Let me add: this column is my absolute favorite news column, bar none. I'm constantly quoting you to my friends and sending out links to the blog. Keep up the good work! I'm thankful that there's someone tracking down the subtle connections between events, and is brief and entertaining at the same time. That is no easy task.

Was wondering if "How the World Works" was influenced by the book "The Way the World Works" by Jude Wanniski. You even have the same globe-with-gears. Check it out at polyconomics.com.

I for one am thrilled to see these delightful convergences! Keep up the good work, Andrew.

I've thoroughly enjoyed your blog for the last two years. I read it every day and its cool to consider that I probably live down the street from you.

Cheers to your great blog and congratulations.

I really do appreciate this column, as well as your writing: "...I also wouldn't trade this gig for anything else right now."

Thank you! ...and Happy B'Earthday -- Congratulations on another successful trip around the Sun.

i've been reading since day one. keep up the great work !

Two things .... just for the heck of it, I looked up the first column; I think this is it.

Detroit plays the blame game

Pointing fingers at cheap offshore labor is an easy excuse for stumbling car companies in the U.S. It's also a massive cop-out.

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/htww/2005/12/07/detroit/

Okaaay. Good call.

Second thing; HTWW was one of the key reasons for renewing my Salon membership, and it's content went a long way towards making it a no-brainer to renew my Canadian mortgage as variable rate. Last October, while everyone else seemed to be saying "it's just a little U.S. downturn", I'm reading HTWW and thinking "U.S. only? Canada isolated? Not bloody likely!!".

In a sense, I see my Salon membership and HTWW as having saved me more money than the subscription cost me.

You wrote "The sense of connection and interrelatedness that is essential to globalization is what this blog is going to be about."

Absolutely! Here's hoping you see yourself as having benefited as much as we the readers have so far. And if that is so - then here's to several more years of HTWW!

You are the best (and one of the only!) reasons to keep reading Salon.

Mr. Leonard, a very well-deserved congratulations. Like other readers have commented, I find your column the most insightful and interesting on Salon (and its comments section to be the most level-headed). For me, this column has gone from being a now-and-then perusal to a daily read and a reason for my Salon membership. I've learned a lot through your column and though I appreciate your focus on the current economic downturn, I've always too enjoyed your take and analysis of the at-first seemingly peculiar, curious, or even just mundane you've shown often impacts each of us more than we know. All my best in the future.

I have been reading this blog for pretty much its whole life and have to say I have always found it insightful and educational. It has certainly been exciting lately!

Thanks for your work and congratulations on three years!

If I miss checking in on Salon for a day or two, HTWW is the one column that I check up on all the archives to see what I missed from Andrew and the other regulars (and irregulars).

Keep up the good work, there is a lot to talk about now and down the road. I love having a place to come to read about and spout off about these ideas and happenings.

Happy birthday! I can't overstate how comforting it's been to turn to your column over the last couple of months of insanity to be reminded there actually *is* sense to be made of what's been happening around us. I'm compelled to add one more "Congrats," but more importantly, "Thanks!" for your commitment and determination to follow the debates others of us don't have time to follow or just don't understand, and to put it all in plain English.

I've only been reading HTWW for about a year. However, I was hooked, in a WTF! fashion, from that first read. I live in farm country and your ongoing coverage of issues related to fertilizer - including the fabulous "When Guano Imperialists Ruled the Earth" - has had me reading ever since. You are the Mozart of bloggers - writing minor masterpieces by the age of three. Congrats!

Keep doing what you are doing Andrew.

Your column is one very important reason that I continue my Salon subscription. I read your column to my wife nearly everyday. Thanks for all the great posts.

I am as surprised as anyone that what started out as blog more or less about "globalization" has transformed itself into a chronicle of a world-historic economic catastrophe.

And if you had kept up with my posts you would have seen it coming.

Stiglitz and me, we're both Kassandras. Nobody listens to us. That's how you can tell we're genuine Kassandras.

Unlike Stiglitz, nobody listens to me even after the fact. Except Scorpio69er, because he's a Kassandra too.

"Globalization", by the way, is a Cheap-Labor Conservative euphemism for "extraction of US middle-class wealth through Third-World labor arbitrage."

Cheap-Labor Conservatives: "Suckers!"

Here's a problem for you. The US government itself is fast approaching the point where it will become unable to finance its own debt. What happens when the US Treasure becomes unable to sell its securities? And why would Bush deliberately put the US on a path to national bankruptcy?

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001541.html

And now a word from the Oracle of Omaha:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html

Hey. Happy birthday.

Its not until recently have I been metaphorically flipping though Salon's pages, but this section has become a regular must see. I'm hoping for a long life for this enterprise!