Home
Helaine .'s Library tagged → View Popular
Raisin - Review - Theater - New York Times
Equity Library Theatre production.
-
The new production of ''Raisin'' at the Equity Library Theater catches both the dramatic and musical qualities unusually well. The conflict in the Younger family created by the potential uses of the insurance money made available by the father's death (escape from their slum home, a medical education for the daughter or a liquor store for the feckless son) becomes powerful and poignant in Helaine Head's perceptive direction of a cast that can, for the most part, move from acting to singing with equal skill.
Pro-Marijuana Shows Are Spreading on America’s TV Screens - NYTimes.com
“While the drug is illegal in most states, the idea is to show that there’s a world somewhere where it’s legal, and where people are doing this,” Mr. Peterson said.
The producers are now trying to sell “Top Bud” to networks. Mr. Peterson acknowledged there was some hesitancy at first but said his company already had “solid interest.”
There are similar stirrings in the scripted TV world. On “Glee,” Fox’s new high school musical, one of the characters is a medical marijuana dealer. At the New York Television Festival next week one of the competing pilot projects seeking a TV network home will be “Rx,” a drama set in the medical marijuana world.
A rash of recent news reports have documented the mainstreaming of pot, citing among other examples frequent drug references in the media and endorsements by a growing list of celebrities. This month Fortune magazine’s cover asks: “Is Pot Already Legal?” CNBC repeats its eight-month-old documentary about the pot business, “Marijuana Inc.,” at least once a week; it continues to be rated one of the channel’s most popular documentaries.
Mr. Lane’s inspiration for “Cannabis Planet” came from a more practical place: he noticed an increasing number of ads in local newspapers for medical cannabis. “It was the only market segment that I saw growing,” he said during dinner at a faded Chinese restaurant on Pico Boulevard.
U.S.C. Film School’s New Look Is Historic - NYTimes.com
Mr. Lucas, an architectural hobbyist, laid out the original designs for the project and donated an initial $175 million to build and support it. Industry benefactors like Warner Brothers, Fox and the Walt Disney Company have contributed another $50 million.
About $50 million still must be raised — in the face of hard times, even for Hollywood — to equip a second phase that would include a 36,000-square-foot animation building. Nonetheless school officials said that construction is fully paid for and was scheduled to be finished by August 2010.
For Mr. Lucas the grand expansion — which serves a full-time enrollment of about 1,500 graduate and undergraduate cinema students, along with thousands who take an occasional class — is all about sending a message.
“The only way you are going to get respect on a college campus, or a university campus, is to build something that is important,” Mr. Lucas said of his reasons for backing the complex. “Schools and universities mainly understand money.”
-
Mr. Lucas, an architectural hobbyist, laid out the original designs for the project and donated an initial $175 million to build and support it. Industry benefactors like Warner Brothers, Fox and the Walt Disney Company have contributed another $50 million.
About $50 million still must be raised — in the face of hard times, even for Hollywood — to equip a second phase that would include a 36,000-square-foot animation building. Nonetheless school officials said that construction is fully paid for and was scheduled to be finished by August 2010.
For Mr. Lucas the grand expansion — which serves a full-time enrollment of about 1,500 graduate and undergraduate cinema students, along with thousands who take an occasional class — is all about sending a message.
“The only way you are going to get respect on a college campus, or a university campus, is to build something that is important,” Mr. Lucas said of his reasons for backing the complex. “Schools and universities mainly understand money.”
Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 6, 2008
SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.
McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere
Article Tools Sponsored By
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 27, 2008
WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.
For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.
By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.
The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis.
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com
-
Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News Feed they’d learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around Facebook. The bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group — proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace — all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends. (Very few people stopped using Facebook, and most people kept on publishing most of their information through News Feed.) Pundits predicted that News Feed would kill Facebook, but the opposite happened. It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth. A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users.
NY Times article on Gore leaves out inconvenient truths - Media Matters
-
In a March 13 article headlined "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the
Hype," New York
Times science writer William J. Broad reported on criticism of
former Vice President Al Gore's portrayal of the threat of global warming
in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth
by citing scientists who "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central
points are exaggerated and erroneous." Broad wrote that "scientists
are sensitive to [the film's] details and claims" and that Gore has
received criticism not "only from conservative groups and prominent
skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists."
But of the sources cited in the article, at least four have records of
misinformation on the issue. Though three of these were identified as skeptics
or as having expressed skepticism, in all four cases, their past statements or
studies questioning global warming theory have been debunked or discredited by
the scientific community -- which Broad did not report.
From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype - New York Times
-
This article leaves out important information about the "dissenters." Look at the other article which gives this information.
- helaine on 2007-03-13
-
But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.
“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”
Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in NYT
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo