Cheat Sheet

With Wall Street tearing out its hair at another day of staggering Dow losses (500 points!) and mind-boggling news alerts—retirement accounts have lost $2 trillion, consumer borrowing has fallen for the first time in ten years, and that's just the national news—the Fed chairman Ben Bernanke says he is considering an interest rate cut. "Continued efforts to stabilize the financial markets are essential," he said Tuesday to the National Association for Business Economics. Market instability and asset price declines "can take a heavy toll on the broader economy if left unchecked." After a five-month pause, the Federal Open Market Committee could lower the fed-funds rate at its October 28-29 meeting, and borrowing costs could be cut before then.

Since the start, Sarah Palin’s job has been to feed red meat to the base, but this is getting pretty bloody: Dana Milbank reports on some ugly incidents from a rally in Fort Myers, Fla., where, after Sarah Palin blamed Katie Couric for her “less-than-successful interview,” attendees began shouting at the press, with one instructing an African American sound man to “Sit down, boy.” Later, when Palin spoke about Bill Ayers, one audience member shouted “Kill him!” "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," Palin said about Obama. How does Palin’s audience see America?

Three years ago, London lost one of its more provocative homes for art when collector Charles Saatchi decided to break his lease at Country Hall on the Thames and seek a new location to showcase his oddball sensibility and ragtag team of buzzy artists (the confessional Tracey Emin, animal-preserving Damien Hirst, and Chris Ofili, famed for painting the Virgin Mary with elephant dung). Now, the collector has finally opened the doors at his new three-story exhibition space in Chelsea, kicking it off with a survey of Chinese art stars . He plans to stage a show of hot artists from Iraq and Iran in early 2009. Reviews have been mixed so far, but you can’t really blame Charles for trying to capture the international zeitgeist, one sliced-up cow at a time.

Next time your boss gives you a hard time, tell him to go choke on a banana. A study from the University of New South Wales says that the behavior of male managers in the workplace is entirely typical of the dominant animals in social species like chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, and Japanese macaques. Male bosses assert their dominance by owning larger chairs, speaking loudly, wearing flashy clothing, guarding their personal space, and showing off fancy gadgetry. That means the Blackberry your manager clips to his belt is really just a civilized way of showing off huge balls.

Steve Wozniak may be lesser known than Steve Jobs—he’s sometimes called the “Other Steve”—but the Apple co-founder essentially invented the personal computer. So Apple may want to heed its second daddy’s words of warning. After predicting the inevitable end to the iPod’s “long life at number one,” Wozniak went on to criticize the iPhone in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. "Consumers aren't getting all they want when companies are very proprietary and lock their products down," he said. "I would like to write some more powerful apps than what you're allowed."

Borat was funny for a few weeks before overkill spoiled it, but at this rate, we’ll be sick of Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up, Bruno, before it hits the cutting room floor. The Guardian reports that Cohen was spotted on Friday at Paris fashion week in character as the eponymous gay German fashionista, attempting—unsuccessfully—to pass a note to models on the catwalk. Other scenes involving Arnold Schwarzenegger, a near-riot involving kissing men, and a meeting between a former Mossad agent and a Palestinian academic have already been reported. It’s unclear what, exactly, any of the latter scenes have to do with fashion, but come the film’s release in May 2009, we’re not sure we’ll care.

Holy water and Hollywood producers having done their number on Dracula, one of Bram Stoker’s heirs has decided the old vampire needs rescuing. Next October, Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great-grandnephew, will unveil a new book called Dracula: The Undead. It is partly based on some exhumed but unpublished portions of Bram Stoker’s 1897 original. "Our intent is to give both Bram and Dracula back their dignity," Dacre Stoker says. And also their economic viability: The book sold for a cool $1 million.

In a rollicking Washington Post column, Anne Applebaum takes on Sarah Palin’s charge that D.C. needs “a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street.” In fact, Applebaum moans, the capitol has been overrun by “Washington outsiders,” many of them hacks: Tom DeLay; Ted Stevens; Alberto Gonzales; FEMA’s Michael Brown. “Washington needs people who think like national politicians,” Applebaum writes, “and not like spokesmen for the local businesspeople who fill their re-election coffers and for the local party hacks who plan their campaigns.”

EBay was once a bright light of the internet economy—a quirky, homespun website grown into a billion-dollar enterprise. Forbes asks if the online auction site has forgotten where it came from. Traffic to the site has declined 11 percent over the past two years and its stock is trading at a five-year low. The company's failure is one of imagination. "EBay is cluttered with business-consultant types who are out of touch with customers, lacking in technological vision and prone to sheeplike thinking." Moreover, its executives "worship data above all." Says one former strategist: "EBay is run by smart people who don't use eBay and spend hours debating the data about how other people use eBay. That is the problem."

There may be a temptation to keep the elderly out of sight, out of mind—why else do we stow them away in retirement “communities”?—but new research shows that they have feelings too. A team at Yale has found that talking down to older people—"elderspeak," if you will—can lead to significant decline in their self-regard, with their health not far behind. In a study of 660 people over age 50, researchers found that those who had positive perceptions of aging lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative perceptions—a bigger boost than that associated with exercise or not smoking. Even words like “dear” and “sweetie” should be off-limits. "People think they're being nice," said Elvira Nagle, 83, "but when I hear it, it raises my hackles.”

The conflict between Israel and Lebanon has entered a new and more dangerous phase, this time in the kitchen. Lebanon is planning to file an international suit claiming that by marketing original Lebanese food like tabouleh, hummus, and falafel, Israel has cost Lebanon tens of millions of dollars a year. Crazy as the suit sounds, it's apparently not without legal grounds. Fadi Abboud, president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association, has prepared a memo citing the "feta cheese precedent" of 2002, which granted Greece the sole right to produce and market the cheese under that name.