This reader email suggests that "Times Select" is costing the NYT more readers than it's supposed to.
Why are you still giving us only links to your NYT columns?
Now that we have to pay for access to the Times on line, most of us do not do so, and can no longer read Times stories or columns.
If you want us to read them, you'll have to post them on another server. If the Times won't let you, then I for one have no reason to read your stuff, anyway.
I know that you get paid for your writing, so my demanding to read it for free can sound churlish. But you were being paid before; the only difference now is the NYT on-line policy.
If the Times had in fact put my columns behind its pay-only wall, that would reduce the value of the column to me and essentially cut my pay. But that hasn't happened. My columns, like the vast, vast majority of NYT articles, are still available for free. And that, apparently, is exactly what they're worth to some people. (With my editor's permission, I do maintain an archive of columns on this site. The Times, however, owns all the reprint rights.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 07, 2005 • Comments
Thomas Fuller of the International Herald Tribune recently reported on the success of immigrants from the former East Bloc in the three EU countries that admit them without limits: the U.K., Ireland, and Sweden. All three economies are healthy, but is that cause or effect? Or, as I suspect, do both phenomena share an underlying cause? By European standards, all three regulate labor markets and business formation fairly lightly, though Sweden, of course, has famouslyl high taxes. Here's an excerpt from Fuller's article:
It turns out the doomsayers were partly right: Nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, floods of East Europeans have washed into Britain.
Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain's decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the EU last year.
They work as bus drivers, farmhands and dentists, as waitresses, builders, and saleswomen; they are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English.
But the doomsayers were also wrong: Multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers like a sponge. Unemployment is still rock-bottom at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace.
Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected, in what is shaping up to be one of the great migrations of recent decades.
Yet the government says it still has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction.
"They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers," said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. "The U.K. is pleased with the way it's progressed over the first 16 months, and we're confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future."
Tens of thousands of East Europeans have also moved to Ireland and Sweden, the only other West European countries that opened their labor markets to the new EU members.
With nearly full employment, Ireland's booming economy still needs workers, and immigration is actively encouraged. More than 128,000 East Europeans from the new EU member states registered to work in Ireland from May 2004 to August this year.
Irish society seems to be adjusting to the newcomers, 45,000 of whom come from Poland. A newspaper in Limerick now runs a column in Polish; last summer the national bus company began a daily service from Dublin to Warsaw.
The phenomenon is more subdued in Sweden, where about 16,000 workers from the new EU countries registered with the authorities between May 2004 and early October this year. A substantial majority, about two thirds, were Poles, followed by Lithuanians and Estonians.
Fearing a massive influx of East Europeans after enlargement, other West European countries threw up barriers that will be lowered only gradually over the next decade. A Pole seeking to work in France, for example, still needs to apply for a work permit. France issued 737 such permits to Poles in the 10 months after enlargement; that is the number of Poles who arrive in Britain every two days.
Poles who go to Britain, in contrast, do not need any special permission.
In fact, Britain is so eager to recruit more Poles, by far the largest group of entrants since May last year, that British embassy officials in Warsaw have distributed brochures at Polish unemployment offices "so that if people wanted to go to the United Kingdom they had good information," Thompson said.
My latest NYT column looks at scholarly research suggesting that the wave of immigration in the 1990s did not, in fact, depress overall wages of American-born workers. What both stories share in common is a dynamic perspective. Over time, immigrant workers don't just fill existing job openings. In aggregate, they add to the total resources available for economic growth, making new capital investment more profitable and native-born labor more potentially productive.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2005 • Comments
What's the value of a logo once the organization it symbolized no longer exists? What does it mean? Graphic designer Michael Bierut considers the preservation questions raised by the demise of the AT&T logo (a.k.a. the Death Star), a touchstone among designers.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2005 • Comments
Why was the sun rising as I walked to my Paris conference at 8:15 in the morning? I wondered. Thanks to Jim Lindgren, I now know the answer. In a "fall back" post on the Volokh Conspiracy, he explained:
It is pleasant traveling in France in the summer, which based on longitude should be on Greenwich time along with England, but instead is an hour ahead of London; the sun often goes down after 9:30pm. In effect, France and Spain are on double Daylight Saving Time in the summer and single Daylight Saving Time in the winter.
Peter Galison's book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time details the intense Anglo-French rivalries over where to draw the time-establishing prime meridian.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2005 • Comments
D Magazine publisher Wick Allison says rumors are flying that Harriet Miers might run for mayor of Dallas. Sounds crazy to me, but Wick claims "she would be inundated with campaign donations."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2005 • Comments
The complete DVD set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be out in two weeks. Amazon is taking advanced orders.
In other Buffy news, I've enjoyed dipping into Why Buffy Matters, a book of literary criticism.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2005 • Comments
On my recent visit to London, I was struck by the difference between U.S. security procedures and British ones. In London, you are videotaped--and told you are being videotaped--everywhere. But you can walk into a crowded train station or an art museum filled with tourists and priceless treasures without showing anyone the contents of your bag. Even airport security is much more casual than the ritualistic shoe stripping and computer segregation of U.S. airports. I'm not convinced that either surveillance or routine search does much to prevent terrorist attacks. But, while less avoidable (at least in theory), the British way is certainly less intrusive. I'd rather be watched than searched.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 30, 2005 • Comments
I landed back in the USA from London to find CNN reporting that Harriet Miers has withdrawn. The Democrats' congressional leadership, no doubt to be joined by a few conservative interest groups, is spinning this as a victory for the "radical right." But the truth is obvious: It's simply a victory for high hiring standards. The corollary to the "Ginsburg principle" is that a Supreme Court nominee had better be as recognizably qualified as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 27, 2005 • Comments
As regular readers know, I've written an extraordinary amount about Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Early on, my primary purpose was reportorial--to use my locational advantage to provide information and context for people outside of Dallas. But the more I learned, the more appalled I became.
For whatever reason, the president has picked a woman who not only has no constitutional or judicial experience but even in her business practice has demonstrated no interest in the law as anything other than a source of billable hours. At 60 years old, she appears never to have had a substantive conversation about law or policy with any friend. She comes from a closed and cronyish legal and business culture and appears to have gotten ahead through a combination of networking, nose-to-the-grindstone diligence, and willingness to do her law firm's management, rather than legal, work.
Her selection is an insult to women, to evangelical Christians, and to corporate lawyers. Is this really the best these groups have to offer to U.S. Supreme Court?
Unlike some social conservatives, my concerns are not results-oriented. As a matter of policy, I am perfectly happy to have abortion legal, with some restrictions, and actively support gay marriage. If there were any evidence (other than my friend Hugh Hewitt's imaginings) that Harriet Miers shared Richard Epstein's views on affirmative action, I'd give her a pass on that. (Now there' a line of questioning for the Judiciary Committee: Would you agree with Richard Epstein on affirmative action? Does she even know who he is or what he says?)
But the Supreme Court is not a legislature, in which the standard for a justice is whether he or she will "vote right." Supreme Court decisions set precedents beyond the case at hand, and they do that through the arguments they make--the very sort of logic and rhetoric Miers shows absolutely no interest in or competence for. Being the president's friend and lawyer, like being of the right sex and religion, does not by itself meet the requirements of the job.
At the invitation of David Frum, I have joined the advisory board of Americans for Better Justice, a group of people who have supported President Bush but who do not support this nomination. ABJ's website has more information about the organization, which will be running TV ads asking the president to withdraw the nomination, and what citizens can do to let the Senate and president know that America deserves better.
My previous posts on the Miers nomination, in reverse chronological order, are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 24, 2005 • Comments
Bush is expected to announce shortly that he will name Ben Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan--a very difficult job, but one for whom Bernanke, who is best known as an advocate of "inflation targeting," seems to me the best choice. Here's a column I wrote on a speech he gave in 2003, with a link to the text.
UPDATE: There's lots more on Marginal Revolution.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 24, 2005 • Comments