Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.

Politicians generally act as if there is no cost to reconnecting with voters by building new New Deals. But the whole exercise of writing law out of New Deal nostalgia is a form of national narcissism. Call it New Deal narcissism.

Disillusionment can come as fast as a gust, but building faith that the government won't inflate again is like building a new sailboat, a project of years.

FDR's job results were, to put it politely, disturbing.

The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.

Over the course of my 13-year career, I've had a lot of concussions, and yet, because I'm no longer competing or suffering from concussion symptoms, I felt like I was in the clear. The reality, though, is that I get concussions far more easily, and my symptoms last far longer than ever before.

When it comes to making laws that protect the public from the financial services industry, Congress has done a progressively worse job since the Pecora Commission hearings of the early 1930s, which led to Congress taking bold steps to regulate banking and securities firms in 1933 and 1934.

I've been writing about growing old for some time, really from the beginning of my career. It's something I'm apparently hung up about and now that I am old, hopefully I speak about it with some authority.