Most Recent Posts

In the early days of New Girl, Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel) was a toddler-sized tutu made flesh: cute, affected, hard to actually dislike, but earning grins largely by doggedly evoking childhood's clumsy and doomed attempts at grace. Building a comedy around her resulted in a one-note dynamic in which her three male roommates were forever goggle-eyed at the things she didn't know, couldn't do, or couldn't bear to think about, only to find themselves ultimately unable to really relate to her but also unable to resist her, the way you might be unable to resist a sudden infestation of baby koalas.

But as the show matured through its first season, it emerged as much more of an ensemble, with the flavor of Jess' social idiosyncrasies adjusted from scorched-sugar bitterness to something more complex, while those of Schmidt (Max Greenfield) and Nick (Jake Johnson) emerged more sharply. (Candidly, the show has yet to find a bead on Lamorne Morris' Winston, who changes from week to week while Schmidt and Nick become just as indelible and oddballsy as Jess.)

The writing got sharper, everybody stopped putting all their creative weight on Deschanel's ability to open her eyes even wider than last week, and it began to feel like a real show. It wasn't just that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt funny — though they did — it was that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt weird, and lost, and charmingly devoid of grace, just like Jess, so that she didn't have to be that way, all the time, to the utmost degree, about everything.

These days, Jess isn't as confused and isn't as excited; she's legitimately got her own vibe. The writers figured out that marching to the beat of one's own drummer is supposed to feel like a choice; if you're doing it because you're too dumb to walk and listen to drums at the same time, that's not the same thing.

Then, about three-quarters of the way through their second season, they decided to do one of the toughest things in the world to get right: they head-on addressed whether something was maybe going to flare up between Jess and Nick, who had done both a lot of platonic bonding and a lot of slightly less platonic bonding as time went on. Now, the legitimate dangers of getting characters together are overblown as a general matter and the Moonlighting curse is a fiction (at least as applied to Moonlighting). But with these two, who had begun at the opposite ends of the spectrum of normalcy and function, where Nick was the level-headed roommate and Jess often came off like an alien from a polka-dotted planet, the trick was to make it seem like he wasn't a grown man hooking up with an intellectual 12-year-old because she was pretty and simple. She could not continue as a person who couldn't stand up in high-heeled shoes or successfully step onto an escalator; to have an adult relationship, even in a comedy, she had to be written as an adult.

In that sense, while the fear is always that delving straight into your will-they-or-won't-they dynamic is detrimental to the chemistry of your show, it was hugely helpful to this one. Persuasive romances require some level of parity between personalities, and sexy ones require everyone to seem like they've completed adolescence. It was very canny to make the first Nick/Jess smooch, in the episode "Cooler," surprisingly hot rather than warmly awkward, which it easily could have been. For them to kiss like nervous teenagers would have been kind of expected; for them to kiss like that actually added something.

The writers have continued to make unexpected choices and provide incremental progress, mixing episodes in the Nick-Jess story that seemed chemistry-driven with ones that seemed friendship-driven, so that it was presented as the thing that would create the most challenging problem for true friends: a blistering desire to make out grounded by a bond that's important enough that nobody wants to mess it up. That's meant that the romance outwardly happens in fits and starts and impulsive decisions, but also, underneath, moves along an unnerving but steady emotional track.

It's been pretty terrific storytelling, and pretty romantic and sexy, and for a show that started out seeming like Dumb Snow White And The Three Patient Older Brothers, it's quite an accomplishment.

A relatively weak 119,000 jobs were added to private employers' payrolls last month as federal spending cuts and tax increases began to bite, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report.

And there was more potentially troubling news about the health of the economy in Wednesday's data: ADP, which provides payroll and other services to companies around the world, revised down its estimate of U.S. job growth in March. It now says private employers added 131,000 jobs to their payrolls that month, not the initial figure of 158,000.

In the ADP report, Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi says:

"Job growth appears to be slowing in response to very significant fiscal headwinds. Tax increases and government spending cuts are beginning to hit the job market. Job growth has slowed across all industries and most significantly among companies that employ between 20 and 499 workers."

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who sparked plenty of discussion about work-life balance when she prohibited telecommuting this past winter, took a step in the opposite direction, Tuesday: Mayer expanded Yahoo's parental leave policy.

Reuters reports:

"Under Yahoo's new policy, new mothers and fathers can take up to 8 weeks of fully-paid leave. If a woman gave birth to the baby, she is entitled to an additional 8 weeks of paid leave, for a total of 16 weeks paid leave.

"Yahoo previously did not provide paid leave to fathers and the total amount of paid maternity leave varied from state to state, but was generally six weeks.

"New parents will now also get up to $500 for expenses such as child care and laundry, Yahoo said."

Last week's factory collapse in Bangladesh killed at least 386 people. Hundreds more are still missing, making it one of the largest manufacturing disasters in history.

This is just the latest horrific accident in the garment industry despite more than a decade of auditing aimed at improving working conditions in the developing world.

Disasters in the garment industry just keep coming. In September 2012, a fire at the Ali Enterprises factory in Pakistan killed nearly 300 workers. Six weeks later in November, a fire in the Tazreen factory in Bangladesh killed 112 people. And then last week, there was the Rana Plaza collapsed.

These factories made clothes for major Western retailers including Benetton, Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney. All of them had been inspected by what are known as social auditors. This social auditing industry once promised to root out the most dangerous and unsafe working conditions in the developing world.

In the past 20 years, it's become a big business inspecting factory working conditions and safety.

The social auditing industry traces its beginnings to child sweatshop scandals of the 1990s.