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
…
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
…
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 …
A loyal reader in McLean sent me a link to this article by Alec MacGillis in last Thursday’s Washington Post. It begins:
To hear some activists and local officials in Virginia tell it, the key to slowing rampant growth is to follow the lead of many Maryland counties: Ban development where roads and schools are crowded.
But here is what
…
My conversation with Til Hazel took place, appropriately enough, in the parking lot of a brand new shopping center just off Highway 7 (the Harry Byrd Highway) in Loudoun County. I was there working on my column in this week’s Time about the staggering mass prosperity of Loudoun and neighboring Fairfax County, and while the column ended …
For fans of my post on the Bush budget a few days back (I’m talking to you, Ezra), it’s going multimedia this weekend as I talk about the topic on CNN’s In the Money (1 p.m. ET Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday).
My second Time column is now online. Here’s how it starts:
When the Census Bureau announced last August that northern Virginia’s Loudoun County had become the nation’s most affluent, with a median household income of $98,483, it was something of a shock to locals. Loudoun is far from exclusive: a third of its 255,000 residents arrived in
…
So I’m down in North Carolina, at something called the Duke MBA Marketing Conference. There are some cool speakers, most entertaining among them Bob Young, who co-founded Red Hat and founded and now runs publisher (for want of a better word) Lulu. But the real stars are the Doritos kids–the ones from that Super Bowl ad.
Michelle Adams, …
Okay, here’s my big problem with the budget that the Bush administration submitted to Congress yesterday. (No, I didn’t read all of it, but I did check out a few highlights.) It makes a big deal about getting rid of the federal deficit by 2012. But guess what: George Bush will have been out of office for three years by then–and the …
I had a nice e-mail conversation with Ed Thorp last week. Some of it was reproduced in my Time column, but I thought the world’s legions of Thorp fans might want more.
For those who don’t know the man, he’s a math professor (he spent most of his career at UC Irvine), who figured out in the early 1960s how to beat the house at blackjack …
My first Curious Capitalist column, “Hedge Funds Head for Mediocrity,” is in the edition of Time that hits newsstands tomorrow. It’s also online right now, but I must say it looks much prettier on paper (worth every one of those 495 pennies). Here’s how it starts:
In 1962, a government study of mutual funds revealed that they were, on
…
As Bill Gates makes the rounds promoting Microsoft’s new operating system and everybody yawns, it’s worth recalling just how scary and important his company seemed a decade ago.
Just to pluck a few examples from the 1990s pages of Fortune: Microsoft was going to extend its dominance from desktops to handhelds. It was going to take over …