When you hear the word intern, you probably don't think of people like Kristina Shands. For starters, she's 38. And she had notched 10 years of experience as a fundraiser at a nonprofit in Tennessee before she was laid off last year. But now that Shands is considering moving into sports management, she's interning with the Knoxville Ice Bears hockey team, writing game summaries and handing out stats on game day. She devotes about 10 hours a week to the ...

Double dip is not a term that a government keen to extricate itself from the economic-crisis-management business likes to hear. A couple of weeks ago, the Obama Administration was poised to switch to growth mode. Then the ugly data started pouring in like the overflowing Mississippi. First-quarter GDP numbers showed a measly 1.8% increase, well short of the expectations of above 3%, and second-quarter estimates are not much better. Then came a report on housing-price declines that ...

2010 was a tough year, not just for Barack Obama, not just for America, but for the West. Whether one looked at the U.S. or Greece or Ireland, the images were of unemployment lines, political protests and general despair. Every few months, a new crisis cropped up, threatening to once again derail the global economy. Many problems persist, and crises will come again, but let me tell you why I think the year ahead will prove to be a lot better than 2010. ...

The good news is that the American economy is back to its precrisis size. The U.S. GDP is now about $13.5 trillion, a bit above what it was in 2007, before the financial crisis. The bad news is that we are producing the same amount of goods and services as in 2007 with 7 million fewer workers. The number of Americans who are unemployed has roughly doubled, and though that number is declining, it is doing so ...

Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down, I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers' share of the U.S. economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4% of GDP, down from about 60% in the 1970s. No wonder Marx is back ...

Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits last week, a sign that layoffs are dropping and employers may be hiring more workers. The Labor Department says the number of people seeking benefits dropped 10,000 to 382,000 in the week ending April 2. That's the third drop in four weeks. The four-week average of applications, a less volatile measure, declined to 389,500. See TIME's special "Out of Work in America." Applications near ...

Immigration has always been a contentious issue in Europe. But these days, with enduring economic turmoil further fueling concerns over rising unemployment, European nations are especially sensitive about the prospect of foreigners taking jobs away from their citizens. So it's not difficult to understand why leaders in many European Union countries are displeased at seeing their peers in four member nations extend the promise of citizenship to nearly five million people — most of whom come from ...

The New Republic recently asked an intriguing question about the U.S. intervention in Libya: Why isn't Obama getting credit for preventing an atrocity? The answer is obvious when you think about it: because he prevented the atrocity. It's hard to get credit for avoiding a disaster when it's impossible to prove the disaster would have happened without you. Social scientists call this the counterfactual problem. There's no double-blind study to show what would happen in an alternative ...

The kid who's wimpy whupped the teen girls whose couture is skimpy. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, second in the film adaptations of Jeff Kinney's stick-drawn book characters, earned $24.1 million, according to early studio estimates. That made it a winner over Zack Snyder's comix-style adventure Sucker Punch, with $19 million, at the shrimpy, limpy, anything-but-blimpy North American box office. For the 17th time in the past 18 weeks, theatrical revenue was down from the ...

Obama's 8-Month Nightmare Could Begin Tomorrow For months now, the pundits have predicted doom and gloom for Barack Obama and the Democrats come November. But we're not totally convinced. A very likely storyline goes something like this (as we've already written): Healthcare passes. On Friday, April 2 at 8:30 AM the March jobs numbers come in, and they show for the first time decisive job growth (very possible). Finally Case-Shiller shows the housing rebound that stalled out over the winter, and voila, the ...