Circa 1850 in the Richmond Examiner:
too many of our gazettes are in the hands of persons destitute at once of the urbanity of gentlemen, the information of scholars, and the principles of virtue”,
Circa 1850 in the Richmond Examiner:
too many of our gazettes are in the hands of persons destitute at once of the urbanity of gentlemen, the information of scholars, and the principles of virtue”,
Full ‘Talk of the Town piece here:
It’s like everybody’s in mourning. It’s like a member of the family has died, and its name is Money.
Quoted in a recent New Yorker profile:
Conservatives believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.
“The only willing risk taker is the government,” said William H. Gross, the chief investment officer of the Pacific Investment Management Company, or Pimco, the giant bond trading firm. Speaking of the epicenter of the financial world, he added: “It is no longer New York, it’s Washington.”
Full NYT article here.
The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.
Full post from the New Yorker here.
One of the things that keeps me optimistic about an Obama administration is that by temperament, he doesn’t seem the type to claim a mandate. One of the things that makes me cautious about an Obama administration is that he damned well better govern as if he has one. Will:
For now, the president-elect is coming to terms with something noted by Ambrose Bierce, the 19th-century American wit who wrote “The Devil’s Dictionary.” He defined “president” as the leading figure in a small group of persons of whom it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want them to be president. Tuesday night, Obama, in his agreeably subdued speech in Grant Park, seemed to feel the weight of that.
In Barron’s:
I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained — but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.
So it’s more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.
If you look at the people who have been screaming about impending doom, and you added all of those several dozen people together, I don’t suppose that collectively they could run a single firm without dragging it into bankruptcy in two weeks. They are just a different kind of person.
So we kept putting organization people — people who can influence and persuade and cajole — into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don’t have those skills
Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles.
Full op/ed piece here
Friedman points to the fact which remains simultaneously verboten in this campaign and as plain as the nose on your face: this President will be forced call on Americans to sacrifice.
George W. Bush never once — not one time — challenged Americans to do anything hard, let alone great. The next president is not going to have that luxury. He will have to ask everyone to do something hard — and I want to know now who is up to that task.