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First, the good news:

There were 316,000 first-time claims filed for unemployment insurance last week, down 10,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration said Wednesday.

The pace of claims slowed in September to a rate not seen in six — before the economy slipped into its last recession. In October, as lawmakers argued in Washington and the federal government partially shut down, the pace picked back up. But at 316,000, claims are now down around that pre-recession rate once again.

Bloomberg News says the latest number is a sign "that the labor market is showing resilience."

But when it comes to reporting about the economy, there's always "the other hand."

So here is Wednesday's bad news:

Orders for durable goods declined 2 percent in October from September, the Census Bureau says. Durable goods are such things as equipment, appliances and other products designed to last three or more years.

The Associated Press says "businesses spent less on machinery, computers and most other items. The decline suggests companies may have been reluctant to invest during the 16-day partial government shutdown."

The capital city we visit with Grafton contributes to this general feeling of mystery. It has winding, twisting streets with no names, long distances between locations, little traffic, and a constant invasive police presence. At times mystery rises to the level of foreboding (as when Grafton, taking a boat across a large local lake, finds himself in the presence of a rather frightening man dressed all in black). Grafton himself, by the middle of the novel, stalks the streets armed with a gun, carrying a dead woman's somehow animate hand in his pocket — yes, give this man a hand! — and taking on the duties of a police investigator trolling for culprits.

Behind all this stands Grafton's undeterred desire to turn all of his adventures into that first-ever guidebook to this odd and sometimes deadly dangerous domain. He's constantly taking notes and, as he says, "I find that even when something happens to them later having written them down fixes them in my mind. So it is good to take notes, and when they get lost I have not lost the information, usually."

Neither does the reader. Does Grafton survive to turn his discoveries into his long-awaited guidebook? I think so. I hope so. After the intensity of reading his story I felt that I had taken the journey myself, to a place on our own planet in the here and now as bizarre and yet as familiar as anything in Gene Wolfe's galactic fiction. If you thought no one could improve on Kafka, try this one at home.

Read an excerpt of The Land Across

We've been reporting a lot lately on the troubled rollout of President Obama's signature health care law. But at the same time, there are rumblings of a major shift in the way companies offer private health insurance to workers.

It involves what are called "private health care exchanges." These are similar to — but completely separate from — the public exchanges you've heard so much about.

Some experts say this new approach soon could change how millions of Americans receive their health care.

Dean Carter is the chief human resources officer for Sears Holdings, which means he's shifted more than 50,000 employees onto this new kind of health care system. And he thinks this is the future. "In my 20 years of HR and working with benefits," Dean says, "this fundamentally changes the game."

The change Dean's talking about is kind of like what happened when most companies stopped offering pensions. Instead, many just contribute money to their workers' retirement accounts.

With health care now, some companies are saying: "Here's $300 to $400 a paycheck. Go use that toward buying insurance on a 'private exchange.' "

For years at big conferences that benefits managers attend, there has been talk about private health care exchanges with four, five or six different carriers competing on price to offer people insurance. But it seemed to be something maybe 10 years in the future. Then the Affordable Care Act passed. And that made exchanges seem more doable right away for the private sector, too.

"When we began to look at it, and it looked like it was a good idea for our associates and Sears holdings, we leaned-in fast," says Carter.

In the past, the whole company was essentially trapped in a health plan for several years with one insurance company, says Carter: "For two to three years the entire employee population would be locked in to using that carrier alone. ... If that carrier decided there would be cost increases year on year, you were basically loaded into those cost increases."

But in private health care exchanges, every year multiple insurance companies have to compete on the exchange. And individual employees shop for the various plans, and select an insurance company based on the price they offer for benefits.

"We believe the competitive nature enables us to save on costs and our employees to save on costs," says Carter.

Akshay Kapur is a principal with the consulting firm Booz & Co. He studies health care and private exchanges. And he says these exchanges reduce costs, both through competition, and by changing employee behavior. "Once you give a fixed amount of money to employees, they will make health care choices that are appropriate or optimal for themselves and their family," says Kapur.

Kapur says that will mean fewer healthy people going to the doctor too frequently. For example, some plans have premiums as low as $5 a paycheck but with a high $6,000 deductible. That might be a good option for someone who is healthy and doesn't expect to go to the doctor. Most plans, though, also offer some free checkups, to make sure people are going to the doctor enough to catch any health problems early on.

In theory, these new private exchanges might sound good. But, there are problems.

Christine Trapp, 42, has been battling advanced-stage breast cancer. And she also works for a major retailer that's switching to a private exchange, which she says has been having the same kind of problems as the public exchanges. The website wouldn't work, and she couldn't get help on the phone, Trapp says, calling it "very overwhelming and confusing."

And, she says, "contacting the company to get answers was very difficult — 20-, 30-, 40-minute wait times.

As it turned out, her employer is chipping in $417 per paycheck. And with that, she could have gotten a similar plan to the one she had before for a few dollars less per paycheck. But she couldn't figure that out. So she signed up for the most expensive platinum plan because she was scared about losing her doctors and fouling up her cancer treatment. That's going to mean a 25 percent cut in her take-home pay. She makes $37,000 a year, and has two kids in college. So for now, Trapp says she's going to try to save money however she can.

So some big questions remain: As more companies make this shift, will competition rein in rising health care costs for workers? Or will workers end up paying more anyway, because employers keep making them shoulder more of the health care burden?

Major stock indexes have shot to record highs in the U.S. this year, gaining more than 20 percent, and yet economic growth remains at disappointing levels. A lot of analysts believe the stimulus efforts by the Federal Reserve are behind the stock boom and a possible bubble.

Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of the giant bond fund, PIMCO, says the markets would not have done so well without that support from the Fed. He says the stock market has become dependent on the $85 billion a month the central bank is adding to the financial system in its third round of quantitative easing, or QE3. The Dow Industrials closed above 16,000 for the first time last week, and the S&P 500 crossed the 1,800 threshold on the way to new highs.

El-Erian says the evidence is clear: When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said in June that the Fed might begin dialing back the stimulus, or tapering, as early as September and then end it next July, stocks dropped sharply. The opposite happened when September came and the Fed decided not to reduce the stimulus.

"When the Fed decided to the surprise of everybody not to taper, the markets took off, so you can identify very clearly the comfort that investors have in riding this massive central bank liquidity wave," El-Erian says.

And why is the market so influenced by the Fed? It's because through its stimulus, El-Erian says, the Fed has "pushed" investors into the stock market. The Fed's policies have reduced interest rates to historically low levels. That means the return on money market funds is near zero and the return on Treasury bonds is extremely low, so investors are "pushed" into stocks to get higher returns.

But El-Erian says pushing someone into something is a tricky business.

"If you're pushed into a marriage, the likelihood of there being deep conviction is much lower than if you're pulled into marriage by love. Similarly, if you're pushed into an investment because it's better than something else, your conviction is not as high [as] if you are pulled in by the fundamental attractiveness of the investment," he says.

El-Erian says the Fed's policies did help the economy avoid a depression and grow faster. But, he says, the Fed has gotten no help from Congress. He says its policies and brinksmanship have hurt growth. That's forced the Fed to keep its stimulus in place too long, and there's now a risk the Fed's exit could tank the stock market.

"We are so deep in experimental mode. We are using untested tools. There [are] no analytical models or historical experience or game plan that can help us," El-Erian says.

Fed officials seem less worried than El-Erian. Janet Yellen, the Fed chief-in-waiting, said at her confirmation hearing that historical data suggest there's no bubble in stocks.

That was also the conclusion of a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the of the big business consulting firm.

"Investors are clearly watching every move the Fed makes, but when you look for evidence that in the long-term equity prices are higher than would be justified by fundamentals, there's no evidence of that," says Susan Lund, a partner in the firm.

She says the market is up so much partly because it dropped so far during the Great Recession.

"Typically after stock market slumps you do see a rebound and that also the stock market gains reflect in the long term, just the rise in corporate earnings and the amount that corporations have today," Lund says.

And, she says, the fact that the ratio of stock prices to company earnings is about at the historical average suggests there is no bubble. Other economists who see a bubble developing counter that company profits today are largely the result of cost cutting, not growth in sales. But the no-bubble side points out that adjusted for inflation, the S&P 500 index is no higher now than it was 13 years ago.