2-for-1: The Paul Krugman Blues, plus the Goldman Sachs Blues

This is good for a few chuckles:

http://www.newyorker.com/video?videoID=67644232001

And then, you might call this "The Goldman Sachs Blues."


Bet Against The American Dream from Planet Money on Vimeo.

UPDATE: Frank Rich's column in the April 25 NY Times devotes its last two paragraphs to the song in this last video. The lesson: "Those who shorted the housing market shorted the country."

Thanks to the public radio program "This American Life" and the ProPublica noprofit journalistic organization for producing this pointed music video.

Notable in media catching my attention this weekend:

!. The cover of the June 29 New Yorker is a masterpiece of subtlety. A young woman looking at a punch card. No, a young woman with a head scarf looking at a voting record. No, a young Iranian woman raising her eyeglasses like the vote-counters in Broward County in 2000 to better fix her dubious stare on a paper record of a lost chance for better government.

Here’s a link to the New Yorker contents page where you can admire Barry Blitt’s artwork with the brilliant title ”Hanging Chador.” Wasn’t there a letter in a recent Miami Herald comparing our election two terms ago with what the Iranians now have to endure?

2. The Sunday NY Times Book Review section had a fine surprise on p. 14, with a photo of the lovely former Miami Herald columnist Ana Menendez and, under the headline “Sleeping with the Enemy,” a review of her new novel, “The Last War.” We’ve missed your column, Ana Menendez, but will trot out and get your book that may be about your wandering NY Times war correspondent husband, Dexter Filkins, and the life that adds temptations galore to married people living apart.

How busy are we? How bored are we?

Here’s a fascinating video about the explosion in information technology.



And the antidote from the New Yorker: Are we bored silly in our frenetic lives? The late novelist David Foster Wallace says yes. Is all that information not getting the job done? Warning: This is a long read, especially if you continue in the same issue of the magazine and read an exerpt.