Professional Traveler (The Britannica Blog “Guide†to Careers)
With a nod to this year’s Academy Awards, and for anyone who has yet to see Up in the Air , we highlight the professional traveler this week.
Solutions to Our Problems: Teleports, Telesurgery, and the Food Pill
THE FUTURIST magazine has recently featured potential “fixes†and uncommon solutions to various big problems facing the world. Patrick Tucker of THE FUTURIST highlights several of them below. The Issue: Transportation The industrial world’s addiction to cars is costly and will become more so
Academy Award–Winning Films of the Past: For Fans of Up in the Air, There’s How Green Was My Valley
In Up in the Air , George Clooney plays a fellow who takes pride in his work, which requires him to fly around the country firing people, until he actually starts to think about what it is that he’s doing. Had Clooney’s Ryan Bingham been on the job during the Thatcher regime over in the United Kingdom, he might have occupied himself making striking coal miners redundant, as they say across the water
Haunted Hollywood: 10. The Comedy Store / Ciro’s (10 Oscar-Related Ghost Stories in Honor of the Academy Awards)
The Sunset Strip has long been known as the playground of the stars. The brightest stars, the biggest moguls and most Oscar -winning artists dined, danced and romanced in clubs along the Strip. The most popular rendezvous, Ciro’s (right), opened in 1940. Today, it is called the Comedy Store, world-famous laugh club; but late at night, the ghosts of Ciro’s rule the roost.
U.S. Job Shortage or Skill Shortage?
Curious headlines have recently appeared in the Financial Times: “Aging Workforce Creates Skills Shortage for U.S.
Academy Award–Winning Films of the Past: For Fans of The Hurt Locker, There’s The Best Years of Our Lives
Kathryn Bigelow ’s film The Hurt Locker has been earning praise, not least from GIs serving in Iraq , for its depiction of the terrors of war. Scarcely had World War II ended when William Wyler ’s film The Best Years of Our Lives appeared, similarly earning applause for its portrayal of the difficulties three veterans face in returning home to the lives they once lived. Fredric March plays banker Al Stephenson, whose wife, played by the ever-wonderful Myrna Loy , asks him on his homecoming, “What do you think of the children?” He replies, “Children?
Haunted Hollywood: 9. Wilkerson & the Hollywood Reporter (10 Oscar-Related Ghost Stories in Honor of the Academy Awards)
William “Billy” Wilkerson was a colorful figure in Hollywood history — of the type you don’t find anymore. In the late ’30s and ’40s, he founded several nightclubs, among them Ciro’s and Cafe Trocadero — both industry meccas that helped make the Sunset Strip into one of the city’s hottest spots and earning Wilkerson the nickname “Father of the Sunset Strip” (he would later also be called ”The Man Who Invented Las Vegas,” for his role in the building of the famous Flamingo Hotel). A ladies man, he had an eye for female talent, discovering, among others, Lana Turner, whom he spotted on a soda fountain stool in a malt shop. But his real baby was the Hollywood Reporter , the first Hollywood-based daily trade newspaper covering the entertainment industry, which he founded in 1930. The Reporter is a bible for the industry
