The Way We Live Now: Nursing ourselves back to health. Slowly and painstakingly, we're seeing signs of life in our most precious damaged institutions. Like Wall Street bonus pools, and bank fees, and the Hummer corporation. Revival is for everyone!

The Way We Live Now: Ass out. We barely even know what we're doing any more. Stealing a bus? Living on the front lawn? Buying in before yet another real estate crash? It's a party!

The Way We Live Now: Jusssssssst squeaking by. Everything is a close call. We're dodging from government regulators, we're scraping up rent money, we're snoozing through school. Of course, we're bankrupt anyhow. But we like the chase.

The Way We Live Now: Unregulated. No man, god, country or law shall hold us back from our vast material ambitions! What matters is not that no one has any money; what matters is that our malevolent dreams remain unrestrained!

The Way We Live Now: Up to expectations. We see the expectations, and we fulfill them, "being all that we can be," we tell ourselves, while in fact wallowing in the sordid, muddy, lowness. Of expectations.

Trash company Waste Management's executive was featured on CBS's advertainment pseudoshow Undercover Boss. Today: the company announces fourth quarter profit rose 45%. Plus: companies were "given assurance that the show wouldn't damage the brand." CBS: American capitalism's last friend!

The Way We Live Now: coming to terms with hopelessness. No use being hoity-toity any more! Our neighborhoods are slums, we live off food stamps, and we work in restaurants. We must accept that we are normal!

The Way We Live Now: doing anything for love. By "anything," we mean "anything worth less than $50," and by "$50," we mean "assuming we can steal that much from our fellow poor suckers for love."

The Way We Live Now: Optimagically. We choose to believe that good times are ahead despite plain evidence to the contrary. As long as someone somewhere can bail someone else out, it's luxury condos and Bergdorf Goodman for us.

The Way We Live Now: Blaming the victim. People, stop! It's crazy! We know you're angry about your unemployment and poverty and endless coupon-clipping. But golf-happy bankers are not the enemy!

The Way We Live Now: Unfulfilled. We can't enjoy our bonus check. We can't scam others. We're finally building casinos when nobody has the money to gamble. Worst of all, we may never know the taste of hot nuts again.

Yale's endowment has recently plummeted to a marginally less insane multiple of billions of dollars. In addition to layoffs and salary freezes, the nobles of New Haven may soon find themselves subjected to an agonizing bout of extreme survival training.

The six-foot high 1960 Alberto Giacometti sculpture "Walking Man I" sold yesterday for $104.3 million, the most ever paid for a work of art. Unless you consider credit default swaps to be art, in which case this is trifling. [WSJ]

The Way We Live Now: recalibrating our responsibilities. In tough times, we can't be expected to support certain causes as effusively as we once did. Such causes include, but are not limited to: Colleges, mortgage payments, and the poors.

The Way We Live Now: enamored with strategies doomed to backfire. College? Big waste of money. Taxing the rich? You're punishing the best and brightest. When will the unemployed just start working harder, for money?

The Way We Live Now: Like a smooth criminal. Well, "smooth" is not quite the right word. Desperate? Yes. And occasionally inept. There are no banks left to rob. There's no bull market left to milk!

The Way We Live Now: Piling tragedy atop tragedy, in a towering tree of tragedy. It is not enough that the underclass exists; they must be made to suffer above and beyond their already harsh circumstances. Just like the overclass!

The Way We Live Now: bicycling towards oblivion. Toyota's given up on cars. The young lady winking at you's a professional gold digger. And everyone who can't run fast enough to keep their job is getting whipped into submission.

The Way We Live Now: Falling apart. Here are the things we currently lack: food, health care, and food, as well as money. What we do have, though, is our eye on the British. And we don't like their looks.

While the New York Times is taking a full year to get its online paywall right, Newsday—an immeasurably crappier paper—just went ahead and did that shit. How's that working out for them?