Jonathan Landreth:

Ai Weiwei’s studio compound sits behind high, ivy-covered gray brick walls on an isolated street in Beijing’s shabby northeast outskirts. China’s best-known dissident, architect, and creative provocateur, Ai used to travel around the country making art and recording injustice: He helped design Beijing’s famous Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics (before denouncing it as “propaganda”) and fought with authorities in Sichuan province over their handling of the 2008 earthquake, in which thousands of children died. All that stopped, however, when Chinese police imprisoned him in April 2011 on politically motivated charges of tax evasion; when he was finally released after 81 days in custody, he was forbidden from leaving Beijing for a year. (He has since been given permission to travel domestically.) Ai, who lived in New York for much of the 1980s, has become a patron of China’s disaffected urbanites, and here, in his tranquil garden, he holds court, offering advice to the thousands of fans, bloggers, activists, and petitioners who visit from all across China and the world. Despite the government’s relentless attempts to shut him up, Ai is still talking. The first change he would make to Chinese cities? Free the people.

Rex W. Huppke:

A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world’s most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue.



But for many, Facts’ most memorable moments came in simple day-to-day realities, from a child’s certainty of its mother’s love to the comforting knowledge that a favorite television show would start promptly at 8 p.m.



Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people’s lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: “Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.”

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.

Andrew Hill:

Appropriately for a US election year, the longlist for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award inc­l­udes an array of titles charting the strengths and weaknesses of the American corporate, economic and financial system.

William Silber’s forthcoming biography of form­er Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker sits alongside Walter Isaacson’s life of the late Apple chief executive Steve Jobs. The stories of ExxonMobil under Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson, and Ford under Alan Mulally, are tackled by, respectively, Steve Coll (Private Empire) and Bryce Hoffman (American Icon).

But tales of towering US personalities and companies were outnumbered among the 262 entries by books warning of threats to the world’s biggest economy. In this vein, the longlist includes Luigi Zingales’s warnings about US cronyism (A Capitalism for the People), and Michael Sandel’s dissection of a world where everything is for sale (What Money Can’t Buy). Philip Coggan’s Paper Promises and Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, each take different long views of the flaws in global fin­ance and the roots of power and prosperity. Guy Lawson’s Octopus focuses on the Bayou hedge fund fraud, a signature scandal of the past decade, while Charles Duhigg (The Pow­er of Habit) and John Coates (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf) explore the scientific secrets of success and failure in financial markets and beyond.

Gail, the actuary:

It is easy to see how sub-prime mortgages blew up Wall Street; it is a little more challenging to see it as the author of the global recession. Why were there economies that had no sub-prime mortgages that experienced even deeper recessions than the United States? Why did those economies go into recession even before the US economy went into recession? Maybe, just maybe, there was something more important going on–more important to the global economy than Wall Street or sub-prime mortgages, like $147 barrel oil, for example. If we know anything about watching the global economy in the last 40 years, we know this: feed it cheap oil, and it runs very smoothly. All of the sudden, give it expensive oil, and it stops in its tracks.

Every major recession in the post-war period has oil’s fingerprints all over it. The 1973 first oil shock led to what was then the deepest post-war recession, at the time. The second OPEC oil shock led to no less than two recessions: 1979 and 1982. And then when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and left half of its oil fields on fire, and oil spiked to the then unheard-of price of $40 barrel, lo and behold, the industrialized world again fell into recession.



Gee, I wonder what happened to oil prices before this recession. It seems to me that oil prices went from about $30 barrel, at the beginning of 2004, to almost $150 barrel by 2008. Even in real terms, that is, inflation-adjusted, that price increase was over double the price increase of either the first or the second OPEC oil shock. If they had led to devastating recessions, why would not the biggest oil shock of them all, be the obvious culprit for what has been the deepest recession to date?

By Adam Higginbotham:

If everyone had kept quiet, it could have been the most valuable parking spot on earth. Convenient only to the careworn clothing stores clustered in the southern end of downtown Nogales, Ariz., it offered little to shoppers, and mile-long Union Pacific (UNP) trains sometimes cut it off from much of the city for 20 minutes at a time. But the location was perfect: In the middle of the short stretch of East International Street, overshadowed by the blank walls of quiet commercial property, the space was less than 50 feet from the international border with Mexico.

On Aug. 16, 2011, just before 3:30 p.m., three men sat in a white Chevrolet box truck parked near the Food City supermarket on Grand Court Plaza. In the driver’s seat was Anthony Maytorena; at 19, Maytorena already had an impressive criminal record, and a metal brace on one arm as a result of being shot while fleeing from local police three years earlier. Locked in the cargo compartment behind him were two boys from Nogales, Sonora, the Arizona town’s twin city on the other side of the border—Jorge Vargas-Ruiz, 18, and another so young that his name has never been released. Together they drove over to International Street, where two cars were holding the parking spot for them.

Maytorena parked the truck, climbed out, and—watched by a spotter gazing down from high up in the hills on the Sonoran side of the border—sauntered around the corner. Inside, the two teenagers lifted a hatch in the floor of the cargo compartment; beneath, in the steel box that had once contained the truck’s refrigeration unit, was a trapdoor that opened less than a foot above the street.

Atul Gawande:

It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the “Skinnylicious” menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It’s a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There’s wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there’s also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food—pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.

The place is huge, but it’s invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entrée is under fifteen dollars. The décor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the food—can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?—it was delicious.

Chris Bryant:

The Mittelstand, Germany’s thriving strand of midsized, family-owned export champions, are the envy of the world. “We should all learn the lessons from the successful Mittelstand model,” George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, told a business conference in Manchester last year.

But just what is the model? Conversations with executives of some of the best-known Mittelstand offer a clue to the qualities others might emulate.

Avoid debt, maintain independence and focus on the long term
Audio company Sennheiser’s state-of-the art facility in the village of Wedemark, near Hannover, sits just a few strides from the cottage where Fritz Sennheiser founded the business in 1945. The company has always avoided debt, partly to focus on growing at a pace it could manage but also to maintain its autonomy.

Laura Ruane:

Health app developers initially focused on consumer diet and exercise, said Brian Dolan, editor of Boston-based MobiHealthNews.com, which tracks advances in mobile health and medical technology. “Now we’re seeing them look into more serious health conditions where there’s a real need for innovation.”
Glen Stream, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, sees an “explosion” of mobile medical apps, and gives the trend a qualified endorsement. He’s an “iPhone guy” who uses about 20 medical or health-oriented apps.

Daina Reed:

A trained eye can tell when a logo is really thought deep about or just whipped up without much thought. The type of logo that seems to require the least effort is when the type choice is not customized or easily recognizable. This is usually accompanied by a recognizable picture combined with arrows, swooshes, or other distracting elements- trying to depict WHAT a business does/is, not WHO a business is.

A logo of this standard is easily procured at sites like 99 Designs where logo design happens without any brand discovery on the designer’s behalf. The logos are dictated and picked based on if the client likes it or not, but no professional advisement is dispensed. Many of the logos are half-baked recycled concepts that designers scrap up to make a quick buck. A logo produced this way might very well resemble many others. The public is becoming increasingly aware and able to recognize when a logo looks like it’s from 99 Designs. While it is possible to get a good logo there, the chance it will be a great logo are drastically reduced.

The Economist:

Two of his rules of business, in particular, are rarely found in books on entrepreneurship. One is that, rather than being the pioneer, it is often better to be second with a new idea—as he was in launching KB Home, which became his first Fortune 500 firm, selling houses that were cheaper because they had no basement, a controversial idea at the time copied from a firm in another state. (“The second guy can just charge along the path the first guy has marked, avoiding the rough patches where he stumbled.”)