"The economic metrics from the last century, to some degree, no longer accurately measure global economic reality. I remember speaking across the United States and around the world in 2010 and 2011, the years after the economic thought leaders in the U.S. had determined that the Great Recession had ended in 2009 because the traditional metric of two consecutive quarters of growth had been met. Speaking largely to business audiences of CEOs and entrepreneurs, they almost laughed out loud that the recession had been called as over. Pain was present, debt had become a four letter word, profits were nowhere near where they had been four years prior and unemployment was still in the upper single digits in the U.S. and in the low double digits in other developed countries. It sure didn’t feel like a recovery. It sure didn’t feel like the recession was over. Reality and the “official” economic analysis were no longer connected. What struck me was that most economists and politicians were making claims and forecasts based upon the GDP of countries. That was due to the trailing ability to measure and believe in national economies. To paraphrase a well-known phrase in response to this prognosticating: “It’s the Global Economy stupid!” Since the recession had, in large part, been triggered by the unprecedented interconnectivity of the global financial sector, how could we ever look only at national economies in isolation again? That old economic worldview that a recession is a finite measurable time followed by a period of consistent and increasing GDP simply no longer had relevance. Any national economy could, and still can, attempt to measure itself solely based upon a national viewpoint, but this largely casts the global economy into the import and export set of numbers. How quaint and limited a way to categorize both global interconnectedness and economic interdependence! A major economic development in Europe or China has profound effect on the U.S. economy. The terms 'goods' and 'services' now have a huge, digital, on-line component to them that respects no political borders. An event in the Middle East or Eastern Europe can have a greater impact on U.S. equities markets than a slew of quarterly earnings reports. So as the first 25 years of integration into a global economy ends, we have to let go of this now contrived view of any economy as being clearly and distinctly being national. So where are we now as the new stage of the global economy begins? -"(Mediabozbloggers)
"The headache started in the morning. It was a Thursday last June, and Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, was working on the final preparations for New Day, the morning show he was set to debut four days later. From the moment Zucker took over CNN in January 2013, he had been focused on getting the morning right. He was a morning-television savant, after all, having led the Today show on a storied run of ratings dominance. And CNN’s early show, Starting Point With Soledad O’Brien, had become a symbol of the network’s slide from cable-news pioneer to industry laggard. O’Brien drew just 260,000 viewers, compared with more than a million people who watched Fox & Friends and some 450,000 viewers of Morning Joe on MSNBC. Zucker had built the new morning show around Chris Cuomo, a brash 42-year-old hire from ABC News and the younger brother of the governor. But finding a female co-anchor had been difficult. His first choice, CNN host Erin Burnett, balked. Zucker ultimately settled on Kate Bolduan, a 29-year-old Washington, D.C., correspondent. In meetings, Zucker gushed about Cuomo and Bolduan’s chemistry, speaking as if he had found a cable analog to Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. 'I’ve never seen anyone test so well,' Zucker said.But that morning, as he led the 9 a.m. editorial meeting, he felt as if his head were about to explode. It wasn’t because he didn’t like the updates he was getting from producers. He felt like his brain was in a vise. Afterward, at a luncheon honoring former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, he had the misfortune of being seated in front of a New Orleans jazz ensemble, a tuba blaring in his ear. The pounding grew worse, so he went home and climbed into bed." (NYMag)
"Sunday Story. I am up north and in NYC and the migration of some of my possessions begins, starting with renting a truck to transport three paintings. After a peculiar set of circumstances including being put on the phone with a convicted murderer, but that’s another story as I am wont to say, three paintings belonging to me landed temporarily in the office of the father of a friend’s ex-boyfriend. None of which would’ve mattered at all except coincidently, this office at Time...s Square, was the same where I had worked as the receptionist many years ago. After high school I was propelled into the job market. In nearly a year I was on my third job. Receptionist in a pop singer’s office. I was always nervous and I smoked at my desk. I was too shy to ever look the pop singer in the eye when he showed up at the office, to play his white grand piano by the large windows. It didn’t help that anytime he called for his messages I didn’t recognize him on the phone and a tragic Monty Python skit repeatedly ensued. Because I hadn’t any skills the boss, a gentle lady named Lenore Dove, arranged for me to attend a typing school. I was grateful to be hired at all given my lack of qualifications and I tried my best but after four months I was ready to bust. It was summertime and I had toiled a full year in all. I had severe burns from the radioactive constraints of reality. And then one weekend I was invited out to the beach and I realized I could never return. I phoned the office and explained I had adventure in my blood and I was gone. My boss said she understood and that most people felt this way. 'Your job will be waiting for you!' she assured me. Here we were 3000 years later and I attempted to demand the return of my job. But no one from the original crew still worked there." (Christina Oxenberg)
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"Margo Howard I’ve known for more than two decades. We first met (she doesn’t remember) in Los Angeles in the '80s at a dinner party at the home of Edie Goetz, the eldest daughter of film legend LB Mayer. Margo was with her mother Eppie Lederer – known to millions of newspaper readers as Ann Landers. Margo was married to Ken Howard, the actor, at the time. But we didn’t get to know one another until several years later when we were both living on the East Coast (Margo lives in Cambridge where she is married to a doctor). Margo’s book, 'Eat, Drink and Remarry,' is a very contemporary memoir, like sitting down with a friend and being filled in on the various paths our lives take us down. Or up. It’s so intimate in its frankness that I found myself falling right into it without any considerations of time. For example, in discussing the meeting and getting to know the first man she married: 'It did not register in any serious way that he was one of those people who, as Jewish grannies used to say, had ‘shpilkes.” (ants in his pants).“On the fourth date he told me he was madly in love with me and asked me to marry him. Reader, I said yes. Do not ask me why because I could not tell you. It was then that he told me he had a minor bit of business to take care: he needed to get a divorce. A what? Where was she, I asked? Was he dating even though he was still married? Well, he explained, they’d been separated for much of their two-year marriage, and he had not planned to rush into a divorce, not now of course, his plans had changed. I accepted his explanation and went along with the engagement. I really do not know what possessed me.... I’d had a romantic history of boyfriends who were smitten with me, warm and devoted. All I can figure out, in retrospect, is that his very different kind of personality was somewhere between a change and a challenge for me, and I was intrigued .... His personality exhibited characteristics I had never experienced in a romance before. He was introverted and remote, the classic loner. And he was driven. There was something of a wounded soul about him that called out to me. It was as though he needed me ...' Many years later, she would learn '... that bad boys were sometimes irresistible. Had I been objectively evaluating what I’d been observing in (him as ex-husband) I would have seen that this was a man ‘practically woven out of red flags,’ to borrow critic Emily Nussbaum’s perfect phrase ...' Now, these matters (days of yore and romance) are subjects I rarely think about on a day-to-day. Yet Margo had me thinking about them, and about her, now married thrice, mother, grandmother, advice columnist, and friend to many. Although it’s a contemporary’s personal history, it ends up being a book where despite the differences in backgrounds, psychological needs, financials, gender and intellectual interests, I found myself thinking about myself through her introspection and recall." (NYSD)
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