Cheap household labour is no longer in abundant supply
MUMBAI
AMRITA SABNAVIS, a busy financier with two BlackBerrys, an equally hectic husband and a six-year-old daughter, refers to one of her former maids as "a nightmare". Ms Sabnavis says the hired help was always on the phone, frequently late when collecting her daughter, and tried to discourage her second maid from doing any work. The servant then went on holiday in May and never came back. Ms Sabnavis has been through 11 live-in maids in three years in Mumbai, India's financial capital. Finding replacements only seems to be getting harder.
British superstar artist Damien Hirst is parting company with the world's richest gallery, Gagosian
Financial Times, 11:09pm Thursday December 13th, 2012
Hirst to split with Gagosian Gallery
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By Georgina Adam in London
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British superstar artist Damien Hirst is parting company with the world's richest gallery, Gagosian, in a shock move that will roil the art world
Ministry of Education and Health – Brazil. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons User Jcvasc.1938 – Grand Hotel Ouro Preto – Brazil
1939 – Brazilian Pavilion – USA
1982 – Monument to Carlos Fonseca Amador – Nicaragua
1986 – Monument to “Torture Never Again” – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1988 – Monument to the “November Nine” – Volta Redonda, Brazil
1989 – Hand Sculpture – Memorial of Latin America, São Paulo, Brazil
One of the legends of 20th Century architectiure passed away yesterday at the tender age of 104.
Oscar Niemeyer: In Memoriam
NYTimes.com
Oscar Niemeyer: In MemoriamBy SHEILA GLASER
Agencia Estado, via Associated Press Images Oscar Niemeyer working on a project in São Paulo, Brazil, Apr. 6, 1969.
Oscar Niemeyer, the renowned Brazilian architect, died yesterday at 104, but not before transforming Modernist rigors into something surprisingly sensual. When Michael Kimmelman profiled him for the magazine in 2005, Niemeyer was still going to his office in Rio and planning new buildings, including an auditorium for Brasília, the city whose creation fueled his critics but also ensured his fame. As Kimmelman wrote, Niemeyer “designed some of the most audacious, sublimely poetic and occasionally goofy buildings of the 20th century.”
It was his museum in Niteroi, across the bay from Rio, that brought him renewed attention when it was completed in 1996 and thereafter became a backdrop in fashion magazines. As Kimmelman put it:
Trendy publications like Wallpaper embraced his formal finesse, with its hint of radical chic. Brand-name architects made pilgrimages to Rio. At nearly a century old, Niemeyer became the darling of the smart set.
And so he remained, continuing to plan and dream and to inspire.
Ms. Gretch says some of her clients pay up to $1,200 a week to have their dogs walked four times a day.
#NYC Dog walkers just ain't what they used to be..I know, I used to be one as a kid...
The city's most high-end walking service may be It's a Dog's Life NY. The outfit's hourlong strolls start at $41, and the dog gets more attention than a naughty Dalton fourth-grader. Founder Elena Gretch, a former derivatives trader, says most of her clients are Wall Street bankers who demand that the walk be "productive." That often means obedience training or weight-loss exercises followed by a post-stroll paw cleaning, organic cookies and a tooth brushing. It's all administered, of course, by an attractive, highly trained college grad certified in doggy CPR.
Ms. Gretch says some of her clients pay up to $1,200 a week to have their dogs walked four times a day.
WSJ.com: A Step Up in Pooch Pampering
Bryan Thomas for The Wall Street Journal
NYC Doggies' Jennifer Wheeler picks up Sherpa.
When Koda took her usual afternoon constitutional this past Wednesday, she was under heavy surveillance. As soon as the sweet, bear-headed Newfoundland hit the pavement, her walker, an employee with the dog-walking service Swifto, launched a GPS iPhone app to track the 120-pound canine's swaggering stroll along West 24th Street. When Koda sniffed a grumpy bulldog in Madison Square, the walker recorded the exact coordinates of the encounter. And when she paused just short of Fifth Avenue to defecate at the curb, the walker tapped the app's brown "pooped" icon, plotting the excretion on a digital map of Manhattan.
All this was for the benefit of Koda's owner, Lisa Paulson, a branding coordinator who puts in long hours at a big cosmetics firm. While she's busy at work, Ms. Paulson gets text messages and photos documenting Koda's ambulatory exploits. And if she wants extra reassurance, she can log into Koda's online account to view a digital map detailing the day's walking route—complete with markers indicating poop sites and canine encounters. Ms. Paulson says the service provides peace of mind. And what does the gentle Koda think of all this surveillance? Ms. Paulson smiles: "I don't think she knows."
This article was originally published in the February 2012 issue of National Geographic Italy magazine and has been translated from Italian.
A dream ... an obsession lasting more than thirty years, for a mystery worthy of a detective novel, of a mural painting, a masterpiece lost centuries ago. And of another fresco painted on top of the first, complete with a clue: a small flag with the inscription "Cerca Trova" ("Seek and you shall find"). It was in the mid-1970s that Carlo Pedretti, one of the world's leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci, first communicated to Maurizio Seracini, a Florentine engineer, the idea of using scientific methods to look for traces of the mural painted in 1503 by the genius da Vinci: the Battaglia di Anghiari. It all started with a book, Leonardo inedito (The Unpublished Leonardo), that Pedretti published in 1968, in which he theorized "the necessity of research on the lost Battaglia di Anghiari," which could be found, according to Seracini, behind the right panel of the east wall in the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, on top of which Giorgio Vasari painted the Battaglia di Marciano.
The frescoed wall and the older one behind it, on which one might find Leonardo's work, prove to be separated by a gap of 10-15 millimeters, the existence of which was confirmed by ground-penetrating radar investigations from last August and recently, by the use of an endoscopic probe.
In the book, Pedretti referred to other cases in which Vasari could have "hidden" works of art in order to not destroy them: the Trinity of Masaccio, "[was] discovered in the mid-1800s in Santa Maria Novella after tearing down the planks of a large altar built by Vasari, which did not touch the fresco. The same occurred in Santa Croce with Giotto, in the Cappella Peruzzi." Not to mention that in the former Courtroom of the Arte dei Pellicciai e Vaiai, today part of the monumental complex of the Uffizi, the late-fourteenth century Annunciation, which was visible but not yet allocated, was only discovered in 1885, found by chance behind a wall put up in subsequent eras, probably by the hand of Vasari himself. According to Pedretti, the architect from Arezzo "would intervene but would not destroy." So why would he have ever needed to eliminate that great fragment of the Battle of Anghiari? He even praised it privately to a Venetian traveler when he said: "Stop and take a look at Leonardo's horses."
And so it is then, that Pedretti's book and the recent start of the final phase of the investigation in the Palazzo Vecchio conducted by Seracini, financed in part by the National Geographic Society and supported vehemently by the mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, represent the two extremes of the research, between which there are more than 35 years of document studies, acquired data, discoveries, advances and obstacles, misunderstandings and interests, all leading up to the fact that, for Seracini, the Battle of Anghiari is more than just research, it is an obsession.
Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures for The New York Times The Times Magazine, May 15, 2005.
Bryan Thomas for The Wall Street Journal 
