Category: today’s top story

“U.S. newspapers that spend more money on their newsrooms will make more money, according to a study released on Wednesday, which questioned the wisdom of the media industry’s trend of cutting jobs to save costs. The authors of the University of Missouri-Columbia study, which was based on 10 years of financial data, said news quality affects profit more than spending on circulation, advertising and other parts of the business.”

“What is not, potentially, a quotation? The dullest instructional prose, with the right light thrown on it, can acquire the gleam of suggestiveness or insight. ‘Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are’: that one has been appropriated many times. Whenever I take a plane, I am struck by “Secure your own mask before assisting others” as advice with wide application. And I have often found myself imagining ways of fitting tab A into slot B.”

The Dixie Chicks, suddenly, aren’t the only country musicians whose politics are known to be somewhere to the left of the Republican base. “It’s telling when country luminary Merle Haggard has an entry on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of top protest songs. Country musicians and their fans tend to hail from conservative states with high enlistment rates. Then again, the toll of the war on the sons and daughters of these states has been acute.”

Everyone seems to agree that Canada has to update its copyright laws. The question is how. “When a copyright bill does arrive it will require a new round of hearings, leaving some industry insiders worried the current legal limbo will out-last the sitting government.”

Ticket charge add-ons have escalated to an outrageous degree in recent years. Yet theatres and the ticket services aren’t comfortable talking about them. “We will not talk about this. We do not ask you to comment on how much you charge for the newspaper.”

A California woman decided to sell the painting over her piano. “All the seller had hoped for was a couple thousand dollars to help pay for her daughter’s tuition at UC Berkeley.” But “on Super Bowl Sunday, someone gambled more than half a million dollars at an Oakland auction that the painting is the lost work of a 17th-century Italian master.”

“Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in ‘racism as criticism.’ The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week…”

There’s pressure for everything to go faster these days. Even reading. “Is it any surprise that there is now a reading crisis worldwide that affects people at all levels, from preschool to graduate school, the affluent and the poor alike? Don’t assume you are immune, people of higher education. Is it reassuring or frightening to learn that problems that afflict one group actually afflict other groups considered to be as different as night and day?”

Cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich is stable and in “satisfactory condition” after being admitted to a Moscow hospital with an unspecified illness. Rostropovich, who turns 80 in March, “was hospitalized last week in Paris, where he maintains a residence, and then decided to return to Moscow.”