Trying to recruit Americans.
Rails, roads, airports closing too.
And compiles them in massive database.
Video shows him moving footballs.
Says negligence caused mother's death.
Through network of advocacy groups.
Shot himself in the chest.
One-third don't share DNA mutations.
For first time in decade.
Will have shoulder surgery this week.
Alex Gibney’s highly anticipated documentary ‘Going Clear,’ which premiered at Sundance, makes some shocking claims about the Scientology A-lister’s split from Nicole Kidman.
The creator and star of HBO’s Girls sat down at Sundance to discuss her Eloise documentary, Hannah’s Iowa mess, and her legion of haters.
Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne, Patricia Arquette, and J.K. Simmons all gave moving SAG Award speeches Sunday night. Here's why they'll all win Oscars, too.
Barack Obama seems ready to fight. In his State of the Union address he boasted about “assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism.” To demonstrate his determination, he will host a conference on the subj...
Can America’s ‘I’m-Ok-You’re-OK’ overly-psychological culture handle Islamism’s ‘I’m-Ok-Die-Infidel!’ death cult.
Last week was a great week for Hillary Clinton. The State of the Union was essentially 2016 Clinton’s campaign kickoff speech. Its themes of work and responsibility were vintage Clinton—Bill Clinton, anyway. Meanwhile, the Republicans were doing...
So Obama tees it up for Clinton by focusing on the middle class, and what does the GOP say? Cut entitlements! Can anybody play this game?
Here’s a fun little exercise for you. Go Google the phrase (in quotes) “the Republican senator from Israel.” It will return you 5,600 results. Maybe that isn’t that many in the scheme of things, but it’s still noteworthy that the overwhelming majo...
The White House is rightly apoplectic about Netanyahu’s address to Congress, but will Obama or Hillary sack up and let the Israelis know that it’s time for a new PM?
Does Hillary Clinton need binders full of women?Some Democrats, particularly women and people of color, think so.In interviews with The Daily Beast, nearly a dozen Democrats, said they were worried Clinton’s hires for the top echelons of her pre-c...
Hillary Clinton’s pre-presidential campaign has made some high-profile hires recently—but all of them, so far, are white males. And Democrats have noticed.
In his State of the Union address, the president told us he wants to craft a trade policy agenda fit for the 21st Century. If only!A true free trade agenda should be the cornerstone of any “middle class economics” platform. Open international mark...
The president’s lukewarm embrace of truly unfettered international trade leaves a lot to be desired.
For female urbanites—and New Yorkers in particular—Eloise represented their wildest fantasy come to life: a free-spirited, wildly independent young girl who lives in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel and embarks on an endless array of First World a...
The creator and star of HBO’s Girls sat down at Sundance to discuss her Eloise documentary, Hannah’s Iowa mess, and her legion of haters.
The SAG Awards are a quirky curio of awards season. They're certainly among the most important entertainment awards given out each year and can often be used to take the temperature of how Oscar voters are feeling. They are also barely watche...
Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne, Patricia Arquette, and J.K. Simmons all gave moving SAG Award speeches Sunday night. Here's why they'll all win Oscars, too.
Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is arguably the most hotly anticipated film premiering at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.HBO Documentary Films, which is releasing the eye-opening documentary on the Church of Scient...
Alex Gibney’s highly anticipated documentary ‘Going Clear,’ which premiered at Sundance, makes some shocking claims about the Scientology A-lister’s split from Nicole Kidman.
Gore Vidal once said, “There are two things you never turn down: Sex and appearing on television.”Indecent overexposure notwithstanding, he understood the power of TV in a way that few public intellectuals of his time did. While the small screen w...
Vidal called Buckley a 'crypto-Nazi' and Buckley threatened to ‘sock you in your goddamn face.’ The Sundance documentary ‘Best of Enemies’ goes inside the famous feud.
When Francis Ford Coppola first saw a screening of Peter Bogdanovich’s second movie, The Last Picture Show, he couldn’t believe the reception. The movie ended, credits rolled, and the audience stood and applauded. That kind of appreciation is the ...
The director hauled a film crew to Larry McMurtry's home town of Archer City, Texas. Grover Lewis tagged along and wrote one of the best stories about moviemaking ever written.
Almost fifty years ago, ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary and his colleagues penned an essay titled "On Programming Psychedelic Experiences."Essentially, the article served as a field manual for navigating awareness during altered state...
Pay attention. What if you could focus and control your consciousness when under the influence of psychedelics? Cognitive roller-coasters may be upon us.
I was still shy onstage then. I didn’t say much into the mike, and I wasn’t doing interviews. But if I wanted to meet someone I was fearless and nobody was bigger in my eyes than Miles Davis.Bill [Graham] was booking a summer weekend up in Tanglew...
In an excerpt from his autobiography, ‘The Universal Tone,’ Carlos Santana describes how he met and befriended Miles Davis and the stages and music they shared.
Kurdish forces’ apparent near victory of the northern Syrian city of Kobani marked the first major defeat for ISIS at the hands of local ground troops and the U.S. air war.But the four-month campaign to reclaim the city also exposed the fragility ...
Kurdish fighters now control 90 percent of Kobani—and winning the besieged Syrian city back from the terror group exposed the vulnerability of the U.S. and coalition effort.
ABUJA, Nigeria — For Dauda Musa, voting in Nigeria’s upcoming election is not a choice between candidates; it is one between life and possible death.The 31-year-old is from Chibok, the largely Christian town where almost 300 schoolgirls were abduc...
Forced to flee a murderous terrorist group, many Nigerians now can’t vote out the government they believe has failed them.
By Mahrokh GholamhosseinpourWhen I was growing up in southern Iran, there were many dark and painful stories about young women and girls whose loss—or whose alleged loss—of virginity effectively became a death sentence. Clearest in my mind is th...
In a culture where women who do not bleed on their wedding night may pay with their lives, there’s a creative way to fool the groom.
Mohsin Hamid’s first three novels are canny, intimate reader-writer transactions. His debut, Moth Smoke (2000) casts the reader as judge (“Your gavel falls like the hammer of God”). The Pakistani protagonist of his second novel, The Reluctant Fund...
One of Pakistan’s most famous novelists, Mohsin Hamid, is out with a collection of essays that tackle everything from being Muslim-American to why Pakistan has become so messy.
Here’s a fun little exercise for you. Go Google the phrase (in quotes) “the Republican senator from Israel.” It will return you 5,600 results. Maybe that isn’t that many in the scheme of things, but it’s still noteworthy that the overwhelming majo...
The White House is rightly apoplectic about Netanyahu’s address to Congress, but will Obama or Hillary sack up and let the Israelis know that it’s time for a new PM?
CARACAS, Venezuela — “God will provide,”said Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in his State of the Union speech last Wednesday. Praying is one of the few options left for Maduro, after an unsuccessful international tour of the Middle East, where...
Falling oil prices and incompetent governance mean Venezuela might default on its debts, leaving major trading partners like Brazil holding the bag.
Before he was released from a U.S. maximum-security prison last week, a confessed al Qaeda sleeper agent was offered up in a potential prisoner swap that would have freed two Americans held abroad.The Daily Beast has learned that the proposal was ...
Before the Qatari government freed an imprisoned American couple, they asked for a jailed terrorist in return. That al Qaeda agent was recently released from the Supermax prison.
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a press conference Sunday, "This could be the biggest snowstorm in the history of this city.” The National Weather Service (NWS) and Weather Channel meteorologist Chris Dolce have both said the impending storm...
The East Coast already looks like a snow globe thanks to winter storm Juno, but the worst is yet to come.
Well, this was bound to happen.You may have heard of the Christian baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. In December 2013, he was found to have violated Colorado’s antidiscrimination law. The Christian right was outraged.And now...
Is it discrimination when a baker refuses to bake a cake saying ‘God Hates Gays’? No—but the opponents of LGBT equality are still likely to win.
When the heat fails in Keisha Jacobs’ Brooklyn apartment during the winter months, discomfort is just one of her troubles. The frigid temperatures create a spiral of aggravation and unplanned bills that can mar the entire season.Her two-year-old d...
The city’s crooked landlords frequently leave tenants without heat, often causing illness and unplanned bills.
During the course of any normal day I usually pay more attention to assembling a grocery list than I do to reading movie reviews, although there are a more than a few film critics who bring huge insight to their work. A.O. Scott of the Times, Joe ...
Lost in the right/left debate over the new Clint Eastwood film is how few Americans fought this century’s wars, and how the suffering of their families has often gone unnoticed.
Eric McDavid says a lot with his eyes. He’s constantly using his hands, too, as if feeling for the temperature of a question before answering it, stroking the air to smooth out a kink or sometimes using all five fingers to pluck and draw down the ...
After a decade in prison for an alleged bomb plot, Eric McDavid was released this month—ten years early—after documents proved that he was entrapped by the FBI. Here’s his story.
By Amanda Woerner for Life by DailyBurn If you were gifted a fitness tracker this year, we bet you had grand ambitions of using it to finally get fit. You swore you’d take 10,000 steps a day, log miles, track calories, count your zzz’s and maybe e...
Tips to Get the Most From Your Tracker
When my daughter was five, we were strolling alongside a Ukrainian Orthodox church in our neighborhood when we spied an icon of Christ that was leaning on an exterior wall, about to be carted off for restoration work, perhaps. It was one of the bl...
The language Alex Malarkey used to describe his trip to heaven sounded suspect, but when he took it all back, he truly sounded like a tool of Evangelicals.
It’s a mad world when a bot buys drugs on the Internet. Somewhere in the deep, dark depths of cyberspace is a whole world that escapes the reaches of Google and Yahoo search engines or modern browsers. It is there in the deep web, known to those w...
Swiss police shut down an art and coding experiment after a ‘darknet’ shopping binge turned up some disturbing finds.
The commercial drone that crashed in a parking lot near Tijuana, Mexico carrying six pounds of meth has garnered a wealth of media attention in just 24 hours. Most of it inflating what is likely, for the world’s most powerful drug lords, child’s p...
A crashed drone carrying six pounds of meth has people buzzing, but the DEA has much bigger worries.
It’s been years since I visited California’s Disneyland, only just once as a small boy. Now that I have kids of my own, I know that sooner or later a trip to its bigger Florida cousin, Disney World, is probably in the cards. (They did right by my ...
A measles outbreak has sickened 70 people at Disneyland, and could be the spark that brings the once-eradicated disease back in force.
The nonsense idea that only desperate people use dating sites can be put in the dustbin of recent history. Online dating just is dating—much like online work is work (how some of us feed ourselves), online harassment is harassment (ask the FBI and...
You can now buy yourself an ‘invisible girlfriend,’ complete with voicemails and a social media trail. Weird or simply of the Internet age?
While coverage of the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa remains centered on the human populations in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, wildlife experts’ concern is mounting over the virus’ favorite victims: great apes. Guinea, where the epid...
In just four decades, Ebola has wiped out one third of the world’s chimp and gorilla populations. If it continues, the results will be devastating.
By the seventh glob of translucent organic amphetamine-laced candy, things are starting to go south.I’m not sure which will bring me down first, the pounding of my sleep-deprived, speed-addled heart or the looming sugar crash and impending diabete...
Our correspondent, buzzed on way too many energy bars, sweats and shakes his way through a huge outdoor retailer trade show.
Spain’s supreme court recently decided that it would, after all, hear a paternity suit from Ingrid Sartiau, a Belgian woman who claims the former king of Spain, Juan Carlos, who stepped down last year in favor of his son Felipe, is her father.The ...
As the former Spanish King faces a paternity suit, we look back at a lifetime of womanizing, including an alleged tryst with Princess Diana.
There’s something missing from the Great Cocktail Revival, something strangely and profoundly absent in the midst of an otherwise superabundant trend.To be sure, there’s no shortage of ambitious bartenders pouring hand-crafted cocktails made with ...
We may love drinking them, but there hasn’t been a cocktail since the Cosmopolitan to have struck really big. What’s gone awry in the mixing?
Thanks to the accessibility of photography, “everybody is a celebrity,” stated Susan Sontag in her essay America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly. “No moment is more important than any other moment; no person is more interesting than any other pe...
A Paris exhibition features photographs of Travolta, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, and others—just before their careers went stellar.
Would media mogul Mike Bloomberg like to buy The New York Times? That question has been raised continually over the past decade, and it’s the subject of renewed speculation today in a gossipy, hypothetical piece posted on New York magazine’s web ...
The NYT stoutly maintains it is not for sale, after a flurry of rumors that the former New York City Mayor is considering a bid to purchase the paper.
Patrick J. Adams embodies a picture-perfect young Hollywood star: chiseled features, a leading role on a hit TV show (Suits) and an equally successful and attractive fiancé (Troian Bellisario, Pretty Little Liars).But what you might not know about...
He’s known as the badass lawyer Mike Ross on the hit show Suits, but Patrick J. Adams’ true passion of photography is rooted in a dramatic childhood.
The last time Ali Rezaian saw his kid brother, Jason—who today, Jan. 23, is marking 185 days of incarceration in Iran’s Evin Prison, notorious for the torture and execution of political dissidents since the reign of the shah—they were in Istanbul ...
Iranian authorities refuse to say why Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian is incarcerated at the notorious Evin jail. His brother is leading the fight for his freedom.
Until recently, Artemis Pebdani was one of the best kept secrets on television.Since 2004, Artemis has appeared on a diverse array of network and cable television in supporting roles including Ugly Betty, Modern Family, and How I Met Your Mother. However, it was in her recurring role as Artemis Dubois on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that the actress has been able to flex her comedic and dramatic muscles. With just one line, whether about her bleached asshole...
With just one line, whether about her bleached asshole or conspiratorial fervor over who pooped the bed, the Iranian-Texan fits snuggly with the eclectic cast of ‘It’s Always Sunny.’
The United Nations just took another step in its mission to turn Emma Watson into its next Angelina Jolie-style human-rights warrior.On Friday, UN Women launched the HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 initiative. The one-year pilot project—geared toward adv...
The United Nations makes its latest move to transform the ‘Harry Potter’ alum turned goodwill ambassador into the next Angelina Jolie.
The light pink shirt that Ross Ulbricht was wearing when he came into Manhattan federal court from the holding pen on Wednesday seemed to make his mom forget everything else for one wonderful moment.“It looks good,” she told him.Lyn Ulbricht appea...
Lyn Ulbricht was like any other mother, worrying about her son Ross, what he wore at trial. But she couldn’t look at him as testimony laid bare his life as an alleged drug kingpin.
For centuries, the pervasive power of the Madonna-whore complex has dictated society’s view of women, limiting them to the either the role of the nurturing virgin or seductive siren. In the past 100 years, this dichotomy has morphed into the gee...
A computer genius never without pink lipstick and heels, Arrow’s Felicity Smoak is a fully-fleshed out female character amidst a sea of superhero bulge.
By Julie Rovner, Kaiser Health News Deb Hauser was a married mother of a 6-month-old when her husband “went to work one day and didn’t come home.” Two weeks later, she realized she was pregnant. “I’m working full time. I’ve g...
Pro-choice groups urge women to tell their own abortion stories to change the public view of the procedure.
On page one of filmmaker and artist Miranda July’s novel The First Bad Man, the narrator, Cheryl Glickman, is driving to a doctor’s appointment, imagining how she might look to passersby on the street and in other cars: “When I stopped at red ligh...
In her debut novel, filmmaker/artist/author Miranda July creates the indelible Cheryl Glickman, the anti-romantic likes of whom we rarely see in fiction.
Lawmaking officially began last week in most states, and it should surprise no one that abortion is again high on the list of priorities for a number of legislatures going into 2015.Since the 2010 election tipped statehouses Republican, states ado...
Republican state legislatures are getting an early start on draconian bills that would make it harder than ever for women to get an abortion.
The Trace By Forrest Gander New Directions, 240 pp, $22.95Dale and Hoa, the couple whose road trip across the southern border into Mexico is the focus of poet Forrest Gander’s new novel “The Trace,” are not exactly traveling for pleasure. True, ...
A vision quest gone wrong, a poet laurate looks back on life, and an academic reconsidering of Modernism in Nazi Germany. By Nicholas Mancusi
When Francis Ford Coppola first saw a screening of Peter Bogdanovich’s second movie, The Last Picture Show, he couldn’t believe the reception. The movie ended, credits rolled, and the audience stood and applauded. That kind of appreciation is the ...
The director hauled a film crew to Larry McMurtry's home town of Archer City, Texas. Grover Lewis tagged along and wrote one of the best stories about moviemaking ever written.
Taken together, the title and subtitle of Daniel Bolger’s Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars suggest it’s either another contribution to an increasingly crowded genre—a memoir from an American soldier who has ...
Both a soldier and a scholar, Gen. Daniel Bolger seems ideally equipped to hash out what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan, but even his expertise and honesty are not enough.
The secret history of same-sex marriage By Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Guardian Same-sex marriage is making the headlines, with Stephen Fry’s wedding and the US supreme court soon to decide on its legality. It seems like a quintessentially 21st-c...
The secret history of same-sex unions, ‘Internet Sexual’ and wolf fights. The Daily Beast picks the best journalism from around the web this week.
I was still shy onstage then. I didn’t say much into the mike, and I wasn’t doing interviews. But if I wanted to meet someone I was fearless and nobody was bigger in my eyes than Miles Davis.Bill [Graham] was booking a summer weekend up in Tanglew...
In an excerpt from his autobiography, ‘The Universal Tone,’ Carlos Santana describes how he met and befriended Miles Davis and the stages and music they shared.
When my daughter was five, we were strolling alongside a Ukrainian Orthodox church in our neighborhood when we spied an icon of Christ that was leaning on an exterior wall, about to be carted off for restoration work, perhaps. It was one of the bl...
The language Alex Malarkey used to describe his trip to heaven sounded suspect, but when he took it all back, he truly sounded like a tool of Evangelicals.
Goddaughter of Queen Victoria, offspring of a deposed Maharajah, and fashion icon—Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was as unlikely an activist as one could find, let alone one who would garner headlines for her support and funding ...
Goddaughter of Queen Victoria, scion of the Lion of the Punjab, feminist revolutionary, Princess Sophia finally gets a worthy biography.
We should all be Okies from Muskogee.From that small Oklahoma town comes an example for the entire country on how a police department should conduct itself, starting with equipping its officers with body cameras and following through with a promis...
A recently issued body camera to a Muskogee, Okla., cop shows the value of openness, especially when guns are drawn.
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