Every other luxury brands consumer is not, in fact, wealthy.
The Economist: “According to Luca Solca of Bernstein Research, 60% of the luxury market is now based on demand from ‘aspirational’ customers r...
Category: people
Stepping correctly.
A friend of mine tried to outsmart a fellow voter using Twitter. And I thought: that’s an interesting game. Twitter is like previous word games. To play a...
Ronald Coase to join writers of Mad Men for next season.
The United States benefits from a market economy. Only, it’s not really a market economy, is it? Economist Nancy Folbre in the New York Times: [A] large s...
One and two equals LOL’s.
1) Scott Simpson has rewritten classic book titles with an ear for today’s marketing lingo. Example: Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class become...
Are protest signs like help wanted ads?
This woman with a sign that turns “cap and trade” into “cap and traitor,” does she know what cap and trade is? I’ve read several e...
Any Given Monday.
Amanda Terkel: The Arlington Independent School District in Texas decided not to show President Obama’s address to students live yesterday because it reportedly...
Politics is competition. Where there’s heat, there’s a threat.
Affordable health care for all, especially mental health care, would erode the financial base of at least one right wing organization: James Dobson understands ...
An Orange County Republican
From the wellspring of California conservatism: Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting f...
The power of words, again.
Raffi Khatchadourian in the New Yorker: At the time of Steele’s deployment, the 101st Airborne’s base of operations in Iraq was in Tikrit, and its o...
Be afraid, be very afraid.
on the brouhaha over the President of the United States addressing America’s public school children. one of the few benefits of being a Cuban refugee is t...
Mamma mia.
I’m fascinated by Italy because the gap between what it claims to be (liberal democracy, capitalist economy, Catholic society) and what it actually is (kl...
America’s got no class; i.e., it’s a class-bound society.
About a week ago, someone on MetaFilter posted a link to Wal-Mart People, the photo blog that mocks people who, wittingly or not, draw too much attention to the...
Making money off of cheapskates.
Now would be a good time for businesses that “sell” to frugality: Sales of vegetable plants swelled fivefold in March over past years. The company a...
Dream job.
Ricky Jay in Wikipedia: Jay created a consulting firm, Deceptive Practices, which provides “arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis.” His firm̵...
The Class (Entre les murs) will make your heart explode – inside your head.
The movie The Class may be the smartest, most gripping story I’ve encountered in a very long time. The day after, I was still thinking about the character...
Politics as campaigning also sucks when Democrats do it.
Matthew Yglesias: My worry would be that it strikes me as very plausible that a political strategist could overlearn the lessons of his own success. The fact of...
Always on the offense, never on the defense.
The tell is more important than the telling: Voters don’t have a great deal of knowledge about the issues, or a great deal of interest in acquiring knowledge ab...