Istanbul  This museum honors a work of fiction, its exhibits and artifacts reflecting events that never took place, except in the imagination of the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.  In perhaps his most ambitious creation, possibly the world's only museum of its kind, the writer has taken literature on a course that is remarkably novel.  Yet the Museum of Innocence is also a genuine institution and, after more than a decade of planning, a huge triumph for Mr. Pamuk.  The author not only curated the displays but collected all the items, grouped in 83 numbered panels, one for each chapter of his 2008 book, "The Museum of Innocence."  "I conceived both the novel and the museum together," he insisted during a private tour a few days after the museum's April 28 opening.  Mr. Pamuk bought the four-story building that now houses the museum in 1998.  Painted a rich wine red, the 19th-century structure sits in Cukurcuma, a fashionable area of Istanbul close to where the author lives.  Cukurcuma is also the setting of his love story about Kemal, an Istanbul socialite who is engaged to be married to Sibel, but then suddenly falls hopelessly in love with a teenager, Fusun.  The novel details Kemal's infatuation during the mid-1970s and '80s, and, in the real world, the museum reflects Mr. Pamuk's own intense obsession.  Ron Gluckman  Find more plus pictures at:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304451104577392024005675152.html

The Troubles was a period of ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland which spilled over at various times into England, the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe.  The duration of the Troubles is conventionally dated from the late 1960s and considered by many to have ended with the Belfast "Good Friday" Agreement of 1998.  However, sporadic violence has been ongoing since then.  The principal issues at stake in the Troubles were the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and the relationship between the mainly Protestant unionist and mainly Catholic nationalist communities in Northern Ireland.  The Troubles had both political and military (or paramilitary) dimensions.  Its participants included republican and loyalist paramilitaries, the security forces of the United Kingdom and of the Republic of Ireland, and nationalist and unionist politicians and political activists.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

Her dramatic gold medal at the Munich Olympics in 1972 ensured her status in her home country of Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles.  Now the pentathlete Dame Mary Peters is to be remembered in a 12-minute opera composed to coincide with the London Games.  Our Day, by Conor Mitchell, will be performed by Northern Ireland Opera at New Music 20x12, a programme of newly commissioned pieces which will be played across a weekend in July at London's Southbank Centre.  The piece does not focus on Dame Mary, but instead explores the effect of her win at one of the lowest points of the Troubles in 1972.  Mitchell, who was born five years after the event, said:  "That year all hell broke loose and then there was this day when someone from Northern Ireland won a medal and for one day it all just stopped."  Nick Clark  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/mary-peters-olympic-glory-remembered-in-mini-opera-7689177.html 

With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past.  Now nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing.  As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.   Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to an analysis by The New York Times of the latest data from the Department of Education.  This includes loans from the federal government, private lenders and relatives.  Graduates of Ohio’s more than 200 colleges and universities carry some of the highest average debt in the country, according to data reported by the colleges and compiled by an educational advocacy group.  The current balance of federal student loans nationwide is $902 billion, with an additional $140 billion or so in private student loans.  “If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.  Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages.  And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise.  But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic:  an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/student-loans-weighing-down-a-generation-with-heavy-debt.html

Slow Food Fast  See a collection of seasonal recipes for busy home cooks who don't have all day, prepared for The Wall Street Journal by well-known chefs.

http://topics.wsj.com/subject/S/slow-food-fast/6829

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells published in 1897.  Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year.  The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it absorbs and reflects no light and thus becomes invisible.  He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse the procedure.  While its predecessors, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using first-person narrators, in The Invisible Man Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view.  See plot summary, characters and adaptations at:  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Man 

Find references to Invisible Man in literature (3), film (2), television (5)  and music (6) at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Man_(disambiguation)

Back in February, Raymond Bragar and Gregory Blue sued legal database providers Westlaw and LexisNexis, claiming they were engaged in the “unabashed wholesale copying of thousands of copyright-protected works” created and owned by lawyers and law firms.  Those works, of course, are legal briefs.  But who really registers their legal briefs with the copyright office?  Edward L. White, for one.  He’s one of the plaintiffs, representing a purported class of lawyers who have gone to the trouble.  Another plaintiff, Kenneth Elan, represents the vast majority of lawyers who have not.  On May 16, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan booted the would-be class of lawyers without registration from the lawsuit.  “The statute is unequivocal that completing registration or pre-registration is a prerequisite to filing a claim,” Judge Rakoff said.   Messrs. Bragar and Blue argued that lawyers whose briefs are unregistered, even if they can’t sue for infringement, could seek an injunction and a declaratory judgment that Westlaw and LexisNexis broke the law.  Judge Rakoff declined both requests.  The lawsuit still has a pulse. Neither Westlaw nor LexisNexis has moved to dismiss claims by Mr. White and the class he seeks to represent.  http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/05/17/rakoff-dismisses-copyright-claims-against-westlaw-lexis/?mod=djemlawblog_h

 

UPDATE:  Apparently a few employees are still roaming the halls at Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP’s Manhattan offices.  Make that 100, to be precise.  On May 16 the firm amended its WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) filing with the New York state Department of Labor to reflect the following:  there are 533 total employees, not 433, as stated in the initial May 8 filing.  http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/05/16/and-then-there-were-none-deweys-landgraf-exits-for-arnold-porter/