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A Lousy Time to be a Shopaholic
In the opening scene of Touchstone Pictures Confessions of a Shopaholic, financial journalist Rebecca Bloomwood has a flashback to an event in her childhood in which she is shopping for shoes with her mother. Her extremely frugal mom buys her what could only be described as a horrific-looking pair of shoes because they were on…
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Is Grad School a Good Place to Hide??
The conventional wisdom is that when the economy starts to falter, grad school is a great place to hide out until things blow over. True to form, grad school applications are up across the country. Over the past year I’ve heard friend after friend say that they’re frustrated with their respective job searches and are…
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Tuesday's Headlines
WP: Geithner Asks Congress for More Power to Seize Firms, They Say “When Your Jacket Fits” WSJ: Obama Dials Down Wall St. Criticism, Leaves It to the ‘Internet Stans’ NYT: With No Foreign Aid Workers Left, Sudanese Take to Shooting Domestic Aid Workers USNWR: Study IDs Variation in Black, White Genomes; Maybe Race Isn’t a…
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Obama's Organizing Advantage Comes With Its Own Headaches
Amid all of the talk of AIG malfeasance and a pink slip for Timothy Geithner, Democratic organizers have been subtly shilling for President Obama’s budget. Over at MOTHER JONES, David Corn has been consistently asking when and how the Obama administration is going to use its massive grassroots network to flack for this and other…
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Magic Johnson Shills for Predatory Loans
You’d think by now anybody with sense would feel ridiculous promising fast cash through easy loans. Alas, not Magic Johnson. It’s tax season, and he’s shaking his enchanted moneymaker for one of the oldest, most predatory lending scams in the business: high-priced payday loans. “It’s money like Magic,” Johnson beams in TV and web ads…
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White House Easter Will Be Transparent, Web Driven Celebration
The Obama administration is announcing that this year’s traditional Easter egg roll on the South Lawn of the White House will be run in Web 2.0 style. From the news release: For the first time, tickets for the Easter Egg Roll will be distributed online so that more children and families from across the United…
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Crihanna, Again: Is Acting Male as Bad As "Acting White"?
A recent trend piece in the NEW YORK TIMES continued the public parsing of the “Crihanna” debacle. Attitudes toward domestic violence among the teenagers interviewed for the story are disturbingly blasé. From the story: “[Rihanna] probably feels bad that it was her fault, so she took him back.” Her friend nodded. “I don’t think he’ll…
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Sickle Cell's New Breakthrough
After last year’s first-ever sickle-cell anemia cure scientists at John Hopkins are convinced a trend is underway. Robert Brodsky, director of the hematology division at the John Hopkins University Medicine, successfully cured Pamela Newton of Capital Heights, Maryland of her sickle-cell disease in May 2008 through a new intensive chemotherapy and a follow-up bone-marrow transplant. …
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March Sanity
After four days of close, intense games and some memorable last-second shots, the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Championship Tournament, aka March Madness, has narrowed the field from 64 to 16 teams, and the results are surprisingly predictable. In each of the four regions, the top-three seeds are still playing; two fourth seeds, Xavier University and…
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Is Barack Obama Overexposed? Ask Donny Deutsch
The NEW YORK DAILY NEWS’ Mike Lupica might want to think about sticking to sports. This morning, Lupica went full metal hatchet on President Barack Obama’s in-progress media campaign. Lupica, whose own “The Mike Lupica Show” on ESPN2 was cancelled after only a handful of episodes, took the president to task for doing a series…