FINANCE
• Good-bye, long weekends at the Hamptons. Merrill Lynch employees now have just three sick days a year, down from an unimaginable 40. [DealBook/NYT]
• At Renaissance Technologies, no traders and analysts need apply. The hedge fund hires only physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, and computer scientists. [Reuters via Deal Breaker]
• Some notable Wall Street wives (Mrs. Leon Black, Mrs. Steven Roth, and Mrs. Carter McClelland, to name a few) backed the recent flop Coram Boy, the most expensive play ever staged on Broadway. [DealJournal/WSJ]

MEDIA
• Judith Regan's recent trip to China was apparently a scouting mission for her new career as a fine-arts dealer. [Radar]
• Christopher Bancroft, a Dow Jones director, came out against the Rupert Murdoch offer for the first time in public. [WSJ]
• New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones amended a blog post in which he asked for donations to retrieve lost data after getting hit with incredulous backlash. [Radar]

LAW
• Sullivan & Cromwell hired PR-crisis firm Sard Verbinnen specifically to handle the Charney case. Looks like they might not be doing the best job — they only now started reaching out to bloggers. [Above the Law]
• Will McGuireWood punish the partner who drafted a brief arguing that the $49 million Bar/Bri settlement should be partially rejected? [Law Blog/WSJ]
• Jonathan Lippman, former state chief administrative judge, is now the presiding judge of the state appellate court based in Manhattan. [NYT]

FASHION
• Scarlett Johansson plays a movie star in her next Vuitton ads. Typecasting? [WWD]
• Former Paco Rabanne designer Patrick Robinson has been named Gap's VP of design. [British Vogue]
• Bond Girl Eva Green is the face of the new Christian Dior fragrance. [Downtown Darling]