Category: people

The national police say that they cannot guarantee public safety at the singer’s sold-out arena concert because of objections by hardline Islamic militants. Says the leader of one such group, “She’s a vulgar singer who wears only panties and a bra when she sings and she stated she is the envoy of the devil’s child and that she will spread satanic teaching. This is dangerous.”

“Liberal Muslim activist and author Irshad Manji and her assistant suffered minor injuries after hundreds people from the Indonesian Mujahidin Council (MMI) attacked the writer’s book launch at the Institute for Islamic and Social Studies (LKiS) Foundation in Yogyakarta on Wednesday.”

He was “a prizewinning reporter for Newsday who to his chagrin was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America – the best-selling collaborative novel Naked Came the Stranger, whose publication in 1969 made Peyton Place look like a church picnic.”

“Actress Ursula Yovich has quit playing indigenous roles, saying she has been typecast because of her race and that a career spent portraying the ‘tragic reality’ of Aboriginal characters has left her emotionally drained.”

“When Studs was 91½, he took time to fly to New York City to cut the ribbon on our first StoryCorps Booth in Grand Central Terminal. At the opening, Studs proclaimed, ‘We know who the architect of Grand Central was, but who laid these floors? Who built these walls? These are the voices you must celebrate through StoryCorps!'”

“For better and worse, Ms. Redman’s fieriness as an actress was most memorably on display in her portrayal in Tom Jones of the promiscuous Mrs. Waters, with whom Tom locks eyes in lusty communion as they devour one course after another in a crescendo of sexual anticipation. Haskel Frankel described it in The Times in 1981 as ‘one of the funniest, most sensual scenes ever put on film without removing one stitch of clothing.'”

“The master of the American short story was the original purveyor of midcentury mystique, especially its darker facets. The endless drinking, ever-present cigarettes, infidelities, secrets of suburban life and anxiety regarding America’s place in the postwar world — they’re all in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stories of John Cheever.“

“Published in 1985, her memoir, Deceived With Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, describes the luminous orbit around Ms. Garnett’s mother, the painter Vanessa Bell, a sister of Virginia Woolf. It was a self-reflexive, self-congratulatory milieu in which art was all, sex was the coin of the realm and the only real transgression was the unpardonable sin of being ordinary.”

“A Chinese court has made an unusual decision to hear a lawsuit by dissident artist Ai Weiwei who accuses the government of violating the law by imposing a 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) tax evasion penalty on the company that markets his work.”

“I was interested that the president said he discussed the subject of same-sex marriage with his daughters. Their acceptance of the same-sex parents of some of their classmates was so automatic and total that their very ease convinced him that same-sex marriage was inevitable … Which shows something that anthropologists have known a long time: That innovative behavior comes from children, is passed to their mothers and recognized by their fathers last of all. This rule of innovation holds true throughout the primate world.”