Super Bowl Wardrobe Malfunction

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I generally ignore the two-week promotional buildup to the Super Bowl when the Patriots aren't involved, in the same way I avoid pre-game shows for any sport. But I did happen to catch an interview earlier this week with Sean McManus, Chairman of CBS Sports (the network that's carrying the game). He was asked what his biggest concern was about the live broadcast, the one thing that kept him awake at night. A power failure? A terrorist attack? 

No. 

"A wardrobe malfunction." 

Hillary Clinton Declares Iowa Victory In A Dead Heat

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John Cassidy (in his New Yorker blog post this morning) summarizes a startling demographic result from last night's Democrat caucuses in Iowa: 

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 "The age gap between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters was huge. According to the entrance polls, which wrongly predicted a Clinton victory, Sanders got eighty-six per cent of the Democratic vote in the seventeen-to-twenty-four age group, eighty-one per cent in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine group, and sixty-five per cent in the thirty-to-thirty-nine age group. Clinton, by contrast, was largely reliant on the middle-aged and the elderly. Among forty-something voters, she won by five percentage points. Among the over-fifties, she won by more than twenty per cent."

As Bill Belichick would say, "we're on to New Hampshire". 

Breaking News: Newspapers Not Dead Yet

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On a recent Starbucks run in Lexington MA, I parked near a line of newspaper boxes along Massachusetts Avenue, the main drag through this posh suburban town west of Boston, where property values are sky-high.

In Boston and in most of its surrounding communities, newspaper boxes have pretty much fallen into disrepair or been removed as eyesores because of the steep and continuing decline in sales of print-edition newspapers. And in fact, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald are both long gone from this location.

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What's selling here is Chinese newspapers. In my short time in the parking lot, three different elderly Asian men walked up to the boxes and purchased newspapers, reflecting the dramatic increase in young Asian homeowners in Lexington - two-income couples with high tech jobs, with kids - who have brought Mom and Dad over to live with them. And their newspapers keep them in touch with the world they've left behind.