New York Times News

Inspired by the recent release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, podcaster Len of Jawbone Radio paid a visit to Bill Watterson's home town, Chagrin Falls, Ohio. He ended up interviewing Watterson's mom, laying eyes on some original Calvin and Hobbes artwork and sharing some interesting bits of trivia about the beloved strip.via

Every time the stock market crashes, someone gets famous for having predicted it. Though some will argue that there's always somebody arguing that armageddon is right around the corner (and that even a stopped clock is right twice a day), one of the voices who predicted our current economic crisis - banker and economic historian Charles R. Morris - is getting quite a bit of praise on Wall Street and his recently released book, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, is selling like hotcakes.Thanks to our 24-hour news cycle, newsworthy events (9/11, Katrina, elections, the Red Sox winning the World Series, etc.) often spawn books that are rushed into print so that they can be in front of readers before the next headline has taken the spotlight. Morris' book is unique in that it's not a rush job, he began formulating the ideas behind it back in 2005, basing his pessimistic view on the activities of hedge funds and other Wall Street firms. As a recent NPR interview put it, "He ran a company that created the software investment banks and hedge funds use to build these new, exotic credit instruments. And he saw how they used his software, and thought, 'This is crazy,' he says. 'I was sure that people weren't keeping track of the trends so they had proper margins and collateral and so forth.'"For those interested in the topic, the NPR interview linked above is good, as is The Economist's review, which explains just how far back the roots of the crisis go, in Morris' estimation, "Mr Morris deftly joins the dots between the Keynesian liberalism of the 1960s, the crippling stagflation of the 1970s and the free-market experimentation of the 1980s and 1990s, before entering the world of ultra-cheap money and financial innovation gone mad."At Foreign Policy Morris has offered up an 8-step explanation for what exactly went wrong and gives some insight into what happens next. Despite some technical terminology, this article should prove quite illuminating for those bewildered by our current economic crisis.