Amy Ione Online

Article: Black Oak bookstore in closes in North Berkeley

Black Oak Books Moves Out

By Riya Bhattacharjee

After more than two decades in North Berkeley, Black Oak Books, one of the city’s best-loved bookstores, is moving out. 

Article: Another bookstore closes

Morningside Bookshop, an independent store that operated for 50 years near its landlord, Columbia University, fell too far behind in its rent to remain open. Full article

Article: Getty Fees and Budget Are Reassessed

NY Times article: The value of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s endowment has fallen so sharply and quickly that the Getty has taken the unusual step of abandoning its traditional budgeting formula. Full article

Article: More on the economic downturn and bookstores.

A Downturn Wraps Portland in Hesitance | By Peter S. Goodman/NY Times | The economic downturn has become a crisis of expectations in cities like Portland, Ore., where creditworthy households and businesses are choosing not to invest.

Thought: Signs of the Time

The Metropolitan Museum in NYC said Thursday that it would lay off more than a quarter of its merchandising staff, eliminating 74 jobs in addition to 53 already cut over the last year, see the article here. The Art Institute of Chicago raises admission 50 percent, see the article here. The Philadelphia Art Museum Cuts Staff and Salaries and Mulls Ticket Increase, here and here.

Article: Alfred A. Knopf Jr., Influential Publisher, Dies at 90

Alfred A. Knopf Jr., who left the noted publishing house run by his parents to become one of the founders of Atheneum Publishers in 1959, died on Saturday. He was 90, the last of the surviving founders, and lived in New York City. Obituary

Book Review: Angels and Ages: Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

I know I'm a bit behind with this, it should have been posted on Feb 12, the shared birth date of Abe Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Both were born on Feb. 12, 1809. After I heard that tidbit on the radio last week, I thought to myself, "someone should write a book" on the two men. Reading the paper a few hours later, I discovered someone did: Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik, reviewed here and here.

Article: Specimens of Alfred Russel Wallace

Finding Clues to Evolution Inside a Chest: article and slide show | Specimens belonging to Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection, were found inside an antique chest now owned by a Washington, D.C., resident.

Article: A new New Deal for the arts

Many of the WPA projects from the 1930s are extraordinary, so I always applaud the idea of doing something similar today. Here is an article by Carla Blank calling for a 21st century version of the the New Deal arts programs. "[P]rojects that employ creative ideas and energies of artists, as did two famous New Deal programs, the Public Works of Art Project, instituted in 1933, and it successor, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), formed in 1935, when more than 8.5 million jobless Americans worked on arts-related projects that paid the equivalent of today's minimum hourly wage." Full article

Article: University for Solving the World's Biggest Problems Coming to the SF Bay Area

A new university is sprouting up in the Bay Area this summer with quite an ambitious charter: solving the world's biggest problems.