Expensive Art, Grit, Mid-East, Red Meat and Cancer

Guest: Michael Plummer, Principal and Co-Founder of Artvest Partners LLC and Co-Director of the Art Fair Spring Masters New York  At a Christie’s auction this week, a Chinese collector rattled the art work by paying $170.4 million for a painting of an outstretched nude woman by early-20th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani. That $170.4m figure is the second highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction and more than twice the previous high price for a Modigliani. The collector is Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned billionaire. He and his wife plan to exhibit the painting in an art museum they opened five years ago in Shanghai.

Guest: Gale Lucas, PhD, Senior Research Associate for the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California  We celebrate “grit” in our athletes, our leaders, our literary heroes – and often encourage it in our kids. But there are times when sticking with something in the face of adversity is not a good thing. That’s according to some new results in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Guest: Kate Walsh, President of the National Council on Teacher Quality  A few months into the school year now, and we’re going to address an issue we touched on at the start – the teacher shortage. Hopefully, by now, your child’s class has a teacher and not a perpetual substitute. Back in August we were hearing that a number of large urban districts across the country were struggling to fill all their slots with just days before classes started. But we also learned, in that initial conversation, that talking about a national teacher shortage isn’t very helpful, because the situation varies dramatically from state to state and district to district. A more important conversation centers on how to ensure our children are being taught by the most qualified teachers possible.

Guests: John Macfarlane, PhD, Adjunct Political Science at Utah Valley University; Matthew Stathis, PhD, Professor of Political Science at Southern Utah University; Hakan Yavuz, PhD, Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah  Our monthly panel of Middle East experts is back as we consider the growing possibility that terrorists are to blame for the crash of a passenger jet carrying more than 200 Russian tourists. We’ll also be discussing an important recent election in Turkey and the evolving nature of America’s relationship with Iran.

Guest: Mariana Stern, PhD, Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University Of Southern California School Of Medicine and a member of the WHO panel  You probably heard about the recent World Health Organization report that declared eating processed meats carries an increased risk of cancer. A lot of us pretty much figured hot dogs and baloney weren’t great. But bacon? Prosciutto and salami? That’s harder to swallow. Alas, the WHO report says there is reasonable certainty all processed meats cause cancer. So bacon, ham, hot dogs and the rest are now in the same category as smoking and formaldehyde.