The Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger I wrote about in June will be allowed to go forward despite the FTC’s bizarre objections.

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Burning Man chronicler Brian Doherty responds to the news that the iconic counterculture festival, which has traditionally made a point of officially eschewing commerce, will be allowing a few corporations to exhibit (unbranded) “green” technologies this year. Predictably, even this quite mild step has elicited carping about “money changers in the temple.” And Brian offers […]

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I’ve given this exactly no serious thought, but Megan McArdle has an interesting proposal. My first-pass reaction is that this would weaken the humanitarian argument aspect of the argument for immigration, but it’s probably still worth pondering.

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The New York Times cheers the purchase by

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The FTC is making a move to halt the planned assimilation of Wild Oats markets by the Whole Foods collective, on the grounds that it would raise prices for consumers. This seems unlikely for precisely the reason cited in the article linked above: Whole Foods isn’t just competing with other organic food stores, it’s competing […]

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Ezra is shamefaced that the United States, alone in the industrialized world, has no legally mandated minimum vacation time or paid holidays. Which is why, as we all know, such things are wholly unknown to American workers.

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Continuing his long-running attack on free trade, William Greider has a new piece in The Nation touting a seven-year-old book by Ralph Gomory and William Baumol, which Greider claims had “languished in academic obscurity”until “recently,” which seems like a slight stretch given that Chuck Schumer and Paul Craig Roberts were essentially touting Baumol & Gomory’s […]

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Sociologist Duncan Watts (whom I interviewed a couple years back) has an article in the New York Times Magazine on the idea of “cumulative advantage” in culture markets—a kind of aesthetic version of Schelling points or stock bubbles that, says Watts, explains why it’s so hard to predict what will become the “next big thing” […]

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As someone who’s generally disposed to favor free-market solutions to a wide variety of problems, I’ve always been a bit troubled by the observation, often touted by progressives, that here in the U.S. we manage to spend a hell of a lot more per capita on healthcare than various countries where it’s socialized to some […]

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The catch is that she won’t be there: Marie Gryphon, is headed back down to D.C. this summer and looking for someone who wants to swap digs—she’s got a well appointed pad up in Cambridge, Mass. near Harvard. Follow the link and drop her a line if you’re interested.

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