The tide is changing. Rhetoric on the 80 million strong Generation Y is softening. Last year, Gen Y was labeled lazy slackers with unrealistic work expectations. This year, they are simply slow starters who have been humbled by the current economic environment.

I'm encouraged that Gen Y is getting a better shake, but I keep wondering if Gen Y is changing or if our perceptions of Gen Y are changing? It could be both; I'm just throwing it out there. Take the discussion of Gen Y living at home longer with their parents. While it's easy to pass judgment and write them off as not having their act together, new studies indicate that parental assistance in early adulthood isn't such a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing -- leading to autonomy and resiliency.

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Warren Buffet is involved in a situation in which he is deciding whether one of his employees, David Sokol, did something wrong and possibly illegal when he bought close to $10 million in Lubrizol stock prior to Buffet's firm, Berkshire Hathaway, making an offer to buy the company. Buffet should be careful in his defense of Sokol that it wasn't just Sokol who did something wrong here and quite possibly illegal.

In a letter to Berkshire's shareholders, Buffet defends Sokol by saying that Sokol notified Buffet of his substantial position in Lubrizol prior to Buffet's decision to acquire the company, and that Sokol had no authority to give final approval for acquisitions at Berkshire. Green-lighting a potential merger candidate was solely the purview of Buffet, his vice-chairman, Charlie Munger, and the Berkshire board.

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U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), the new chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, is sponsoring federal legislation aimed at blocking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from updating Clean Air Act pollution standards. Today his committee is expected to pass Upton's "bad air bill" in a largely party-line vote. The Republican majority in the House expects to pass the bill before the Easter recess.

Obviously, people should be very alarmed by Rep. Upton's legislation because preventing EPA from doing its job of updating and enforcing Clean Air Act standards would pose a severe health threat to us all. But I decided to tackle this serious threat in a not-so-serious way: by creating a parody song about the bill based on the classic Billy Joel hit "Uptown Girl."  With the help of my colleauge Lauren Zingarelli we hope you enjoy this Karaoke-style video we created.

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On the first anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, I travelled to the Leogane region of Haiti, the center of the earthquake's devastation. I went as the guest of an Israeli NGO called Tevel b'Tzedek (The Earth, in Justice) founded in 2005 by Rabbi Micah Odenheimer to promote social and environmental justice in the world. With the support of IsraAid a team of Israeli volunteers travelled to the region soon after the earthquake. Uri l'Tzedek, a U.S. based Orthodox social justice organization, asked me to be the first of a series of rabbis to visit the team and interact with many of the Haitians that they have been helping.

Haiti is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Its per capita income is about $350/ year. Haitians expect nothing from their government. It has been ruled by a succession of leaders who have either been ruthless dictators or incompetents. The $15 billion dollars of aid that poured into the country after the earthquake and the hundreds of NGOs on the ground can barely make a dent in the country's problems because there are no government agencies that have effectively coordinated the aid effort.

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