Category: today’s top story

Through the program, the billionaire mayor has channeled “nearly $200 million of his fortune” to local groups. “His decision, which is not yet public, has set off alarm in the city’s arts and social services worlds, which depend heavily on his largesse and are grappling with deep budget cuts and a brutal fund-raising climate.”

“Eighty people who thought they were participating in the shooting of a pilot for a French reality series were willing to deliver potentially lethal electric shocks to a contestant who had incorrectly answered knowledge questions, according to the documentary, ‘The Game of Death,’ airing on French TV on Wednesday night.”

When Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s 2004 play Behzti (‘Dishonour’), depicting violence and rape in a Sikh temple, opened in Birmingham, protests by enraged Sikhs became violent, she received death threats, and the play had to be cancelled to preserve public safety. Now she has written a new play called Behud (‘Beyond Belief’) that recreates the furor.

Tamizdat, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is “a nonprofit group with an official mission of promoting international cultural exchange, and a docket each year of hundreds of visa applications that need I’s precisely dotted and T’s precisely crossed. Its clients include classical, ethnic and pop musicians from around the world….”

“Barnes & Noble plans to offer its eReader application for the Apple iPad, giving users of the upcoming tablet the option of buying digital books from an online store other than Apple’s iBook store.” The app should be available when the iPad hits the market in early April.

Digital content is “available in [people’s] homes, and they feel it’s theirs,” outgoing MPAA chairman Dan Glickman said. “Our job has been to try to educate people that in fact it’s not theirs, unless there’s some form or system for paying for it. At the same time, it’s our responsibility to provide it in ways that are easily accessible and at reasonable prices.”

“[F]or most of the three centuries since its debut, Double Falsehood; or, the Distrest Lovers has been ridiculed as a hoax or just disregarded. Yesterday that changed when The Arden Shakespeare … published Double Falsehood, endorsing its credentials and making it available in a fully annotated form for the first time in 250 years.”

“In a blunt new letter to the Shadow Theatre board of directors, recently resigned artistic director Keith L. Hatten claims the teetering company owes more than $12,000 in unpaid royalties and at least $4,200 more in payroll taxes.”

Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII won the fiction award, with Richard Holmes earning the nonfiction prize for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.. Joyce Carol Oates accepted an award for lifetime achievement.

“The paper (Salinger had a fondness for goldenrod-colored sheets) and the typeface, ordinary in themselves, are the same ones with which the writer, in between letters, must have been producing hundreds of pages of extraordinary, unpublished fiction. Even the envelopes tell a story of growing fame and isolation.”