Category: issues

“Employees at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Canadian War Museum were to vote Thursday on whether to strike if they can’t reach a deal with their employer. The 420 guides, hosts and other floor staff represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada have been without a contract since April 1.”

“Several schools reported a falloff in applications because of the economic downturn, and some struggled to fill the freshman class.” Says the president of “Great Books” school St. John’s, “People all think that in a bad economy, they need skills for a job. What they don’t realize is that a liberal arts education will give them skills for life, and that will get them a job.”

“What an ugly word it is, to begin with. Why heritage, exactly? Why not inheritance – a much more forceful and imperative word? But that’s the point: to call historic art and buildings our inheritance would suggest a heavy burden of debt. The effect of the word heritage is, by contrast, to mute and disempower history and weaken our sense of relationship with it.”

Michael Kaiser: “I always compare the relationship between these two staff heads to that between a naughty child (artistic director) and an angry parent (executive director). The naughty child is always asking for ‘More, more, more!’ and the angry parent says ‘No! No! No! We can’t afford it.’ The lack of trust that develops between the two people who are meant to act as a team is ineffective at best and crippling at worst.”

“Agreement has been reached which will see the creation of a ‘one-stop shop’ for tickets which promises to curb lengthy queues at festival venues across the city. It is also hoped to bring an end to the current situation which forces festival-goers to make different transactions for tickets for various Fringe venues, and events at the likes of the Book Festival, the Tattoo and the Edinburgh International Festival.”

“In the larger scheme of things, where $502 million in stimulus money is coming into Minnesota for transportation projects alone, the $316,200 aimed at the arts hardly registers on most radars. But many small arts organizations applying for the money, some of which have budgets of less than $100,000, argue that a federal stimulus grant can be critical.”

“Siemens AG, which sponsors the Bayreuth and Salzburg music festivals, said it will maintain an annual budget of about 50 million euros ($72 million) for aid, education and arts patronage, even as orders for the company’s products tumble.” The engineering company has slashed thousands of jobs and reduced hours for thousands more workers, but a spokesman said that its “social activities … are not a dispensable quantity in an economically difficult environment.”

“By the end of the century, Venice – Italy’s City of Water – could face daily floods, and according to a new study, the costly and controversial flood barriers now being built might not be able to protect it.”

“The narrative of the refinement of “hypochondria” from luridly real disease to the name we give to an overactive medical imagination – and the parallel story of what we might still learn from our fears – begins with the Greeks, for whom the hypochondrium was the area just below the rib cage.”