“Black Bird”

  Here’s a link [ht: db] to Andrew Revkin’s story of the history of the song he wrote, along with the lyrics and links (by him and those contributing comments) to other coal-related songs.

“It needs to get better”

  Excerpts from the letter sent by the 4 to 5 Movement to Rev. John Jenkins, C.S.C., the president of the University of Notre Dame, can be found here.

“American Land”

  Then there’s this 2009 live version. And the lyrics: Whoa! What is this land America, so many travel there I’m going now while I’m still young, my darling meet me there Wish me luck my lovely, I’ll send for you when I can And we’ll make our home in the American land Over there [...]

Public art of the day

Above

The house of mirth

You just can’t make this stuff up: The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters. “People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said [...]

Protest of the day

Millions of workers, including members of the nation’s eleven largest trade unions, took to the streets across India yesterday in a nationwide strike.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

The rich really ARE different from the rest of us

We’ve suspected it all along but now we know: the rich really are different from the rest of us. People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series [...]

In Search of Lost Time

Clearly, things have gotten so bad we need to invoke classic literature to make sense of the current crises. It all started with the Great Gatsby Curve. Now, it’s the Proust Index. Next up: the Dictionary of Received (Economic) Ideas and the Economic Comedy.

Protest of the day