Weekly Wrap: Aflutter over Twitter plus #longreads
Leigh Gallagher, editor of Fortune Magazine, and Sudeep Reddy from the Wall Street Journal recap the week in news.
The Federal Reserve is meeting this week. Are they just biding their time now until new chair Janet Yellen takes over if she’s confirmed? “The big problem right now is that the Fed doesn’t really know its next move,” says Reddy. “That’s a little bit scary, that the Fed is trying to watch the economy, understand what’s happened after this turmoil with the government shutdown, the debt-ceiling fight, painfully slow improvement in the labor market … we don’t really know what the exit looks like.” And what’s more important to control: Inflation or unemployment?
Despite the Fed’s murky outlook, Leigh Gallagher points out that as a whole, the economy is slowly improving. “We are in a recovery, it’s painfully slow, but we’re there,” says Gallagher. “If you want something tangible, all you have to do is hop on a plane and head to Silicon Valley. It’s sort of happy bubble-land out there … it’s like a different universe. There’s stuff happening. There’s real companies doing real things. There’s a lot of enterprise and innovation happening.”
But will that impact areas like Detroit and the rest of America?
Weekend #longreads:
Leigh suggests:
China’s grand aviation experiment to build a jetliner
Vanity Fair on the web of tunnels below New York
Mike Tyson on Mike Tyson
Sudeep picks:
Helaine Olen’s profile of Dave Ramsey will force you to think about how people use debt and whether the personal-finance guru’s evangelism goes too far
Forget Siri. James Somers on the real meaning of artificial intelligence: replicating the human mind
Matthew Power takes us deep into the life of a combat-drone operator. To address PTSD, researchers have proposed a Siri-like interface that could help to (psychologically) shift blame for the act of killing
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