Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Chavez have made some headlines by declaring that they’ve had it with pricing oil in dollars. Making headlines is what these two men aim to do, so in that sense their declarations were a big success.
They also got the other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to agree to look …
The feedback I got on my critique of Ramesh Ponnuru’s inaugural Time column on health care was a good reminder both of why I hardly ever venture to write about about health care (it’s complicated) and why I should probably do it more often. Ponnuru made the case for a new, “radical” Republican approach that would move responsibility for …
Floyd Norris has a typically Floyd Norrisish (that is to say, really good) column in Friday’s NYT:
Consider how banks make money. They pay low rates on short-term deposits and charge higher rates on long-term loans. So they love what are known as positively sloped yield curves. And they like to see big credit spreads, where risky
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My September trip to Denmark has finally resulted in actual print-on-paper article that’s in the new issue of Time and online here. It’s a lot shorter than I had banked on. Actually, that’s not quite right: Its two pages are about as much space as I had ever hoped to get in the U.S. edition of Time, but the original plan had been to run …
Work in Progress is going on holiday. I mean it.
On Sunday, I’m going to take my little one and travel 8,000 miles to my hometown in Japan. My mom has advanced cancer, and my pop is old, so my three siblings and I—none of whom live in the country anymore—take turns making the international house calls. For two weeks, I’ll trade …
Albert Kim makes this argument better than I could in the Huffington Post yesterday:
As a writer who’s worked both in Hollywood and journalism, it’s clear to me that the arguments used to justify residuals in one field could certainly apply in the other. Newspaper and magazine reporters produce stories and the companies that employ them
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I didn’t know quite what to make of the news Wednesday that former superpublisher Judith Regan was suing HarperCollins for being really mean to her. Happily, I’ve got Roger Parloff to think (and read the filing) for me:
Regan’s [complaint] reads like one of those humor pieces in The New Yorker, where it not-so-gradually dawns on the
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My post from Madison a few weeks ago about the McRib and world peace has enabled me to enter the elite world of McRib bloggers, and while reading this fascinating post by a McRib-obsessed guy named Andy Fox (no relation, as far as I know) I came across this even more fascinating statement (in the comments, but also by Andy Fox):
i’m a
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We all do stupid things at work. Below, my nominations for the top 10 stupidest workplace mistakes by some boldface names, inspired by the recent antics of Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury.
1. Stupid workplace trick: Stephon Marbury leaves Phoenix before a game against the Suns on Nov. 13 after a reported altercation with boss Isiah …
From a report sent out this morning by Merrill Lynch North American economist David Rosenberg (who is Canadian):
We don’t seem to recall that the economy or market backdrop in Canada (and New Zealand or Australia for that matter) were being severely damaged when the Canadian dollar (the loonie) endured its multi-year downward adjustment
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A new survey by Development Dimensions International (DDI) and Monster.com asked job seekers and hiring managers to share the most inappropriate questions they’ve been asked during a job interview. DDI divided them into three categories, as below:
Crossing the Line … Illegal and Inappropriate
• “Would you join a church to get a
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I missed this when it came out, but the NRC Handelsblad had a piece Saturday on the latest data from University of Maastricht professor Piet Eichholtz‘s famous index of house prices along the Herengracht in Amsterdam dating back to 1650 (translation mine):
The average house on the Herengracht now costs 2.6 million euros. That is, on an
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