"Nora Ephron's Final Act," the New York Times Magazine story about the final days of writer/director Nora Ephron and the cancer that led to them, is as adoring and intimate as you'd expect coming from her accomplished writer son, Jacob Bernstein (he contributes regularly to the Times and his father is Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame).
While being interviewed recently for a Japanese TV show, Leonardo DiCaprio was asked if he did any celebrity impressions. DiCaprio confessed he did do one impression — of his Departed co-star Jack Nicholson.
So Russell Crowe and a friend of his installed a camera outside Crowe's office in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo with the intention of capturing footage of fruit bats rising from the nearby Botanic Gardens.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is currently at its highest point in history. Never before has the stock market been this valuable, uh, not taking inflation into account. As the media piles in and investors celebrate, the question of the day is: Is it now "time" to buy stocks?
This week's probing episode of OWN's Our America with Lisa Ling focused on polyamory. In a brash Barbara Walters-esque style, Ling asked several of the profiled subjects what it's like to be considered perverts and freaks by mainstream society for loving multiple people. It was almost cartoonishly rude, but it gave the opportunity for what all seem like reasonable, well-adjusted people to give reasonable, well-adjusted answers about their way of life ("lifestyle," a word frequently used on the show even by the polyamorous, seems like a pejorative, but maybe that's just me being gay).
A man in China was ordered to pay $300 in damages after sending a bottle of his sperm to a woman as a token of his love.
This is some Indiana Jones level stuff right here. Scientists may have uncovered the Viking "sunstone," a magical-sounding crystal whose powers to locate the sun despite cloud cover, snow, and darkness were understandably considered to be a legend. A group of researchers think a cloudy crystal found in an Elizabethan shipwreck off the Channel Islands may have been the mystical sunstone—thought to be one of the secrets of the Vikings' legendary navigational skills on the seas.
New bosses often mean change. We here at Gawker would not know this, because all our managers die in their chairs, but we have heard from industry professionals that when there's a transition of a power at a company, the change often augurs new protocols, shifting job descriptions, the ominous possibility of layoffs, and, say, far worse, the loss of telecommuting. The immediate aftermath can be nerve-wracking—especially when the position at stake is CEO.
Parents: when will they learn to, ugh, just give me the check mom, don't say anything? It's bad enough that the Wall Street Journal was able to cobble together enough material to even write this trend story on concierges that serve college students—the type of indulgence for the idle rich that can enrage young and old alike. But did mom have to go and talk about the birthday party?
Pavel Dmitrichenko, a star dancer at Moscow's legendary Bolshoi Ballet, has apparently confessed to orchestrating an acid attack that left the company's artistic director Sergei Filin with burns to his face and eyes—an attack possibly motivated by Filin's treatment of Dmitrichenko's girlfriend, another Bolshoi dancer.
The chicest, shriekingest skull in all the land, Naomi Campbell, ran the gamut of human emotions on last night's episode of Oxygen's reality modeling competition-cum-sorority rush The Face. As coach/mentor for three of the show's aspiring models, she ranted, she raved, she condescended, she laughed manically, she cried crocodile tears of cold-blooded joy, she rounded corners ominously.
A gay couple in Oregon says it was their pink poodle Beauty who prompted a man to violently attack them in broad daylight last Friday.
Hours before the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Vice President Nicolás Maduro ejected two U.S. diplomats from the country, accusing them of plotting to "destabilize" Venezuela and implying that the U.S. had infected Chávez with cancer. "We have no doubt," Maduro said in a television address, that a scientific commission would find "that commander Chávez was attacked with this illness," comparing Chávez to Palestinian Yasser Arafat, whom Maduro suggested was also poisoned. The removed diplomats, U.S. Air Force attaché Col. David Delmonaco and another, unnamed military official, had, Maduro claimed, attempted to recruit members of the Venezuelan military into an unspecified plot against Venezuela. U.S. officials scoffed at the claims, and most observers understood Maduro's accusations against "imperialists" to be a fairly standard base-rallying move that Chávez himself had frequently resorted to in the past. Conspiracy theorists, nevertheless, turned to Venezuelan lawyer and commentator Eva Golinger, who claimed in an interview with Russia Today—the media wing of the administration of longtime Chávez ally Vladimir Putin—that there's evidence that the E.U. had had infected the president with cancer. She declined to present or describe this evidence. The U.S. has indicated it will likely ask some Venezuelan diplomats to leave the country over the next few days in response. Chávez's funeral is on Friday; Venezuela will hold elections in 30 days. [Reuters | WSJ | Ultimas Noticias]
