Noteworthy reads from the last week:
"What Mayer is pleased to call the [Yahoo's] stable of 'digital magazines' is, in reality, the barest of fig leaves for an orgy of sponsored content—i.e., copy commissioned, inspected, and (increasingly) edited by advertisers, and misleadingly packaged as reliable, independent journalism in order to win eyeballs and reader trust."
"Will Predatory Lending Take Down More Colleges?," Alan Smith
"Is Sweet Briar the canary in the coalmine? Banks are certainly making obscene profits on the backs of the swap deals in the UC system, at the University of Michigan, and at American University."
"Advertisers Should Pay You," Thomas R. Wells
"If advertisers had to negotiate directly with you, or at least your software agent, then they would have to start paying a price that would not leave you feeling violated. And at that price they would want to buy much less of your attention than they do at present."
"Tolstoy Replays History," Andrei Zorin
"Both Darwin and Marx presented their books to the reader not only as scientific discoveries, but as an important stage in their personal biographies. In the same manner Tolstoy was attempting a total explanation of the current state of Russia that had to be at one and the same time a panoramic historical reconstruction and an intellectual autobiography."
"We Buy Broken Gold," Clancy Martin
"I came by my own dishonest trade honestly."