Due to a combination of being sick most of last week and supposedly being busy with an important “project,” I don’t have a column in this week’s Time. I did have a last-minute opportunity to write something about the XM-Sirius merger, but decided I didn’t have much of anything more to say than what I [...]

When I saw the front page of today’s Washington Post, with its big story on Bill Clinton’s speaking-fee riches, it made me think of a sneaking suspicion I harbored while writing my working-for-free column last week. The Post article says Clinton has gotten almost $40 million in speaking fees over the last six years: His [...]

There are those who say the New York Times‘ website has gotten so good you don’t need to read the newspaper anymore. But Website-only readers are missing two of the most interesting things in today’s paper: The full-page ads taken out by formerly beloved airline JetBlue and crotchety restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow. The JetBlue ad, an [...]

I can’t really tell you whether the proposed Sirius-XM satellite radio merger will be good for consumers or investors. I do know who it’s got to be bad for: the talent. Nobody else will be getting deals like the five-year, $500 million contract Howard Stern landed with Sirius in 2005, that’s for sure. This I [...]

My latest Time column is now online (and on actual paper in the issue dated Feb. 26, with the little fetuses on the cover). It begins: It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin’s big idea–that there are important human motivations beyond what he called [...]

A reader (and old friend) comments on my hopeful post about the northern Virginia boom region that is Fairfax County: I don’t really buy the assessment that Fairfax is another Paris in the making. I actually think there is something fundamentally different about the way sprawl works today and about the way places like Fairfax [...]

What are we to make of buyout king Steve Schwarzman’s insanely over-the-top 60th birthday party at the Park Avenue Armory in New York last night? First, it just sounded really unpleasant. Five hundred mostly fair-weather friends (nobody has 500 real friends, and the Schwarzman guest list seemed to lean heavily toward the fake and the [...]

A loyal reader in McLean sent me a link to this article by Alec MacGillis in last Thursday’s Washington Post. It begins: To hear some activists and local officials in Virginia tell it, the key to slowing rampant growth is to follow the lead of many Maryland counties: Ban development where roads and schools are [...]

My conversation with Til Hazel took place, appropriately enough, in the parking lot of a brand new shopping center just off Highway 7 (the Harry Byrd Highway) in Loudoun County. I was there working on my column in this week’s Time about the staggering mass prosperity of Loudoun and neighboring Fairfax County, and while the [...]