Jennifer's Mercedes is back in the shop-caliper problems. That's only one of today's Media Team revelations. The other? Her husband has a penchant for difficult-to-obtain dog breeds, and they imported a Rhodesian Ridgeback from South Africa. But they worry they got a dud. The beast fears precipitation. Over the weekend's snow shower, it refused to leave the house and shat in the foyer, the very one Yves had interior decorated. Now they are considering legal action (against the breeder, not Yves) [...]

Because with their Enron auditing and consulting, Andersen took it to the next level. If there were a company to risk it all for, it was Enron, once described by the New York Times as "a new-economy company, a thinking-outside-the-box, paradigm-shifting, market-making company ... [one] ranked as the most innovative company in America four years in a row, as judged by envious corporate peers in the annual Fortune magazine poll." Enron was an energy company that didn't so much produce or distribute energy as it did buy and sell positions on the price of energy stocks -- derivatives. [...]

[...] His students, I among them, were ready to be moved. But he never pushed, really. Of course, every interpreter has their own Marx, but his was a rather peculiar one. He conjured the philosophical spirit of a progresive professional liberal who might have voted for Bill Clinton and sent his offspring to private school while simultaneously leveling a totalizing critique against the progressive professional liberalism and privatization that Clinton introduced. The 1990s were famously a decade of irony, and that, my very first Marx, was imbued with a strange ironic nihilism. Your work will exhaust you, and you'll still do it because what else is there to do. Your wedding will be boring and bourgeois, and you'll still have one because individual sexual love offers what little redemption you're likely to find. Your children will be as entitled as you are, and you'll try to please them nonetheless. Let bushy, bearded Karl and clean-shaven me detail for you a guide to the travails inherent in your privilege, he seemed to offer.

Other Marxist prognostications have been a bit more spacious and urged followers to understand similar capitalist construction projects as fallen in theory regardless of their posture in physical reality. "We begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins, even before they have crumbled," advised Walter Benjamin. [...]

[...] Gay Tim made monthly site visits to Asia, I assumed for the frequent-flier miles, but his last trip had been derailed by an early-in-the-season typhoon and he'd been waylaid in Brisbane, Australia, a rerouting that would have garnered him more frequent-flier miles but that meant I was the last team member to visit one of the Conglomerate's Tokyo shops.