My new column is online and the issue of Time with a California fire fighter on the cover. It begins:
When times are good, it’s awfully hard to tell the knuckleheads from the geniuses in the financial-services business. That’s because bad loans and bad investments tend to look just as profitable as good ones–and sometimes even more
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My husband’s friend Janey Choi sent a link to this procrastinator-friendly computer game. Called Free Rice, this web site poses spelling-bee-level vocab words and four multiple-choice definitions. For each correct response, the org donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to “help end world hunger.” I got to 110 grains: …
Listen to this:
In a recent survey of American adults conducted by Booth Research, one in four respondents (25%) pointed to their office as “the germiest place” they are exposed to on a regular basis. Shedding more light on how Americans view the office, the top “germiest” response was selected more frequently than public
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From Forbes.com:
Health care, education and financial services–if you’re looking for work in the coming decades, these are the fields to get into.
What are the worst careers you could pick in the 21st century?
The usual suspects. According to the projections by the U.S. government, manufacturing jobs are expected to decline by more
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Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a provocative article in City Journal (the Manhattan Institute’s publication; that’s two MI references in two blog posts. Crazy!) making the case that state and federal politicians should stop spending money trying to resurrect Buffalo (via his Harvard colleague Greg Mankiw):
Scores of close to
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The conservative Manhattan Institute got lots of press a couple of months ago for its study of school naming practices, which discovered that ever fewer schools are being named after people. This trend, the Manhattanites wrote, “raises questions about the civic mission of public education and the role that school names may play in that …
Today, from Gawker:
The New York Times will make all its employees feel better by installing $110,000 worth of trees in the lobby. Seriously! They announced today that they’re building an “open-air birch and moss garden” on the ground floor of their fancy new building. An open-air birch and moss garden. So maybe this season’s $15
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I turned on the TV when I got back to my hotel Tuesday night and somehow ended up on the Golf Channel. They were offering news coverage of the Southern California fires, but purely in terms of which golf courses were affected. Of particular interest was Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, which will be hosting not only the Buick …
When I saw this sign at a McDonald’s here in Madison I had to take a picture. Why? Because of its potential international-relations consequences. Back in 1996, Tom Friedman proposed his famous Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention in the New York Times:
[W]hen a country reaches a certain level of economic development, when it has
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So says a new study:
Gay men working in management and traditional blue-collar, male-dominated jobs make less than straight men because they are discriminated against by their employers, according to new research released today by the University of New Hampshire Whittemore School of Business and Economics. Lesbians, however, do not
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Back when it became clear early this year that subprime mortgage lending had become a big mess, I sort of figured that the practices that had led to the mess would disappear pretty quickly. That’s the way financial markets work: They can go wildly overboard in one direction or another, but when it comes time to correct they at least do …
I took a photo of the first class I spoke to here in Madison, so when I arrived in Bob Drechsel‘s intermediate reporting class this afternoon the students asked if I was going to take their picture. So as an illustration of, I dunno, the self-indulgence inherent in blogging (or at least my blogging), I’ve decided to take their picture …
