Your customized headlines for Tue, May 1, 2012

It had been a long road, but when Sabrina Torres received her master's degree in 2010, she was sure it would eventually pay off in a good job that would allow her to afford an apartment.

She is still waiting. The American University graduate's financial struggles have prevented her from living on her own, making her part of a dramatic slowdown in household formation that is both a consequence of the economic downturn and a continued obstacle to overcoming it.

There's not much in politics that allows me to say, "I'm old enough to remember when." But here's one: I'm old enough to remember when George W. Bush was president.

It was, after all, only four short years ago. And it didn't go so well. The Bush economy is one of the worst on record. Median wages dropped. Poverty worsened. Inequality increased. Surpluses turned into deficits. Monthly job growth was weaker than it had been in any expansion since 1954. Economic growth was sluggish. And that's before you count the financial crisis that unfurled on his watch. Add the collapse to the equation, and Bush's record goes from "not so good" to "I can't bear to look."

BOSTON — In 2006, under Gov. Mitt Romney, Massachusetts became the first state to extend insurance coverage to all its residents. Now it's looking to slow the growth of its health-care costs in equally groundbreaking ways.

"Washington promised to create American jobs if we passed their stimulus, but that's not what happened. . . . American taxpayers are paying to send their own jobs to foreign countries."

— New TV advertisement by Americans for Prosperity

Microsoft on Monday announced a $300 million investment in Barnes & Noble's e-reader and tablet business, giving the software giant a late entry into the race for digital publishing and online education.

It had been a long road, but when Sabrina Torres received her master's degree in 2010, she was sure it would eventually pay off in a good job that would allow her to afford an apartment.

She is still waiting. The American University graduate's financial struggles have prevented her from living on her own, making her part of a dramatic slowdown in household formation that is both a consequence of the economic downturn and a continued obstacle to overcoming it.

— Jon Chait explains how Paul Ryan charmed Washington DC's centrists.

— A week at a private equity "boot camp."

— Where Buzzfeed gets all those cute animal pics.

— A history of the mason jar.

Writing in the Daily, Josh Barro notes that "the higher education sector looks a lot like the health care sector": Costs are up, productivity growth is flat, there's little evident adoption of technologies that could make the sector cheaper, etc.

Scientific studies are misrepresented all the time. But now and again the distortions get particularly bad. That was the case Monday, when Fox News ran the headline, "New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming." A number of other media outlets did the same thing. And it's... not true at all.