The Fourth

Frederick Sciulli,  of Norfolk, Virginia looks out of a window of the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Closed to the public after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the section of the monument  was re-opened today.  Photo: David Goldman-Pool/Getty Images.

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Overpaid bankers

Robert Peston's lengthy blogpost is worth reading because it undercuts the argument that those inflated City salaries made economic sense. He also raises the question of how to revive the old-fashioned notion of  moral hazard:

The problem is that no one can possibly any longer believe that there are any circumstances in which our government will let one of our biggest banks collapse. Which is an enormous comfort to the chief executive of a bank. It means he or she can do something spectacularly stupid, safe in the knowledge that taxpayers will bail out the bank as and when it all goes wrong.

The best deterrent against greed-fuelled gambling by banks is the threat of being sacked when it all goes pear-shaped. But that's not a particularly scary threat to any banker who's earned enough in the preceding years never to need to work again. That rather implies

Continue reading...

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Starstruck

It has been a good couple of weeks for Kurt Weill fans. At the South Bank conductor Charles Hazlewood [right], the BBC Concert Orchestra and soloists led by Clive Rowe [left] gave a stirring performance of the composer's last Broadway show, "Lost in the Stars". Based on Alan Paton's novel, "Cry, The Beloved Country", the self-styled "musical tragedy" still seems astonishingly contemporary. The choral passages are just stunning. Hazlewood's staged reading, directed by Jude Kelly, was only on for two nights, but the iPlayer version is around for a little longer. Hardcore Weillists might also want to catch the Lost Musicals team's bare-bones revival of his very first Broadway production, "Johnny Johnson", currently running at the Sadler's Wells studio theatre. It's not a classic by any means - Paul Green's book is a one-dimensional slab of anti-war sloganeering - but it has its moments.

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Documenting it

Everything you ever wanted to know about sex researchers, but were afraid to ask... The NYT has a fascinating review of a biography of Masters & Johnson. I always used to think they were a kind of baby lotion:

Can the life of a man who spent most of the waking hours of his adult life either having sex, watching sex or talking sex be sad? The answer, as we see in Thomas Maier’s eye-opening “Masters of Sex” is a resounding yes.

Having stripped to the skin, Masters “instructed Gini to remain as professional as possible,” and told her that “these encounters should not venture beyond the scope of scientific inquiry,” Maier writes... They would be married for 20 years, pretending to the American public that they were an ideal pair of lovebirds. Meanwhile they never used the word “love,” which Masters considered imprecise and inappropriate. Both knew what their relationship was about: the success of their product... They were as famous as Kleenex, Johnson boasted. 

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Faking it

The New Statesman's boudoir guru, Ziauddin Sardar, provides a guide to Eastern aphrodisiacs and, um, pick-me-ups. As for the art of making men think they're hitting all the right spots, Elaine Benes will always remain the ultimate practitioner.

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