Vanity Fair a long story online about the meltdown of Iceland’s economy. It’s a facinating piece about how a famously reticent, frugal people managed to create a financial bubble that is certain to go down in the history books alongside the Holland’s tulip craze. Although the autho...

It may be a bit dated now but here’s a bit from my piece from the Politico last week on the auto bailout: The Drudge Report cheekily labeled the auto execs “beggars on the Hill.” True enough, but remember that the executives had to come to Congress to ask for money because Treasury...

They have organized crime in Israel just like the rest of the world. But it IS just a little different. From a Jerusalem Post story about the assassination of a reputed crime lord Monday: [Yaakov] Alperon had many enemies, including convicted drug lord Ze’ev Rosenstein - who himself has surviv...

Speaking of the new Nationals stadium, Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch, a recent transplant to DC from the wrong coast, thinks the lengths the city went to to build it were deplorable. He links that to more mundane problems the city faces, such as its vermin problem. No, not that kind. The four-le...

A mega-rich Russian is starting a new magazine called “Snob” according to this Reuters report: MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s super-rich love to flaunt their wealth. Soon they will have a magazine called Snob to help them. Mikhail Prokhorov — whose wealth is estimated at around ...

Rob Long examines the latest indicator of economic change/technological progress in Hollywood: the difficulty in firing your agent: A few years ago, a friend of mine tried to fire his agent. It didn’t go well. After a long, wearying phone call, in which the agent tried everything in his bag o...

How hard do French labor laws make it for businesses to fire somebody? Well, apparently you can cost your employer $7.2 billion and still not get sacked. That is the situation that the bank Société Générale faces with employee Jerome Kerivel, 31, more than a week after it announced that his unau...

As a writer myself I should probably be following the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike a little more closely. Whatever you may think of unions, the strike is at least an attempt to address some fundamental issues about how writers will get paid in our rapidly changing media environment. That sa...