Disgraced former Wall Street baron Bernard Madoff might have made millions swindling others for profit during his heyday, but he doesn’t seem to have made much of a literary cottage industry for writers presumably looking to cash in on his downfall. Not even the “I-was-Bernie’s-mistress” angle is tempting book buyers at this point.
Not so long ago, it seemed like big news that a woman—CBS’ Katie Couric—would be chosen to anchor the nightly news at a major network. Now Couric’s got some competition in Diane Sawyer, who’ll replace Charlie Gibson at ABC’s “World News” starting in January.
Although the world at large has yet to find out exactly what spurred Sarah Palin to vacate her post as Alaska’s governor this summer, her almost-son-in-law Levi Johnston pipes up (surprise!) in the latest edition of Vanity Fair, helpfully offering that Palin’s plan had something to do with money. This kid is on a tear.
Left-leaning ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is temporarily changing the name of its popular “Chubby Hubby” ice cream to “Hubby Hubby” to serve up support for same-sex couples, who as of Sept. 1 can marry in the company’s home state of Vermont.
Oh, what a tangled web Spider-Man weaves. Thanks largely to the multibillion-dollar success of Marvel’s characters on the big screen, Disney is buying the fabled comic book company for $4 billion in cash and stock. The Mouse House says Marvel characters will soon be appearing at its theme parks, but that isn’t the half of it.
A recent squabble between “The Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein and the director who is adapting her book into a documentary film has led Klein to ask that her name be taken off the credits. Conflict reportedly arose over the form of the documentary, and the director’s use of narration rather than interviews as the key story-telling device.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, Elia Kazan was inarguably one of the 20th century’s greatest Broadway and Hollywood directors. A new book reveals the master at work.
The Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood (a play on Hollywood in the manner of Bollywood), has grown from an accidental discovery into a mega-industry of over 2,000 titles and $200M annually.
It’s well known that Adolf Hitler dabbled in watercolor and that the Führer and his Nazi underlings amassed vast stashes of ill-begotten works of art, but according to art historian Birgit Schwarz, Hitler’s artistic streak ran deeper into the dark zones of his psyche than most people realize.
Quentin Tarantino certainly took full cinematic license and ran with it in his Nazi-bashing big-screen extravaganza “Inglourious Basterds,” but as Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman explains, some people are getting pretty fired up about the film’s convention-busting climax, worrying that it could lead impressionable future generations astray about what really happened at the end of World War II.
Peter Richardson’s fascinating new book explores the short, unruly life of Ramparts Magazine and its extraordinary effect on American politics and media.
Are Americans sacrificing the possibility of a more tolerant humanity for a suffocating guarantee of fidelity, a frigid prospect that seemingly unites the commissars of the politically correct left as much as it does the thought police of the puritanical right?
Is it possible to pluck the Beatles’ psychedelic classic “Yellow Submarine” out of its original 1968 context, remake it and plunk it down somewhere around the year 2012 ... just in time for the London Olympics?
“Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman is one of the greatest works of 20th century literature. A new theatrical adaptation is innovative, but ultimately loses the epic’s profound meditations on good and evil.
The American television industry is in crisis, according to Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield, who figures prominently in The Wrap’s two-part look into the future of the industry. In fact, says Garfield, we’re seeing early signs of “the total collapse of the network television model.”
This has to rank among the more embarrassing airport diplomacy blunders in post-9/11 America: U.S. immigration officials pulled Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh “King” Khan aside for questioning at the Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, failing to recognize the “King of Bollywood,” thus causing an international stir of a decidedly undesirable sort.
Are we entering an age in which the electronic image, endowed with the ability to manufacture its own reality, is hurling us into a state of collective self-delusion? Welcome to a brave new post-literate world where we confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge.
With multiple gadgets and screens constantly running, and perhaps even a different sense of time than our forebears had, it’s no surprise that powering down long enough to curl up with a book is becoming an endangered activity—although, as David L. Ulin argues in the Los Angeles Times, it’s still a very vital contemplative practice to pursue.
Sarah Palin is facing several challenges these days, what with her pile of legal bills, self-reinvention campaign, the whole not-being-governor thing and her daughter Bristol’s pesky ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, who seems to want to bask in the limelight as long as possible. Most recently, Johnston, 19, made an appearance at Sunday’s Teen Choice Awards ... as the date of comedian Kathy Griffin, 48.
Now 90 years old, America’s exemplary troubadour continues his lifelong project to agitate and organize through song, fulfilling his father’s dictum that “Music, as any art, is not an end in itself, but is a means for achieving larger ends.”
Now, everyone knows that even the toniest of Ivy League institutions recently suffered substantial blows to their massive endowment funds, but Harvard University’s idea to launch a menswear line called Harvard Yard just seems like school branding gone horribly awry.
The economic downturn has been rough on countless industries, and arts organizations in New York City that rely on endowment money to survive have been hit hard—not just, as City Journal’s James Panero points out, by the immediate effects of the meltdown felt round the world, but also by the “indirect effects” of how some of their funds have been managed.
Amazon’s Kindle reader might still be a great device in the estimation of some literary aficionados, but the honeymoon is over for Michigan high school student (and potential member of Future Lawyers of America) Justin D. Gawronski, who’s getting litigious with the online superseller after his copy of George Orwell’s “1984” was yanked from his Kindle in July.
It’s no secret that Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly don’t get along, but the two TV personalities have drastically scaled back their attacks on one another ever since a private meeting between GE and News Corp. CEOs determined the feud was bad for the bottom line.
Was Socrates an atheist, a guru to a strange sect and an elitist corrupting the youth of a democratic Athens defeated in the Peloponnesian War, as his accusers successfully charged? A new book by Robin Waterfield seeks to dispel the myths about “Why Socrates Died.”
Gorbachev’s Sermon on the Mount
