The Hallo Berlin cart at 54th Street and Fifth Avenue is among the most acclaimed purveyors of street food in New York. So acclaimed that every time I’ve walked by in the past the line was so dauntingly long that I kept going. Not today, though. I got the “single soul food mix”: bratwurst, German [...]

Paul Wolfowitz is now really, truly on the way out (although he is, as has become his custom, dragging it out for as embarrassingly long as possible). So now President Bush will pick a replacement. Whose job should be what, exactly? The answers to this question I’ve been seeing have mostly been about healing wounds [...]

My latest dead-tree effort is out today, in the issue with Al Gore on the cover and online here. It’s actually in the magazine as a two-page story, part of the thing called “The Well.” But I wrote it as just a slightly longer-than-usual column. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the [...]

Paul Wolfowitz’s painfully drawn-out exit from the World Bank continues to draw out painfully, as the man with the holey socks tries to work out some sort of deal whereby the World Bank board apologizes for being so mean to him, and he in turn resigns with head held high. In reality, of course, this [...]

The news about the Pasadena website that has hired two people in India to cover city council meetings from 8,000 miles away, which I wrote about last week, stirred up an awful lot of pontification all over the media and blogosphere (a nice collection of links can be found here). Most of the virtual ink [...]

The seven-year-old Curious Capitalist Jr. is allowed dominion over the family iMac on Saturday mornings, and one of his favorite destinations is Club Penguin, where he sometimes arranges to chat with friends from school but mainly just plays the lame-seeming games to win more swag for his penguin avatar. What’s his and a whole lot [...]

Whenever I write about the burden that pension and health care costs place on the Detroit-based automakers, I hear from readers who think that’s a sorry excuse for Detroit’s problems. Here’s a thoughtful example from my e-mail inbox: Your article on the buyout of Chrysler did a great job highlighting the high costs of healthcare [...]

In the comments to my Monday Chrysler post, James asks a couple of interesting questions: Do you feel that Toyota and other rising automakers will face challenges similar to the Big Three in the future, once their current workers start to retire? Of all the industries facing waves of boomers retiring, why has the auto [...]

At Seeking Alpha this morning, hyperprolific venture capitalist/blogger Paul Kedrosky has this to say about the Chrysler deal: I’m sure I won’t be the only [one] to be intrigued by the juxtaposition of Daimler (DCX) paying Cerberus almost a billion dollars to take Chrysler off its hands yesterday and last Friday’s announcement that Tesla Motors [...]