My second Time column is now online. Here’s how it starts: When the Census Bureau announced last August that northern Virginia’s Loudoun County had become the nation’s most affluent, with a median household income of $98,483, it was something of a shock to locals. Loudoun is far from exclusive: a third of its 255,000 residents [...]

So I’m down in North Carolina, at something called the Duke MBA Marketing Conference. There are some cool speakers, most entertaining among them Bob Young, who co-founded Red Hat and founded and now runs publisher (for want of a better word) Lulu. But the real stars are the Doritos kids–the ones from that Super Bowl [...]

Okay, here’s my big problem with the budget that the Bush administration submitted to Congress yesterday. (No, I didn’t read all of it, but I did check out a few highlights.) It makes a big deal about getting rid of the federal deficit by 2012. But guess what: George Bush will have been out of [...]

I had a nice e-mail conversation with Ed Thorp last week. Some of it was reproduced in my Time column, but I thought the world’s legions of Thorp fans might want more. For those who don’t know the man, he’s a math professor (he spent most of his career at UC Irvine), who figured out [...]