The Way We Live Now: Panicky! Swine flu is happening so sell your stocks, for some reason! Japan is shrinking! The good grocery store went out of business! Where will we buy our 'Recession soup?'

I saw that the swine flu is also killing the stock market right after I finished writing this and I was just like, geez, what will these finance guys think of next?

Meanwhile, in Japan: the economy will shrink 3.3% this year. If they could confine that shrinkage totally to the video game and cell-phone book categories, it might not be such a bad thing.

But what's happening in New York City, you ask? Balducci's went out of business and to top it all off restaurants are now charging us for bread and water. Hey thanks guys, thanks for that. We'll just grow our food on the roof if that's okay.

The real question: with all of this strain, are Americans prepared to handle sickening, mawkish oversentimentality? Mitch Albom was apparently off today so Dan Barry stepped up to tell us all about the soup made with a little bit of love:

The cook measures not by the quart but by the heart, so if you ask exactly how much water, the answer is: exactly the right amount.

This is not just any soup, you see.

But the soup she is making now, this Portuguese soup she learned from her mother, is for a working-class city with 16 percent unemployment, nearly double the average in Massachusetts and recently raised by the layoffs of dozens of police officers and firefighters.

Yea that's actually the long name for "kale soup." But is the big-hearted woman also a character?

When asked if she takes a drink now and then, the saintly, knife-wielding Ms. De Costa snaps, "Hell, no."

Soup's good but unfortunately the story of it makes you throw up. Recessionomics.