Kevin Meyers

Hanging out

2012-01-08T14:16:00.001-05:00

Posting from my phone

2011-04-22T14:02:00.001-04:00

Here's a post from my Android. Check it out.

Why can't every day be Good Friday?

2011-04-22T14:01:00.000-04:00

As I've gotten settled in Montclair, I've noticed that the commute can be highly variable. One day the good ol' DeCamp bus flies straight down Route 3 to the Lincoln Tunnel, and deposits me at my desk less than an hour after I left home. The next day, the bus crawls on Route 3, the bus lane is backed all the way up, and I am late to work.

Today? Today we flew in. There was barely anyone on the bus, or on the road. Of course, it's Good Friday - a holiday for stock exchanges, the government, and a lot of other folks.

It was fun. On Monday, I'm sure it'll be back to normal.

Also, I'm testing out Google ads

2011-04-21T14:07:00.000-04:00

Also - in an attempt to learn more about Google's ad products - I'll be running some Google ads on the site in the next few weeks. Hope it doesn't offend anyone.

Switching from iPhone to Android

2011-04-21T13:50:00.000-04:00

I've been a user of the iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) platform since 2007, and I love it. It's sleek, easy to use, and the apps are amazing. I have lots of favorite apps - MLB At Bat, Pandora, Rdio, Twitter, and Reeder, to name a few. I have several Macs at home as well - an iMac desktop, a MacBook, MacBook Air, and even Apple TV.

Yesterday, I did something unthinkable. I got an Android device. Specifically, I got the HTC Thunderbolt from Verizon. 4G. It's pretty badass.

I've played around with the Thunderbolt for just over 24 hours, and here are my initial impressions:

4G is fast. Amazingly fast. Blazingly, blazingly fast. My entire life - my house, my commute, and my work - are all within the Verizon 4G network. So I was FLYING on this puppy. It really is amazing. I almost didn't even bother hooking the phone up to my home WiFi network.
Verizon bloatware is horrible. For example, the second I turned on my phone I noticed an app for Blockbuster. Ah yes, the defunct, bankrupt video rental chain that I hated six years ago and haven't visited since 2002 is greeting me on my shiny new 2011 4G phone. That's terrific. Well, let me just go ahead and uninstall that - wait, I can't uninstall that? No, no I can't. Well that sucks. Best I can do is hide it.
Right out of the box, the first thing you need to do is take the battery cover off and install both the battery and the SIM card. Now this is great - except taking the battery cover off requires an absurd amount of force. Engadget even mentioned this in their review of the device. I finally resorted to using my beloved Starbucks Gold Card to wedge in there. I hope I never have to do it again.
I'm not a fan of HTC Sense. For some reason HTC thinks I want something called "FriendStream," which is apparently a way for me to see all of the activity from my friends on Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter on one screen. I'd rather just download the Twitter for Android app (which I did). Unfortunately HTC has given me an HTC Twitter app called Peep that is also - apparently - unremovable.
The battery life is tough. On my commute this morning I listened to Pandora and read the New York Times. I arrived at the office with 50% battery remaining (after having it plugged in overnight while I slept). Granted, this is heavy usage of streaming music, but that's going to be tough to overcome.

Overall, it's a cool phone. It's pretty big, but not noticeably bigger than the iPhone 4.

The Verizon bloatware ruins it for me, though. I don't want Blockbuster, Peep, or FriendStream on my phone. And I don't feel like I should have to compromise my experience for the sake of a carrier (I guess that's my iOS experience coming through).

Even though I love the Verizon 4G experience, I am going to be returning the Thunderbolt and sticking with my iPhone 4 for the next few weeks. I'll buy the Sprint Nexus S (4G!) on launch day, and I think that'll be the perfect device - all the coolness and polish of Android 2.3 with none of the crap of Verizon and HTC.

Pictures from the move

2011-04-01T09:47:00.001-04:00

See the full gallery on Posterous

Our move from Boston to Jersey in pictures

A few days behind on this meal. Been a busy week.

2011-03-19T19:06:00.001-04:00

Definitely gonna miss this place

2011-03-19T16:01:00.001-04:00

Taken at Casey Playground

Multiple pictures - what do they look like?

2011-03-19T14:23:00.000-04:00

They look like this

Pictures via email

2011-03-19T14:16:00.000-04:00

Testing this out. Here's our new house.

Finally, a chance for my vote to count

2010-01-18T20:08:00.001-05:00

My entire voting life I've cast presidential ballots in states that didn't matter. New Jersey in 2000. New York in 2004. Massachusetts in 2008. So while I enthusiastically voted for the president each year, I knew that my votes didn't matter much, aside from moving a single number on the CNN Election Night scoreboard.

Tomorrow is different.

We're having a little senate race in Massachusetts tomorrow. Maybe you've heard about it. Winner gets Ted Kennedy's seat and, by all accounts, cast the decisive vote on health care, along with many of Barack Obama's other initiatives. So, in a sense, I get a do-over of 2008's presidential election tomorrow. If I had the chance to do it again, would I still vote for Obama?

Now I know how it feels to live in Ohio.

Posted via email from Kevin Meyers

Goals for 2010

2010-01-02T17:12:00.001-05:00

2010 is going to be a big year for me. I'm turning 30. I'm a dad. I have real job (you know, one that requires me to carry a BlackBerry, read the Wall Street Journal, and sleep in airport hotels). So I'm not really "a kid" anymore. I'm a real adult.

So I've decided I'm done messing around with certain things in my life. Really, the biggest thing about my life that needs to improve is my weight and general fitness. According to the BMI calculators on the internets, and how I look in pictures, I could stand to lose about 25 pounds.

I just read a blog post that says that in order to make your resolutions stick, you should committ to them publicly. So this is what I'm doing. Committing publicly.

Here's my main goal for 2010: Lose 25 pounds by December 31, 2010.

In order for this to happen, I'm going to form 12 new habits (one per month) that will help me to get there. I'll focus on forming each habit each month, so by 12/31/10, the goal will magically appear. Here are the habits I've thought of so far, and when I'm going to accomplish them:

January: Wake up at 5:30 am every day - this will allow me to workout.
February: Eliminate all "fake" sugar from my diet - no more diet soda, Splenda in my coffee, Nutrasweet, etc.
March: Workout every single day. I realize you're not supposed to workout hard 7 days/week, but on the 7th day each week (Friday, I guess?) I'll do something easy like take an long walk.
April - December: I guess I'll think of these other habits by the time we get to April.

So if you're reading this, I guess you know me personally. So keep me on track.

Posted via web from Kevin's Posterous

Are you kidding, Yankee Stadium?

2009-05-14T19:33:00.004-04:00

Ah, how nice for NYU students, to have their commencement ceremony at the new Yankee Stadium. Pretty fancy pants, especially with all those comfy expensive seats down front, right? Oh wait, what's that?

Man, the Yankee organization is doing such a horrible PR job with this new stadium. Really? You can't even let the kids sit in the expensive seats? Or, more likely, the seats were sold to investment banks, but nobody showed up?

You stay classy, Yankees organization.

Our top guy in Afghanistan only eats one meal a day

2009-05-13T14:03:00.000-04:00

I was fascinated by this profile in today's Times about Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the guy that Obama and Gates put in charge of our troops in Afghanistan, particularly two little tidbits they drop:

Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the ascetic who is set to become the new top American commander in Afghanistan, usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness.

One meal a day? Really? To avoid sluggishness? I don't really ever feel sluggish when I have a meal. In fact, I feel sluggish when I don't have meals. What is this guy eating? Turkey and stuffing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

Here's another doozy:

One other thing to know about General McChrystal: when he was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000, he ran a dozen miles each morning to the council’s offices from his quarters at Fort Hamilton on the southwestern tip of Brooklyn.
“If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal,” said Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the council, “I think of no body fat.”

Man, this guy sounds like a barrel of laughs.

Then again, I guess if you were looking for someone to kick the Taliban's ass, you could do worse than a guy who wakes up every morning on an empty stomach and runs a half-marathon on his way to work.

Man in the News - A General Steps From the Shadows - NYTimes.com

Dear Costco, I don't get it

2009-05-12T23:20:00.002-04:00

So I've read a few things about this in the past few months, but this article in the NYTimes brought it to my attention once again. Costco, apparently, does not take food stamps. This is weird. It seems like it would be a pretty good deal for people who need food stamps - stock up in bulk on your daily staples.

Costco, it has been said, is a fairly liberal company, as far as big box retailers go, with over 85% of their employees receiving health care, and the average worker making over $18 an hour. So why won't they take food stamps?

To make matters worse, it seems that their trucks have applied for, and received, special permission to drive through East Harlem at all hours of the night to make deliveries. This poor lady about sums it up:

“You’re moving to a neighborhood with thousands of people on food stamps, and you don’t accept food stamps, and you want to drive on their streets all night to deliver something they can’t buy?” said Viveca Diaz, an East Harlem resident who has objected to the delivery schedule.

I don't get it. If this article is to be believed, Costco has never fully accounted for its unwillingness to take food stamps. I'm curious if this article in the Times will encourage them to be a little bit more forthcoming.

Read the whole article here:
About New York - Neighbors Use Food Stamps, but Not Costco - NYTimes.com

The economics of the new Yankee Stadium

2009-05-12T18:04:00.000-04:00

I am visiting the new Yankee Stadium for the first time on Saturday. Looking forward to it, at least to check out what everyone is freaking out about. My seats are in the nosebleeds, way up under the frieze. Face value was $20 apiece. I paid $40 on StubHub on opening day. Didn't time the market properly - I am told now that tickets can be had for close to face value, as the market for the new Yankee Stadium experience isn't quite as frenzied as Lonn Trost and the rest of the Yankee brass had hoped.

In any case, I was amused by this post, which compares going to a Yankees-Mariners game in New York, versus flying from New York to Seattle, staying in a four-star hotel, and buying two tickets to the Yankees game in Seattle. You save over two grand flying to Seattle.

Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000.
Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.

The economics of the new Yankee Stadium

Booming iPhone Sales Slow Profit Decline for AT&T - NYTimes.com

2009-04-22T16:29:00.001-04:00

It could well be that we are witnesses to the birth of yet another Apple ecosystem, where the iPhone App Store is creating a self-sustaining competitive advantage for Apple that is helping the iPhone pull away from the rest of the pack.

via nytimes.com

Posted via web from Kevin Meyers

My first race

2009-04-06T21:16:00.002-04:00

On Sunday, I became a runner.

Sure, I've run before. I've run a lot. Three miles here. Five miles there. I live so close to the Charles River and it's famous running path that it's super easy for me to just hop on down to the river, put in a few miles, and make it home in time for breakfast.

I've never really put much stock in it. It was an easy way to keep in shape. Wasn't even particularly enjoyable. I'd pop my iPod in, listen to a podcast, or an audiobook, or, if I was feeling particularly saucy, I'd put it on "shuffle" and see what songs came up. I always ended my runs feeling winded, a little sore, and not really sure why I was doing it.

I had registered for races before -- I've registered for 5-Ks, 10-Ks, even a half marathon, but I've never actually run one. I always find some excuse to wimp out. For my (aborted) half marathon, back in October 2008, I even went so far as to paste a training plan to the fridge. I crossed off races as I ran them. But at a certain point (I think it was around the time when the long runs got up to the nine or ten mile range), I just gave up. I think I caught a cold. Or I told myself I caught a cold. But all of a sudden, the training plan came down from the fridge. I stopped working "you know, I'm training for a half marathon" into conversations. I was done with running.

That all changed on Sunday April 5. On Sunday, you see, I ran my first real race. I ran the Cambridge City Run, a five-miler that loops around the Fresh Pond Reservoir in Cambridge. Five miles. I usually run around the river at around a 12-minute mile pace, so I figured anything short of an hour would be pretty sweet.

Well, turns out I ran into some friends at the start, and ran with them for the first mile. When I got to the first mile mark, I heard the time-keeper announce "nine-thirty." Wait, what? I had unknowingly ran the first mile in 9:30, a blistering pace for me. So I politely bid my friends adieu and settled into a nice pace of around 11-minute miles. My Garmin GPS watch was coming in very handy.

There was just something intoxicating about running a real live race with other people that I hadn't expected. Sure, there was a slight feeling of pressure - how many people are behind me? Is that girl with the ponytail getting too far ahead of me? What happened to the fat Indian dude that was pacing me? But it felt so great to be surrounded by other runners, and I have to say, it felt pretty awesome to cross the finish line. Sure, there were, like 20 people there. But still, crossing a finish line is pretty sweet. And then you apparently get free bananas and water. Sweet.

I came home and celebrated with a glazed donut and my first iced coffee of the year from Dunkin. So it was a nice Sunday. And I'm officially hooked on this racing thing. I think I'll try it some more.

Let the People In: The Baseline Scenario

2009-03-23T10:54:00.002-04:00

Awesome ideas here from a commenter and James Kwak at Baseline Scenario. The best way for Obama, Geithner et al, to get public support for the bank recovery plan is to make it as open as possible. By opening it up to private investors, every average American can participate in the so-called "double-digit returns" that guys like Bill Gross at Pimco are salivating over. Money quote:

If Geithner’s taxpayer subsidized toxic public/private plan goes forward, I think it would be fair if the federal government allow non-institutional investors to participate via a no-fee investment vehicle. I think if Americans had the option of investing in this program (without having to pay the egregious fees to the investment advisors/PE shops), it would be much easier to swallow since they would at least get the same deal the sharks are getting. There is probably more money on the sideline with individual investors than all these institutional investors. Maybe they could set up some ETF equivalent for it. I think the willingness of the administration to do such a thing would tell us a lot about whose for whose interest they are really looking out.

While I doubt I would personally participate (I'm more of a Vanguard 500 index-fund man myself), it would be great for non-institutional investors to have a chance to play their hand at the bank recovery.

On the other hand, if this entire plan blows up (as Krugman predicts), there will be a lot of angry voters in 2010.

Let the People In: The Baseline Scenario

Cool Dad A Terrible Father | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

2009-03-16T15:54:00.001-04:00

via theonion.com

Hilarious.

Posted via web from Kevin Meyers

Tumblr vs. Posterous: microblogging throwdown | raddevon.com - tech, the Internet, and gaming

2009-03-15T16:13:00.001-04:00

via raddevon.com

Posted via web from kevinmeyers's posterous

The Vegas real estate boom goes bust

2009-03-06T18:29:00.001-05:00

In March 2008, my wife and I spent a luxe week at the Wynn Resort & Casino in Vegas. It was a ton of fun - every morning, after a lavish breakfast buffet, she would hit the pool and I would hit the blackjack table, we'd hit cocktail hour around 4pm, and then try out one of Vegas's great restaurants for dinner. Neither of us are particularly high rollers, which is why it was strange that we got such a deal at the Wynn - I think it was around $150/night. When we priced out the vacation on Travelocity, I remember being surprised that Wynn was only a little bit more expensive than a place like Planet Hollywood or New York, New York, which were both nice enough hotels, but nowhere near the reputation for luxury that was the Wynn. I guess I should have taken our low price as the first sign that something was strange in the economy.

Now, almost a year later, the market has crashed, and as the New York Times reports, Vegas has fallen on hard times.

The buildings at CityCenter, the $8.6 billion six-structure development just south of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, embody the uncertainty in the condominium market. The developer, MGM Mirage, holds deposits on 434 of the 670 units at the twin-tower Veer condominiums and 210 of the 227 at the residences atop the 400-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel. But there is no telling how many will close when the buildings open in December. The company also canceled 210 units in another building, the Harmon, when construction problems there forced the company to build 21 fewer floors than intended. The Harmon is now planned solely as a hotel and is due to open in late 2010, a year late.

Our week in Vegas was fun, but now I remember it as our last jaunt through a world that was soon to disappear forever. A few weeks after we returned from our trip, Bear Stearns collapsed. By the end of the summer, it was clear that the good times had simply stopped rolling.

As the Las Vegas Real Estate Scene Stalls, Buyers Look Elsewhere for Bargains - NYTimes.com

A-Rod's supposed "hip cyst" a cover-up for steroid suspension

2009-03-05T21:00:00.001-05:00

It's no secret that I hate Alex Rodriguez. Hate him with a passion. So I enjoyed reading this conspiracy theory, which suggests that his supposed "hip cyst," which will require him to miss the first three months of the baseball season, is a secret way for the commissioner to suspend him for 50 games. The authors of this conspiracy theory also claim that Barry Bonds missed all of last season for the same reason -- secret steroid suspension -- and that Roger Clemens, a few years ago, didn't start pitching until June because of, guess what, a secret steroid suspension.

If you were Bud Selig, though, why would you keep these suspensions secret? In the minds of the public, A-Rod, Clemens, and Bonds are guilty until proven innocent. Selig would only enhance the reputation of Major League Baseball by making any suspensions as public as possible.

Hip surgery or off-the-books suspension for A-Rod?

UPDATE: So now it appears that A-Rod is not having surgery, and does not have a cyst... a breaking news development on which I managed to scoop NBC News on Twitter...

Twitter becomes easier to use, but will it ever make money?

2009-03-05T18:24:00.002-05:00

I'm still not sold on whether or not Twitter will ever become a viable revenue-generating company. I've been using it for the past six months or so (follow me @kevinmeyers), and I can definitely see how it's fun, even mildly addictive.

Twitter became a lot easier to use today with the addition of Trends and "Search" to the front page. Now, instead of just following along with the Twitter stream and having to manually type in search.twitter.com, I can quickly see what's trending on Twitter, and do a quick search. Instead of a constantly-updating stream of "tweets," then Twitter becomes a search-able repository of human knowledge, compiled in real-time. Some have compared Twitter to Google, and while that will obviously never happen, as more and more people start to tweet, the hive mind of Twitter will become a more-and-more helpful resource for real-time communications on the web.

All this being said, I still can't really figure out how Twitter will ever make money. Maybe by monetizing their database of communication? Sort of like the conversation-eavesdropping machine in "The Dark Knight"?

Slanket vs. Snuggie: Allowing a competitor to become the fad

2009-03-04T09:50:00.005-05:00

Many, many years ago (2006, to be exact), I saw this post from Lifehacker, alerting me to this wonderful new invention called The Slanket. It was, in short, a blanket with sleeves. I remember gulping when I saw the price - around $50 - but I figured, hey, if it's something that I'll wear every day, $50 is a small price to pay. Fast forward to almost three years later, and The Slanket is one of my favorite things in our house. I use it almost nightly, lying on the couch while I watch TV. It's a great invention. In fact, I bought The Slanket as a gift for at least three people: my sister, my brother, and my mother-in-law.
So it confused me when I saw this new product hit the pop culture radar a few months ago: The Snuggie. What the hell is the Snuggie, I asked myself. Well, turns out, it's just like The Slanket. Except cheaper. A lot cheaper. And, because of infomercials, nearly ubiquitous. Ellen danced with a Snuggie on TV. There was a Snuggie Pub Crawl. In fact, Snuggie is one of the most-talked about products on Twitter.

Where is The Slanket in all of this?

Well, I guess they got left in the dust by a copycat product. I'm actually not even sure that Snuggie is a copycat of The Slanket - for all I know it's the other way around. The point is, I bought The Slanket long before anyone else ever heard of it, and I paid a good bit of money to do so. Then, the Snuggie comes along, viciously undercutting The Slanket on price, and becomes the dominant blanket-with-sleeves on the market. Ouch.

Maybe $50 was too much for The Slanket to be charging. There was no differentiation between The Slanket and Snuggie. Apple can get away with charging way more for an MP3 player than, say, Creative Zen (or Microsoft), because they've differentiated their product with the entire iPod-iTunes-ecosystem, not to mention the cultural cache of having those white earbuds. Blankets with sleeves, I'm afraid, do not have the same cultural cache. So it's a price game.

My guess is that The Slanket people got lazy and left their prices too high for too long, and were basically daring a new entrant to steal their market share from them by coming in with a $10 product. Unfortunately for them, Snuggie called their bluff, and instead of Ellen Degeneres dancing with The Slanket on national TV, it was left to Snuggie to get that advertising.

Incidentally, there's a brief note posted on TheSlanket's website, under the "News" section, that seems to acknowledge that they missed the boat:

SLANKET CUSTOMERS RULE!Today we here at the Slanket want to thank all Slanket customers, who were part of this cultural phenomenon. You were the first! We will continue to stay devoted to you and provide quality and awesome products! All good things in 2009

The private market begins to clean up the mess

2009-03-03T22:07:00.000-05:00

Terrific article from the New York Times about former Countrywide executives stepping in to clean up the housing mess. One homeowner, Robert Robinson, says: "Literally, their assistance saved my family's home."

The money quote is this:

Federal banking officials — without mentioning Mr. Kurland by name — added that just because an executive worked at an institution like Countrywide did not mean he was to blame for questionable lending practices. They said that it was important to do business with experienced mortgage operators like Mr. Kurland, who know how to creatively renegotiate delinquent loans.

There was a similar story in my aforementioned piece from This American Life about a bunch of former mortgage brokers (MBAs) who were driving around Wayne, NJ, buying distressed mortgages and either re-selling them to the home owners, or giving the owners the opportunity to rent the home from them.

Stories like this give me hope for this country. We have the smarters entrepreneurs in the world; if any nation has the talent to pull itself out of this morass, it's us. I just hope politicians (ahem, ahem, Rep. Frank) don't get too full of themselves by shouting about these guys' former Countrywide associations. I imagine it's hard to find someone with mortgage experience in this country without some slight taint on them...

Ex-Countrywide Leaders Profit on Loans Gone Bad - NYTimes.com

The Ambiance iPhone app: How to ruin your product and alienate your customers

2009-03-03T17:00:00.005-05:00

OK, I'll admit that's a preposterously long title for a blog post. But I'm new at this blogging thing, so cut me some slack.

Not to be all Apple fanboy or anything, but I'm pretty psyched about my iPhone. I carry it with me wherever I go, pull it out to dig up information at times that are both socially opportune and inopportune, and I've received many a share of dirty glances from my wife for fiddling with my iPhone when I should be cooking dinner, taking out the trash, or paying attention to the baby. Guilty as charged.

Until recently, one of my favorite iPhone apps was called Ambiance. I used it all the time to study in the library last semester. It was one of the simplest apps imaginable, and I think at one point it was one of the top-selling apps in the App Store. You opened it up, it had a silly little scroll wheel, you selected a random loop of noise to run over and over again, and you were off to the races. For example, let's say I wanted to study with white noise, or a thunderstorm, or the sound of raindrops falling on a tin roof. Whatever. Took me about three seconds to wheel it up, and I was off to the races. Ambiance was achieved. Hence the name.

Now, I don't know what the designer, apparently some guy named Matt Coneybeare, was thinking, but it's clear he's never taken a business class in his life. He recently updated the app. No, sorry, updated is the wrong word altogether for what he did. He took his app and destroyed its very nature. Where there used to be a simple little scroll wheel, there's now a convoluted process of registering at some cockamamie website, downloading sounds, entering your e-mail address, blah blah blah. Feature creep on steroids. Some of the reviews on iTunes even accuse Coneybeare of selling e-mail addresses to spam lists. I deleted Ambiance from my iPhone within five minutes of opening up the new version.

According to the reviews in the iPhone app store, several other users have shared my frustrations. A few notable recent reviews since the "upgrade":

"This is a very different app from before. An upgrade does not describe the change."
"Bait and switch indeed: many previous purchasers enjoyed this app because of what it was in its former incarnation not because the creators decided to start collecting user data"
"Scam took away all sounds I had. I paid for this you can't just take it away."

The lesson here for businesses of all stripes: customers are smart, especially savvy consumers like iPhone users. Don't expect a fundamental change of your business model to go off without a hitch. In fact, if you're going to change your entire product, give your customers as much input as possible, and make them feel as though you appreciate their loyalty. Whatever you do, though, don't spring wholesale changes on your customers without any notice, unless you like horribly negative feedback posted for the world to see.

The greatest piece of radio journalism I've ever heard

2009-03-02T17:34:00.000-05:00

The podcast of This American Life is the greatest thing ever to happen to iTunes. I have been a loyal TAL fan since the days when you had to shell out to get the episodes on Audible, which I did. The fact that it's now free is amazing. True, once or twice a year Ira Glass comes on and asks me to contribute $5 or so to cover their hosting fees, which I happily do. And because of the program I listened to today, entitled "Bad Bank," I will contribute even more this year.

In about 35 minutes, NPR's Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg distill this entire banking mess into plain English. It was in depth enough for an MBA student to enjoy, but plainspoken enough for the average Joe on the street to enjoy (or, I should say, the average NPR listener, who might not exactly be Joe on the street).

One of the most interesting portions was their interview with Simon Johnson, who's blog Baseline Scenario is a mainstay in my Google Reader. Johnson is the former chief economist of the IMF, and he explains how the IMF would have dealt with failed banks in any country other than the US: nationalization. The government would give the bank enough capital to plug the crater in its balance sheet created by the toxic assets and, in exchange, would wipe out all the shareholders, sell off the pieces of the bank, and return it to private hands. Johnson claims this could even be done in a matter of hours.

Anyway, you owe it to yourself to listen to this show. It's smart, funny, and fascinating - exactly what NPR ought to be. And exactly why I am going to cancel my Sirius subscription - everything I need from radio, I can get for free from NPR and iTunes.

I should also mention that my second favorite podcast is Planet Money, a podcast started last fall and run by the aforementioned Blumberg and Davidson, along with some other folks from the NPR news desk. Great stuff.

This American Life