“It’s an exciting time to be an Abbott shareholder,” said Mark Geraci Jr., a financial adviser for Sound Strategy Estate & Retirement Specialists … who works closely with many local Abbott employees, retirees and shareholders. (Chicago Sun-Times) I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. (Ralph Waldo Emerson.) Quotations are the foundation of news stories, [...]
People apparently like funny headlines. Facebook users post them right and left. Tumblr pages abound. I’m told they’re a regular feature on some late-night variety show. The mere mention of ”funny headlines” here will probably attract more hits than anything could, except kittens. To me, ”funny headlines” means more like “stupid headlines,” and I don’t think they’re funny [...]
Once, in the distant past, Thanksgiving was a sleepy holiday, devoted to food, drink and gratitude.* Now it’s the first day of America’s annual Salute to Shopping, a ritual that extends from the fourth Thursday of November to Dec. 25. Reporting on this frenzy of consumerism follows numbers — numbers of people shopping in stores, [...]
The Baltimore Orioles may have a reason of concern with the development of pitching prospect Kevin Gausman. … Gausman will soon be without his crutch that made him … the No. 4 pick in the June draft — powdered donuts. (USA Today) Hostess Brands, which was proceeding with its second Chapter 11 reorganization in U.S. [...]
Q. Is there anything lamer than a Q&A? A. No. “The job of journalism is not stenography. It is getting the full story and the meaning of that story,” Bob Woodward said to an Indiana University audience in 2007. Woodward was not necessarily talking about the question-and-answer format in his talk, but I was when I [...]
The defenestration of Vikram S. Pandit from the corner office at Citigroup might just be a turning point for shareholders of this great big beleaguered bank. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the change will also protect American taxpayers from future bailouts. (New York Times) Only time will tell how much damage has [...]
A day after the Twitterverse exploded in reaction to Mitt Romney’s vow to fire Big Bird by cutting federal funding to PBS, “Sesame Street” declined to enter the political fray …. (USA Today) Public broadcasting supporters say the amount of federal funding that PBS receives – $444 million in fiscal 2012—would not make a dent [...]
The mailbox A reader writes: “A lot of columns and blogs start out with ‘a reader writes.’ How do I know if a real reader actually wrote?” OK, so no reader wrote any such thing. No doubt a lot of people in this business get real emails and letters with questions, but I’m willing to [...]
Whether any class of people was systematically damaged by this seems unlikely to me since the manipulation went in both directions at various times, but by the same token huge numbers of people and institutions around the world will have lost money due to this. (Matthew Yglesis in Slate) “It could make Bernie Madoff look like a [...]
