We’re more than five years into the current economic expansion, which means it’s entirely natural that we ought to be worrying about when it might end. This expansion has already lasted longer than most of its post-World War II counterparts, after all. Last year a few economists predicted that falling housing prices might send us into …
Something’s been bothering me about the XM-Sirius merger. Everything I’ve read seems to point to XM being the better-run of the two satellite radio rivals. Hugh Panero, the CEO since 1998, got his company’s radios to market first, signed better distribution deals than Sirius did, and has been running a significantly tighter ship. This …
At first the word was he was going to make a quarter of a billion dollars over five years. Then Grant Wahl reported in January that David Beckham’s L.A. Galaxy pay will be more like $50 million over five years. Now the AP tells us his base salary is actually $5.5 million a year.
At this rate, we should expect to learn soon that Becks is …
There’s no way I can keep up with or be one one-millionth as intelligent and informed as Corliss and Poniewozik, but I feel the call to say something about the Oscars.
So here it is: I’m pretty sure it’s BLAN-chut, not blan-SHETT. Back me up on this, Cate.
A little while back, in the august pages of Foreign Affairs, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby offered a rousing defense of hedge funds. It began:
Imagine two successful companies. Both are staffed by very smart people; both are innovative; both have an impact far beyond their industry, improving the productivity of the
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Due to a combination of being sick most of last week and supposedly being busy with an important “project,” I don’t have a column in this week’s Time. I did have a last-minute opportunity to write something about the XM-Sirius merger, but decided I didn’t have much of anything more to say than what I posted here on Tuesday. So it was …
When I saw the front page of today’s Washington Post, with its big story on Bill Clinton’s speaking-fee riches, it made me think of a sneaking suspicion I harbored while writing my working-for-free column last week.
The Post article says Clinton has gotten almost $40 million in speaking fees over the last six years:
His paid speeches
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There are those who say the New York Times‘ website has gotten so good you don’t need to read the newspaper anymore. But Website-only readers are missing two of the most interesting things in today’s paper: The full-page ads taken out by formerly beloved airline JetBlue and crotchety restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow.
The JetBlue ad, an …
I can’t really tell you whether the proposed Sirius-XM satellite radio merger will be good for consumers or investors. I do know who it’s got to be bad for: the talent. Nobody else will be getting deals like the five-year, $500 million contract Howard Stern landed with Sirius in 2005, that’s for sure.
This I learned from listening to …
My latest Time column is now online (and on actual paper in the issue dated Feb. 26, with the little fetuses on the cover). It begins:
It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin’s big idea–that there are important human motivations beyond what he called “reckless
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A reader (and old friend) comments on my hopeful post about the northern Virginia boom region that is Fairfax County:
I don’t really buy the assessment that Fairfax is another Paris in the making. I actually think there is something fundamentally different about the way sprawl works today and about the way places like Fairfax have
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What are we to make of buyout king Steve Schwarzman’s insanely over-the-top 60th birthday party at the Park Avenue Armory in New York last night?
First, it just sounded really unpleasant. Five hundred mostly fair-weather friends (nobody has 500 real friends, and the Schwarzman guest list seemed to lean heavily toward the fake and the …