Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Fears and Failure (New York Times)
Washington looks for trouble in all the wrong places while the unemployed are left to suffer.
Froma Harrop: Bin Laden was Already Stopped (Creators Syndicate)
Bin Laden was last century's news in an Arab world whose young people were concluding that modern democracy, rather than a medieval caliphate enforcing puritanical Islam, would address their anger and frustration. Women joined demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria. Some were seized, killed and raped - but the women were not going to be the silent shadows of the bin Laden vision.
Jim Hightower: GOP HOUSE CHOOSES BIG OIL OVER GRANNY
Exxon, for one oily example, had a $19-billion profit in 2009, but not only did it pay exactly zero in federal income taxes, it manipulated the system to get a $156 million rebate from us. Likewise, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips had multibillion-dollar profits that year, paid not a dime in taxes, and also got refunds.
Steve Lopez: Think of it as hire education (Los Angeles Times)
Being awarded an honorary doctorate shows the bargain that California's colleges and universities once were - and that they need to remain a budget priority.
Jonah Lehrer: Building a Thinking Room (Wall Street Journal)
Although we're only starting to grasp how the insides of buildings influence the insides of the mind, it's possible to begin prescribing different kinds of spaces for different tasks. If we're performing a job that requires accuracy and focus (say, copy editing a manuscript), we should seek out confined spaces with a red color scheme. But for tasks that require a little bit of creativity, we seem to benefit from high ceilings, lots of windows and bright blue walls that match the sky.
Jessica Grose: 62 Going On 22 (Slate)
When did my mom become more fun than me?
Elizabeth Bernstein: Online, Is Dream Date a Scam? (Wall Street Journal)
I recently spotted Mr. Right on an online dating site. … I worked up the nerve to write him and was thrilled when he replied, saying he was flattered to receive my email. He told me he is a great cook (perfect), loves the beach (ditto) and tries to work out but isn't always consistent (Hello, soul mate!). He said he hoped to hear from me again soon. Imagine my heartbreak when I discovered he doesn't exist.
Catey Hill: Is This Your Brain on Retirement? (Wall Street Journal)
As the baby boom has grown older, more researchers - and research funding - have focused on all aspects of aging. Recently, a growing number of studies have all pointed out the ill effects of not just aging, but retirement. The earlier people retire, the sooner they're likely to get Alzheimer's disease, according to a study of 382 men published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychology in 2010.
Ed Pilkington: "Paul Allen: 'I think Bill Gates was surprised by my book. He'll want an intense discussion about it'" (Guardian)
The Microsoft co-founder and multi-billionaire talks about his autobiography in which describes his bizarre working relationship with Bill Gates - and how it was he, not Gates, who had the visionary ideas.
John Bream : Sheryl Crow's new nest: Nashville (Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
The nine-time Grammy-winning pop star thinks the lyrics will make this project seem country. "I already had a pretty strong country influence in my music," she said recently from Nashville. "You listen to 'Strong Enough' and 'If It Makes You Happy' and 'Hard to Make a Stand,' there's a lot of country influence in there already, but there's just no pedal steel and no fiddle. The lyrics are nearing what I consider straightforward country lyrics; they're a little left of center.
David Bruce has 41 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $41 you can buy 10,250 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," and "Maximum Cool."
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Selected Readings
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Today
Free Comic Book Day
"The first Free Comic Book Day featured just four publishers. This year, three dozen publishers are participating," Joe Field said, including Marvel, DC Comics, Archie, Zenescope Entertainment, Image, Dark Horse and IDW.
Geoff Johns, DC's chief creative officer, called the event a way to celebrate "an American-born medium and educating and passing that passion off to other people."
Some 2.7 million copies of free comics are set to be handed out across the country and in 40 other countries on Saturday.
In Denmark, Morten Soendergaard is gearing up for his third such time hosting the event at the Fantask comic store in Copenhagen.
Free Comic Book Day
New Rules
GOP Debate
The Associated Press has decided not to cover a Republican presidential debate to protest limits placed on media coverage by its organizers.
Fox News Channel and the South Carolina Republican Party are co-sponsoring the first GOP debate of the 2012 presidential race on Thursday. But the sponsors are barring still photographers from entering the hall in Greenville, S.C., during the debate.
That is a change from past debates, when Fox permitted still photographers greater access. Both AP and Reuters photographers were permitted extensive access to the January 2008 GOP primary debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., including multiple photographers from each agency allowed in the hall during large parts of the debate, said J. David Ake, the AP's assistant chief of bureau/photos.
Fox informed the AP and Reuters that it will only allow one still photographer into the debate at the start, when candidates shake hands, and that the photographer must leave when the debate begins. It also wants the single photographer to distribute the photos to all other media organizations.
Reuters has told Fox and the South Carolina Republican Party that it will not accept such coverage restrictions. The McClatchy Co., which owns five daily newspapers in South Carolina, also objected to the restrictions but is covering the debate.
GOP Debate
Engagement News
Paul McCartney
A publicist says Paul McCartney is engaged to his girlfriend of nearly four years.
Stuart Bell said Friday that recent media speculation over a proposal is true but declined to give further details on when and how the former Beatle asked New York socialite Nancy Shevell to marry him, saying only "we're all thrilled for him."
The marriage will be McCartney's third; his first wife, Linda, died of cancer in 1998 and the rocker divorced his second wife, Heather Mills, in 2008 after a separation period.
McCartney and Shevell started seeing each other in Long Island's Hamptons area in late 2007.
Paul McCartney
Posts Greatest Hits
Jerry Seinfeld
Jerry Seinfeld loves breakfast cereal, Superman and stand-up comedy. And on Friday he launched a website dedicated to one of those passions.
JerrySeinfeld.com will bring together highlights of the New York comedian's 35 year stand-up career. It launched with three clips -- including Seinfeld's first appearance on "The Tonight Show" in 1981 -- and another three videos will be posted every day.
The new website will not feature dramatic episodes from Seinfeld's most famous outing -- the 1990s sitcom "Seinfeld" which is considered one of the most successful comedies on TV and which revolved around a fictionalized version of Seinfeld's own life as a comedian.
But it will include stand-up segments that Seinfeld performed on the show.
Jerry Seinfeld
CUNY Reconsidering Awarding Honor
Tony Kushner
The trustees of the City University of New York are reconsidering their decision to block an honorary degree for playwright Tony Kushner.
CUNY chairman said in a statement Friday that he believed board members made a mistake of principle in failing to award the degree to Kushner. Trustees will meet Monday.
This week, trustees voted to block the nomination after one of its members, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, claimed the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright held anti-Israel views.
Wiesenfeld tells the New York Times he expected to be the sole vote against the nomination and was surprised when other trustees went along with him. He says he thought he was just voicing his dissent.
Tony Kushner
Won't Be Prosecuted
Nicolas Cage
An attorney for Nicolas Cage says the actor won't face criminal charges stemming from his April 16 arrest in New Orleans.
New Orleans police say Cage was arrested in the French Quarter after he grabbed his wife's arm and pounded on cars in a drunken argument about whether a nearby house was the one they were renting. He was booked with domestic abuse, disturbing the peace and public drunkenness.
District attorney spokesman Christopher Bowman says prosecutors determined "the conduct did not amount to criminal conduct."
Cage had been free on $11,000 bond put up by bail bondsman Duane Chapman, known as "Dog the Bounty Hunter" to reality TV fans.
Nicolas Cage
2 Montana Legislators File Suit
"Three Cups of Tea"
Two Montana lawmakers are trying to start a class-action lawsuit against "Three Cups of Tea" author Greg Mortenson, claiming they were duped into buying Mortenson's best-selling book and donating to his charity based on lies they thought were true.
The claim filed Thursday in federal court in Missoula is the latest fallout from reports by "60 Minutes" and author Jon Krakauer last month that alleged that Mortenson lied in "Three Cups of Tea" about how he became involved in building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The reports also questioned whether Mortenson financially benefited from his charity, Central Asia Institute, and whether CAI built the number of schools it claimed.
The complaint, which tells only one side of a legal argument, alleges Mortenson and CAI induced state Rep. Michele Reinhart of Missoula to buy the book and Rep. Jean Price of Great Falls to donate to the charity. Reinhart and Price claim Mortenson and the charity engaged in fraud, deceit, breach of contract and racketeering under a statute normally used for prosecuting mobsters.
The Democratic legislators are seeking class-action status, saying the lawsuit potentially could be joined by millions of people who bought Mortenson's books, heard his speeches or donated to his charity.
"Three Cups of Tea"
CEO Axed
OWN
Discovery Communications Inc and Oprah Winfrey on Friday pushed out Christina Norman as chief executive of OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, after a tough start for the five-month old cable network.
Discovery Chief Operating Officer Peter Ligouri will take over from Norman on an interim basis in addition to his current role.
A joint venture between Discovery and Oprah Winfrey's production company, OWN launched in the United States early this year as a largely female-oriented network with a combination of lifestyle, advice and uplifting shows.
Winfrey, regarded as the most influential woman on U.S. television, is expected to devote more energy to OWN in the coming months after the last original episode of her popular syndicated TV show, "The Oprah Winfrey Show," airs on May 25 on Walt Disney Co's ABC.
OWN
Sold For $1.3B
Warner Music
Warner Music Group Corp., the world's third-largest recording company with such artists as Eric Clapton, Michael Buble and Paramore, is being sold for about $1.3 billion as a global decline in CD sales weighs down the industry.
Len Blavatnik's Access Industries is paying $8.25 a share and will take about $1.9 billion in Warner debt.
The deal, announced by the companies Friday, comes as U.S. recorded music sales are half what they were about a decade ago. Gains in digital sales have started to flatten, and CD sales continue to fall.
Blavatnik is a former board member who was part of the group that bought the company in 2004. He has about a 2 percent stake in the company.
The sale ends a seven-year run by investors led by Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr., who purchased the company from Time Warner Inc. with private equity backing for $2.6 billion. Those investors slashed payrolls and took other measures to cope with music's decline. They took the company public a year later to help recoup their investment. There are now just 3,700 employees, down from 5,100 in late 2003.
Warner Music
Making More Money Than Ever
Supermodels
U.S. unemployment might still be hovering near 10 percent, but don't worry about the supermodels.
The world's 10 top-earning models pulled in a collective $112 million during the past year, a 30 percent increase from the previous year, thanks in part to consumers spending again on the luxury sector, according to Forbes.com.
But most of the increase went to the big three of the modeling world, Gisele Bundchen, Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, who have molded themselves into moguls in their own right, or morphed into pop icons, or both.
Despite the elites' burgeoning wealth, it's a different story down in the trenches, Forbes said.
Younger models just getting started are finding their paychecks have shrunk since pre-recession days.
Supermodels
Travels Woe
Charles Darwin
The very travels that inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and shaped modern biology may have led to one of the illnesses that plagued the British naturalist for decades and ultimately led to his death, modern researchers say.
Darwin's ailments are the topic of an annual conference in Baltimore on Friday that offers modern medical diagnoses for the mysterious illnesses and deaths of historical figures. In past years, the conference hosted by the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Veterans Administration's Maryland Health Care System has looked at Alexander the Great, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Booker T. Washington. Guest speakers include Darwin's great-great-granddaughter, poet Ruth Padel, who penned the book, "Darwin: A Life in Poems."
Philip A. Mackowiak, the VA Maryland medical care clinical center chief and UM medical school professor who started the conference in 1995, had Darwin on his running list of possible candidates for years.
Throughout his life, Darwin sought help for multiple health problems, which included vomiting stomach acids after every meal when the symptoms were at their worst. He was diagnosed with dozens of conditions including schizophrenia, appendicitis and lactose intolerance.
Charles Darwin
In Memory
Marian Mercer
Tony Award-winning "Promises, Promises" actress Marian Mercer, whose five-decade career also included dozens of television appearances, has died in California at age 75.
Her husband, Patrick Hogan, tells the Los Angeles Times that Mercer died April 27 of Alzheimer's disease complications in the Newbury Park area of Thousand Oaks, about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
Besides her 1969 Broadway hit "Promises, Promises," Mercer won praise for the 1978 revival of "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off" co-starring Sammy Davis Jr.
On television, she starred in the ABC-TV comedy "It's a Living" from 1980 to 1982. She also had roles on "St. Elsewhere," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" and "Love, American Style."
Besides her husband of 31 years, Mercer is survived by a daughter, Deirdre Whitaker, of Seattle.
Marian Mercer
In Memory
Arthur Laurents
US playwright, screenwriter and director Arthur Laurents, best known for inspiring the Broadway musicals "West Side Story" and "Gypsy" died here late Thursday aged 93, US media reported.
Laurents's film credits included Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope," "The Turning Point" with Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine, and "The Way We Were" starring Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, adapted from his novel of the same name.
But he was perhaps best known for the hit 1957 musical "West Side Story" based on his book, which set Romeo and Juliet in a gritty New York, their feuding families replaced by rival street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets.
Two years later he helped create "Gypsy," a musical about stripper Gypsy Lee Rose told from the point of view of her overbearing mother, famously played by Ethel Merman.
Laurents was born in New York on July 14, 1917, and drafted into the army in 1941 before his career took off.
In 1945 he made his Broadway debut with "Home of the Brave," a play about a Jewish soldier wrestling with army anti-Semitism and the death of his friend in fighting in the Pacific during World War II.
He later enjoyed a stint in Hollywood, writing the screenplay for the 1956 film Anastasia, in which Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for playing a woman believed to be the sole survivor of the family of Russia's last czar.
He published his first novel, "The Way We Were," in 1972 and turned it into a screenplay the following year. The 1973 film starred Streisand as a Jewish political activist and Robert Redford as an apolitical screenwriter.
In it, Laurents drew on his own experience as a screenwriter during Hollywood's red scare in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was among several suspected Communist sympathizers who were blacklisted.
Laurents was openly gay, and spent more than 50 years with his partner Tom Hatcher until the latter died of lung cancer in 2006.
Arthur Laurents
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