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Google’s Ads Preferences believes I’m a guy interested in politics, Asian food, perfume, celebrity gossip, animated movies and crime but who doesn’t care about “books & literature” or “people & society.” (So not true.) Yahoo! has me down as a 36-to-45-year-old male who uses a Mac computer and likes hockey, rap, rock, parenting, recipes, clothes […]

Until five years ago, Mel Gibson was one of the best-loved and best-paid talents in Hollywood, not to mention one of the town’s few real family men. How to explain the foulmouthed, violent bigotry that has since burst into public view, making him an industry pariah, even as his 26-year marriage imploded? With the help […]

“Fear has descended,” says James Schamus, the screenwriter-producer who also heads the profitable indie company Focus Features, “and nobody in Hollywood wants to be the person who green-lit a movie that not only crashes but about which you can’t protect yourself by saying, ‘But at least it was based on a comic book!’ “

The John Edwards tale began, like so many National Enquirer investigations, with a phone call. When the tip line rang in the paper’s Santa Monica office, reporters often raced to answer it. Rick Egusquiza grabbed it late one afternoon in fall 2007, knowing full well that nine out of 10 calls were worthless, just wackos […]

After my wife died, music and movies we once loved became the very triggers I tried my hardest to avoid. A song, a poem, a scene from a film triggers memories. You’re startled, moved, shaken. And you’re faced with two options: 1) engage with the work and the memories it calls up, or 2) retreat, […]

“Being a new girl [in New York] is a lot to process. Your dopamine receptors are haywire from so much of what feels like the right kind of attention and you preen out of paranoia. Sometimes you tap-dance about books, music, movies, food and politics for complete strangers. For hours. You mind-meld with people you […]

Why remake a bland but beloved thriller? Because movies should at least try to be as dangerous as life.

Neil Patrick Harris used to be an underage doctor on TV. Now he’s another Hollywood first: an out gay actor who can host award shows, play a womanizer, walk the red carpet with his boyfriend, and then get cast in movies as a straight dad. Neat trick.

America has been flooded by a tsunami of cute–we’re drowning in puppies and kittens and bunnies and cupcakes–that is transforming marketing (the Geico Gecko), automobiles (the Smart car), and movies (Up). But is the world bound to sour on all this sweetness?

While reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose.