I’ve got two questions after the NFL’s first-ever regular-season visit to Europe on Sunday (the Giants beat the Dolphins 13-10 in London): Does anybody think American football will ever have sustained mass appeal outside the North American continent? And if not, is it really worth the NFL’s money to go to all this effort to stage the …
I came back from Madison Thursday night (somewhat shockingly, my trip via O’Hare encountered no delays) but have been laid low by a Wisconsin cold ever since. So now I’m finally getting around to posting the leftover photos from my visit to the city whose mayor hopes to make it the most progressive city in America. (I would have thought …
While I was in Madison, Wisconsin, last week, I paid a visit to one of my favorite econobloggers: UW professor of public affairs and economics Menzie Chinn. I took this photo, which I hope will be the first in an acclaimed and award-winning series on econobloggers at work. Although if you look closely, you’ll see that Chinn is not …
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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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 …
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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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 …
And it’s really cold. At least it is if you’re riding a bike along Lake Mendota before 9 a.m. with no hat and no gloves.
I’ve blogged before about the loopy brilliance of Ray Hudson’s soccer commentaries on GolTV, and linked to the Hudson Wikipedia entry in which some of his gems are collected.
But now I’ve learned (via DuNord, who says Grant Wahl told him about) that there’s now a whole friggin’ blog dedicated to “Hudsonia–the Wisdom of Ray Hudson.” Two …
