This morning, Tom Ashbrook, the host of On Point (WBUR) spoke with researchers Stuart Rutherford and Daryl Collins and one of their survey participants Lufefe about what it really means to live on $2 a day.  Lufefe, along with hundreds of others, participated in a year-long survey of the poor’s financial practices. Rutherford and Collins, along with Jonathan Morduch and Orlanda Ruthven, gathered meticulous financial diaries that demonstrate not only don’t the poor live hand-to-mouth, but they manage their money well enough to save for life’s big emergencies and celebrations. If you visit WBUR’s site, you can listen to the program and also view a series of photos taken in the Langa Township where Lufefe lives and where much of the research was conducted.

Collins and Rutherford’s research is available in Portfolios of the Poor. Visit the book’s web site here: http://www.portfoliosofthepoor.com/

Image Caption: A participant in the “financial diaries” research in Madhupur, Bangladesh, March 2009. Photo: Robin Saidman /VitalEdgeAid.org

[Updated]: We weren’t the only ones who noticed or mentioned our book. Read this article from The New Yorker.

This photo appeared in The Daily Star (Lebanon) earlier this week alongside an article on their elections. On the table in front of President Carter– a copy of Hezbollah: A Short History by Augustus Richard Norton.

On Bullshit has become an instant classic and we’ve been fortunate enough to spread the fertilizer around the globe. In this article from Foreword Magazine, press director Peter Dougherty considers the various titles and covers the international editions of the book have carried.

According to my colleague Ben Tate, PUP’s Director of Subsidiary Rights and Translations Editor, many of the foreign editions have retained the English term, “bullshit,” either as their title or in their title of their respective editions. “Among the…editions which conveyed the book’s title in the local language, only the Italian comes closest to a straightforward translation, as ‘stronzate’ means bullshit in the literal sense of cow excrement, but also in the sense which Frankfurt is considering. The rest of those publishers who sought to localize the title either had to approximate the expression using several words or had to settle for something close but inexact, such as the Brazilian Portuguese edition, Sobre falar Merda (On talking Shit) or the French edition, De l’art de dire des conneries (On the Art of Saying Crap) . Indeed, that is the reason so many of the publishers left the word untranslated. It’s a unique word with a specific history, and its meaning as addressed by Frankfurt is underpinned by the crassness and vulgarity of its literal meaning. It’s a special word.”

And while many of the international editions have emulated PUP’s sober, monochromatic cover, some of our foreign co-publishers bravely chose to go the graphic route, in the process rendering some pretty imaginative cover art. The Dutch edition is a shocking pink, the Portuguese edition sports stripes. Truly amazing is the Japanese edition which features anatomical images.

Heather Gerken and Jack Balkin discuss The Democracy Index on this segment of bloggingheads.tv.

I wanted to share this great image Reason created to accompany their review of The Invisible Hook.

Over at Forbes.com, Christopher Eisgruber has a great piece that looks at the political nature of the Supreme Court appointments process. Eisgruber tells us that “the confirmation process has been political for a long time, and America’s founding generation itself showed how tough, and how ugly, a confirmation fight could get.” A point he demonstrates with the story of George Washington’s nominee John Rutledge–a nomination that was squashed by the Senate for political reasons.

Eisgruber writes, “Presidents have submitted just over 150 Supreme Court nominations to the Senate, and about 80% of the nominees have been confirmed. A closer look at the numbers shows that the odds of confirmation depend on some basic political facts. Not surprisingly, fewer nominees–less than 60%–get confirmed when the president’s party does not control a majority in the Senate. By contrast, when the same party controls the White House and the Senate, the confirmation rate rises to over 85%.”

So what does this mean for President Obama’s nominee?

Eisgruber writes, “All this bodes well for Judge Sotomayor, the nominee of a popular president just beginning his term whose party controls the Senate by a hefty margin.”

Eisgruber will also discuss his recent book The Next Justice in a Firedoglake Book Salon tomorrow at 3:00 PM est, hosted by Professor Rebecca Brown.

James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira have written a timely new book called CITIZENS, COURTS, AND CONFIRMATIONS, which examines the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court Nominations. As the news of Sonia Sotomayor continues to flood newspapers and blogosphere alike, this book is a enlightening examination of how and why people form opinions about the nominee, and to determine how the confirmation process shapes perceptions of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy–the authors use the Alito nomination as a case study.

James Gibson has written a new article on the subject in the current issue of Miller-McCune Magazine.

And on the blog The Monkey Cage, Joshua Tucker has mentioned the book, as well.

Princeton University Press’s esteemed author and professor Perez Zagorin has passed away following complications following open-heart surgery.  He was 88.   You can read his obituary in the Washington Post.  His Princeton books include the highly-regarded FRANCIS BACON, the Los Angeles TImes Book Review‘s Twenty Best Books of 2003 HOW THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION CAME TO THE WEST, the well-reviewed THUCYDIDES: An Introduction for the Common Reader, and the forthcoming intellectually-powerful HOBBES AND THE LAW OF NATURE (February 2010).