So why are American factories reporting that 600,000 jobs are going vacant across the country?

Would you live in one if you were looking for a single space in Manhattan? In theory, it looks great.

In 2008, This American Life did a story about New York City's "rubber room"—a place where teachers accused of wrongdoing go to wait disciplinary action.

Yakking about the minimum wage.

And these are things that have only come to the surface. Who knows what other things are lurking in the shadows.

Bloomberg has a pretty stunning report about the amount of money telemarketing companies that work on behalf of charities receive because of one-sided contracts. A telemarketer named Robin convinced 64-year-old Carol Patterson (quoted above) to reach out to 15 neighbors asking them to donate to the American Diabetes Association. A report shows that the telemarketing company, InfoCision, received nearly 80 percent of the money raised by donors—only 22 percent of the money raised went to the charity.

With a tweet like that, how could you not pay attention to this Bloomberg feature on the Libor scandal?

For years, traders at Deutsche Bank AG, UBS AG, Barclays, RBS and other banks colluded with colleagues responsible for setting the benchmark and their counterparts at other firms to rig the price of money, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and interviews with two dozen current and former traders, lawyers and regulators. UBS traders went as far as offering bribes to brokers to persuade others to make favorable submissions on their behalf, regulatory filings show.

Members of the close-knit group of traders knew each other from working at the same firms or going on trips organized by interdealer brokers, which line up buyers and sellers of securities, to French ski resort Chamonix and the Monaco Grand Prix. The manipulation flourished for years, even after bank supervisors were made aware of the system’s flaws.

“We will never know the amounts of money involved, but it has to be the biggest financial fraud of all time,” says Adrian Blundell-Wignall, a special adviser to the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. “Libor is the basis for calculating practically every derivative known to man.”

It’s the biggest financial fraud of all time, yet the general public finds it it too boring? complex? to really give it the attention it deserves. So let’s put this story on our reading lists today.

Update: Heidi’s newest column is about how nobody cares about Libor:

…there is literally no one in the United States who has ever pounded a dinner table in outrage over government complacency, yelling, “But if we’re so tough on financial crime, why haven’t we thrown those obscure Asian bureaucrats of a foreign bank into the slammer for fixing a London-based interest rate?!”

No. What US consumers wanted was the prosecution of American banks, for American crimes. Insider trading. Mortgage fraud. Foreclosure abuses. Unjust, overdone compensation for executives and managers who failed to uphold ethical business standards.

Finding gifts for people when you're unsure of what to give them can be terribly stressful.

Can you design a beautiful, tiny space?