Moleskine, the maker of fancy notebooks and other paper products is going public and will be entering the Italian stock exchange.

Mary Beard reviewed Claire Holleran's Shopping in Ancient Rome: The Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate in The London Review of Books, and discussed what ancient commerce might have looked like.

Jacob Newberry's essay in Ploughshares about living in Jerusalem and his naive attempts to resolve relations between the Israelis and Palestinians by taking shopping trips in Ramallah is a very good read.

But, yes! Having a good mattress is very important.

I buy makeup because YouTube tells me to.

I’m an AmeriCorps member, serving as a quasi-social worker helping low-income families with their financial difficulties. I’m explaining to my client in painfully incompetent Spanish that there’s nothing she can do legally, that the landlord’s letter she handed me says she needs to move herself and her family out of their apartment by tomorrow, that the county will probably offer her shelter since her kids have social security numbers, even though she doesn’t.

Shopping or hanging?

Lauren Rodrigue and I gchat sometimes during the day. We gchat a lot about having no money. We gchat about wanting things, but being unable to buy those things, because of no money.

I reread all of our chats from the past six months to see if I could find any growth. Are we getting smarter? Are we getting less whiny? Are we messing up less? I found that we have not yet progressed to talking about Excel spreadsheets and tax law (NEVER), but I think we’re moving in that general direction. Kind of.

‪Lauren:‬ Have you looked at Ruche.com

‪Logan:‬ I don’t do that. I don’t do online shopping.

‪Lauren:‬ Oh sorry. Oh my god. I am so sorry. For ever even suggesting.

‪Logan:‬: It just doesn’t work for my lifestyle. I am an emotional shopper. If I want to buy a new dress, I want it NOW, not in 5 to 7 business days.

Lauren: I don’t usually buy things online, I just look at shopping sites like how some people read magazines. Well I also read magazines. But I like to browse stores’ websites and think about the clothes and how I’d wear them. I usually get inspired to go change my outfit or to go find something new to buy anything anything anything I can possibly exchange money for. To me online shopping is like a thought exercise for actual shopping.

‪Logan:‬ I don’t do that. I just take myself out to dinner every time I feel sad.

If you buy good things and use them for a long time, it can help you save money for more nice things in the future.

*Crying*