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A profile of Mary Jo White, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who is making a name for herself as a tough enforcer. But when it comes to regulating, can White keep Wall Street in check?: As the country sank into a severe recession, many wondered why the major figures in the financial […]

[Not single-page] A competitive intelligence consultant on how he acquires information about competitors for various companies: “As the sales manager and I surfed Talbots’s website together, looking for the green mini my wife saw on the website earlier that day, I mentioned offhand that I had just graduated from business school. I talked about how […]

Why are violent crime rates still dropping, even during the recession? The latest evidence suggests lead—in the air, in our gasoline, in our paint—was responsible for the rise in crime in the 1960s & ’70s, and the drop in the 1990s: “And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by […]

Cities are slashing school budgets to pay for professional sports stadiums, and the NFL is still a nonprofit. An argument for cutting off all public funding for professional sports across the U.S., which could save taxpayers billions: “Consider stadium subsidies. When Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure dome above a sunless sea, he did not […]

A trip to an oil boomtown transformed by thousands of young men arriving to find work: “I’d heard Williston was a magical place. A small town where the recession didn’t exist, where you could make six figures driving a truck, and where oil bubbles straight up from the Earth’s Bakken layer like water from an […]

An author meets a full-time gambler at the racetracks, who later ends up becoming his roommate: “The Scholar, the Human Computer, and I were interested in a horse named Keys to Astro. According to The Scholar’s speed figures, Keys to Astro was two or three lengths faster than the rest of the field. A horse […]