Matt Ulman

In the last 16 years I probably spent more time in this room than anywhere else. It felt weird to walk out last week knowing that if I was ever back it would be as a visitor.

Two apartments, a 9 year-old, seemingly countless seasons and events and just everything happened while I was here. Good times and bad and some awful and some great.

We moved just three floors, and it was the right call because no one wants offices anymore so why were we paying for 30 of them, but it feels a lot farther.

Probably some day I’ll stop hitting the wrong button in the elevator, but not yet.

11 1/2 years, that’s how long it took.

May you live in interesting times.

I’m pretty shocked to see someone, especially a public economist, ask a question like this:

 

Is there any argument against the TPP that isn’t just a generic argument against free trade? Asking for a friend.

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) April 23, 2015

But it’s just another example of how the specifics have flown under the radar, or been dismissed because it’s just another trade agreement.

Everyone should read this.

“It used to be if you wrote a memo, they had to stop, because now there’s proof that they knew what they were doing,” she says. “But when the Justice Department doesn’t do anything, that stops being a deterrent.

I don’t want to be melodramatic about this, but it could seriously be the most important idea of the last few decades.  It’s bigger in scope than the Move to Amend plan, and it’ll take time to see which is more achievable.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.  – Henry David Thoreau

Dear CNBC:

I’m writing to let you know I’m quitting you.  For 10 years watching every morning I’ve let you get away with a lot of stuff, but this is too much.   This was two hour long commercial for a political agenda.  Letting someone say that we’re frozen by  ‘regulatory activism’ when we’re coming out of a crisis of regulatory failure, talking about our ‘debt crisis’ when our financing costs are at historical lows, calling debate about a joke of a budget demagoguery , I could go on and on.

I’m not sure what I’ll watch instead but there’s got to be something better.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I’m not going to claim to have invented this, but more and more people are starting to talk about it.

The true problem is the return of neo-liberal thought and policy that is dominating debate, and the financial and political elites that are using this return to push their own destructive agendas.