Jim McInerny hopes every day at work will be like “The Gong Show.” But unlike the iconic 1970s TV talent show, swinging the mallet does not mean rejection at VMTurbo, a high-tech start-up company based in Waltham and Valhalla, N.Y. It signifies that a potential client has agreed to a Web software demo.

Hiring ground to a halt last month, and the nation’€™s unemployment rate rose to its highest level this year, adding to the deep uncertainty about the pace of the nation’€™s economic recovery.

Seventy-five job applications. Forty cover letters. Twelve interviews. Zero job offers.

Republican pundits are aghast over the staggering deficit and scold us to deal with the budget like a sensible ordinary family: cut household expenses. But what if the well-heeled son in the household opts out of contributing to the family income? America’s flush son is the corporate structure and its network of affluent allies.

Parents have long differed on whether children should be paid for doing household chores. Some say tying kids’€™ allowances to housework is good training for entering the workforce. But others say children should do chores for free, reserving allowances as a tool for teaching money management.

A Middleborough woman who recently graduated from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science has been selected to represent the state at the 2012 Miss America Pageant.

Back when the financial crisis hit, there were few things more irritating to Americans than seeing huge bonuses go to the top dogs at big corporations. Two years later, and apparently nobody cares.

Mitt Romney stood before a shuttered steel factory in Pennsylvania the other day, using the iconic backdrop to underscore what has become the most forceful theme of his presidential campaign: the need for more jobs.

Is anyone else getting as nervous as I am about this debt-ceiling debate? Don’t get me wrong; my view has long been that we would endure some stomach-churning days on the way to a deal. Ultimately, though, I believed that the adults in both parties would prevail and lift the debt ceiling sufficiently to get […]

How do you get people to get beyond the city limits to explore the Harbor Islands? A study in approaches:

Is anyone else getting as nervous as I am about this debt-ceiling debate? Don’€™t get me wrong; my view has long been that we would endure some stomach-churning days on the way to a deal. Ultimately, though, I believed that the adults in both parties would prevail and lift the debt ceiling sufficiently to get […]

It was creeping toward a sultry 90 degrees on Tuesday afternoon on Chicago’€™s South Side, where the mix of heat, humidity and joblessness can weigh on teenagers like 19-year-old Marcus Cammon. But Marcus was keeping busy, mending the battered bones of an old Schwinn 10-speed bicycle.