WHAT I'M READING LATELY.

Fast Company: Infographic of the Day

Written by: Sahil Lavingia

Design isn’t just wire frames or visual style; it’s about the product as a whole, writes Sahil Lavingia.

By Dan Zarrella

By Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

Wonderfully written foil between small-town America of old and the power of new money via Vanity Fair. Profiles of both involved parties enhances the story way beyond the “what” to give—sometimes emotional—context to the reader.

Great narrative of #OccupyWallStreet from Vanity Fair told in text and video like a story being passed from one generation to the next.

Informative infographic with context that follows the money and tells a story.

Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound.

The French Fry Connection: Following one globe-hopping load of Northwest potatoes reveals a lot about the world economic crisis

A 1999 Explanatory Reading category Pulitzer Prize winner by Richard Read of the Oregonian.
 

The New Yorker Magazine

“On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed ‘one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.’ He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.”

Is it any wonder that a deal among European Union leaders is hard to come by? Just look at what they say about each other. British Prime Minister David Cameron called French President Nicolas Sarkozy “a hidden dwarf” as part of a joke told to a journalist. German Chancellor Angela Merkel referred to Sarkozy as “Mr. Bean,” while Sarkozy called her “La Boche,” or the Kraut. Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero is “too pink” because of the high proportion of women in his cabinet, said Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. And Berlusconi’s opinion of the euro? “A disaster,” he said, that has “screwed everybody.” — Compiled by Spencer Bailey

As a result, in the future, a college degree by itself will be less likely to guarantee a high wage. Ongoing economic globalization may even reduce the gap between the 90th percentile and 50th percentile, but continue to widen it between the 99.9th percentile and the 90th percentile.

The most recent spending cuts have tended to be largest in those states with the sharpest increases in Medicaid spending, as Kane and I had found for previous business cycles. For example, from 2008 to 2010, for every percentage-point increase in the share of a state’s general-fund budget devoted to Medicaid, funding for higher education was reduced, on average, by 3 percent.

Methinks that when Google, Microsoft, IBM, GE and Citigroup all get behind something, the ball may start rolling…