I know my occasional soccer posts are mostly ridiculous, but having just watched the U.S. beat Brazil 2-1 in an unhingingly thrilling and nerve-wracking U-20 (it obviously stands for “under 20,” but some of the players are already 20) World Cup game before a packed house of Ottawans, I have a couple of things to say:
1) Jozy! Jozy! …
Last Friday, as part of the reporting for my column about Facebook, I chatted with Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, co-founders of Ning. (Andreessen might also have been involved with some thing called Netscape that I seem to remember people talking about a lot in the mid-1990s.) Ning, which enables people to set up customized social …
At least, that’s what The Business, a reasonably respectable British weekly in the same media family as the Telegraph, is reporting (link via Drudge). Given that the editor of The Business and co-author of the article is Andrew Neil, who was editor of Murdoch’s Sunday Times for 11 years and appears to have stayed on pretty good terms …
Ana Marie Cox has informed me that several Democratic candidates for president have been participating in a United Steelworkers forum at the Crown Plaza Cleveland City Centre yesterday and today focused on trade and manufacturing. This is news to me on so many fronts (There’s a presidential election coming up? There are Democrats …
My new column is about Facebook, and it’s in the issue of Time with a glass of Scotch (or is it bourbon? or rye? or colored water?) on the cover and online here. It begins:
I knew something significant was up when, a couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail notifying me that a long-ago boss had added me as a “friend” on Facebook. This was a
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This was at the Independence Day Parade in Southampton, NY. I had no particular interest in the Long Island Women for Peace (although they were very pink), but this was the only one of my camera phone shots that turned out well enough to consider posting here:
David Wessel’s column in the WSJ today is about Alan Krueger‘s research into the economic determinants of terrorism. The nice people at the Journal have put the piece outside the pay wall, but here’s an excerpt anyway:
Less than a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush said, “We fight against poverty because hope is an
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It’s behind the FT’s pay wall, but Brandeis economist (and inflation geek) Stephen Cecchetti‘s opinion piece in today’s paper is worth citing:
A single-payer, publicly run health-care system is the inevitable consequence of the nearly continuous scientific revolution in molecular genetics that began a half century ago. … The time is
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The excitement over my column on the swellness of the Dutch pension system continues. Here’s the reaction of Steve Utkus, who runs the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research:
The Dutch system is interesting but has some limitations from a European perspective. One is that it ties benefits to working in the Netherlands, a small country
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Today’s NRC Handelsblad has an article outlining a recent change in fortunes (for the better) at Rotterdam’s Feyenoord soccer club. One of the reasons is a new program called “Talent Pool” (they failed to come up with a proper Dutch name for it) which allowed outside investors to buy a stake in the transfer rights of seven young players. …
My latest column is in the issue of the magazine with Rupert Murdoch on the cover and online here. It begins:
On June 22, shares in the private-equity firm Blackstone Group began trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. By late afternoon, CEO Stephen Schwarzman’s 23% stake in the firm he co-founded was worth almost $9 billion; he
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At halftime, when the score was still 1-1, I was gearing up to write an embarrassingly gushing post about our brave young band of second stringers and their glorious performance against Argentina’s A team. But Messi, Tevez, and Co. ended up winning 4-1 (although the U.S. team certainly never embarrassed itself). So I will quote instead …
