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Even two years ago, we had a very real, very tangible anxiety related to a crisis with spectacularly disastrous implications. Global warming, it seemed, was threatening us with tornadoes and hurricanes, tidal waves, desertification, snowstorms and heat waves. Before that we had terrorism, Y2K and the great nuclear fears of the Cold War. Our current [...]

It says a lot about our unbalanced national cultures of democracy and capitalism that in order for newspapers to enjoy freedom of the press they have to be successful businesses. For most hardworking media folk, though, this delicate equilibrium isn’t so much a matter of constitutional principle as day-to-day livelihood.
Indeed, if Time magazine’s listicle of [...]

Yes, real estate in bigger, older cities is awful uncertain in the current climate, but all that seems like so many small fries when compared to the disasters unfolding in many mid-size cities whose ballooning real estate markets were mostly based on projectioons of continuous growth. In a piece chronicling the lightning fast transition from [...]

In a New York Times article today, folks from Wal-Mart muse that while every other retailer in the U.S. is hemorrhaging funds and customers, they’re doing great thank you very much. While we think Wal-Mart is one of the single most evil things in the world, we’re at least glad that their success will likely [...]

Through all the doom and gloom of the current financial-political-social-environmental situation, it’s still a little exciting to find ourselves at one of those rare historical moments when Old White Men’s firm grip on power is threatened. As banks collapse, financial firms go bankrupt and various industry leaders ask for hand-outs, there’s been plenty of accompanying [...]

The gents at NextRound compose some silly lists, but every once in a while they really hit the nail on the head. Such is the case with their latest, which takes the misguided mascot choices of soon-to-be-bankrupt NBA franchises to task. We especially agree that no character will match the bizarre cool of the decamped [...]

We’ve always enjoyed the old sort of bank ads, so divorced from any real risk or danger as their pre-financial crisis rhetoric sounded. Now, of course, bank ad campaigns have a heaping mass of negative associations to overcome before viewers will even begin to contemplate their message. This new problematic is exactly what Creative Review’s [...]

As you’re undoubtedly well-aware, the current financial melt-down has the U.S. government propping up several of the world’s largest banks in hopes of maintaining some semblance of confidence in our economic system. Much of this disaster is bound to shaky real estate investments, but in the shuffle of discussions about foreclosures on private homes, we’re [...]

With the recent Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé art auction proving that the lifetime collections of famous rich people can still fetch huge sums in an art market many predicted was crashing, it’s time to start planning ahead for April’s Michael Jackson auction.
Yes, the gloved one is only the most eccentric victim of the foreclosure epidemic, [...]

Another week has gone by and another slate of listicles we can barely keep up with has been published. Even with the addition of our list-submitting service, The Listocracy (start submitting lists today!), we’ve been unable to cover the Interweb’s perpetual cycle of lists. In this edition of our list-of-lists survey, Weekly Wednesdays, we chronicle [...]