Paddy Hirsch at the Whiteboard: What’s an index of credit default swaps?
See also: Heidi Moore’s explainer on JP Morgan
APM is the second largest producer and distributor of public radio programming and the largest owner and operator of public radio stations in the nation.
May 15, 2012
May 15, 2012
"The first time I looked at my 401(k) statement, I was like, “Holy moly how did that money get in there!?” I never would have done that on my own. So that taught me the value of making the the money invisible. I have a Chase checking account and three savings accounts. So my first savings account is savings I need to live for the next three months or whatever. The second one is for if I want to buy house, so future things. And then the third is for vacations. So a portion of paycheck immediately goes into each of those savings accounts each month. If it goes into your checking first, it seems like it’s your allowance and your job is to get it to zero."
May 14, 2012
Jessica Biel Follows Us!
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
What does Justin Timberlake and On Being have in common? Jessica Biel follows both of us on Twitter. And it gets better. She’s been on Twitter since May 7th and follows four people — one being her fiance.
Well, how did us culture hounds discover this, you ask? Well, Ely, Minnesota’s (at least she was born there…) very own Jessica Biel retweeted us:
“RT This week’s show (“The Last Quiet Places”) is an escapist’s dream, an absolutely immersive experience: http://bit.ly/KOssdO #pubmedia”
Even better, she offers up not only this pleasing endorsement:
“Check out NPR’s On Being podcast. Endlessly interesting.”
And then corrects herself and gives our distributor some love too:
“Oops! I meant APM’s On Being podcast. Still getting used to this twitter thing…”
A needed reprieve after a grueling week of production that put smiles on all our faces. Yes, we get starstruck too!
May 4, 2012
ohboyOhBoyOHBOY!
The art is final.Pre-orders are available. A Summertime Grilling Guide from The Splendid Table will start shipping June 1. Donate now at the $7/month level and we’ll set one aside for you.
April 30, 2012
Dan Savages the Bible and Christians on Anti-Gay Bullying
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
This video of the popular syndicated columnist Dan Savage speaking at a high school journalism conference in Seattle is generating some impassioned (to put it mildly) comments on YouTube. The creator of the “It Gets Better” video project spoke to aspiring young journalists on April 13 about “alternative media, social media, and creating a movement against bullying,” which turned into a bit of a profane rant against the core source of belief for Christians: the Bible. A number of students walked out; a number of students laughed and cheered.
In response to the backlash from believers and non-believers alike, Mr. Savage responded on The Stranger’s Slog blog, “I would like to apologize for describing that walk out as a pansy-assed move. I wasn’t calling the handful of students who left pansies (2800+ students, most of them Christian, stayed and listened), just the walk-out itself.”
Here’s a transcript to accompany the video. Decide for yourself whether Mr. Savage’s comments were out of line or appropriate for the situation. Or, by upping the divisive rhetoric, I have to wonder if he furthered his aim of helping gay children and young adults from being harmed:
“The Bible. We’ll just talk about the Bible for a second. People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullying because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans that being gay is wrong.
We can learn to ignore the bulls**t in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bulls**t in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore the bulls**t in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slaveowners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War, and justified it.
The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slaveowner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say, ‘Christians don’t own people.’ Paul talks about how Christians own people. We ignore what the Bible says about slavery because the Bible got slavery wrong.
Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong: slavery. What are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong 100 percent.
The Bible says that if your daughter is not a virgin on her wedding night, if a woman isn’t a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort, there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night, if they’re not virgins. At least not yet. We don’t know where the GOP is going these days.
People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle. They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality.
Umm, one other thing I want to talk about is… [laughs to himself] So you can tell the Bible guys in the hall that they can come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible.
[applause and cheers from audience]
It’s funny as someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-a**ed some people react when you push back. So I apologize if I hurt anyone’s feelings… but, I have a right to defend myself and to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.”
April 30, 2012
Wondering wha’ happened at Wits Friday night? Fred Willard, Dan Wilson and John Moe played the Commercial Showdown Throwdown.
April 30, 2012
"Marketers have thought of everything. They knew I would want this car before I even knew. Which is to say, they know me better than I know myself. Some people might find that creepy. I find it comforting. Because not only do they know me, they like me. They like anyone who steps into a BMW showroom, all of us craving the aggressive, masculine, deeply meaningful lifestyle embodied by these handsome automobiles with their taut steering. They know us because their only mission in life is to satisfy these deep American cravings that resonate across the vastness of our culture like whale songs."
April 25, 2012
Somebody went through our bookshelves and replaced Dewey Decimal, and the alphabet for the matter, with another cataloging system. I can’t find anything I need, but it sure is purdy! — Tess
April 14, 2012
Pitch Season! From Wits with John Moe: “What is art if not a quantifiable competition.?”
So funny. But Reggie Watts was robbed!
April 13, 2012
April 13, 2012
It’s Friday folks! And what a week it has been. We started off with a 14-hour car ride with an Australian GPS named Jill who yelled at us about shaaap turns from New York to North Carolina, spent mid-week in Urgent Care with a case of strep throat that took at shot of penicillin in the ass to resolve, and now we’re so loaded up on ibuprofen that it’d take a horse tranq and a Big Gulp of rectified spirits to cure these cramps! TMI? Our apologies! We’ll make it up to you with this vintage picture of APM’s Kai Rysdall, who is single-handedly responsible for making the Dow sound like sexy talk. Did you know that before joining Marketplace, Mr. Rysdall was a Navy pilot and worked in the foreign service in Ottawa? There’s only one thing hotter than spying on Mounties, and that’s this: when you donate to Marketplace’s sister show, The Dinner Party, you get a page from Kai Rysdall’s on-air script! No word on how much it takes for in-person delivery, but that would be worth all the Nina Totenbags in the world. HOT!
April 12, 2012
April 11, 2012
Inside Foxconn: Exclusive look at how an iPad is made
Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is only the second reporter ever to gain access to visit the factory floor at Apple’s Chinese producer Foxconn. In this exclusive video, see highlights from his tour of the assembly line and the Foxconn campus and facilities to see what living and working conditions are like for the hundreds of thousands of workers there.
April 11, 2012
Scenes from the new Common Good Books location, at 38 S. Snelling Ave. in St. Paul. Read more about the new space here.
Nice! The store is putting on a few great events to celebrate the grand opening, including a reading of the brand new Guy Noir novel — Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny — featuring Tim Russell and Sue Scott, on May 2nd.
April 5, 2012
"But after you enter the gates and walk around, you quickly realize that it’s also a city — 240,000 people work here. Nearly 50,000 of them live on campus in shared dorm rooms. There’s a main drag lined on both sides with fast-food restaurants, banks, cafes, grocery stores, a wedding photo shop, and an automated library. There are basketball courts, tennis courts, a gym, two enormous swimming pools, and a bright green astroturf soccer stadium smack-dab in the middle of campus. There’s a radio station — Voice of Foxconn — and a television news station. Longhua even has its own fire department, located right on main street. This is not what comes to mind when you think “Chinese factory."
— Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz goes inside the gates of Foxconn
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