Growing up in an international community made up of dozens of nationalities, I developed a keen ear for accents. I could not only differentiate the Swiss from the German, but also discern the Chinese by way of Taiwan by way of California.
Maybe that’s why it jarred me to hear Barack Obama speak to a church audience before the primaries …
According to new research, women take 50% more sick leave than men. ScienceDaily reports on a study about to come out in Occupational and Environmental Medicine that the work patterns of 7,000 workers in Helsinki between 2002 and 2005 showed women take far more short-term sick leave, but no more long-term leave.
Physical health
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I was thinking of doing my column for the magazine this week on something I’ve blogged about a couple of times already–whether the U.S. needs a recession to straighten out some of the imbalances in the economy. Mainstream American economists all seem to think this argument is nonsense, but lately a few perfectly serious economists who …
I figured I needed to get some photographic record of the Greatest Tuesday Ever in New York City (seriously: a New York presidential primary that matters, Fat Tuesday, and a ticker-tape parade for the Giants, all in one day). I had thought I could get a photo of the big lines outside my polling place, but there were no big lines. …
Same booth. Different names.
I guess I expected something different.
We’ve been hearing a lot of fuss here in New Jersey about our transition to electronic voting booths. Said the New York Times,
All polling places in New Jersey, Delaware and Georgia, as well as most in Tennessee and some in Arkansas, will use paperless touch-screen
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Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute have a new paper (pdf!) in which they argue that high corporate taxes depress manufacturing wages. NYU law professor Daniel Shaviro allows that they might be right (although they might not) but then asks a crucial question:
What to do with the corporate tax if labor
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The Super Bowl apparently drew 97.5 million viewers in the U.S. Sunday night. Which, in a nation of 301 million people, is pretty impressive (it’s 32% of the population).
But I’ve taken to listening to Dutch radio news on my iPod lately, so I can report that it didn’t hold a candle to crime reporter Peter de Vries’s two-hour show Sunday …
The White House released its proposed FY 2009 budget this morning, complete with pledge that the budget will be back in balance by 2012. Which is, um, three years after George Bush leaves office.
In the meantime, the Office of Management and Budget is projecting that, after several years of shrinking, the deficit will grow dramatically …
I admit it: I’m so not interested in American football that I could barely be bothered to glance up for the commercials. So I missed these live. But my Asian colleagues in journalism are fuming today about two spots from the same company, SalesGenie.com. One involves an Indian salesman, Ramesh, who explains in a thick accent to an …
…and I don’t mean a career in sanitation. / Univision
Read this inspiring but sad story in the Wall Street Journal today about Daniela Cott, a Brazilian girl who not long ago made her living scavenging the trash piles of Buenos Aires.
Today, she is one of Argentina’s most talked-about new fashion models. Ms. Cott, now 15, recently
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Been wondering what the best-performing stock in the world was in January? Well, I just got an e-mail from Russell Investments informing me that it was Impac Mortgage Holdings, an Irvine, Calif., based REIT that specializes in buying Alt-A mortgages. IMH was up a stunning 156% in January.
What was the secret to that amazing performance? …
I’ve long ago blurred the line between what’s appropriate material for a work blog and what’s totally not. So I figure this is as good a place as any to mention what was foremost on my mind this morning as I headed in to work: the little creature inside me—whom we’ve been calling Blurgh because that’s how it made me feel for the first …
