Daniel Akst

I see that some Harvard MBA students are signing onto an MBA oath in which they pledge to be good scouts and maybe even sprout wings before they sally forth into the grubby world of work. I hope they will excuse the rest of us if we engage in enough eye-rolling to warrant an ophthalmological exam. I'd like to think that Harvard students already know its wrong to lie, cheat and steal, and certainly any who don't won't be signing onto this oath. (Unless of course… More »

Mike Morgan, a Florida real estate broker specializing in helping lenders dispose of foreclosed homes, has a strong piece in Barron's arguing that signs of hope in the housing market are masking more trouble to come. Basically he says that foreclosures have mostly stopped for awhile, but will start up again soon. Here's the guts of it:The asset managers we work with have warned us to expect a flood of properties, beginning in early June. This will hit as the number… More »

That's been the charm of Craigslist for awhile now: except for employment ads in two or three cities (and lately some erotic services), advertising has been free and easy. Which may be why the computer listings on Craigslist New York are now a wasteland of spam. This is an ominous sign for their business model, and perhaps another indicator that in the long run, for at least some important things, the "free" model on the Internet is not sustainable or perhaps even… More »

Yesterday was a momentous day--the day my sons started shaving. This was of course a rare opportunity for Dad to impart some ancient tribal wisdom, now that we no longer need to practice bringing down a mastodon with a spear. It was striking how utterly mysterious the whole process was to them. More striking still is how much easier shaving is today than when I got going, back before the invention of soap.In my day, I said in my best fatherly baritone, men all over… More »

Tyler Cowen, the worldliest of worldly philosophers, over at marginalrevolution links to a fascinating article in The New Yorker about the apparent futility of high levels of health care utilization. A great excerpt:In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations… More »

For some reason I never got around to reading George Gissing's marvelous New Grub Street until now. If you make your living with your keyboard or only hope to do so (the second category is unfortunately much larger than the first), this is a must-read. Dialogue in this 1891 novel could have been taken from my very own kitchen, and then (as now) there was a revolution of sorts underway in the market for the literary arts. In those days universal literacy,… More »

Don't look now but the shopping mall, those air conditioned nowheres that have supplanted downtowns all over America for the past half century, may well be dead. The Wall Street Journal has a story this morning about the large numbers of them likely to succumb to the recession, and the piece contains this remarkable paragraph:Developers, in fact, have been moving away from the enclosed-mall format in favor of big-box centers anchored by free-standing giants such as… More »

If you're a new grad or unhappy in your job, or if you just like to read a satisfying extended argument about how we should live, I recommend Matthew Crawford 's brief and powerful Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry Into the Value of Work, about which you can read here. Basically, Crawford argues for working with your hands at some craft. But an aspect of his book we shouldn't overlook is that, when he abandoned his pointless exertions at a Washington think tank… More »

It's graduation season again and since I've been out of school for awhile (I understand they no longer use quill pens), I'm no less qualified than anyone else to offer advice. Mine is that, in whatever you do, you should aim to become your own boss.I mean this in every possible sense in which it can be interpreted, but especially with respect to work. What I'm telling you is that your life will go much better if you subject yourself and your appetites to your own… More »

In the Nation, there's an allegation that newspapers have always sucked, so we should just shut up already about their protracted death throes. And I see from the jeering comments on one of my earlier posts that some people agree. This argument seems to depend on the failure of newspapers to conform to the political perspective of their criticizers. It also seems to depend on the papers' coverage of Washington. If only these newspapers weren't so damned politically… More »

The good news is that auto dealers still advertise in newspapers. The bad news is that a lot of dealers are closing. The NY Times (still clinging to life) says that GM and Chrysler plan to shut down 3,158 dealers between them, which has got to be yet another bad blow on the advertising front. Not that this dealer advertising would have lasted forever; already, I suspect, people do most of their car shopping on the Internet rather than in the Sunday paper. So sooner… More »

Some crank has a piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning about the amazing number of deaths that result every year from smoking, overeating and other risky behaviors. The key grafs:Dr. Majid Ezzati, a Harvard School of Public Health professor who co-authored the report, estimates that if you net out the double-counting, somewhat more than a million people die annually from the 12 behavioral risk factors, which include the obvious (immoderate alcohol… More »

Size suddenly matters again, and bigness is taking its lumps across the political spectrum. Conservatives who hate bigness (in government) are joined in this by liberals who hate bigness (in firms). But people have always liked to think that small is beautiful, as E. F. Schumacher put it. Perhaps there is even an evolutionary basis for this, since humans no doubt developed in clannish little groups very different from the vast anonymity of modern society. Big… More »

Now comes word (sigh) that vitamins may be harmful to exercisers. Key quote:"If you exercise to promote health, you shouldn't take large amounts of antioxidants," Dr. Ristow said. A second message of the study, he said, "is that antioxidants in general cause certain effects that inhibit otherwise positive effects of exercise, dieting and other interventions."This is a classic example of what my friend and fellow Atlantic blogger Ed Tenner calls a revenge effect--an… More »

A couple of posts down I joked about steroids in Little League, but now this: more and more kids are being held out of kindergarten for an extra year, so that they start school at six rather than five. The reasons are mostly bad, as are the consequences, according to a pretty interesting study from scholars at Harvard's Kennedy School. Some kids gain an advantage by being bigger and older than their peers, but there's a large social cost (not least the lost year of… More »

Walter Pincus, a veteran newspaper guy (and therefore in my book eligible for beatification) has a long essay about how the many failings of these tragic beasts are leading them to extinction. He cites indifference to readers, excessive prize-seeking, government spin doctors, corporate ownership etc. If only they had foreseen the subprime crisis!Unfortunately, the essay suffers from the self-importance it ascribes to its subject. The real problem is simply that… More »

I see that Manny Ramirez is the latest slugger caught up in the steroids scandal. Inevitably, testing will become more widespread; one of my sons is precociously adept at hitting a 60 mph fastball, and while he's out I plan to scour his room for signs of performance enhancing substances (his bamboo bat doesn't count; it says "Little League Approved" right on it). This 60 mph business is yet another of those things, piling up like the fateful bricks in the Cask of… More »

Everyone knows that we're all dying. But would you really want to know that death was imminent?There was a time when news of this kind was kept from patients by doctors and even spouses. Recently someone we know, discussing a terminally ill friend, expressed the wish that she herself might be spared the knowledge (when her time comes) that medicine has nothing more to offer, so she could go on with normal life. Of course the dying have always known, many of them,… More »

Everybody knows that the investment decisions of the average doofus like me are a reliable contrarian indicator, so start shopping for stocks, because the point of this particular post is, as the headline has it, that I'm not buyin'. I say this from the cool penumbra of my last big investment decision, which was to sell every goddamned thing we had, short of the kids and the cats, last spring. It's silly to expect that i'll get so lucky a second time, so I ought to… More »

This morning I made a mental note to have my kids call a physician's office when they get home so they can hear something they've never heard before: a busy signal.Yes, modern medicine is a marvel. They can remove your large intestine through your left nostril, but they can't get a telephone system that kicks a call over to voicemail when all the lines are in use. You can't get a busy signal calling our house, or anybody else's that I know of, because regular… More »