Advertising characters mythology

 

Ellen Havre Weis, Whose Museum Put Pop Into Mythology

Ms. Weis’s intent was to link our conceptions of these pop-culture figures to the human need to mythologize; she asserted that our Fates, Furies and giants were not left behind in Greece or Egypt, but rather transposed to our own culture. The Jolly Green Giant was her selling point when describing the museum to its leadership and the public — he was, she said, a character straight out of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

Ms. Weis took inspiration from “Mythologies” (1957), a collection of essays by the French intellectual Ronald Barthes, which asserted that social values reflected archetypes and tropes from ancient myths.

Pen dipped in an inkwell of acid

 

Michael M. Thomas, an acerbic columnist and novelist who wrote chiefly about money and how people got it, what they did with it and what it did to them — people he dismissed as “social climbers, stock market papermongers, real estate shills and assorted other virtuosos of hype and blather” — died on Aug. 7 in Brooklyn. He was 85. 

He was being treated in a hospital for complications of arthritis and died of a bacterial infection, his wife, Tamara Glenny, said.

Mr. Thomas, who was the scion of an old-line family and who inhabited the upper echelons of Manhattan society, had three distinct careers: assistant curator of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, investment banker at Lehman Brothers and, finally, writer. While he loved art history and immersed himself for a time in the world of high finance, it was with his pen — dipped, some said, in an inkwell of acid — that he found his groove.

What if Highways Were Electric? Germany Is Testing the Idea.

Electric trucks: NYT article, 8/5/2021

Figuring out how to make trucks emissions free is a crucial part of the fight against climate change and dirty air. Long-haul diesel trucks produce a disproportionate share of greenhouse gases and other pollutants because they spend so much time on the road. But the industry is divided.