The protagonist of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, is a hatchet man for hire. The Omaha company that employs him, which goes by the Orwellian name Career Transition Counseling (CTC), rents him out to other companies to fire employees they don’t have the courage to fire themselves. He flies about the country, touching down briefly in Kansas City or Tulsa or Miami, to walk into offices he has never visited and tell workers he has never met that they are being let go. There are tears, and rages, and Bingham accepts them with unflappable grace.

Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank and chairman of the Institute of International Finance (an influential group, reflecting the interests of global finance in Washington) is opposed to breaking up big banks. According to the FT, he said,

“The idea that we could run modern, sophisticated, prosperous economies with a population of mid-sized savings banks is totally misguided.”

This is clever rhetoric--aiming to portray proponents of reform as populists with no notion of how a modern economy operates. But the problem is that some leading voices for breaking up banks come from people who are far from being populists, such as the UK authorities (in the news today) and the U.S.’s Thomas Hoenig.

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

By Mitchell Zuckoff

(Knopf, 592 pp., $35)

Here is your exam question: who is the last American movie director who made thirty-nine films but never won the Oscar for best director? Name the film by that director that cost the most money, and name the film of his that earned the most. Clue: The Departed, which must have been around Martin Scorsese’s thirtieth picture, and did win the directing Oscar, cost $90 million (four times as much as any of this man’s films cost)--so don’t go that way. Background info: Gosford Park cost $15 million; Nashville cost $2.2 million; M.A.S.H. cost about $3.5 million, and earned around $70 million; Popeye cost $20 million (in 1980). Here is your assignment: assess and reconcile these allegations in an essay of approximately 3,000 words. (Note: banish from your mind any insinuation that nowadays a director who makes thirty-nine films has to be given a best director Oscar--though it is not easy to think of many that fecund who don’t have a bronze fetish to nurse at night.)

The Kansas City Fed's Thomas Hoenig made some news Tuesday claiming that the Fed should tighten "sooner rather than later." This was in stark contrast to NY Fed president Bill Dudley, who echoed the FOMC's line that rates will stay low for an "extended period."

Who to trust?

Gentleman bandit. Heartless killer. Confederate martyr. Rank opportunist. Inspiration. Abomination. Jesse James has been considered all of the above by various people at various times, but Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is largely agnostic regarding such disputes. The film is concerned less with the content of James's character than with the meaning of his murder. Insofar as it asks a question, it is whether a man who has been elevated to myth can continue to coexist with mere mortals. The answer is right there in the title.

Over a thousand delegates gathered in early October at the Sheraton Chicago for the fifteenth annual Hispanic leadership conference. The gleaming hotel, towering over the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, seemed emblematic of Hispanics' growing political heft. Speakers at the conference included former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry G. Cisneros, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, and Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman. But no one attracted as much attention--or adulation--as Bill Richardson, former Congressman from New Mexico and America's new ambassador to the United Nations.

There was always a special patriotism to the speeches of Martin Luther King. No other American orator could bring audiences to their feet by reciting three full stanzas of "My Country, Tis of Thee." From there he often soared across the American landscape in perorations calling on freedom to ring "from the granite peaks of New Hampshire . . . from the mighty Alleghenies of Pennsylvania . . . from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado . . . from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee! Let it ring . . .

Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker

by George Robert Reisner

(Citadel; $4.95)