Away from the media for a while, watching music people at the South by Southwest Conference question Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks about the "Smile" project. My favorite Wilsonian answer, drily typical, came when he was asked why he changed the putative original title of the project, "Dark Angel." "We thought," Brian Wilson said, "that if we called it 'Smile', people would be more likely to buy it."

Re: risk and Social Security: a couple of emailers observed that removing the safety net would make most people more risk-averse and conservative, not less. Of course, they're talking about normal people. I sometimes think the right wing that Brooks was writing about, the right that wants to "create" a more dynamic economy through making more risk-takers out of people, is in fact taking on a project weirdly (I was almost going to say eerily, but I've used up my quota for that word) reminiscent of the New Soviet Man. If the twentieth century taught us anything, and it didn't, it was to be very cautious about large-scale social projects based on the way people "ought to" behave.