“European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said his pledge to buy government bonds is helping to ensure that interest-rate cuts reach the parts of the euro-area economy that need them the most.”

“In Wallace’s book, a Canadian terrorist informant of foggy allegiance asks an American undercover agent a form of the question: “If Americans would choose to press play on the film Infinite Jest, knowing it will kill them, doesn’t that mean they are already dead inside, that they have chosen entertainment over life?” Of course vanishingly few Americans would press play on a film that was sure to end their lives. But there’s a truth in this absurdity. Almost every American I know does trade large portions of his life for entertainment, hour by weeknight hour, binge by Saturday binge, Facebook check by Facebook check. I’m one of them. In the course of writing this I’ve watched all 13 episodes of House of Cards and who knows how many more West Wing episodes, and I’ve spent any number of blurred hours falling down internet rabbit holes. All instead of reading, or writing, or working, or spending real time with people I love.”

“Unfortunately, the idea that the euro is yesterday’s problem is a dangerous figment. In reality, Europe’s leaders are sleepwalking through an economic wasteland.”

“If the twentieth-century space race was about the might of the American government, the emerging 21st-century space age is about something perhaps even more powerful - —the might of money. The necessary technology has converged in the hands of a particularly boyish group of billionaires whose Right Stuff is less hard-boiled test-pilot, more high-tech entrepreneuring wunderkind—and whose individual financial means eclipse those of most nations. A massive industry is coalescing around them.”

“The eurozone’s difficulties, I have long argued, stem from European financial and monetary integration having gotten too far ahead of actual political, fiscal, and banking union. This is not a problem with which Keynes was familiar, much less one that he sought to address.”

“What is Lloyd Blankfein thinking? The health of Europe’s fragile economies has taken a gefahrhlich, German for perilous, turn since last spring. That puts the common currency in far greater danger than ever. The declarations of solidarity by European Union officials and heads of state, and a desperate patchwork of fixes that that only mask the members’ basic weakness, are deluding the best financial minds, including Blankfein, into believing that the euro is virtually certain to survive.”

“In the 6 min. it took the diminutive vehicle to travel at up to Mach 5.1 over 230 nm to its watery grave, the X-51A program smashed every time and distance record for sustained, air-breathing hypersonic flight. The achievement means that nine years after starting the program, and two years after first flight, the X-51A team has finally proved the viability of a free-flying, scramjet-powered, endothermically fueled vehicle.”

“They set up subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland and Luxembourg to own copyrights to their products. Then their subsidiaries in high-tax countries like the U.S. make tax-deductible payments for the products they make to the low-tax subsidiaries.

The key to Apple’s success, as the company tells us over and over (and over), is that its products empower its customers. So I decided to set up a strategy like Apple’s to see if I could lower my personal income tax bill.

Here’s how this would work.”

“EU energy policy must shift towards diversifying supply, with natural shale gas likely to be part of the mix, EU leaders said at a summit in Brussels on Wednesday (22 May).”

“In September, the U.S. government will fire into orbit a two-stage rocket from a Virginia launchpad. Officially, the mission is a scientific one, designed to improve America’s ability to send small satellites into space quickly and cheaply. But the launch will also have a second purpose: to help the elite forces of U.S. Special Operations Command hunt down people considered to be dangerous to the United States and its interests.”