So Pearson, which owns the Financial Times and part of the Economist, is talking to GE, owner of CNBC, about putting in a bid for Dow Jones. And now Ron Burkle is apparently contemplating on a bid, too.
Which puts the much-discussed dangers posed by Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones in perspective. Yes, Murdoch has repeatedly toadied …
I just had lunch with a summer intern here at Time Inc. My employer pays its interns (though my friend was shocked that they categorize the housing stipend as a “signing bonus” and thus lop off a huge chunk in taxes). But many don’t. These bosses seem to think of it as an even exchange: I give you experience, you give me free …
On the side of a van this morning at 97th Street and Amsterdam Avenue:
Let us now talk of poo. As in, my daughter’s.
As she approached her third birthday still bubble-butted in diapers, I pondered this Zen koan: If both parents work fulltime, how is a child supposed to learn how to go on the potty?
We had no idea. The time-tested methods offered by other parents mostly involve letting the toddler toddle …
The notion that the U.S. is stingy about government benefits in comparison with the rest of the wealthy world is widely held, and is mostly backed up by the data. But in the case of retirement benefits, it’s getting less true by the day. Yet few here in the States have caught on.
Consider what Chicago lawyer/rabblerouser Tom Geoghegan …
My latest column is in the issue of Time with Mike and Arnie on the cover and online here. It begins:
In early June, the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)–the club of the world’s wealthy and almost wealthy nations–released a 208-page document perversely titled Pensions at a Glance. Inside is a rundown of how
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Curious Capitalist Jr. took the photo above. He and all the rest of the second graders at his school did a Circle Line field trip today. I was one of the chaperones. Nobody fell out of the boat. And nobody got lost in the subway on the way back. A spectacular success.
One of CC Jr.’s classmates took this cool shot (with my camera) of …
A while ago, out of sheer, eyeball-clawing desperation, I sought to reduce the mountain of books covering every surface of my office by Tom Sawyering some readers into reviewing them. Many of you wrote in offering to take on my workload. I didn’t really expect anything to come of this purely selfish exercise, but reader John Struan is …
Last year, my company hired the consultancy firm McKinsey to–okay, I don’t pretend to know what exactly they do. They buzzed around the offices for some time and when they left, a bunch of people were laid off. But they left behind this gem:
My company paid God knows what for their services, and this is what we get: an Idea …
Blogger/law professor Stephen Bainbridge, trolling for similar sob stories after a bad United Airlines experience, has found one of the great blog posts of our age, by one Brianna, who was stranded by United in Denver twice in one weekend last month. I was going to paste a sample here, but none of the ones I came up with did the thing …
A friend asks, apropos of my post about the dollar’s future as reserve currency:
As a currency becomes weaker and less sought after by central banks doesn’t it take a toll on the issuing nation’s economic standing in other ways? Did the pound’s decline as a reserve currency coincide with the decline of England’s power and influence?
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