Maria Popova's Brain Pickings is a very popular blog with over 500,000 visitors to her website every month. "Brain Pickings provides the bulk of her income. She eschews ads on the site, but openly solicits donations..."* "But there’s something Ms. Popova doesn’t mention in her appeals to donors, amid her talk of operating 'ad-free.' She might not run banner ads, but she appears to earn income from affiliate links. You read a glowing review, you click through to order the book, and Ms. Popova gets a commission. The accusation comes from an anonymous Tumblr [update: he has now named himself as Tom Bleymaier]..."* [more inside]
posted by ericb on Feb 14, 2013 - 74 comments

New Case Law in Sovereign Debt Restructuring...in Lego Form [more inside]
posted by JPD on Dec 2, 2012 - 22 comments

TED Fellow Evgeny Morozov (previously, previously) calls bullshit on the "increasingly" "simplistic" "anxiety-peddling futurology" surrounding the TED conference in generally and especially the new TED book Hybrid Reality by Ayesha & Parag Khanna. [more inside]
posted by bbuda on Aug 4, 2012 - 54 comments

Felix Salmon, the Reuters finance blogger, has raised a skeptical eyebrow at some of the latest success stories at Kickstarter (one, two). In a post yesterday pivoting off Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler's appearance at the Wired con, he wonders: Is Kickstarter ripe for a big scam? [more inside]
posted by Diablevert on May 2, 2012 - 47 comments

Counterparties is a nice little collection of curated and tagged economic news stories, 5-8 every day. It is edited in part by the admirable (and MetaFave) financial journalist Felix Salmon.
posted by shothotbot on Dec 22, 2011 - 12 comments