Here’s an interesting number, from the footnotes to Daimler Chrysler’s annual report for 2006: $18.5 billion. It’s the estimated current value of health-care benefits that Chrysler has promised its many retirees, minus the money Chrysler has set aside to pay for them. Contrast that with what private equity firm Cerberus is ponying up to take [...]

My belated print contribution to the great media cud-chewing over Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones bid is in the new Time (with Mitt Romney on the cover) and here. It begins: In 1902, Boston boardinghouse owner Jessie Barron bought Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, with a down payment of $2,500. She [...]

A friend who grew up in Pasadena alerted me to this AP article about a guy who runs a local news Website there. He has apparently decided to outsource reporting to India: James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the two-year-old Web site pasadenanow.com, acknowledged it sounds strange to have journalists in India cover news in [...]

His Rupertness has a full-page column at the beginning of the opinion section of today’s New York Post announcing News Corp.’s plans to become carbon neutral by 2010. It begins: I grew up in Melbourne, Australia; the last few months and years have brought some changes there: In Melbourne, 2006 was the 10th straight year [...]

I went to the party for Dan Gross‘s new book Pop! Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy, last (Wednesday) night in this cool little wood-paneled room with views of Central Park in the Newsweek building called “Top of the Week.” The cameraphone photo above is of Dan making a shockingly touching tribute to his [...]

The last time the Warriors won the NBA championship, their star was a guy with a hair weave who shot his free throws underhanded and made 90% of them. If the Warriors had made 90% of their free throws tonight, they would have beaten the Jazz, easily. Come on, you people! Skip the hair weaves, [...]

First four ingredients: sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, enriched flour, corn syrup. You don’t have to be a locavore to believe that’s nasty. But man it tastes good! Just one more, okay?

Thomson Corp.’s plan to buy Reuters hasn’t gotten nearly the attention that Rupert Murdoch’s play for Dow Jones has. There are lots of good reasons for this: Thomson-Reuters is a (yawn) friendly deal, Reuters doesn’t posses the iconic status (at least not in the U.S.) of the Wall Street Journal, and David Thomson is no [...]

This is sort of shooting (exotic) fish in a barrel, but here’s a stray comment that recently showed up on my post from a few weeks back about Ari Fleischer’s ridiculous attempt to intimate that rich Americans are paying higher taxes than they did three decades ago (in fact their effective tax rates are down). [...]