The Daily Dozen

1. Leaders go left, but economists get back to the basics.
   
2. Road trip Japanese style -- in a transforming toyota truck.
   
3. Tim Ferriss tries to find the perfect office chair. He settles on the Aeron Chair. I have one too and love it. I bought it years ago at a special discount because my company had bought a lot of them from a local distributor. It remains the only piece of furniture I've ever spent more than $400 on.
4. Some brilliant visual displays of international economic development statistics.
5. Acemoglu: The models are broken.
6. Facebook is now twice as big as MySpace? And judging by how many of my friends have recently added accounts, it's growing strongly.
7. Lobel & Amir on Behavioral Economics, Law, and Policy.
8. How to send text messages from the Kindle.
9. Brew the best possible coffee without breaking the bank.
10. Flatworld: Open source textbooks. This sounds like a great idea to me and I'd really like to see this take off. College expenses are out of control right now making higher education less and less affordable and practical for many people. I'd love to see more innovations like this take place to start giving competition to normal means of acquiring higher education. Here is chapter 1 of a microeconomics textbook as an example.
11. Recession can change a way of life. Tyler Cowen on the current economic downturn. Apparently mental health goes down and physical health goes up.
12. Eyewitness testimonies not as reliable as most people think.