Catastrophic ‘News of the World’: Some Salvage Jobs Are Impossible, Even for Rupert Murdoch
We’ve seen scandals before at News Corp. properties, and in normal circumstances, the obsession with the fates of these editors would be a matter of forgetfulness. Do we not already know that top editors and executives in Rupert Murdoch’s international media empire, like naughty nephews of the Caesar, need only to be assigned to a lush manor in a remote province for a time before their behavior there necessitates their return to Rome, their old sins in the capital long-forgotten?
Writers in Hollywood
To the writing of his detective stories Raymond Chandler brings the experience and the skepticism of a newspaper reporter, the narrative gifts of a born storyteller, and a mastery of pungent American dialogue. His leading character, Philip Marlowe, is a professional detective who has held the spotlight thus far in four novels, all of which have been purchased by the movies. One of them, The Big Sleep, in which Lauren Bacall plays the lead, is soon to be released. In his screenplays as in his books, Mr. Chandler has scored a personal success, but he has done so without losing sight of the difficulties encountered by the creative writer in the studios. For this is the anomaly: the producers pay their authors large fees apparently for the purpose of disregarding their advice and their text.
My Lost Boy John Walker Lindh
John Phillip Walker Lindh, my son, was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam when he was 16 years old. He has an older brother and a younger sister. John is scholarly and devout, devoted to his family, and blessed with a powerful intellect, a curious mind, and a wry sense of humour. Labelled by the American government as “Detainee 001” in the “war on terror”, John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Indiana. He has been a prisoner of the American government since 1 December 2001, less than three months after the terror attacks of 9/11. #Sept11
The Man Who Invented Free Love
Soon after he arrived in the United States—by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity—Wilhelm Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about sex came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and, by extension, their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened “orgone energy”; in concentrated form, these mysterious currents could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness and a host of minor ailments.
Waiting for Big Bird
(Fiction) Jonathan jumps up from his seat, knocking over his mug of coffee, when Mona tells him she thinks she is in labor. They are having brunch at Café Bar. It is one of their favorite things to do. “You aren’t due for two weeks,” he says. Mona agrees. She is not due for another two weeks, and she cannot be sure that what she feels is labor, because she has never been in labor before. “I’m pretty sure,” Mona says.
My Father Is an African Immigrant and My Mother Is a White Girl from Kansas and I Am Not the President of the United States
My father moved back to Nigeria one month after I was born. Neither I nor my sister Ijeoma, who is a year and a half my elder, have any recollection of him. Over the course of the next 16 years, we did not receive so much as a phone call from him, until one day in the spring of 1999, when a crinkled envelope bearing unfamiliar postage stamps showed up in the mailbox of Ijeoma’s first apartment. Enclosed was a brief letter from our father in which he explained the strange coincidence that had led to him “finding” us.* It was a convoluted story involving his niece marrying the brother of one of our mother’s close friends from years ago. As a postscript to the letter, he expressed his desire to speak to us and included his telephone number.
The Day Kennedy Died
As they get settled, ready to hear about surgical manipulation of the biliary tract, Jennings notices a magazine on the coffee table. From the cover, it appears the entire magazine is dedicated to conspiracy theories revolving around the John F. Kennedy assassination. Six floors and 44 years separate the place where they are sitting from that moment in November 1963 when the president of the United States was carted into the emergency room in a condition witnesses would later describe as “moribund.” Andrew points to the magazine. “Were you here when they brought him in?” “Yeah, I helped put in the trache,” McClelland says matter-of-factly.
Death of a Yogi
In downtown Portland, across Southwest 5th Avenue from City Hall, stands a tall glass and aluminum tower. Inside this building, the Pacwest Center, is a safe. This safe keeps many secrets, but this story is about the disputed contents of a single envelope. Inside the envelope were the last wishes of a holy man, instructions to be revealed after his death. Many of the holy man’s followers were successful entrepreneurs: One founded Kettle Chips, a Salem-based company whose owners sold it in 2006 for a reported $320 million; others co-founded Golden Temple foods in Eugene, a company famous for its Yogi Tea brand. More than a few of his followers were practicing lawyers. But the holy man trusted one lawyer in particular with the most sensitive matters of money, family and legacy.
Two Space Shuttle Veterans Describe Takeoff and Landing
“You wake up around five hours prior to going out to the vehicle. It reminds me of Christmas morning, the level of excitement as you get up and have that last meal, get into your orange launch-and-entry suits in the white room and then get on the bus that takes you out to the pad. There’s a background level of anticipation, looking forward to the event. You get out to the pad about three hours prior to the launch. The commander gets in first and is strapped in. The vehicle is on the pad pointed upwards, so everything has been tilted 90 degrees and it is like getting into a different vehicle than the one you trained in. It takes a little effort to get all strapped in, but finally I’m in and the rest of the crew comes in after me. Everything starts to look like the simulators we’ve spent thousands of hours in. The rhythm feels like the simulators. You forget this is actually launch day and not just another simulation.”
A-R-E-T-H-A
The organizers of the Grammy Awards quickly put together a tribute for her, and the sudden and shocking weight loss displayed in a taped thank-you played during the ceremony in February only kept advance-obituary writers scrambling for whatever superlatives were left to describe a career that has included 18 Grammys, upward of 75 million records sold, being the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. But now there she sat at a front table, in a flowing cream-colored silk Naeem Khan gown, with the kind of resurrection glow you see on stained-glass windows in churches.
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