Morning Reading: Doomsday?

Senate Republicans killed the plan to bail out the auto companies. Here’s a look at what might happen as a result.

On a normal day, this would be a huge story: Bernard Madoff, a legendary Wall Street trader, has been arrested for running a securities scam that may have lost as much as fifty billion dollars.

Does poverty do serious damage to the brains of many poor children? Tyler Cowen suggests that the study mentioned in this article is flawed because it did not control for I.Q. But since poverty actually affects I.Q., it’s not obvious that this is much of an objection.

On the other hand, for all the complaints about the dumbing down of culture, are we actually living in an age of mass intelligence?