- Fresh Air Fund just launched a new community that I would love you to join. Learn more about FAF and also meet people who have participated in hosting, attending, and sponsoring FAF Summer camps. Thanks in advance!
- When I sent a email out to request wedding graduate guest posts, Aimee and Minh wrote me a post about one of the coolest wedding ideas I have ever heard in my life. Period. As I mentioned yesterday, I've always felt a little strange about having a charity registry, since it feels a little like asking for cash, when I know people want to give us something tangible to help build our home. Enter Aimee and Minh with the tangible charity gift that you can mix in amongst the china. We are planning to participate in this project too. It won't help build our physical home, but it will help to build someone else's home, as well as the strong bedrock of values that we bring into our marriage. And, we'll still get those shiny pots and pans. Take it away, you two….
- When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany's inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.
In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current cri
