "big personality"), the series of supposed "big ideas" opening the Ideas Festival last night was for the most part a procession of the banal, unoriginal, and half-baked. Jessye Norman is a great singer with tremendous stage presence, but she's not going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree that the arts should play a bigger role in public education. (You can see her here.) You can't even tell what ideal curriculum she has in mind or whether she wants to direct arts education at the gifted and enthusiastic or at everyone.
The nadir may have been water expert Peter Gleick's proclamation that "less is more," which started with the presumption that conventional production and economics assume more is always more--more resource consumption, more people, etc.--but that fresh water is a finite resource. Yet toward the end of his three minutes he mentioned that the U.S. actually uses less total water each year than it did 30 years ago. What a paradox--except to those who understand the difference between an input, where less is more (profitable), and an output. Economic competition is all about finding ways to offer more value at a lower cost, and one way to do that is to reduce inputs, including water. We don't need some kind of new economic system to produce that result; the old one works just fine. If the Aspen Institute wanted to present this big idea in a serious way, it would have invited someone like Jesse Ausubel, who has spent decades studying dematerialization. Or it could have picked a random economist, strategy professor, or business person. As Jonathan Rauch demonstrated in this January 2001 Atlantic article about oil, there are great stories to be told about how we've come to do more with less.
The Gleick talk also illustrated a bizarre lacuna in the conference in general: a distinct lack of social scientists. The absence of economic thinking is glaring, especially given its dominance in the rest of public discourse, but it's not as though the lineup is full of sociologists or psychologists either. The presumption seems to be that anyone can opine on those topics, especially if they're experts in something else, and that there are no new ideas or discoveries to be found in the social world.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 03, 2007 • Comments
In the opening session of the Aspen Ideas Festival, Atlantic owner David Bradley gave a funny, flattering talk in which he cribbed from Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson's new book on Einstein. In the process, he recycled one of Isaacson's favorite examples: the way Einstein visualized the relativity of time by imagininglightning bolts striking at either end of the track traveled by a fast-moving train.
The example made me wonder, Would Einstein have developed his theory if trains--or some other rapid form of transportation--hadn't been invented? Or was the familiar technology of high-speed travel essential to the intuitive leap? We usually think of technology driving science through new tools like Galileo's telescope or the electron microscope. But by changing the everyday background in which science is done, technologies can also create new sources of scientific inspiration.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2007 • Comments
What I want from doctors is Star Trek medicine--diagnosis and cure with no bodily invasion. Mark Anderson of Wired.com reports that tricorders are getting closer to reality, citing a number of different, largely unrelated, developments, including this mind-blowing one:
In the other research, scientists have developed a compact, precision-magnetic microscope based on a new state of matter. The technology, the researchers said, is as effective as current imaging devices such as MEGs for the brain and MCGs for the heart, which require a hospital visit because the devices are large and expensive.
Physicists at UC Berkeley have developed the device by harnessing a special property of Bose-Einstein condensates: Because they are cooled close to absolute zero, they are as free of vibrations and thermal noise as a quantum system can be, and are thus like a quiet, acoustically pristine concert hall. Tiny magnetic fields that might be unobservable in other systems are easily picked up.
Dan Stamper-Kurn, assistant professor of physics at Berkeley, and his colleagues published the work in the May 18 issue of Physical Review Letters. Unlike the superconductors that power current magnetic imaging, Stamper-Kurn's device is cooled not by gigantic refrigerators but by lasers -- making the prospect for miniaturization bright.
"I don't know when will come the day that you can strap a Bose-Einstein condensation experiment to your head," Stamper-Kurn said. But, he added, both the lasers and the vacuum chambers needed to make a condensate are shrinking fast.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2007 • Comments
In my January/February Atlantic column, I argued that air travel has lost its glamour not just because of the hassles and discomforts it entails but because it's simply too common an experience and hence has lost its mystery and its aspirational quality.
Not so in Aspen, where I've come for the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by The Atlantic, which has its own Festival blog, where I'll be cross-posting if we can overcome some technical issues. (I'll be moderating a couple of panels.) Here, judging from the ads in local magazines, air travel has recaptured its glamour, thanks to fractional jet ownership. The images are fascinating for the way they express different ideals of travel. (Click photos for larger images.)
AEXjet, an Aspen-based company, provides the most glamorous shot, evoking effortless cruising to unknown destinations. The company's strategy is based on its ability to get in and out of Aspen when other private jets can't.
Bluestar ads another classically glamorous element, with little emphasis on the actual idea of travel. Delta, by contrast, emphasizes the destination and barely shows you a plane.
Finally, Flexjet promises to make you the perfect preppy dad, complete with soccer field right next to the runway. It's the least glamorous ad, and the most obviously calculated to make luxury spending seem like the Right Thing to Do. It's for the kids!
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2007 • Comments
My friend Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna and Reason contributing editor, is donating a kidney to one of his wife's relatives today.
UPDATE: A day after surgery, Jack emails that "all went well. The transplant was successful and I'm having very little pain or discomfort."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 27, 2007 • Comments
In my latest Atlantic column (link good for three days), I look at how George Hurrell created the iconic photos that defined Golden Age Hollywood. The column is adapted from a longer essay I wrote for the catalog to a major retrospective exhibition of Hurrell's photos, which will open at the California Heritage Museum in Santa Monica in January.
Good portraits are said to "reveal character." As I write in the column:
Yet these photos weren't entirely artificial. Not even the most gifted photographer can create charisma with only lights and a retouching pencil. Hurrell didn't invent Joan Crawford's drive or Jean Harlow's sexuality. Rather, he encouraged the stars to reveal their inner selves to his lens. Then he intensified their defining qualities, while creating mystery with light and shadow.
True enough for clearly defined personas as Crawford and Harlow (though, as the article goes on to explain, less so for Garbo). But I'm skeptical at how reliably something as genetically determined as facial appearance can reveal character. Maybe we want to believe we can see character in a good portrait, because that would suggest we can accurately judge character from the faces we see every day.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 26, 2007 • Comments
Before they were comic superstars Trey Parker and Matt Stone applied their unique sense of humor (with fewer potty jokes and more wine coolers) to an corporate film introducing Universal Studio employees to their new owner, Seagram Co. The video is too long but still pretty funny.
. In the process, he recycled one of Isaacson's favorite examples: the way Einstein visualized the relativity of time by 
In my