There I was at CVS trying to find a Hallmark sentiment to convey to my new friends Mary and Larry what an inspiration their ten-year marriage has been to me.

Larry and Mary were the quintessential California fairy tale couple --...

Perhaps you think a photography book on Iraqi soldiers that comes out on Veterans Day is predictable, and that's too bad because what you are about to see is not.
To say that the faces of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team are haunting sounds trite and also predictable. Especially...

A Chorus Line opened on Broadway in 1975 to unprecedented box office success, receiving 12 Tony award nominations and winning nine of them, in addition to the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It became the longest-running production in Broadway history up to that time.

GAIJIN JUSTICE - PART II

PART 1: YAKUZA

Did you see the story on "Sixty Minutes" about the Japanese mafia? The Yakuza is one of the most powerful organized crime syndicates in the world. It is Japan's relatively overt version of the Mafia, with...

Remember when you were just starting out and it was all you could do to cover the monthly expenses you HAD to pay-like rent and utilities-and paying for health insurance just seemed so .....optional? According to the Annals of Internal Medicine annual visits for healthcare drop sharply...

Last time I stopped at the local Coffee Bean for an overpriced caffeine boost, I had the opportunity to purchase a pound of coffee to be donated to our troops in Iraq. The bag of beans had a panel on one side so I could write a personalized message of...

The idea of reincarnation and the huge role that it plays in Tibetan Buddhism is a struggle for most Westerners to grasp. Israeli filmmaker Nati Baratz uses the story of a monk's search for the reincarnation of his own master to explore the power of that concept. Unmistaken Child...

Take three masters of the electric guitar -- Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White--plop them on one of Hollywood's largest soundstages along with their instruments and then add a documentary film crew headed by The Inconvenient Truth's Davis Guggenheim.

There...

Sunset Boulevard--it's a street, it's a movie, and it's perhaps best known as the quintessential blank slate that lures generations of dreamers west. Now it's also a coffee table book.
Amazingly, no other modern photographer has sought to document the denizens of perhaps the most famous thoroughfare in...

Ed, Farrah, Michael, Billy (Mays) and soon, Walter: we mourn the deaths of these celebrities as if they are old friends or family. My dear friend and 9/11 widow Nikki Stern knows a thing or two about this unique sort of communal grief appropriation.

She says "We humans seem...

Tell all memoirs by Chinese Communist Party leaders are simply unheard of. That's why the discovery of secret journals kept by former Premier Zhao Ziyang are particularly extraordinary. Zhao was not only the primary architect of the financial reforms that led to China's current global economic status, he was also...

Whatever Works is a black comedy featuring Larry David as Boris Yelnikoff, an eccentric and very grumpy self-proclaimed genius who comes home one night and finds a young woman (Evan Rachel Wood) begging for a place to stay. He takes her in for the night and eventually marries her....

By Christal Smith and Angela Shelley in Santa Monica

Friends and family of the detained US journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee -- reporters who were detained in North Korea three months ago -- are finally speaking out. The two...

Here am I floating round my tin can...
Planet earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do
("Space Oddity," David Bowie)

It's an earnestly thoughtful little science fiction film called simply "MOON," yet it navigates the...

James Gray is on a crusade. You might guess that a conservative judge from a conservative county would advocate for the prohibition of marijuana, but based on his experiences, he is adamantly pro-legalization.
After witnessing first hand what he...

Take one run down high school near Watts, California, that straddles two rival gang territories and has a 75% dropout rate for incoming freshmen; add one visionary ex-newscaster who is profiled in this weeks' New Yorker, mix with his charter group that became the first in the country to...

A talented yet tormented man, he is both feared and admired for doing what he does best. His reputation as a womanizer with an addiction to excess precedes him. I am describing both the director and the subject of James Toback's latest film: an unexpected, frightening and oddly refreshing look...

"You've got that packet in the mail from the army that you've been dreading"....with those words Ryan Conklin went from the hunky star of an MTV reality show to what many viewers consider a modern American martyr.

At the age of 17, inspired by 9/11, he had enlisted in the...