American Idol’s first mass audition of the new season is going on as we speak at Browns Stadium in Cleveland. They began lining up yesterday at 6am, 26 hours before the auditions were to begin today at 8am. Police estimated the hot, sweaty, musical crowd of hopefuls lined up around …

A druid and his sword suffer separation not lightly: Prosecutors dropped charges Tuesday against a man who explained that he carried a sword into a shop because he is a druid. At a brief appearance in court last month, Merlin Michael Williams, 26, said previous cases heard by the court …

I like Al Franken, although I like him much better as a humorist than as a partisan political pundit. Franken’s radio show will appear on the Sundance Channel beginning in September: “The Al Franken Show,” heard live each weekday from noon to 3 p.m. Eastern on Air America Radio, will …

I don’t care either way about Teresa Heinz Kerry’s outbursts: she isn’t the candidate, it is sexist to assume that her husband can “control” her (I sure as hell can’t control my wife), and her bluntness isn’t inherently good or bad – it just is. I am somewhat concerned about …

In the 9/11 report, the Bush administration was quite rightly assigned a significant part of the blame for failing to anticipate and prevent the attacks. Similarly, the administration should also be assigned credit – in this case “negative” credit – for preventing, or at least delaying, any major subsequent domestic …

I vividly recall when Deep Forest’s first hit, “Sweet Lullaby,” first poured into my ears, a beguiling hybrid of spacious ambient house and verdant pygmy chants and throat singing, an oddly intimate and organic music tickling something familiar in an atavistic corner of my brain. The entire ’92 Deep Forest …

I love Arrested Development: the particularity of its absurdity is sharp and richly detailed, rendering its satire on American values, the idle rich, the formerly idle rich, the formerly rich but still idle, and intra-family relationships telling as well as hilarious. The critics and the industry love the show as …

JK Galbraith is exceptionally unwise for a brilliant old man, as demonstrated in this excerpt from his latest book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud : Truth For Our Time: We cherish the progress in civilisation since biblical times and long before. But there is a needed and, indeed, accepted qualification. …

Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga to director Alejandro González Iñárritu: I have an idea: let’s make a relentlessly grim, gray movie with lots of joyless mechanistic substance abuse (nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, religion) about the lives of a weak woman (Naomi Watts) who loses her husband and two young daughters to a hit-and-run …

You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a presidential candidate around here: President Bush, defending his record on the economy, told supporters Saturday in an Ohio town where job losses are a major issue that he has a four-year plan for peace and prosperity. “After four more years, the …