So long, “Oprah”—in 2011, that is. Oprah Winfrey’s eponymous show went national in 1986, and, on Thursday, the talk show host and international media mogul gave notice when she’ll call it a wrap: Sept. 9, 2011, just a day over 25 years since her daytime reign began.
Want some Frankenfood with your superfood? How about those functional foods? As you might imagine, a preview of what we may be eating—or at least what we may be told is good for us—in the future is best taken with a grain of salt.
What are the responsibilities of an openly gay celebrity to the LGBTQ community? There are no easy answers, but “American Idol” runner-up and newly minted gay proto-icon Adam Lambert has to grapple with them by virtue of his visibility, and opinions vary widely about how to be out and proud as a public figure.
In her important new book, Miriam Pawel chronicles how a movement to unionize farmworkers failed to realize its charismatic founder’s vision as his relatives turned a union into a family business.
Sotheby’s enjoyed a windfall Wednesday when the auction house’s New York HQ nearly doubled its estimated high of $67.9 million for its contemporary art bid-fest, in which Andy Warhol’s works figured prominently among the biggest-selling successes of the evening.
Truthdig is pleased to present an excerpt from Gary Phillips’ novel “Freedom’s Fight,” which interweaves real historical figures and situations in a fictive narrative about World War II, focusing not just on the black soldier’s struggle, but also on the debates various civil rights groups had about the war stateside.
British actor Emma Thompson has drawn the ire of Roman Polanski’s supporters by removing her name from a pro-Polanski petition she’d signed following the Polish filmmaker’s September arrest in Switzerland. On Tuesday writer-filmmaker Yann Moix archly accused Thompson of “petition tourism.”
So Marion Barry ultimately wasn’t able to be Washington, D.C.‘s “mayor for life,” but he may get his own reality TV show. According to the Web site DCist, Barry, who’s now a city councilman, is currently filming a pilot for the show, although his chief of staff couldn’t say which network or production company was behind the project.
Does the prospect of deepening economic meltdown and political disarray raise the specter of a social upheaval and, perhaps, the collapse of capitalism, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression?
In a deal two decades in the making, China is opening its doors to the Walt Disney Co., having finally given the quintessentially Western enterprise the go-ahead to bring Mickey Mouse and his fellow characters to Shanghai with a new Disney theme park tailored to the Chinese megalopolis.
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who wrote several seminal works during his six-decade career and is responsible for those seemingly inscrutable structuralist texts you may have grappled with in college, died last weekend at 100.
Two new biographies about the irascible and idiosyncratic Ayn Rand, objectivist philosopher and ham-fisted mistress of the capitalist morality tale, show how her rocky Russian childhood and her subsequent self-reinvention campaign in America (partly conducted in Hollywood, of course) influenced her work, and how her ideas led to her own undoing.
“The Opposite Field,” a memoir by Jesse Katz, is a moving meditation about baseball, politics, and the unease of negotiating a new kind of American place.
Google expanded its sprawling multimedia empire this week by adding a music feature to its array of search options, which means that the average, law-abiding music buff won’t have to shell out 99 cents or settle for a 30-second snippet of a new song on iTunes, nor hope that the song will eventually queue up on a Pandora playlist, to hear the whole thing online.
Despite Hollywood’s reputation for being a liberal hotbed, some stubborn forms of prejudice persist, such as the lingering notion that it’s a potential career-killer for certain high-profile types to come out of the closet. Luckily, those who are willing to try have at least one industry expert ready to give them a hand with the press, the public and their risk-averse bosses.
The Church of Scientology counts several high-profile figures from the world of entertainment among its members—Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, to name a few—and they sometimes act as public advocates for their religion. However, one of their own, screenwriter and director Paul Haggis, has very publicly left the fold after taking issue with the church’s stance on Proposition 8.
Somehow the Walt Disney Co. managed to convince the parents of one-third of America’s babies to spend $200 million a year on Baby Einstein videos. The tapes were supposed to smarten kids up, but watching TV from ages 1-3 could actually cause attention problems. Under pressure, Disney is now offering refunds. (continued)
The veteran alt-rockers of R.E.M. are joining forces with other musical acts such as Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails and Roseanne Cash in a bid to close Guantanamo Bay. Their group effort, the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, sprung in part from their joint outrage about their music reportedly being blared at high volumes to upset prisoners held at the detention center in Cuba.
There was a time when Hollywood studios kept their stables of stars on a short leash, keeping close watch over their public personas and even arranging their marriages. Actors at least appear to have more leeway these days, but some studios are requiring that they refrain from broadcasting the minutiae of their daily lives via social media like Facebook and Twitter.
Drawing God is an age-old challenge, but ultra-quirky illustrator R. Crumb was up for it—although it took a lot of white-out to do the job, which seems fitting somehow. Crumb tackled the first 50 chapters of the Old Testament in his latest creation, simply titled “The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb,” and lo, it is good.
A Turkish television series, “Separation,” caused a diplomatic clash between Turkey and Israel after an episode this week portrayed an Israeli soldier shooting and killing a Palestinian baby. The fictional scene was shown on Israeli television Wednesday and drew criticism from Israel’s foreign minister Thursday.
Battlefield in the War of Ideas
