MATTHEW YGLESIAS writes that he hasn't gotten too exercised about the New York Times' article on the plight of the Chinese workers who make Apple products because he's seen what it's like to work on a Chinese farm. Fair enough. Mike Daisey, the tech enthusiast/performance artist whose piece "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" has partly touched off the current anti-Apple/anti-Foxconn backlash, talks about standing outside the gates at a Foxconn plant talking to workers who slave terrible hours under mind-destroying conditions, doing things that cripple their bodies. My reaction was to recall the time I spent standing outside the gates talking to workers at the world's biggest laser-printer factory, Canon's plant in...

IMAGINE you head a municipal utility company. Your coal-fired power plant is aging. Your plant is among the 47% of American plants that have not yet installed the scrubbers needed to bring it into compliance with new EPA regulations. You therefore face a choice. Do you a) install the scrubbers, b) build a new coal-fired power plant, c) build a natural-gas-fired power plant or d) invest in solar or wind power? All four options are expensive, and none is perfect, but the latter two, in most circumstances, are clearly the better options.

Two weeks ago I wrote an article arguing that we are in or nearing the end of the American coal era. The country's coal-fired power plants are aging; natural gas abounds; the installation costs of renewables are falling; and environmental regulations are growing stricter and being properly enforced. Coal may well continue to provide more energy than any other single source for some decades to come, but it will probably never again generate the majority of America's energy, as it did for much of the 19th and all of the 20th centuries. Still, coal will not vanish overnight. Neither will mountaintop-removal mining, which now accounts for much of the coal Appalachia produces. But, as this...

IN THE latest edition of the New Republic, Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at Brookings and noted Kagan, serves up a ponderous rebuttal to the proposition that America is in decline. I don't disagree with Mr Kagan that America remains, for the foreseeable future, securely hegemonic, which is the thesis he is most anxious to establish. But I am sceptical of Mr Kagan's assumptions about why American unipolarity must be so jealously protected, which he announces at the outset of his essay:

The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American...

IN AN article I wrote last week on Alabama's immigration law, I referred to Samuel Addy, an economist at the University of Alabama who was trying to determine the overall costs of the law. Mr Addy has just released his cost-benefit analysis, and it makes for compelling—and, at nine pages, brief—reading, for the law's supporters and opponents alike. Blissfully free of the moralising, hyperbolic language that both sides of this debate too often use (the police are not the Gestapo; undocumented immigrants are not a horde of disease-ridden scofflaws), Mr Addy seeks to provide information that will let legislators and Alabamans determine whether the law is worth the costs it imposes. He is scrupulously fair-minded.

First, the potential benefits of the law. Mr Addy identifies four: savings from the costs of providing services to illegal immigrants, increased safety, more "business, employment and education opportunities for legal residents" and "ensuring the integrity of various governmental programs and services". To those I might suggest adding a fifth, one routinely brought up by supporters of laws such as Alabama's: the...