Damon Vickers: The Day After the Dollar Crashes: A Survival Guide for the Rise of the New World Order

Over a year ago, on CNBC, the author proclaimed that the U.S. dollar would be "utterly destroyed." From CNBC.com: The dollar will get "utterly destroyed" and become "virtually worthless", said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners."We don't have resources. Neither does a lot of Asia to be quite frank," Vickers said on CNBC's Asia Squawk Box. "Countries that have resources -- the Brazils, the Canadas, Australia -- their currencies are doing well." Vickers noted that their stock markets have done the best year-to-date. "They have stuff. They've got resources. They export real things. The United States exports 'promises' and 'pretty paper'," he added. Read the full story, here. See also: The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It: Make a Fortune by Investing in Gold and Other Hard Assets.

"Washington: A life by Ron Chernow: review: Ron Chernow's fine biography of George Washington reveals a man who was inspirational despite lacking charisma" from The Telegraphy by Brendan Simms

The remarkable thing, as Ron Chernow shows in his Washington: A Life, is that he was all these things, at different times, and sometimes even simultaneously. This, of course, is well known, and purists may wonder whether we really need another Washington biography. Strictly speaking, the answer has to be: not this one. The author brings no new evidence to bear and advances no fundamentally new interpretation. The justification for Chernow’s book lies elsewhere: in the fluency of the argument, the wisdom of the author’s judgments, and – despite its length – the tautness of the narrative, which keeps the reader engrossed from the first to the last page. Some stylistic slips and a tendency towards the homespun aside, the author writes well, and has a remarkable eye for telling anecdotes and quotations. He takes us deftly through the familiar set-pieces of Washington’s career, beginning with his struggle with his overbearing mother and the disastrous expedition against the French and Indians that nearly brought his career to a premature end in the mid-1750s. [...] Wisely, Chernow does not explicitly set out to write a biography 'for our times’. All the same, his account bears an obvious message for American readers: big government, far from being a betrayal of the Founding Fathers, is as American as pecan pie. The final chapters show that Washington was deeply concerned after independence by the weakness of the bonds holding the 13 states together.

Read that review from The Telegraph, here. Additionally, WNYC Radio's Leonard Lopate Show had Chernow over, as a guest. Listen to that show, here.
See also: Alexander Hamilton, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family

"To give or not to give: It's all about the brain" from APM's Marketplace

JONAH LEHRER: The first thing to note about giving away money is that it feels really good. For instance, several brain scanning experiments demonstrate that donating to a worthy cause leads to activation in the dopamine reward pathway. It's the same part of the brain that's turned on when we have sex, or eat a slice of chocolate cake. In fact, there is typically more "reward-related" activity when we donate money than we receive an equivalent amount. Giving is literally better than getting, at least from the perspective of the brain. But this generosity comes with a catch. Yes, we have altruistic instincts. Still, these instincts come with some real blind spots. Consider the work of Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. He told undergraduates about a starving child named Rokia -- she lived in a crumbling refugee camp in Africa. His students acted with impressive generosity. They saw her emaciated body and haunting brown eyes and they donated, on average, about $2.50 to Save the Children.

View the Marketplace webpage of the story, here. Download the podcast here. See also: Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Decisive Moment, the, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, (PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST)PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST BY LEHRER, JONAH[AUTHOR]Paperback{Proust Was a Neuroscientist} on 2008

The Starbucks Cup Dilemma from Fast Company by Anya Kamenetz

Starbucks introduced paper cups in 1984, when it had just seven stores, as part of its transition from an artisanal roaster to the world's biggest specialty-coffee chain. It has taken various steps over the years to mitigate the environmental impact of its packaging. In 1997 (1,270 stores), Starbucks introduced the recycled cardboard-brown hot-beverage sleeve to cut down on double cupping. It fought the FDA for more than two years to get approval for the first hot-beverage packaging featuring 10% postconsumer recycled content. That cup, introduced in 2006 (12,440 stores), won the National Recycling Coalition's annual award. In 2008 (16,680 stores), Starbucks switched its plastic cups from polyethylene (No. 1) to polypropylene (No. 5), which uses 45% less greenhouse gases. As the company has grown, its cup-disposal problem "got to be a bee in the bonnet of [CEO] Howard Schultz," says Senge, the MIT business professor whose management philosophy book, The Fifth Discipline, is a worldwide best seller that popularized the concepts "learning organization" and "systems thinking." Senge originally got to know Starbucks through his work with the Sustainable Food Lab, a global network of NGOs and companies that work on international supply-chain-management practices around products like fair-trade coffee and cocoa. "These are the best NGOs and the best people in business around sourcing and food systems," he says. "They regard Starbucks as being as good as anybody in coffee."

Read the full FC article here.