Barbara Ehrenreich: “Everyone knows that you won’t get a job paying more than $15 an hour unless you’re a ‘positive person,’ and no one becomes a chief executive by issuing warnings of possible disaster… [F]or those at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, all this positive thinking must not have seemed delusional at all. With the rise in executive compensation, bosses could have almost anything they wanted, just by expressing the desire.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Munch’s Vampire, Long in Private Hands, Goes Up for Auction
The 1894 painting, formally titled Love and Pain and part of Munch’s 20-work series “The Frieze of Life” (along with The Scream), is expected to fetch more than $35 million at Sotheby’s this November.
14th-Century Cookbook, Canterbury Tales Manuscripts to Go Online
“Manchester University’s John Rylands Library will be digitising much of its renowned collection of medieval manuscripts… Staff will begin to scan the pages using a high definition camera in October and the results will be available by late 2009.”
Ancient Assyrian Ale? (No, It’s Older Still)
A Caltech scientist, using eons-old yeast recovered from a weevil trapped in ancient amber, “now brews barrels (not bottles) of pale ale and German wheat beer through the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company.”
Royal Shakespeare Company Hopes to Attract Petro-Rubles with Russian Plays
The company is presenting a series of Russian drama, including four new scripts, at Stratford-upon-Avon. “Michael Boyd, the RSC’s artistic director who trained in Moscow early in his career, told The Independent yesterday that he wants Russian money to flow into theatre in the way that it has helped the visual arts to prosper.”
It’s One Way to Deal with the Financial Collapse…
“A Brooklyn artist is giving Wall Streeters the opportunity to vent their irritation with corporate America. Geoffrey Raymond takes his over-sized paintings of CEOs to Wall Street, then asks passers-by to write comments on his artwork.”
Science-vs.-Creationism Debate Rages in Muslim World
A Turkish writer who says that “All terrorists are Darwinists” and that the impending return of both Jesus Christ and the Mahdi is “scientific fact” is gaining a growing following and claims to have sold eight million books.
Dallas School District Gets Cold Feet Over PBS Documentary
The city’s art teachers were set to use a new curriculum featuring the public TV series art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century when “some teachers and parents [became] concerned that images they consider too disturbing or sexual for the classroom may be acceptable to some art teachers.” (Among those images are Sally Mann’s photos of her naked children.)
The Nose Knows, Even When We’re Asleep
“Pleasant scents give rise to pleasant dreams, and foul smells turn fantasy to phantasmagoria: so concludes a small, unreplicated and wholly plausible study on odor and dreaming.”
Osama Bin Laden, Bard
A Univ. of California professor is publishing poems by the Al-Qaeda mastermind in an academic journal next week. The verses, collected from cassette tapes left in his Afghan compound, “reveal Osama Bin Laden as the performer, the entertainer with an agenda.”