It’s not a great depression, neither is it a great recession we’re going through now. At the Brite conference this week, Umair Haque called it a great ‘compression,’ as an economy built on perceived value […]
Category: Storytelling
Dow's Fall From Grace, Yesterday and Today
It has been 513 calendar days since the stock market peaked on Oct. 9, 2007. Since then, the S.&P. 500 is down 56 percent and the Dow is off 53 percent. On Jan. 29, 1931—the […]
Newspapers' Supply-Demand Problem
The essential problem with the newspaper business today is that it is suffering from a huge imbalance between supply and demand. What the Internet has done is broken the geographical constraints on news distribution and flooded the market with stories, with product. Supply so far exceeds demand that the price of the news has dropped to zero…
The Firefighter’s Gift
Last night my daughter asked if I could buy a Santa hat for her to wear ice skating with friends. But I couldn’t find one anywhere. You would expect them to be sold out on Christmas Eve. Later, as I exited the UTC mall’s food court, I saw four security guards sitting around a table, the woman among them wearing a Santa hat. Surely they would know where to find one! I approached and cheerfully asked if they could suggest a store selling santa hats.
Doggy Style
I just got home from a party with friends. Climbing out of the car I heard what sounded like a dog whiny barking. But no. From the second-floor window in the house across the street, a woman […]
Auto Myths
I know because I read it in The New York Times—and I remember because I wrote that story. Jerry Flint
Apartment Dwelling
Somebody is grateful this Thanksgiving. Windows are open, and somewhere in earshot a woman is having an orgasm.
Language Old Is New Again
I may not here omite how, notwithstand all their great paines and industrie, and the great hops of a large cropp, the Lord seemed to blast, and take away the same, and to threaten further and more sore famine unto them, by a great drought which continued from the 3. weeke in May, till about the midle of July, without any raine, and with great heat (for the most parte), insomuch as the come begane to wither away, though it was set with fishe, the moysture wherof helped it much. Yet at length it begane to languish sore, and some of the drier grounds were partched like withered hay, part wherof was never recovered.
Mazda Does Right Thing
We couldn’t run the risk of damaging the brand name that Mazda worked so hard over the years to develop. Jeremy Barnes About the destruction of $100 million worth of cars.
DC Demons
Using Dupont and Logan circles as northern points, [David] Bay instructs, you can trace various interlocking streets to form a demonic pentagram, one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Dan Morse
Skater and Coach
Sigma DP1 ISO 800 test: My daughter and coach watch the Skate La Grande on March 28, 2008, in San Diego.
Thanks Isn’t Enough
Thirty years ago, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I knuckled down for a lonely holiday with the mainly foreign students on the University of Maine campus. I had no way home but was ready to tough out the long weekend with the other students.
With a difference: Many of my companions came from countries with no Thanksgiving. They didn’t have the memory of family and feast for this particular holiday. I was a freshman, too. Some of the guys planned to hang out in the computer center and play keyboard games and read the print-out action on teletypes. I would join them.