Michael

Associated Press: "Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama's re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth."Regardless of whether the suspicions […]

USA Today interviews Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:Q. "But how do you find the energy to travel 750,000 miles?"A. "777 -- but who's counting?" […]

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was "forced to sell his dream home" in Utah with "his mortgage bank taking a significant loss -- up to $400,000 -- in a 'short sale' as the housing bust in his neighborhood drained his house's value," the Salt Lake Tribune reports. "Lee purchased the home for around $1.1 million in January 2008, at […]

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed reports.The amendment to the defense authorization bill would "strike the current ban on domestic dissemination" of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon.""The […]

Coming this fall: Government Bullies: Americans Arrested, Abused, and Terrorized by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). BuzzFeed notes that coming out with a book is "an act that's de facto required of ambitious politicians priming themselves for the national stage."Many expect Paul to launch a White House bid in 2016. […]

Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv > From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet […]

Salman Rushdie opines on censorship: Liberty is the air we breathe, and we live in a part of the world where, imperfect as the supply is, it is, nevertheless, freely available, at least to those of us who aren’t black youngsters wearing hoodies in Miami, and broadly breathable, unless, of course, we’re women in red states trying to make free choices about ou […]

"And make no mistake about it, you are dumb.  You're a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people.  I was there.  We all were there.  You're barely functional.  There are some screw-ups headed your way.  I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they're a-coming for ya.  It's a co […]

The Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU hosted I Want Media’s fifth annual “Future of Media” forum on Friday afternoon. Speakers included Adweek executive editor James Cooper, BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti, Jezebel editor in chief Jessica Coen, Reuters social media guru Anthony De Rosa, Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer, Activate’s Michael Wolf, and Greg Cl […]

Absolutely LOVE this short TED talk about 404 pages. What does yours look like? ——- (photo credit) […]

How social media is making the careers of many female comedy writers:  Consider Ilana Glazer, a New York comedy writer who, when she and writing partner Abbi Jacobson didn’t make it into the improv groups they wanted at Upright Citizens Brigade, decided to take their brand of girl-centric comedy to the web. "We said, ‘Eff this, we’re going to make mater […]

Picking stocks is among them: Here’s the thing about picking stocks: You can’t. Hard evidence has demonstrated again and again that the human chances of outperforming the market by picking individual stocks is, if anything, lower than that of a random number generator or a chimpanzee, although conservatives argue that the chimp is merely concerned about the […]