Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news.  Here are the twelve stores that especially caught my attention and that in retrospect I recommend to yours. I'll make no effort to rank their importance against one another, so I will order them simply by month. January: Brick and mortar retail.  A bankruptcy court judge offered Lambert, the man behind the chief institutional owner of Sears, another chance at avoiding the liquidation of that august institution. (Update -- Lambert would get that chance, but wouldn't make it stick. By end of year liquidation was well advanced.)  February : Space exploration for profit. The Dutch organization, Mars One, entered bankruptcy. Why do I elevate that fact to the unutterable prestige suggested by putting it on this list? Because it suggests the narrowness of the line that now separates reasonable business plans from fantasy/fraud. Mars One had planned to cr...

I recently watched a DVD of THE GOOD GIRL, a 2002 movie that parodies the old "brooding/bad boy" romances. Anniston plays Justine Last, a 30-year-old woman in a not-so-happy marriage to Phil Last, who is a house painter when he isn't getting stoned, and who is devoted to her in his own goofy way but is neither attractive (he is played by John C. Reilly after all), nor especially bright. Justine Last works at a place called "Retail Rodeo." It's a Walmart-type place with a cowboyish theme, simply because the movie is set in west Texas, in the middle of the "nowhere" which is so abundant there. Her job involves applying make-up to the faces of women shoppers by way of making them see their need for the cosmetics products available. In the course of the plot she gets a promotion to head of the cosmetics department, so she gets to supervise another woman who is actually applying the make-up to the shoppers in the later scenes. The bro...