To be filed under N, for nyah, nyah:
You’ll recall that James Watson, the Nobel winner and world-famous geneticist, was widely outed recently as a rabid racist. You’ll recall that he’s been spouting garbage like Africans have lesser intelligence, Latinos are genetically programmed to be …
The comment screening software here seems to have gone hyperactive in the past few days, and has been shunting lots of perfectly legit comments (especially but not exclusively those with links) into the junk file. The folks at Time.com don’t know why it’s happening, so I can’t guarantee a fix. But I will try to fish regularly in the …
New Jersey is getting a lot of press these days for taking the remarkable and hopefully trend-setting step of abolishing the death penalty. What’s getting less notice is Gov. Jon Corzine’s wimping out on what would have been the most generous paid leave for employees in the country.
And by generous, I actually mean reasonable. …
Calculated Risk has gotten the latest numbers from Fed economist James Kennedy on net equity extraction (the spending money that Americans pulled out of mortgage refinancings and home equity loans) in the third quarter of this year. It was $133 billion, or 5.2% of disposable personal income. Which is way down from 2004-2006, but still a …
On Tuesday the Congressional Budget Office released its latest estimates of how much of their incomes Americans of various income groups fork over in taxes (pdf; xls). Here’s a graphic represention:
There’s something in this chart for everybody–the rich pay much more of their income in taxes than anybody else, but they’ve also been …
I awoke this morning in my Birmingham, Mich., hotel room to the dulcet tones of my old friend Jamie Samuelsen (I used to babysit the guy!) talking about the interminable Les-Miles-Michigan saga on his WDFN radio sports call-in show.
Then he moved on to an article in Tuesday’s Detroit Free Press about how the Red Wings can’t seem to sell …
I found a white hair the other day.
It wasn’t gray. It wasn’t ashy. It was wiry, long and white. And as vehemently as I’ve always vowed to gray gracefully, I’m telling you I totally wigged out. Then I yanked it.
I’m 36, so I figure I have a few years before head-tweezing becomes a regular occurence. My …
I’ve got to admit that I really have no opinion whatsoever on the adequacy or inadequacy of the Fed’s quarter-point rate cut (clearly I have no future in monetary policymaking). But it is interesting that the rate cut and its size were pretty much what recent Fed economic forecasts and pronouncements by Fed officials had hinted at for …
I was in the airport this morning about to catch a flight to Detroit when I saw the big headline in the FT: “Putin favours liberal as successor.” Interesting, I thought.
Then I saw the headline in the WSJ, which didn’t say anything about Dmitri Medvedev being a liberal: “Putin Chooses Young Loyalist as Successor.” The second sentence of …
My mom has cancer. She’s had some type of cancer for over 10 years now; the latest was diagnosed at Stage 4 about two years ago. Since then, her body has acted like a fireworks factory: stuff just keeps exploding. But she somehow struggles on.
Living with cancer sucks. But you know …
Mark “Economist’s View” Thoma was appalled by my statement in this post that, “Some tax cuts do raise revenues, of course.” So much so that he took back a bunch of nice things he’d just said about my column on Arthur Laffer.
Chastened at having so disappointed the alarmingly prolific man from Eugene, I briefly contemplated changing my …
My commute blows.
Okay, a lot of people fare far worse. I once had an editor who commuted from Philadelphia to New York City—that’s 95 miles. And for this story I wrote on commuter couples, I interviewed folks who on Monday mornings head not for the train station but for the airport.
Me, I live just about as close to the city where I …
