My Wise Bread post Live Where It’s Cheap was featured on MSN Money’s Smart Spending blog as Live where it’s cheap- MSN Money.
It’s always nice to see my work get a bigger audience.
Of course, with the Dow down 500 points again, I doubt if anyone noticed.
In 2008 I posted Ron’s paper on Peak Debt. He recently extended his work, in a new paper called Peak Debt and Income.
Once again, I’ve got a piece up at Wise Bread that provides an overview of paper:
Laszewski creates a simple model of the economy as a tool for investigating the question of how to get household balance sheets back in order after suffering the problems diagnosed in the earlier Peak Debt paper…
Really, though, you ought to read the paper. (The math in this one isn’t as tricky as the math in the original Peak Debt paper.)
Late last summer, I got email from the publisher Gale. They wanted to license my Wise Bread article Bankruptcy is a Good Thing to use in their book Bankruptcy (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints).
They have a whole series of “introducing issues with opposing viewpoints” books, each of which contains a variety of articles and essays on some topic. I gather that the idea is to help teach students the skill of reading a number of articles, any one of which may be unbalanced or narrowly focused, and then synthesizing an understanding of the topic. It’s a useful skill, and one that’s hard to teach with a textbook, since textbooks generally try to present a comprehensive and balanced viewpoint.
I executed the license agreement back in August. The book came out in April, and the check (payment on publication, of course) arrived today!
It would probably be worth my time to market reprint rights more aggressively, but I enjoy writing more than I enjoy marketing. So, it’s especially nice when the chance to earn a license fee falls into my lap like this.
Because of the nature of (and price of) the book, I didn’t try to negotiate a contributor’s copy. If you happen upon a copy, I’d be pleased to hear a little about it.
My Wise Bread post Buy Your Groceries European-Style picked up mentions at both the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green and Lifehacker.
Jason Fitzpatrick had kind words for my post in his piece Shop European-Style for Fresher, Cheaper Food.
Lloyd Alter was especially generous, saying (in a green-living piece subtitled “I thought I was a lonely failure as a frugalista, but I am not“):
I thought we were pretty much along among the frugal living types to do this. However, one of my favourite writers on frugal living, Philip Brewer at Wisebread, agrees…
Thanks guys!
Two of my Wise Bread posts, The Ethics of Hoarding and Healthy, Frugal Eating, got very kind mentions in the Doctor Oz blog:
Wow. Just a stellar post… Philip Brewer strikes again with a straightforward, no-bull piece on why we gotta suck it up and stop eating expensive crap. Stern, but informative!
I find it surprisingly difficult to extract quotes like that—it seems too much like bragging. I guess that’s why it’s useful to have a publicist.
My Wise Bread post Have Style, Not a Lifestyle was featured on the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green.
Here’s the gist of what I had to say:
The key to resisting the Diderot effect is to have style. Not just any old style, but a particular style. Something nicer than everything else you own isn’t in keeping with your style and that makes it easier to resist: It’s just not you.
Check out the Planet Green’s Watch Out For the Diderot Effect which includes a link to a translation of Diderot’s famous essay.
The reprint of my Wise Bread post Understanding Capital Costs is up at the US Airways Magazine site, in the section the Gist: Understanding Capital Costs.
This isn’t new news, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned before that my Wise Bread post How to Spot Counterfeit Money was reprinted in the handsome educational magazine The Forensic Teacher. It appeared in the Winter 2008 issue.
Cool! Lifehacker picked up my post Stuff will never make you organized, as Save Money by Organizing Before Purchasing Organizational Tools.
Lifehacker links to posts by other Wise Bread writers pretty often, but I can’t remember the last time they linked to one of mine.
The Wall Street Journal’s Wallet blog linked to my piece on the economic impacts of pandemic influenza.
