Events

Gen-X, of course. David Frum: For the under-40s who will be exposed to the fullest impact of entitlement reform, the past half decade has been an economic disaster. Now we are about to load an additional burden on a generation already struggling with under-employment and (in many cases) heavy student debt. We also are about to ask them to simultaneously pay the taxes to support current retirees and save for their own retirement, while receiving less help from later generations than earlier generations...

Via TPM, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) explains how the Republican Party have finally solved all the problems in America:

Sitting in the lounge at Boston's airport, I have to ask them what crime we all committed to deserve the punishment they're inflicting. They're playing a Muzak version of "My Heart Will Go On" (from the movie Titanic). It's like drowning in rancid honey. Blah.

The Illinois Department of Corrections wants to make sure convicts leave prison with less than nothing: Kensley Hawkins, 60, has saved $11,000 by working in a Joliet prison since the 1980s, making about $75 a month. The state says he owes them for the cost of his stay. Hawkins began working soon after he entered Stateville, where he was sentenced to 60 years for the 1980 slaying of a 65-year-old man and attempting to kill two Chicago policemen. He wanted to send some money to his daughter, who was 8...

Tom Lehrer joked once that all the trouble in the world made him "feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis." Leonid Rogozov had appendicitis once...at the Soviet Antarctic base...and he was the only surgeon there: Operating mostly by feeling around, Rogozov worked for an hour and 45 minutes, cutting himself open and removing the appendix. The men he'd chosen as assistants watched as the "calm and focused" doctor completed the operation, resting every five minutes for a few seconds as he battled...

The United States Geological Survey has reported 405 significant aftershocks following Thursday's devastating earthquake off Honshu:

Four weeks ago, someone stole my Kindle at the bar in the Stamford, Conn., Marriott. I noticed the theft within a few seconds, because the Kindle was no more than 10 cm from my left elbow one moment and missing the next. Less than a minute after the theft I'd notified the bartender, everyone around me, hotel security, and the concierge. Less than five minutes after that I'd gone up to my room and deregistered the device, then reported it stolen to Amazon. Whereupon I returned to the bar and announced...

James MacWhyte has posted a video on Facebook that clarifies the issue for all of us who live hundreds of meters above sea level. I never really understood what a "tidal wave" was until watching this video. You may have thought, as I did, that a tsunami was just a great big breaking wave on the beach that smashed everything in its path. Clearly this is what the visual-effects guys on Deep Impact imagined. Only, it's not, and MacWhyte's on-scene video makes the terror of a tsunami clear. The United...

Sanjay Saigal, writing on James Fallow's blog today, discusses the dearth of qualified managers in India, and the failure of MBA programs to keep up with demand: Consider, for instance, the following data from a report published last year by an Indian employment company, MeritTrac: Recognized MBA programs produce around 70,000 graduates each year. Approximately 20,000 of them may be considered "employable". The annual demand for MBAs is estimated to be 128,000. To echo Woody Allen in Annie Hall, the...

CNN examines Japanese cultural roots to explain how Japanese people have acted after Friday's earthquake: “Looting simply does not take place in Japan. I’m not even sure if there’s a word for it that is as clear in its implications as when we hear ‘looting,’" said Gregory Pflugfelder, director of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Japanese have “a sense of being first and foremost responsible to the community,” he said. To Merry White, an anthropology professor at Boston...