Truthfully, we're fascinated by bullsh*t. No kidding. Honestly. Trust us. We've written on how betting can serve as a check on bullsh*t, but most of the literature is opinion and conjecture. So we perked up to encounter an academic study…

Over the summer, The Economist magazine published independent pieces on six big economic ideas that changed the world (or at least modern finance). These have now been collected into a a single brief…

We’ve all been there, perhaps. Struggling through the day to get things done — noble things, often, for good people. Things that are necessary, important even. Positive outcomes. All that.  And yet sometimes we keep hitting unnecessary obstacles:…

Finance is rarely entertaining.  But when it is, it’s a doozy.  Last year the activist hedge fund titan Bill Ackerman bet that Herbalife — a company with 33 years of history and $3.5 billion in annual revenue — was a souped-up pyramid scheme…

Whatever you might be doing Christmas week, week, it’s our guess heading over to Sears won’t be high on your list. The rise of online retail continues, all sorts of new services, and a host of other options have made the mass merchant retailer a dying breed,…

t’s a question asked of everyone who has ever started a business: can it scale? The optimal final shape of different businesses can vary, but every new business is consumed with growth. Two different pieces from the Harvard Business Review argue that the notion and advantages of scale economics is changing…

The considerable growth in wealth of top earners over the last generation — with one study estimating that after-tax income for the top 1% of earners increased 275% between 1979 and 2007, compared to just an 18% bump for the bottom quintile…

The crises at Penn State threatens to eclipse the college football bowl season, but at least one writer identified a source of shame in college athletics far before anyone could pronounce Sandusky,…

What if the USA were a business?  Not a novel concept, but trust Mary Meeker to take the idea a little further than simple metaphor.  Meeker, internet research queen before joining the venture firm

The political commentator and writer David Books gives out annual Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays. All are wonderful, but three bear particularly interest for entrepreneurs and others with an interest in the capital markets…

On the topic of measuring one’s life, Clayton Christensen (a HBS professor best known for his work on innovation) noticed, over the years, something troubling about his students. Their analytical ability to dissect industries and plot their careers was phenomenal, yet…

With the July 4th holiday and cookout hangover dissipating into their respective synapses, there were a few interesting commentaries that compared the founding and innovation of nations with that of startups.  As one author…

At a reader’s suggestion, I am going to try to highlight longer articles or books that I think are worth some extended attention (tough in a Twitter world, but worth a shot).  Recently there were two compelling articles on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, one in The New Yorker,..

Perhaps the most amusing and unscripted nugget to emerge from the Apple aura is the reissue of a 1985 interview with a 29-year-old Steve Jobs. In, um, Playboy magazine. It’s refreshing to revisit the early incarnation of Apple…