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 …
Wanted: English teachers. Asians, don’t apply
China is desperate for English teachers. With the Beijing Olympics looming and the exploding middle class eager to prepare their children for a global marketplace, Chinese parents are scrounging for people to teach their kids the lingua franca. Which makes for a terrific job market for, say, a recent college grad hankering to see the …
I saw a giant pumpkin on my way to work
And you all thought I worked in New York City. Seriously: as I walked through Times Square today, I saw a sight that made me wonder where I was. Not to mention what kind of fertilizer farmers today are using on their squash.
Just to prove my location:
What were a batch of ginormous pumpkins doing smack dab in the middle of the …
Madison photo album
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 …
Econoblogger at work: Menzie Chinn
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 …
Unbelievable NYT correction
An article last Sunday about the fashion industry’s reticence to use black models referred incorrectly to a black woman in a maid’s outfit pictured in the September issue of Italian Vogue. She was, in fact, a maid at the hotel where the pictures were taken, and was included, the Vogue photographer said, because of her attractiveness and
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New column: Telling the knuckleheads from the geniuses in the banking business
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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End of Food Week: a Rice-Off!
My husband’s friend Janey Choi sent a link to this procrastinator-friendly computer game. Called Free Rice, this web site poses spelling-bee-level vocab words and four multiple-choice definitions. For each correct response, the org donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to “help end world hunger.” I got to 110 grains: …
Eww! Your desk is grosser than the loo
Listen to this:
In a recent survey of American adults conducted by Booth Research, one in four respondents (25%) pointed to their office as “the germiest place” they are exposed to on a regular basis. Shedding more light on how Americans view the office, the top “germiest” response was selected more frequently than public
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My job is endangered. Is yours?
From Forbes.com:
Health care, education and financial services–if you’re looking for work in the coming decades, these are the fields to get into.
What are the worst careers you could pick in the 21st century?
The usual suspects. According to the projections by the U.S. government, manufacturing jobs are expected to decline by more
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The case for giving up on Buffalo
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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Madisonians aren’t afraid to name their schools after people, or alphabets
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 …