The city’s dining scene still falls short of the quality of Chicago or San Francisco, much less New York or Los Angeles. Nonetheless, it is possible to eat very well here, provided that one understands where the quality is distributed. As a longtime economist who has written a blog and a book on the economics of food, I have been studying and indeed living the economics of our local dining scene for more than two decades.

Macfarlane, a geologist by training, served as a member of the White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which examined nuclear waste disposal.

You’re in your doctor’s office, and he’s got some bad news: You need an MRI. You now have a choice to make about where to go get it. There’s a large academic medical center, one of Boston’s best-known hospitals, where you will pay a $500 co-pay for the scan.

But over at NPR’s Planet Money, Jacob Goldstein notes that these tuition figures can be a tad misleading. The “sticker price” of college has been rising at a frantic rate, true. But we should also consider the “net price” which is what students actually pay after factoring in grants and scholarships*. Those grants and scholarships have also been increasing dramatically. Which means the net price that the average student pays for college has been growing much more slowly:

After 38 years, the famed local conjuring house has announced on its Web site that it is closing its doors July 15.

To try to combat the industry’s decline — in readership, advertising and profits — a handful of newspapers are now cutting back their publishing schedules from seven days a week in print to just three.

The roadshow for the upcoming Facebook IPO, together with the heightened public scrutiny into Facebook's inner workings, has opened our eyes to the ways the Internet business as we know it looks a lot like the entertainment industry.