Jamie Malanowski

As Joe Nocera reminded us in the Times, “Not a single top executive at any of the firms that nearly brought down the financial system has spent so much as a day in jail. . . .What is also true, and which is every bit as corrosive to our belief in the rule of law, […]

A jury acquitted John Edwards of one count of campaign finance crimes last week, and hung on five other counts, allowing the smarmy ex-senator to go free. Afterwards, Edwards offered a self-serving but fairly innocuous comment to the media (it appears at around the 2:15 mark above, and lasts around a minute.) Innocuous to me, […]

[Cross-posted at JamieMalanowski.com]

In the Times earlier this week, Joe Nocera wrote a column that groused, if I read it correctly, about a man attaining excellence in his life’s work, and gently chided the man, it seems to me, for being great. Nocera, whom I generally admire for his lucid writing about the turgid field of business and […]

Ed Gillespie, John McCain, Sean Hannity and other Republicans can complain all they want about President Obama taking the credit for making the decision to take down Osama bin Laden . After all, it’s what happened; as Walter Brennan used to say, “No brag, just fact.” Maybe it was a little tacky to bring Mitt […]

The other day in a post about some of the recent activities of Google’s Sergey Brin , I postulated a new Iron Law of the modern era: When rich guys talk about freedom, hold on to your wallet. They are almost always talking about ways to make themselves more free to get more money. Or […]

Here is an Iron Law of the era: When rich guys talk about freedom, hold on to your wallet. They are almost always talking about ways to make themselves more free to get more money. Case in point: in an interview with The Guardian on Sunday, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, said that the […]

In Psychology Today, Jonathan Gottschall offers an article that will come as a consolation to all writers: even the great one struggle. In proof, he offers some telling pages from some highly celebrated novels. In order: First, Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust ; Couples, by John Updike ; Crash, by J.G. Ballard ; […]

Like Neptune and Jupiter, there is gaseousness in the atmosphere of the planet Thomas Friedman, but we are nonetheless confident that intelligent life resides there. Quite intelligent, in fact; most days we are confident that we’ve learned something from reading Friedman’s columns, which usually deliver a much-needed macro view of America’s position. Still, there are […]