Friday, May 10, 2013

Observations from the Coffee Shop 5.10

I tend save way too many links to articles I want to read later, sometimes I do read them and sometimes they just clutter Chrome until I delete them. The coffee shop is where I do most of my catching up so for the hell of it here is a selection from this week.

There was an article in New York Magazine about NYU Abu Dhabi, a satellite campus that opened in 2008. Their website says it was built because of "a common belief in the value of a liberal arts education" which isn't exactly something that comes to mind when I think of Middle Eastern states. It might have more to do with the $50 million NYU Chancellor Sexton pried from the UAE, a major reason Sexton is known as the Emir of NYU at it's New York City campus. What intrigues me is the new campus they are building on Saadiyat Island, a satellite of a satellite if you will, which is scheduled to open in 2014 and will be located next to the Louvre and Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi of course.

Last Sunday the Daily Mail ran a Piers Morgan interview with Lindsay Lohan. Normally I wouldn't have cared at all but the headline caught my eye so I saved it and ended up reading it. When I finished I quite literally pitied Lohan because the girl has absolutely no clue. In it she says she only did cocaine ‘four or five’ times, that rehab is a joke, and that she doesn't consider herself a heavy drinker. The interview than ran with copies of her six mugshots including the two for DUI. Morgan notes that the interview was done a few weeks before Lohan was scheduled to begin a new court ordered stay in rehab which will be at least her fifth visit in the past six years. Lohan also takes Adderall which, in my un-professional opinion, explains so much..

Also last Sunday The New York Times ran a story on the U.S. Supreme Court and how the Roberts' court could be remembered more for its pro-business decisions than upcoming social ones. It mentions a report in The Minnesota Law Review which ranked all the 36 SCOTUS justices since 1946 for their pro-business votes and found five of the current court's were in the top ten. It has all been very hush hush so you may not have noticed.

Along the same lines comes a column from The Huffington Post about warehouse workers who are suing Amazon over unpaid time, up to an hour, that they spend in security checkpoint lines at the end of their shifts. I love Amazon but maybe if they paid their workers a little bit more they wouldn't have to stop and frisk them on the way out. Amazon reported profits of $621 million in 2011, they reported an actual loss in 2012 but that was due to investing in new product lines.

So you see sometimes my thinking goes off in weirdly differing tangents. I didn't even mention that the Pulse Art Fair began yesterday or that the Frieze begins today.