Always stunning.

The Economist is bullish about online advertising, though not exactly sure which kind of online advertising.

A friend wrote to ask for swift advice for a Paris visit with g-friend. My answer, the distillation of 4 years of fond memories, is always basically the same, so I’ll bookmark for future use:

Dude — I envy! Lunch at Minh Chau, amazing Vietnamese close to Pompidou, cheapest luxury in Paris. Drinks in the PM at George on top of Pompidou for great, relatively cheap view. See museums during the sequential night openings — Louvre, Musee du Paris, Tokyo, Pompidou — basically private showings. (I hate layout of Orsee day or night.) Our favorite spot for dinner is Brasserie Balthasar, full of young and old folk, rapscallion waiters. (Read Paris to the Moon for overview of the place — Gopnik claims it was ruined, but we saw no difference pre/post.) Flea market is good — be ready to brawl with pickpockets. Walk through the Palais Royale and the Luxembourg gardens when the pale winter light is unredeemably Parisian. Walk up the Eiffel Tower and along the Champs Elysee at night. Ramble in the Marais. Take pictures. Finally a literary must: reread The Sun Also Rises. Forget you’re reading a cliche — you’re reading a weirdly woven piece of tragic literature. Watch the number of times “money” is mentioned.

…when a particular ad campaign is going to strike the fancy of a particular set of bloggers. It’s kinda like falling in love, there’s just some chemistry, some rhythm. Well, Wonkette has gotten into a might strange groove with the EcoDriving campaign.

Thank you Will!

Here’s a stunning comparison of Huffpo’s new valuation versus that of publicly traded TheStreet.com. Thank you T!

As friends who read this blog know, I’m pessimistic about the economy. My pessimism sank to new lows last night as I read John Cassidy’s New Yorker overview of Bernanke’s flailing in the face of the crisis. A tiny excerpt:

The most serious charge against Bernanke and Paulson is that their response to the crisis has been ad hoc and contradictory: they rescued Bear Stearns but allowed Lehman Brothers to fail; for months, they dismissed the danger from the subprime crisis and then suddenly announced that it was grave enough to justify a huge bailout; they said they needed seven hundred billion dollars to buy up distressed mortgage securities and then, in October, used the money to purchase stock in banks instead. Summing up the widespread frustration with Bernanke, Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank in Washington, told me, “He was behind the curve at every stage of the story. He didn’t see the housing bubble until after it burst. Until as late as this summer, he downplayed all the risks involved. In terms of policy, he has not presented a clear view. On a number of occasions, he has pointed in one direction and then turned around and acted differently. I would be surprised if Obama wanted to reappoint him when his term ends”—in January, 2010.

The article assumes there was (or is) a solution to the minefield we’ve dropped into the middle of.

Fun to see my Twitter habits graphed. Turns out my prime time for twittering is Wednesday at 8am. I’d love to see the same type of graphic for my e-mail habits.

Arianna pulled off a miracle, raising $25 million in the most brutal funding environment since the invention of VC. She should take Paulson’s job and help bail out the banks next.

Michael Greenberg in NYRB:

members of the Cambridge Psychological Society were asked to reconstruct a meeting of the society that had taken place two weeks before. The average person was barely able to recall 8 percent of what had happened, and almost half of this was incorrect, peppered with the recollection of events that had never occurred or that had occurred elsewhere.