I’m on the Princeton campus, where I spoke earlier this afternoon on a panel on careers in the publishing industry (there will still be careers in the publishing industry, right?) and visited a guy named Krugman. The big excitement, though, was seeing what use Meg Whitman’s $30 million has been put to. The money went [...]

There’s a moment in the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (it’s also in the book, on page 242) where the company’s head of HR is asked at a December 1999 employee meeting, “Should we invest all of our 401(k) in Enron stock?” “Absolutely! Don’t you guys agree?” she says, looking over at [...]

My latest column is up online, and in the issue of Time with the penguin on the cover. It begins: There are those who fret that current troubles in real estate will lead to an economic slowdown, maybe a recession. Then there’s Peter Schiff. “Our standard of living is going to decline,” the Connecticut stockbroker [...]

The author of the world’s absolutely, positively greatest private equity blog, Going Private, has discovered that a lot of people in the “McMedia” (that is, not just me) thought there was something ironic about Stephen Schwarzman, longtime critic of public equity markets, deciding to take Blackstone Group public. Here’s her contrary take: If we view, [...]

I was mostly kidding when I said that a döner kebab van in Leesburg, Va., represented deep truths about globalization. But then I got this comment, from one Michael Pöppelmann: I am an exchange student from Germany and currently in the United States. Doener is my most favorite food. Sometimes I even dream about eating [...]

Now I’m never going to be known as a Fed watcher (and I’m very glad of that), but I happen to have Ben Bernanke’s testimony before the Joint Economic Committee on the TV at the moment, and I here’s my on-the-spot interpretation of what he’s saying: Unless things get really, seriously horrific on the housing [...]

Mrs. Curious Capitalist and I were driving through Leesburg, Va., Saturday in search of cookies when we came across this curious sight: A Turkish döner kebab van, apparently by way of Germany, doing business in exurban Virginia. Anyway, Mrs. CC took this lovely photo of said van, and I was sure I could come up [...]

From the nice people at ClickZ Stats: The number of active Internet home users dipped by 0.13 percent in February in the 10 countries tracked by Nielsen/NetRatings. Spain (-3.31 percent); the U.S. (-1.50 percent); and Germany (-0.96 percent) accounted for the dip in the number of active home users. The number of users was down [...]

I’m writing my next weekly column today, which given the way I work means I’m spending a lot of time procrastinating. So I’m reading the sports blog Deadspin, and come across a reference to the amazing finish of the Division II men’s basketball championship game between Winona State and Barton (Barton came from seven points [...]