I wrote a short piece for Slate yesterday on why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns. It's a bit simplified if you've been digesting every piece of news that comes down the pipe about the story, but if not, and you want to know why your taxpayer money should be going to Bear (or JPMorgan, as it were), take a look for a quick explanation. (The short answer: when choosing between catastrophe and apocalypse, one generally picks catastrophe.)

Bear Run [Slate]

My April Fast Company column is up now. It's about the self-help-ification of the business book genre and, well, its general cliches:

...There are the tortured metaphors (usually involving cute animals with simple, vaguely ambulatory problems -- mice chasing moving cheese, penguins realizing their iceberg is melting and having nowhere to go) and the slightly less persecuted similes (business is like The Art of War, business is like Winnie the Pooh, business is like having your pinkie finger pulled backward until the pain is intolerable). There is the gratuitous manufacture of new jargon that sounds like English but is in fact spoken only in hotel conference rooms near the airport...

Library of the Living Dead [Fast Company]