Articles 2024
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Ralph Lauren: Still King Of Glamour
Despite recent missteps, the designer's vision has not lost its luster.
Forbes, October 20, 2009
Ralph Lauren, who turned 70 last week, is the most successful purveyor of glamour since the golden age of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. -
The Secret Glamour of the Tin Man
How The Wizard of Oz appeals to "dreams of flight and transformation and escape."
DoubleX (Slate), September 19, 2009
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Politics and Glamour
Teddy, JFK, and Obama
Forbes, August 24, 2009
Ted was the Kennedy who lived. He was, as a result, the Kennedy who wasn't glamorous. -
What You Pay For
Review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
The New York Times Book Review, July 09, 2009
Fifteen years ago — before Google or Wikipedia or blogging or Craigslist or podcasts or YouTube — the technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson wrote an article analyzing the business of “creative content” in a future where the Internet made distribution essentially free. “Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid,” she predicted. Enforcing copyrights won’t be enough, because creators “will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content.” That future is today, and it is the subject of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired and the author of “The Long Tail.” Despite its subtitle, the book is less about the future than the present and recent past, which Anderson surveys in a cheerful, can-do voice. “People are making lots of money charging nothing,” he writes. “Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00.” -
With Functioning Kidneys for All
The Atlantic, July 08, 2009
Surely we can find enough kidney donors for those who need transplants. But doing so will require creativity, boldness, and a sense of urgency--and experimenting with controversial ideas like donor chains and financial incentives. -
The Real Reason That Ann Taylor Hates Plus Sizes
It has nothing to do with fat phobia.
DoubleX (Slate), June 08, 2009
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The Gift-Card Economy
For some people, spending just doesn't come naturally--especially in a recession. Behavioral economists have a solution.
The Atlantic, May 2009
MOTHER’S DAY IS coming up. Which do you think Mom would enjoy more—a day-spa gift certificate that expires at the end of June, or an otherwise identical gift certificate that expires a year from now?
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Macroegonomics
Economic policy makers thought they had tamed the business cycle. Not quite. Let's hope their hubris doesn't get in the way of our economic recovery.
The Atlantic, April 2009
CHRISTINA ROMER, the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, is a liberal economist. The LBJ Presidential Library in Austin is a Democratic shrine. But on a September evening in 2007, Romer used that venue to deliver a bluntly negative assessment of the economic policies that began in the Kennedy and Johnson years. What macroeconomists had believed and done in the heady liberal hour of the 1960s, she declared, was simply wrong—a “mistaken revolution” that hurt the country. “Far from being the high point of economic policymaking in the postwar era, the 1960s represented the beginning of a long dark period for macroeconomic policy,” she said.
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My Drug Problem
The Atlantic, March 2009
The cancer drug Herceptin saved the author's life. It also cost $60,000. Would health-care reform put it, and other expensive new drugs, out of reach?
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Defending "My Drug Problem"
The Atlantic, March 2009
Virginia Postrel's March article on the availability of cancer drugs sparked enormous reader response, much more than the print magazine's Letters to the Editor section could accommodate. Here she responds to some common criticisms from those letters.