This post was originally published on nymag.com. Click here to read it. The economist Niall Ferguson had a piece in Newsweek the other day entitled “The Cure for Our Economy’s Stationary State.” As in his most recent book, the Harvard historian pointed out that the economies of the United States and Europe have lost their …
NIALL FERGUSON AND THE SHAGGY LEMONADE STAND STORY Read More »
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy A jury acquitted John Edwards of one count of campaign finance crimes last week, and hung on five other counts, allowing the smarmy ex-senator to go free. Afterwards, Edwards offered a self-serving but fairly innocuous comment to the media (it appears at around …
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The fifth season of Mad Men got off to a fast start, and although a lot was happening, the episode will likely go down as the `Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo’ episode, after the song that Jessica, Don’s young wife, performed for him at the birthday party she threw for him. As Lauren Streib reports …
I was sorry to see that on Wednesday The New York Times Op-Ed page turned over a third of its precious acreage to Bill Maher so that he could offer some self-serving drivel about how America needs to be more accepting of dumb, vaguely insulting jokes. At least that what he seemed to be saying. …
In The Atlantic, Jared Keller has assembled a rather brainy slide show–a collection of literary references in The Simpsons. Many of my favorites are here, including Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chambon, George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Robert Caro, The New Yorker, Tom Wolfe, The Economist, and William L. Shirer.Somehow Keller missed the episde in which Lisa …
Occasioned by the premiere of The Playboy Club on NBC and Pan Am on ABC, the folks at the Canadian Broadcasting Company thought they wanted to talk about the sudden burst of nostalgia for the sixties, and invited me to appear on their prime time talk show Connect with Mark Kelly, to, ah, connect my …
The streets and parts and sidewalks of London are home to some 800,000 closed circuit TV cameras, a huge number of which are mounted on walls of public buildings. The cameras capture the comings and goings of vast numbers of people, scarcely any of whom feel that the cameras constitute an intrusion on their privacy. …
. . .the party is over for Friday Night Lights, a terrific television series based on an excellent Peter Berg movie based ona very good Buzz Bissinger book. The story of a high school football coach and his wife, his players, their families, and the culture of small town football, Friday Night Lights did an …
Three cheers for Craig Ferguson, who explained on his program why he wasn’t going to make jokes about Charlie Sheen anymore, which is because the dud is mentally ill. (This isn’t my armchair diagnosis, but that of my fried Dr. Howard Samuels, the noted therapist. “Charlie Sheen is a hardcore drug addict,” he said last …