On the legal side of the immigration equation, there are easy trade-ups to be had. In fact, even a National Journal columnist with no apparent qualifications could write a better bill.

And what might that look like? Glad you asked.

• First, raise the number of legal immigrants by about 50 percent, to about 1.8 million a year. That meets the economy's demonstrated demand for workers.

• Second, provide pathways to permanence. Bring in these 1.8 million people on temporary visas, say for three to five years, with the promise of permanent legal residency (a green card) if they stay out of trouble, pose no security risk, and work or get a college degree.

• Third, don't micromanage who gets in. Allocate visas using a simple three-way formula that gives about equal weight to family, work, and education: 600,000 family visas for close relatives of citizens and green-card holders; 600,000 work visas for people who are sponsored by an employer and have less than a bachelor's degree; 600,000 education visas for people who hold a bachelor's degree or higher, with first call going to those who also have employer sponsorships or family ties.

There is no chance, at the moment, that this plan will be adopted. But there is some chance that making the case for it might help clarify what the country should be shopping for in an immigration reform measure.

Of course, the last thing policy makers want, or the public will countenance, is a rational assessment of the real-life demand for immigration, which would imply a substantial increase in the number of legal immigrants (not guest workers) across a wide range of skills and occupations.

Why do that? I address some of the reasons in an article in FIRE's newsletter (see page 10).

Check out FIRE's blog for specific examples of current cases, including Tufts' crusade against the campus conservative newspaper, where FIRE's opposition to blatant censorship has been joined by the Massachusetts ACLU.

As always, I encourage you to support FIRE financially. Click here to do so.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with your blog entry on 'What Are Magazines For'.

The model you describe certainly holds true in the US. However, in the UK and elsewhere in Europe it is possible to publish magazines that survive solely on the basis of their circulation revenue (barring some small, specialised advertising revenue).

The company I work for, BBC Magazines, for example, publishes 'Sky At Night', an astronomy magazine. The circulation is only 30,000 but it can charge a high cover price because it is linked to a community of interest that is passionate about their subject and prepared to pay.

I think that point is key--that a magazine's abililty to tap into a community of shared interest is still valid (and growing) in specialised markets. Consumers in that space want longer, more in-depth and contemplative pieces, and are less keen on 'burst' delivery of content.

I'm the Head of Licensing for BBC Magazines, by the way, and reached your piece via Warren Ellis' website.

Sothe real question is, Why are Americans so cheap? Why won't they pay enough for magazines to support them without lots of advertising?

UPDATE: Tim Worstall is highly skeptical that BBC Magazines could make it without all that free TV advertising.

I saw that shortly after reading Paul Berman's 28,000-word TNR essay on Tariq Ramadan--a great, if extreme, example of what a serious magazine can publish. Long essays--4,000 words-plus--are ideally suited to magazines, and satisfying to read in that format. It's not clear, however, that there's an advertising market to support them. So medium-sized ideas tend to get chopped down to column length or blown up to masquerade as books.

I've often said that if I were still editing Reason, I'd redesign the magazine to put all the short stuff on the Web and just run long features in print. But then Reason, like TNR and the rest of its think magazine competitors, is a subsidized publication that long ago realized it has no significant ad base.

The other thing magazines can still do better than the Web is publish photography with high production values. And they're still a lot more portable than a computer. I can't surf the Web while getting my nails done or, for that matter, flying cross country.

I look forward to the attention the NYTBR will lavish on such intellectually serious books as Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed American Politics and Culture and Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Remember the definitive review they ran of Ryan Sager's The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party? Neither do I.

Although the NYTBR has become considerably less blinkered since my friend Sam Tanenhaus became its editor, it is still the NYTBR.

But the Review has punctured my cynicism. True, David Leonhardt's fairly short review of Radicals repeated the old canard about Milton Friedman advising Pinochet. But at least the book got attention.

And Brink's Age of Abundance, a book more in line with my own inclinations than Brian's, receives a long review by George Will in this Sunday's section. As you can imagine, the Tory Will is not enamored with all that the Age of Abundance has wrought, or with Brink's happy acceptance of abundant choice. (He even uses the word "Piffle" in response to one argument.) But the conclusion is positive:

Lindsey rightly says that "today's typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago." And "the typical blue-state liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power." In "the bell curve of ideological allegiance," the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an "implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowances for variations within that lifestyle." If so, material abundance has been, on balance, good for us, and Lindsey's measured cheerfulness is, like his scintillating book, reasonable.

Check out Brink's Age of Abundance blog here.

A peculiar fact about business schools (at least in the USA) is that project management is not part of the regular MBA curriculum. Why is this peculiar? Only because a huge percentage of the work managers do is organized into projects, the success or failure of strategies often rests on the quality of execution of projects, and many of the principles and techniques of good project management are not immediately obvious. But hey, if anyone needs to know about this trivial stuff they can always go to a two-day workshop and get a certificate (probably from an engineering department). Or learn it on the job, which in this context often means screwing things up and trying to guess what you did wrong.

No need to dirty our students' hands with all that icky planning and critical-path stuff--the organization faculty can stick to motivational theory, the operations faculty to stochastic modeing, and the strategy faculty to the resource-based view. Then we can all feel elegant. And our students can elegantly screw up product development, new process installation, quality-improvement initiatives, marketing campaigns, and all the other project-based activities where they are supposed to add value to the firm.

Read the rest, with comments, here.

Now researchers at MIT have figured out a way to transmit electricity wirelessly. They demonstrated the idea by lighting a 60 watt bulb 7 feet away--not revolutionary (yet), but one step closer to truth in lamp advertising.