The New Yorker’s profile of Paul Krugman is worth reading. Corner readers will find this anecdote grimly funny, if not exactly shocking:

Once Obama won the primary, Krugman supported him. Obviously, any Democrat was better than John McCain.
“I was nervous until they finally called it on Election Night,” Krugman says. “We had an Election Night party at our house, thirty or forty people.”
“The econ department, the finance department, the Woodrow Wilson school,” Wells says. “They were all very nervous, so they were grateful we were having the party, because they didn’t want to be alone. We had two or three TVs set up and we had a little portable outside fire pit and we let people throw in an effigy or whatever they wanted to get rid of for the past eight years.”
“One of our Italian colleagues threw in an effigy of Berlusconi.”
“I put out some coloring paper and markers so that people could write stuff on it and throw it into the fire. People really felt like there was stuff they wanted to shed! I had little hats and party whistles.”

I feel bad for the humanities, apparently not invited to the bonfire. Surely Princeton’s comparative lit professors and sociologists would have liked to get in on the effigy-burning.

According to the profile, Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, edits his columns and is mostly responsible for their vitriolic edge:

When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot—she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.”

I wonder if it was Wells who encouraged Krugman to pretend, in his column today, that all these conservative proposals (and more) to fix entitlements simply don’t exist.