Good Friday

Bill Clinton earned nearly $18 million as an adviser and honorary chancellor for the international for-profit college network between 2010 and 2015.

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Shipping goods with a value less than $800 in the US (150 EUR in Europe) is import duty-free – something Chinese firms like Temu and Shein have been taking advantage of, accounting for an estimated 30% of such “de minimis” shipments last year.

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Response rates of major economic surveys are falling, making economic data hard to trust.

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Good Friday


How the norms slide and slip, how the bell-shaped curve moves. Two poems about Good Friday that were outliers are now the norm.


Christina Rossetti's Good Friday


Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?


Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;


Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon –

I, only I.


Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.


And the atheist Housmann's Easter Sunday, taking the human-centric position of the thief:


If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,

Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.


But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.