By Nancy Simon

The whole world is being rebalanced it seems – whatever that means.
President Obama recently called for a rebalancing of the world economy. Cook County officials instituted a rebalancing of its employees to help resolve budgetary problems. Rebalancing has even found its way into an advertising campaign – Merrill Lynch’s Wealth Management Group promises rebalancing in its “help2 Achieve” commercials.
In light of the onslaught of rebalancing efforts taking place, we thought we would provide a little help of our own and attempt to explain what rebalancing is and why so many appear so keen on it.

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Posted on December 16, 2009

By Nancy Simon

In addition to rhyming with the word “vogue,” the term rogue just so happens to be all the rage.
Appearing everywhere – from books (former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin’s autobiographical, best-selling title, Going Rogue:An American Life to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s initial work Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything (predating their current offering SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance) to newspaper headlines (the Tribune’s November 30 front page offering “Rogue Taxis: Holiday Sting Aims To Put The Brakes On Unlicensed Cabdrivers”) to websites (Rogue Radio Show, Rogue Marketer and Rogue Mentality, which, by the way, believes in playing hard, living the adventure and having a sense of humor) – the term ‘”rogue,” now ubiquitous in its use, has itself gone rogue.
What remains puzzling, though, is whether the word is being used properly within an endemic array of multimedia contexts.
To make such a determination, we will first attempt to decipher the origins of this vexing and provocative word and the intent its inceptor may have had in mind.

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Posted on December 4, 2009