Most Recent Posts

Thor: The Dark World

Director: Alan Taylor

Genre: Action adventure

Running Time: 120 minutes

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence, and some suggestive content.

With: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Christopher Eccleston, Anthony Hopkins

All Tech Considered

What We Learned When Twitter Filed For Its IPO

On September 23rd, 1987, opening night of a Sweet Charity revival in Washington D.C., Bob Fosse and his ex-wife and collaborator Gwen Verdon gave the cast a final pep-talk, then left the National Theater to get a bite to eat. They turned right, and about a block away, unknown to the gathering audience, or the cast, Fosse collapsed on the sidewalk. Newspapers the next morning said he died at 7:23 PM.

I was inside that theater. I later calculated what was happening at 7:23. It was a quintessential Fosse moment: a stage-wide bar rising from the floor, a line of dance hall hostesses draping themselves over it, bait for big spenders. Here you can listen to him stage the movie version a few years later.

Twitter's IPO is Thursday's sexy business story.

But the really big business news is that "the European Central Bank startled investors Thursday with a surprise cut in its benchmark interest rate." As The Associated Press adds, "The bank lowered the benchmark refinancing rate to a record low 0.25 percent from 0.5 percent."

Here's why that's important:

"This was the European Central Bank," writes Neil Irwin at The Washington Post's Wonk Blog. "The hard-line, inflation-phobic, Germany-based institution that sets monetary policy for the 17-nation euro zone and has been reluctant to do anything that might risk even the eensiest bit of inflation. ... Analysts had assigned only perhaps a one-in-four or so chance it would make such a move, and thought it more likely the ECB would drag its feet and wait for more data to prove that Europe is falling into a Japan-style deflation trap."