Within hours of going to work at the White House, Elizabeth Warren put Wall Street on notice.

“The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over,” she wrote in a blog post. “People ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn't learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them.”

Last week President Obama named Warren as his special adviser in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal agency inside the Federal Reserve with power to mandate better disclosure and more consumer-friendly products from banks, credit card companies and payday lenders.

The fact that Warren was named special assistant, instead of director of the bureau, points to the controversy that surrounds her. In no less a public forum than the Wall Street Journal editorial page, she has accused big banks of selling “deceptive mortgages for more than a decade” and perpetuating a “massive looting from middle-class families.”

Such frank talk made Warren a darling of liberals and consumer advocates. But it enraged Republicans and bank leaders. It also repelled powerful Democrats including Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Fearing a prolonged fight over her nomination to become director, the Obama administration opted instead to name her to an advisory role that does not require Senate confirmation.

In her first public appearance as special advisor, Warren announced the bureau would create a standard, simplified mortgage disclosure form, which federal regulators have for years tried – and failed – to accomplish.

Chris Maag is a freelance journalist for publications including The New York Times, TIME magazine and Popular Mechanics. He graduated with honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and has worked as a staff writer for daily newspapers, monthly magazines, alt weeklies and websites. Maag writes about people with big dreams set on little stages, including a teenage girl who races jet-powered tractors, and people who make millions of dollars impersonating Barack Obama.

We’ve heard of “jobless recoveries.” Now the U.S. is stuck in a job-killing recovery.

The Great Recession of 2007 ended in June 2009, according to a group of experts. But in the 15 months since then, the U.S. economy shed another 329,000 jobs. That leaves many Americans doubting the news.

“Is anyone really buying this?” one reader commented on the Los Angeles Times website in response to the news. “The recession is over? Yeah, right.”

The announcement comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit group that is the Federal government’s official source for reporting macroeconomic trends including Gross Domestic Product.

When calculating a recession’s end date, the bureau considers things like industrial production and total economic output, both of which began a slow rebound in June 2009. The study does not consider unemployment, which remains at 9.6 percent.

Nor does the announcement mean that the economy regained the strength it had before the downturn began. Robert Hall, an economics professor at Stanford University who served on the committee, tracked online reactions to the report.

“At least half of them excoriate us for saying that the recession is over,” Hall told the L.A. Times. “But we are only saying that things started to get better in June 2009, not that times are good.”

Like many Americans, committee members agreed that this just doesn’t feel like a recovery.

“What’s really unique about this recession is the amount of unemployment in combination with the slowness of the recovery,” Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, told The New York Times. “That’s just not happened before.”

Chris Maag is a freelance journalist for publications including The New York Times, TIME magazine and Popular Mechanics. He graduated with honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and has worked as a staff writer for daily newspapers, monthly magazines, alt weeklies and websites. Maag writes about people with big dreams set on little stages, including a teenage girl who races jet-powered tractors, and people who make millions of dollars impersonating Barack Obama.

Merriam-Webster defines a Stoic as "a member of a school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium about 300 b.c. holding that the wise man should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and submissive to natural law."

After reading A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, by William B. Irvine, I would say that this definition, while sort-of correct, really misses the point of Stoicism. Irvine makes a convincing case that the ancient Stoics, far from being humorless individuals who silently suffered a life of privation and discomfort, were actually curious scholars and experimenters who sought to optimize their appreciation of life. Not only that, says Irvine, there's a lot that we moderns can learn from the Stoics about living a joyful life.

Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, writes that Stoicism was one of many competing philosophies (such as the Cynics and the Epicureans) that ran schools to teach a "philosophy of life" to students in ancient Greece and Rome. The Stoics were interested in leading a life of "tranquility," meaning a life free of "anger, anxiety, fear, grief, and envy." To achieve such a life the Stoics developed, in the words of historian Paul Veyne, a "paradoxical recipe for happiness," that included the practice of "negative visualization." By frequently and vividly imagining worst-case scenarios -- the death of a child, financial catastrophe, ruined health -- the Stoics believed you would learn to appreciate what you have, and curb your insatiable appetite for more material goods, social status, and other objects of desire.

Reading the book, I had no trouble understanding how negative visualization could be an effective antidote against "hedonic adaptation." By imagining ourselves to be homeless, for instance, we can reset our desire for a more luxurious home and once again appreciate the roof over our head that we started taking for granted shortly after moving in.

Irvine has taken the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and turned it into a modern day self help book. I dislike most self help books for being superficial and unrealistic, but I found Irvine's to be beneficial for two reasons. One, it tells the history of Stoic philosophy in an exciting and engaging way, and two, the advice for living as a Stoic makes a lot of sense. Irvine's explanations of how the early Stoics dealt with insults, grief, lust, jealousy, anger, the desire for fame and fortune, aging, and death show that these problems are timeless, and the Stoics's methods for dealing with them are equally timeless.

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.

With two swift searches, you can set yourself on the path to affordable art acquisitions. None of this multimillion dollar, Sotheby’s auction stuff. We’re talking $25, $75, $100. Of course, if tens of thousands of dollars constitutes “affordable” in your world, you’ll have ample opportunities to make artists happy, as well.

This information comes to me from Denver artist Brenda Stumpf, a hellaciously talented artist who distills immense mythical themes onto canvas or into an assemblage, imbuing her work with the ancient like nobody’s business.

Anyway, Brenda advises typing in the following searches: “[your city] art walks,” and “[your city] open studios.” The first will lead you to days when the art district(s) in your town holds a coordinated event during which all of the galleries and sometimes artist studios are open.

The second will lead to similar, though probably less frequent events during which artists open their studios to the public. The advantages are numerous, Brenda informs, starting with familiarizing yourself with the “artocracy” of your city. In addition to the fun of chatting up artists and meeting a lot of interesting fellow patrons, you can also peruse a diverse array of objets d’art in all sizes, shapes and price ranges.

Additionally, while strolling on an open studio walk, you can purchase art that is unframed and thus priced lower. If you want framing, artists will often pass along the discounts they receive from their framers.

Brenda names another perk of these walks: “There are usually all kinds of people, so you’re not going to be stuck in a big, white box all by yourself with some stoic-looking person behind the desk glaring at you.”

You don’t have to buy big, either. Say you have a large, open wall that you want to enliven with art. No problem. Instead of one or two huge canvases, go with several smaller, less expensive pieces. Brenda has appointed one of her walls, she tells me, with a collection of 4” treasures she’s discovered on her own art-walk expeditions.

“The smaller the piece, the more intimate that little space becomes,” she says.

Looking for a “green” component? Many artists today specialize in recycling found objects, attic accumulations or thrift store and flea sale items into artwork. Attending these walks also helps sustain your community, since you’re highly likely to patronize a restaurant, bar or coffee shop. Thus, sustaining your local artists represents an artful and affordable way to expand your private collection.

Image: Imperial Extracts 4, Brenda Stumpf

Christopher Johnston has written for American Theatre, Cleveland, Continental, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Editor & Publisher, The Plain Dealer, Progressive Architecture and Urban Design, and Scientific American, among other publications. He is currently writing a biography of Frederick C. Crawford, founding chairman of TRW Inc. As an avocation, he is a playwright and director, and this December, his play APORKALYPSE! will premier at convergence-continuum theatre in Cleveland.

Prepaid cards are a hot item these days. 

• A recent Javelin study subtitled “The Rise of the Cautious Consumer” notes a decrease in credit card use, and an increase in prepaid card use.

• A survey by Cardbeat  – a market research report published by Auriemma Consulting Group – found a big jump in the number of gift cards carrying a network brand, such as MasterCard or Visa.

• A MarketsandMarkets study predicts the prepaid card market will grow from $290 billion in 2009 to $791 billion by 2014.

So what’s the deal with prepaid cards? Why so popular?

1.  They are available to anyone regardless of one's credit rating. Lost your credit cards due to bad credit? If you have money to load on one of these cards, you can get one. And like other debit cards, they can be used anywhere Visa, MasterCard or Discover cards are accepted, which also makes them useful for online shopping, for example.

 2. They don’t have to be tied to a bank account. That makes them helpful for someone who either doesn’t have a bank account, or doesn’t want to use a debit card tied to their account.

3. Apparently they can also be useful for money laundering, if you’re so inclined.

4. Parents may want to use a prepaid card to dole out money to kids. It may be a lot safer than giving your kids a debit card tied to your bank account.

5. They are safer than cash. Prepaid cards carry the same fraud liability protections as debit cards under Visa and MasterCard’s Zero Liability programs, though you will need to register the card.

But wait. There are drawbacks. A new study released by Consumer's Union says that "prepaid cards can be inferior to debit cards linked to traditional bank accounts in several ways" and details problems with these cards in a 32-page report. 

Here are some of the problems with prepaid cards: 

1. Fees, and possibly more fees. These cards typically carry a laundry list of fees, though I did notice when I reviewed Credit.com’s prepaid card directory recently that some cards seem to carry far fewer fees than in the past. But on average, fees are more than you would pay at most banks or credit unions for a standard debit card tied to free checking.

2. No credit. They don’t help build your credit rating. These are debit cards, not credit cards, and they aren’t reported to the major credit reporting agencies. If you want to build credit, a secured card is a better bet.

3. Safety. I pointed out that these cards carry fraud protections, but they are voluntary. CU points out that these cards are not covered by the same consumer protection laws that cover debit or credit cards, and that money loaded onto these cards may not be protected by FDIC insurance.

4. Overdrafts. According to CU's report, some cards will approve purchases even when funds are not available on the account. The consumer may then be charged a "shortage" fee of as much as $29. This is a concern, since Fed rules now prohibit debit card overdraft fees on standard debit cards unless consumers opt in.

So what do you think? Are prepaid cards hot, or not so hot?