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A “studio account executive” at an LA DWR published his distribution list today. Here’s one look at the 435 recipients: That sure is a lot of .mac users.

Sitting in the living room, I looked out at Ana who was standing at the far end of the backyard, photographing a salamander that she’d fished out of the pool, when I saw a gray and white blur move past her. Then another and another. And another.

This is how it’s done: relaxed, conversational, outdoors. We can imagine another world.

I couldn’t figure out why this BBC News story about a Russian art bubble bursting was so downbeat but then I realized the author, Marina Denysenko, was trying to create a narrative – to help us care. Only, we shouldn’t care. As one quoted observer notes: “There are no longer prices exceeding original estimates ten-fold.” That’s [...]

Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books: “The true scarcity in Keynes’s world—and ours—was therefore not of resources, or even of virtue, but of understanding.”

The marketing team behind this Thanksgiving Day parade stunt are geniuses.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about performance: the simulation of the last 25 or so years versus the execution needed for us to survive the 21st century and promised by Barack Obama. Over the last two days, President-Elect Obama has held two press conferences. Both have been highly effective. This morning he managed [...]

the best kind of political art

no structure, no gain: Normally, a big bank would never allow the word of just one executive to carry so much weight. Instead, it would have its risk managers aggressively look over any shoulder and guard against trading or lending excesses. But many Citigroup insiders say the bank’s risk managers never investigated deeply enough. Because [...]

I want to be skeptical, but Soros’ reflexivity argument is elegant. And this is delightful dishing of the “oh-no-he-didn’t” variety: Alan Greenspan was a past master of manipulation with his Delphic utterances, but instead of acknowledging what he was doing he pretended that he was merely a passive observer of the facts. Reflexivity remained a [...]

I didn’t know this but, also, I always knew it: New York City is the densest city in America. San Francisco is next.

NYTimes.com: Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize.

Amazing. on Marketplace, Lisa Broome speculates that General Motors may be motivated to become a bank-holding company so that it can submit to regulation and thus inspire investor confidence. Yes, regulation to inspire investor confidence.

is the name of the artist whose work i – and, likely, tens of thousands of other Los Angelenos – have been enjoying for the last two years. without knowing his name or that it was “art,” for that matter.

About those five men just freed from our unconstitutional and immoral prison camp in Cuba after seven years without a trial. And the man who freed them: Judge Leon is a Bush-43 appointed Judge [who] was Deputy Chief counsel for the Republicans on the Iran-Contra Committee in 1987, was Special Counsel to the Senate Banking [...]

From Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million: The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species.

Everything that is wrong with our press and NPR in particular is on stark display in this exchange between NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Rep. Barney Frank.

It’s 1:30 in the afternoon but it looks like the sun is setting. The sky is filled with smoke of a dozen fires. update: our smoke detector went off. twice.

I would love to visit and revisit a month by month graph of sales for all the tiers. From the NYT: As sales at high-end stores like Neiman Marcus plunged by nearly 30 percent in October, compared with a year earlier, Costco sales slipped just 1 percent and Wal-Mart reported gains.

I hope he’s right: Second, on the question of the environment. There is no question that the internal combustion engine is at the heart of the climate crisis. But getting rid of Detroit won’t get rid of cars. More to the point of creativity — one of the things about crisis is that it opens [...]

Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead on why it’s (now) time for sacrifice and leadership: “Before I go to sleep at night, I wonder if tomorrow is the day Moody’s and S&P will announce a downgrade of U.S. government bonds,” he said. “Eventually U.S. government bonds would no longer be the triple-A credit that they’ve [...]

David Bromwich has written a monumental and damning profile of Dick Cheney. It begins with this: The vice-presidential search in the spring of 2000 was characteristic of the co-presidency to come in one other way. It involved the collection of information for future use against political rivals. In this case, the rivals were the other [...]

Eighteen years ago I got my first introduction to the world of high finance from Michael Lewis’ awesome memoir Liar’s Poker. Lewis has just written what is likely the most telling and poignant account of how Wall Street played Russian roulette and we all lost.

at certain altitudes the turbulence is milder: “At the right level, the market exists,” said Tobias Meyer, the head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide and the evening’s auctioneer. “But the audience is smart and seasoned.” He said prices had rolled back to 2006 levels.

Michael O’Hare: General Motors proposes that the public lend it some dozens of billions of dollars more, and Obama seems to think it’s a good idea. Sad to see the new guy pooch a big decision so early. Detroit is certainly hurting, and the people who live there and near other plants deserve help, perhaps [...]

Bruce Schneier quoting an account of a British psychological operations campaign in WW2: On March 30, 1945, “Aspidistra” intruded into the Berlin and Hamburg frequencies warning that the Allies were trying to spread confusion by sending false telephone messages from occupied towns to unoccupied towns. On April 8, 1945, “Aspidistra” intruded into the Hamburg and [...]

Meanwhile: Instead, the schools that make up the upper crust of the public education universe belie the system they are part of and the city where they reside, and the disparity between the races has grown even more pronounced over the past decade. In this city of 1.1 million public school students, about 40 percent [...]

Bucephalus Bouncing Ball. It gets better and better as the years pass.

(via Waxy)

On shamelessness as a political weapon: This is why I say that they have retired the concept of hypocrisy. It goes far beyond double standards or duplicity or bad faith. There’s an aggression to it, a boldness, that dares people to bring up the bald and obvious fact that the person making the charge is [...]

Josh Marshall: I’m under no illusion that negative or even nasty campaigning will come to an end in the USA. I don’t think that’s realistic or even necessarily desirable. Hard-fought and brass-knuckle politics is something built into the fiber of American politics. It’s part and parcel of the intensity of belief and passion that many [...]