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November 27, 2009
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View older articles: [ Page 1 of 17 ] Next >>

Polanski
AP / Roberto Pfeil

 * NEW! * Swiss Court Accepts Polanski’s $4.5M Bail Request

Will Roman Polanski spend the holidays at his mountain chalet in Gstaad? That could well be the case after Polanski’s latest bail offer, this time to the tune of $4.5 million, was accepted by a Swiss court Wednesday, although the 76-year-old director ... (continued)

Posted on Nov 25, 2009 2 COMMENTS


Camus
Wikimedia Commons / New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection

Sarkozy’s Bid to Move Camus’ Ashes Stirs Controversy

A French writer could do a lot worse than be buried alongside the likes of Émile Zola, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Victor Hugo, but some compatriots of philosopher Albert Camus, as well as his son, Jean, are none too pleased with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to relocate Camus’ ashes to the celebrated Panthéon in Paris.

Posted on Nov 24, 2009 3 COMMENTS


Lambert
AP / Matt Sayles

Lambert’s ‘AMA’ Act Costs Him ‘GMA’ Gig

Over-the-top pop star Adam Lambert may once have been constrained by the unwritten rules of competition on “American Idol” when it came to his sexuality, but he made a notable departure from those days during his provocative performance at Sunday’s American Music Awards. Looks as if that act cost him ... (continued)

Posted on Nov 24, 2009 5 COMMENTS



The Guantanamo Lawyers: Shipwrecked

This important new book tells the story of the world’s most famous prison from the perspective of the lawyers who toiled under notoriously difficult conditions on behalf of the detainees.

Posted on Nov 22, 2009 7 COMMENTS


Freedom's Fight
Gary Phillips / Parker Publishing

Freedom’s Fight: Part II

Truthdig is pleased to present the second 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.

Posted on Nov 20, 2009


book cover

Claire Wasserman on Europe’s Islamic Immigrants

Christopher Caldwell explores in his recent book what he terms Islam’s “adversary culture” now challenging Europe’s own sense of historical identity.

Posted on Nov 20, 2009 24 COMMENTS


Oprah
Flickr / Alan Light

Oprah Sets Her Show’s Expiration Date

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.

Posted on Nov 19, 2009 13 COMMENTS


pizza and beer
Flickr/rick

Behold the Food of the Future

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.

Posted on Nov 18, 2009 2 COMMENTS


Lambert
AP / Chris Pizzello

Adam Lambert Facing ‘How Gay Is Too Gay?’

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.

Posted on Nov 17, 2009 7 COMMENTS


bookcover

Marc Cooper on the Fate of Cesar Chavez’s Dream

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.

Posted on Nov 13, 2009 34 COMMENTS


Warhol painting
AP / Sang Tan

Art Market Gets a Boost from Sotheby’s, Warhol

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.

Posted on Nov 12, 2009 11 COMMENTS


Freedom's Fight
Gary Phillips / Parker Publishing

Freedom’s Fight

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.

Posted on Nov 11, 2009 3 COMMENTS


Thompson
Flickr/Caroline Bonarde Ucci

Emma Thompson, Petition Tourist?

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.”

Posted on Nov 10, 2009 17 COMMENTS


Marion Barry
Flickr/dbking

Marion Barry Does Reality TV

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.

Posted on Nov 9, 2009 1 COMMENT



AP / Mark Lennihan

Steve Fraser on the Crisis of Capitalism

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?

Posted on Nov 6, 2009 74 COMMENTS


Minnie and Mickey
Flickr / dawvon

Ni Hao, Mickey Mouse: Disney Goes to Shanghai

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.

Posted on Nov 4, 2009 2 COMMENTS


Levi-Strauss
comunidadimaginada.wordpress.com

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Father of Structuralism, Dies at 100

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.

Posted on Nov 3, 2009 5 COMMENTS



Angel City Press

Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times

The Chandler family’s L.A. Times practically invented one of the great American cities. This is the story of the paper’s fall toward mediocrity.

Posted on Nov 3, 2009 4 COMMENTS


Rand
radicalsforhappiness.com

Ayn Rand Revisited

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.

Posted on Nov 2, 2009 35 COMMENTS


bookcover

D.J. Waldie on the Cult of Baseball

“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.

Posted on Oct 30, 2009 4 COMMENTS


Google music
mtv.com

Google Enters the Musical Fray

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.

Posted on Oct 29, 2009 2 COMMENTS


Howard Bragman
logoonline.com

PR Guru Helps Stars Come Out

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.

Posted on Oct 28, 2009 3 COMMENTS


Haggis
Flickr / gdcgraphics

Top Writer-Director Breaks With Scientology Over Proposition 8

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.

Posted on Oct 26, 2009 19 COMMENTS



babble.com

Disney Offers Refund for Baby Bupkis

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)

Posted on Oct 25, 2009 3 COMMENTS


bookcover

Jonathan Kirsch on ‘The Woman Who Named God’

Is the biblical tale of Hagar “a creation story as important as the Garden of Eden,” as Charlotte Gordon argues in her provocative new book?

Posted on Oct 23, 2009 138 COMMENTS


View older articles: [ Page 1 of 17 ] Next >>

 
 

 
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A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
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