"The researchers were looking for quintessential envy, which is distinct from jealousy. Envy involves a longing for what you don’t have, while jealousy is provoked by losing something to someone else. If you crave a wife like Angelina Jolie, you’re envious of Brad Pitt; if you’re upset about losing your wife to him, you’re jealous." —Huh. So Iago and Rick Springfield: envious. Herzog and Ric Ocasek, jealous. And, as John Tierney reports, envy improves our focus and memory, but it makes our brains tired. Also, Brad Pitt was so good in Moneyball!

The second of three seasons of The Bridge Project, a partnership of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic and Neal Street, is closing at BAM this week. Last year, Sam Mendes staged The Winter's Tale and The Cherry Orchard here; this year it's The Tempest and As You Like It. Two of those plays are romances, involving love but also magic, sadness, and personal redemption. One, written as a comedy, is regularly performed as a tragedy, which means that audiences see it as a little of both. As You Like It is a straightforward comedy, but here Mendes has added a torture scene, which isn't very [...]

"In the first half of the twentieth century, 'The Merchant of Venice' in Yiddish translation was probably one of the most popular productions on the flourishing Yiddish stage. Jacob Adler's performance of Shylock was so impressive that he played Shylock in Yiddish on Broadway, with an English-speaking cast. Shakespeare, as Adler understood, was not presenting a stereotype. Shylock was a heroic figure: a Jew who boldly stood up to anti-Semites, impugning their prejudices, and challenged all the forces of the state." -Reconsidering the Shylock problem.

With every civic problem in Chicago long since solved, Mayor Richard M. Daley is free to turn his attentions to whimsical celebration. He's declared Thursday to be "Talk Like Shakespeare Day," so that Windy City denizens can observe The Bard's 445th birthday in eloquent fashion. So, sure, a silly idea which will no doubt be more honored in the breach than the observance, but consider this: what if Rod Blagojevich's Senate soliloquy had been a bit more Shakespearean?

During a scene in Hamlet 2, Dana Marschz, played by Steve Coogan, laments to his cat, "Oh my God, writing is so hard!" It sure is, when you're writing a sequel to Hamlet 1! It's easier to borrow. These following artists took a page out of Shakespeare's own script and wrote songs borrowing from the Bard himself.