Last week, Times columnist Joe Nocera asked a simple question: what is business waiting for? Why isn’t the private sector making a determined push to put people to work? He identified a few factors: the focus on short-term profits and concern about being at a competitive disadvantage; The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson took a wonkier look at the question. This weekend, the Times ran some responses that provide more insight.

For all of the drama and tension and tumult of the Presidential primary process, there’s only one thing that matters: 270. Of course, that’s the number of electoral votes a candidate needs to assume the Presidency.

And it’s also exactly why Rick Perry entering the race is good news for anyone cheering the re-election of Barack Obama. He’s probably the only candidate who can beat Mitt Romney – and Romney may be the only candidate who can beat Obama.

It wasn’t clear that New York City would survive the 1970s. I mean, physically it would, of course – it wasn’t going to sink, grimy and graffiti-ridden, into New York Harbor. But in late 1975, the city was broke. The budget deficit, reported at $600 million, was in reality nearly four times higher – and the city held $14 billion in debt. In October, President Ford basically told New York to fuck itself; that the city would not be bailed out by the government. (Today, of course, they would only do that to everything north of Canal Street.)

You know how sometimes the perfect thing exists on the Internet and somehow you miss it? Somehow we missed this: Slow Clap for Congress. Barring the possibility that this clapping is sarcastic, we can assume that these are a few of the 18% of Americans who approve of how Congress is doing its job. TechPresident.com [...]

CNN’s Don Lemon recently becomes a sweetheart of visitors to social news website Reddit after appearing in a segment on The Colbert Report and being profiled on the Daily Show. In the latter segment, Jon Stewart pays homage to Lemon’s disdain for the sort of newsy pablum networks sometimes use to flesh out an hour.

The Smurfs cartoon was dumb and not terribly interesting. Sorry, those of you who are my age, but you know it’s true. Here’s what’s dumber: a movie about the Smurfs, starring three-dimensional Smurfs that require the most advanced computers in the history of the universe to make. I mean, the machines that added little Smurfs to scenes with Neil Patrick Harris (WHY DID YOU DO THIS, NEIL) are literally, necessarily, some of the speediest and most complex in the world.

An issue of the New Yorker may be long and densely packed, but at least one only comes every seven days. It’s possible that the incarcerated manage to read every issue. I am skeptical of anyone else who makes that claim.

What happens, subscribers know, is that you build a pile of New Yorkers that you mean to get to. At some point, you get a new issue in the mail while you’re still working through the previous week’s. You’ve read about up to the film reviews, maybe, but the fresh new issue is hard to resist. So you put the unfinished one aside. A week later, that once-fresh issue joins it – maybe this time you skipped the fiction or the theater review. Then two months have passed and you have a stack of nearly ten magazines. You’re drowning, surfacing to suck in the new Talk of the Town with ragged gasps, desperate for the one-week reprieve that follows a double issue.

Earlier this week, the New York Observer blasted Conde Nast – and, in particular, Scott Dadich, the company’s executive editor of digital magazine development – for the “stalling out” of the company’s much-touted strategy to transition its properties from print to the iPad. When that strategy was first proposed, though, Dadich was seen as a “savior” to the company – at least according to the hagiographic portrayal by…the Observer. But to truy judge the success or failures of the Conde Nast iPad strategy one must first look through the prism of the significant part that Adobe has played alongside.

Eli Pariser, one of the co-founders of MoveOn, would like you to know that Google is hiding things from you. Not intentionally. It’s just that the algorithms Google uses to sort through search results (and the suggestions it hopefully displays as you type in the search box) are inherent limits. They’re the end result of a particular path – a path informed by what the algorithm knows about you and people like you, mind you, but still, an unseen path. You don’t get the benefit of the journey.

Quiz time. A local news reporter is given a call-in number by city staff for a press briefing. He calls in. What he hears, though, is the staff of an elected official discussing internal business. Nothing salacious (or even particularly interesting) but not the call he was expecting. What should he do? Should he announce himself? Discreetly disconnect? Listen in?

At some point, you’re going to die. At at some point, shortly after that, people will stop caring. There are two antidotes: celebrity and the internet.

We get it, guys. You’re all rich. You’re getting pricey drinks and can’t even be bothered to earn interest on your tens of millions of dollars. Understood. Thanks for sharing.

Between his Tumblr followers and his Twitter audience, more people see Anthony De Rosa‘s updates than attended that Mets game. That’s what you call a platform. Who is this once and future king of social media, and why should you be following him on Twitter?

Data is a source. We are building smarter tools to get answers from it. Which leaves only one problem: who knows what questions to ask?

Most cities don’t have politicians who send pictures of their genitalia to porn stars. Very few do; at last count, the number totaled one.

Most cities don’t have a President who gets into debates on policy with foreign leaders; they don’t have internationally recognized music stars; they don’t create fascinating innovative tech companies. Most cities potter along, debating the police department budget or the addition to the zoo or an increase in auto thefts.

Most cities, in other words, are boring.

You may like Sarah Palin, you may not. (Full disclosure: I don’t.) But there is one concrete, indisputable fact: she tried to riff on Paul Revere and messed up. She was trying to answer a question, tripped up on her words, tried to recover. But it wasn’t a success.

This happens to people – especially people who have cameras pointed at them – all the time. It doesn’t make them ignorant, or a fool. It means they stumbled over their words. It’s OK.

Here’s what’s not OK: pretending that you did exactly what you meant to do.

Some, notably a blogger at DailyKos, have suggested that the screen shot that Andrew Breitbart‘s Big Government ran when it broke the Anthony Weiner Twitter story is a forgery. Our resident expert, Philip Bump, reviewed their findings, and newly-released data about the original YFrog photo, and found evidence that strongly suggests Breitbart’s innocence, and supports Weiner’s contention that he was hacked. Here is Phil’s analysis of the DailyKos findings, and the newly-released cache information on the YFrog photo.

Jack Delano, a native Ukrainian trained as a photographer, graduated from college into the Great Depression.

He couldn’t have had better timing.

At a time when nearly one-in-five people were unemployed, Delano appealed to the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program that, in an ongoing effort to put people to work, sponsored public art throughout the country. Eventually, over 5,000 artists created 225,000 works of art for the program.

In 2005, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched a broad, unprecedented attack on union members. He proposed a series of ballot initiatives that would strip teacher job security, upend their pay structures, eliminate the use of union dues for political campaigns, and gut pensions that went to public safety officers killed in the line of duty.

And the labor movement rose up and beat him silly. Californians rejected every one of Schwarzenegger’s proposals.

Why is this story relevant today? Because NYT contributor Natasha Vargas-Cooper has decided that the reason people care about Wisconsin is because of the manly firefighters.

The recent debate over aggregation and curation of different news sources is now back on the front burner, thanks in part to NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s now-famous attack on The Huffington Post and aggregation. Whether he intended to or not, Keller sounded exactly like a record company executive from 2001, and there is a valuable lesson for media executives to learn from the Music industry’s dramatic transformation in the last decade simply because the expectation of atomized consumption is spreading.

The drama currently unfolding in Wisconsin is tailor-made for cable news executives and viewers alike; it includes a great political narrative and comes incredibly compelling footage and action. Crowds shouting “Shame!” at the legislators making their way through. Citizens struggling to get in to the Capitol to watch their elected government work. So why was it ignored by cable news outlets?

Yesterday, the NAACP released a biting statement, excoriating a prominent member of the right wing for a deeply offensive act. Later in the evening, Dr. Laura Schlessinger announced that she wouldn’t seek to have the contract for her radio show renewed at the end of the year. But the NAACP’s statement wasn’t about Dr. Laura – it was from Shirley Sherrod.

Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation, the parent company for Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, recently made a $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association, a partisan 527 designed to bolster GOP gubernatorial campaigns.

Facing immediate and ferocious criticism, News Corp. responded by citing their sympathy with the RGA’s “pro-business agenda”. Articles about the transaction were similarly quick to note that other companies, even other media companies, have given money to the RGA as well as Democratic committees.

Earlier this year, a juror in a high-profile case came forward with a shocking allegation: after reaching a verdict, her peers conspired to cover up her dissent and to develop an untrue representation of how their decisions were reached. As evidence, she presented a number of emails between the jurors. The New York Times carried the story that Monday on its front page, below the fold; CNN hosted the emails on its site.

Alvin Greene has entered the modern era of political campaigning, apparently releasing a video that summarizes his policies. Folks, it does not disappoint. And it’s legit – at least according to the NY Times. Starting with a segment from one of his first interviews, in which an incredulous ABC reporter asks if he’s “up for [...]