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MOST of the roughly 2.2m incarcerated Americans will eventually be freed. Those who remain in contact with loved ones on the outside are less likely, studies show, to return to a life of crime after serving their time. Much as voters hate criminals, they also have an interest in not being mugged. So why do prisons make it so hard for inmates to phone their families?

Prisoners’ families tend to be poor. Calling a brother, son or father behind bars can incur an upfront fee as high as $4.99; per-minute charges may reach $0.89. Americans at liberty, even if they don’t have Skype, can easily get unlimited domestic calls for $9.99 a month.

LYDIA DAVIS makes for an inspiring choice for the Man Booker International prize, awarded last night in London*. Though she is hardly a household name, her work has been disproportionately influential and enjoys a devoted following. She is best known for her short stories, which are crisp, spare, incisive and slyly funny. They tend to be very short—a couple of lines or a couple of pages—which has the effect of distilling their power, her precision. This makes her collections easy to dip into and seductive to copycats. But efforts to replicate her stylishly compact storytelling tend to be humbling.

YAHOO has bought Tumblr for a hefty sum, but users fear the takeover will result in the blog site losing its distinctive style

THERE is a debate over asset bubbles at the moment and having worked through, in disbelief, the dotcom bubble, it is plain that it is extremely hard to call the top. Given publishing timetables, whether Robert Shiller and Andrew Smithers/Stephen Wright were brilliant or just lucky in bringing out their books on excessive valuations around the market peak in 2000 is hard to tell.

But it is intriguing, and frustrating, to see the old arguments being trotted out again. The Reuters commentator Felix Salmon writes that

when long-term rates are low, that doesn’t just affect the price of long-dated bonds; it also drives up the price of stocks, which have infinite maturity.

and that