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The economy often absorbs the impact of snowstorms, such as this week's storm, without much trouble, but this winter the weather is doing more damage than usual.

Sal Sambataro, the manager of Il Cortile in Manhattan, N.Y., says that when the weather is better, people are packed into the family-owned Italian restaurant. On a recent day, though, the temperature is close to 15 degrees and the doorman wears a furry hat. Business is slower than usual.

"Business is off about 50 percent because of the weather," Sambataro says. "People don't want to go out. They don't want to go out in the ice and snow and the storm."

He says it's been tough as rents keep rising though business has been lower since the recession. It's not just the weather: A look outside Il Cortile's window will show you the impact. Sambataro counts four For Rent signs across the street.

"All that went out of business this year," he says.

If somebody needs a new car or a bigger house, bad weather might keep them home for a while. But they'll eventually buy. With restaurants, it's different.

"If you stay away a week or two, that doesn't mean when the snowstorm is over with that you'll start eating hamburgers at double the pace," says Chris Christopher, an economist with IHS Global Insight.

Restaurants, airlines, hotels and many other businesses are losing sales this winter, Christopher says. The good news is that people do buy things they want or need, they just might do it when it stops snowing.

"Most things they do recover quite a bit," Christopher says.

Still, a big problem for economists is that much of the data is hard to decipher, such as job gains and figures on overall national economic growth. Perhaps we're blaming too much of that on the weather.

Chris Mayer, who follows housing as an economist at Columbia University, agrees.

"There's no statistical way to figure out, to disentangle two things," he says. "So we've seen existing home sales fall over the last six months."

How much is that the bad weather and how much are other factors, such as rising interest rates that make it more expensive to buy a house? The tight credit and challenges people have getting into the housing market could be biting harder, and there's just no way to know.

For the moment, trying to figure out the direction of the economy is like sailing through the fog; we won't really know what course we're on until we get past all this bad weather.

Some experts say the weather has cost the economy billions of dollars, but it's hard to say exactly how much.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A collection of lullaby poems from Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon who died in 1952, is being published on Tuesday by Sterling Children's Books. The works were discovered in a trunk in her sister's farmhouse in Vermont. One lullaby, titled "Sleep like a rabbit," begins: "Sleep like a rabbit, sleep like a bear / sleep like the old cat under the chair." Kirkus says the lullabies "were written in 1952, the last year of her life, when she was traveling in France for a book tour and under contract to create songs for a new children's record company." The compilation is titled Goodnight Songs.

Bill Adler, creator of scores of books such as Outwitting Toddlers and What Is a Cat? For Everyone Who Has Ever Loved a Cat and What to Name Your Jewish Baby, died Friday at age 84. One book, Who Killed the Robins Family?: And Where and When and How and Why Did They Die?, promised a $10,000 reward for solving the (fake) murders. In 1983, People magazine wrote, "For a quarter of a century now, Bill Adler has been a publishing phenom, packaging, agenting and mainly pushing books for movie stars, TV personalities, politicians and just plain folk whose success in life — whether meager or mega — does not rest on the coruscating quality of their prose."

Ansel Elkins has won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her forthcoming collection Blue Yodel, which is set to be published next year by Yale University Press. The prize, founded in 1919, has been awarded to poets including Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery. The poet Carl Phillips, who judged the competition, wrote in a press release, "Razor-edged in their intelligence, southern gothic in their sensibility, these poems enter the strangenesses of others and return us to a world at once charged, changed, brutal, and luminous." You can read Elkins' poem "Reverse: A Lynching" at The Boston Review. It begins:

"Return the tree, the moon, the naked man

Hanging from the indifferent branch

Return blood to his brain, breath to his heart

Reunite the neck with the bridge of his body

Untie the knot, undo the noose

Return the kicking feet to ground..."

Nearly 20 kids went back to high school Monday after a very special weekend: They danced onstage with Pharrell at the Oscars Sunday night. It's the fourth time students of Los Angeles' Academy of Music at Hamilton High School have teamed up with the superstar musician in recent months.

"It was a dream. It was awesome," Alexa Baruch, 15, tells member station KPCC. "Leonardo DiCaprio was right in front of us."

The students were chosen to help Pharrell perform his song "Happy," from the soundtrack for the animated film Despicable Me 2. The song hit No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 list last week.

"It was a very long process, but very worth it," junior Preston Parker tells KPCC's Mary Plummer of working with Pharrell along with his classmates from the school's dance and chorus programs. "It was crazy incredible. It was a true blessing."

The only thing better, Parker said, would be "to actually win an Oscar."

These days you can fly to far corners of the world and eat the pretty much the same food as you could back home. There's pizza in China and sushi in Ethiopia.

A new scientific study shows that something similar is true of the crops that farmers grow. Increasingly, there's a standard global diet, and the human race is depending more and more on a handful of major crops for much of its food.

At the same time, all over the world, people are eating a bigger variety of foods. But until now, no one had crunched the numbers to see whether global diets were overall getting less diverse, or more.

"We wanted to know, really, how many crops feed the world, and what's happening with them," says Colin Khoury, a visiting researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, in Cali, Colombia.

Khoury and his collaborators went through 50 years of data collected by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. And they uncovered two big trends.