According to the classic rock radio station I was listening to in the car this morning, DON'T DRIVE INTO NEW YORK CITY TODAY, oh yes, OCCUPY WALL STREET WILL BE DESTROYING MANHATTAN. If only!

That being said, Occupy and friends have a nice calendar of events for the day.

• 11 a.m. "Free University" in Cooper Square, outside the sad, sad hulk of Cooper Union, which was recently destroyed by capitalism.

• 1 p.m. "Anti-capitalist march" from Tompkins Square Park (of course).

• 4 p.m. Rally in Union Square. (This event has permits.)

• 7 p.m. A people's assembly in Foley Square.

There's much, much more going [...]

Here is the problem in a nutshell with the "idea fellows" of our time: consider this lengthy analysis of Whole Foods as a customer-centric institution, as a perfect example of "customer capitalism." (Not a terrifically good coinage, but hey, you pump out what you can while you're working on your TED talk.) Nowhere in this treatise does the fact appear that, um, one way Whole Foods interacts with capitalism and customers is that, while some prices make a lot of sense, SOME OTHER PRICES AT WHOLE FOODS ARE LITERALLY AS MUCH AS DOUBLE WHAT THEY ARE ELSEWHERE. And other prices are easily 30% to 50% more, for the [...]

As an Amazon affiliate, we get a wee percentage of sales from people who click through from our site to Amazon. But better than that, we get a report from Amazon about what people have purchased! (Don't worry, it's all anonymous: there's no information at all passed on about the purchaser's identity.) One thing we can guarantee: you people buy things online. Here are just a few excerpts from the year 2011, here with quantity, title, media and cost.

1 Chupacabra (HD), Amazon Instant Video, $2.84

2 "Top Chef: Don't Be Tardy for the Dinner Party," Instant Video, $1.89

1 Buffalo by David Bitton Men's Bridle Strap Belt [...]

Daniel Henninger'sWall Street Journal op-ed column today is mind-boggling. He comes out hard, so it's easy to summarize: "It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism." His point is that the drill and the drill rig used for the miner rescue were developed by two smallish companies, right here in America. Other bits of technology were also created by companies! The free market innovates! Companies make things! So capitalism saved miners. Pretty much everything about this column is utterly undone by the facts.

It has been brought to our attention that there is another publication called The Awl! Unfortunately, it seems to have ceased publication sometime in the mid to late 1840s, even though it was only first published in 1843. Documented in Norman Ware's fantastic The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: the reaction of American industrial society to the advance of the industrial revolution, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1924. This bit of history was brought to our attention by the widely-read Aaaron Swartz, praise his name. Let's do some reading!

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, "events have followed Marx's closer predictions almost uncannily: globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, the undermining of democracy, the triumph of a capitalist discourse (railway 'customers' rather than 'passengers'), the decline of socialist ideology, and a succession of capitalist crises, each worse than the last – but none of them as yet showing any sign of being the last. Come back Karl; all is forgiven. You were right. (Up to 'the revolution', that is.)"

At least 180 people were laid off today at Conde Nast, the magazine company with $3.5 billion in revenue last year. More will be laid off as the Christmas season grinds its way towards us. At the height of Tina Brown era, the New Yorker's editorial budget was $30 million a year. If that astounding number were still true, which it certainly is not still that monster, and every magazine there were as insanely expensive, which they are not, then it would cost $510 million a year for editorial on 17 magazines. Triple that (an excessive estimate!) to pay for the business side: congratulations, you are still making [...]

Writers have contorted relationships with publishers, probably because they excel at projection. Particularly this is true now in an age where publishers sue writers for undelivered manuscripts. Something about this has the ring of the disinheriting vengeful father, if you're paying half-attention, until you snap to alertness and realize that it's just a business that wants its money back.

There are writers who dream of selling books, the kind who when they were little children for some reason fantasized about having bound books with their names upon them. No one dreams, yet, of having an .epub file with his name in the metadata. (Or does someone? Who knows [...]

Rupert says he forgot meeting because it took place on his wife Wendi's boat rather than his own

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) April 25, 2012

Who gamed a substantial number of professional news-gatherers into providing free content for Twitter?

Remember back when newspapers and other organizations doubled their employees' workload? (You should, it was only like a couple years ago.) And they were all, ha ha, now you have to blog too! Or you'll get fired like all those union guys who used to run the printing plant! So that worked out pretty well actually. Worked out real good for… some people. But everyone has taken this [...]

What did you do this weekend? Were you among the couple of thousand people protesting Bank of America in Boston? If so, YOU ARE AWESOME. (Although I have no idea why the Boston Herald referred to the 24 arrested at that protest as a "rogue's gallery." Isn't that… odd?) Bank of America should have people protesting outside every branch, every day. Also apparently there were some other protests, in New York, I guess? It only made page A18 of the Sunday New York Times national edition, where it said that only 500 people were arrested, not 700, so, must not have been that big a deal. (To [...]

Once you know that the reality TV "star" "phenomenon" is merely a set of nonsense network-packaged narratives, stories and characters deployed to capitalize on the news outlets that need "information" to sell their own products, particularly when those news outlets don't care that the information they present is actually the product being sold itself, and that the whole thing is a business ploy wherein publicity is made through various entities using other entities in a cash-funded reputation market, well then there's no point in treating reality TV as a cultural product. Sorry, Hank Stuever! You're right about reality TV, but you're just feeding the beast. Particularly since your [...]

This is a fantastic read from Baltimore City Paper, on the "fact" that Maryland's number of millionaires dropped to 4,910 in 2008 from 7,067 in 2007. It includes a basic primer on how business works, which is so delightful we must excerpt it here.

Well, the good news is that Steve Forbes seems to have wearied of playing Edward Gibbon in his recent attempt to mine the ancient past for management tips. The far less good news is that the visionary publishing scion is still thinking great thoughts about the way things ought to be-and he still has an eponymous magazine, which conveniently doubles as a platform for repurposed book content. And yes, the still worse news is that the indefatigable Will Durant of Gramercy Square has released another book (again instigated with a long-suffering collaborator) called How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in [...]