Harry Potter Fans Commit to Issues, from Gay Rights to Genocide
Alyssa Rosenberg is a staff correspondent at Government Executive and writes about pop culture for The Atlantic. She blogs at http://alyssarosenberg.blogspot.com.
Fans of Harry Potter, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and True Blood are organizing to do good in the real world.
This Week's Hot Reads
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
This week: A reporter's journey to overcome a troubled childhood, a new collection of stories from Sherman Alexie, America's favorite hero gets a new biography, a civil rights tale of delayed justice, and a man's efforts to predict the future.
Early Oscar Bets
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
Awards season is heating up and the race is taking shape. Six influential Hollywood pundits and the Daily Beast predict the movies sure to get some Oscar love.
Oscar Voting Madness
Kim Masters covers the entertainment business for The Daily Beast. She is also the host of The Business, public radio's weekly program about the business of show business. She is also the author of The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else.
The academy changed the voting rules this year to include 10 Best Picture nominees with preferential ballots. Kim Masters on the Oscar chaos that has enraged Hollywood.
Sex Advice from Cyrano
Ben Crair is an associate editor at The Daily Beast.
Katherine Heigl's new movie, The Ugly Truth, shows how Cyrano de Bergerac, the poetic romantic hero, has been turned into a lecherous player.
9 Shocking News Videos from This Week
The Daily Beast Video curates the most essential and entertaining video, and brings you original and exclusive productions from our talented contributors.
Watch clips from a week rife with upsetting news, from the violence in Tehran, to the deaths of three American pop-culture idols, to a gubernatorial scandal.
David Carr on the NY Times and Star Trek
Rachel Sklar is the Editor-at-Large for Mediaite.com and a contributor to the Daily Beast. She was formerly a senior writer and editor at the Huffington Post and is currently working on Jew-ish, a humorous book about cultural identity. She recently launched online micro-giving site Charitini, and Twitters up a storm here.
The Daily Beast Video curates the most essential and entertaining video, and brings you original and exclusive productions from our talented contributors.
In this episode of The Daily Beast's new video series, Have a Drink With, Rachel Sklar talks Twitter, the pleasures of Diet Coke, and Star Trek versus Star Wars with David Carr of The New York Times.
The Company That Cracked Hollywood
Tom Shone was film critic of the London Sunday Times from 1994-1999. He is the author of two books, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press) and In The Rooms (Hutchinson), his first novel, to be published on July 7th 2009. He lives in New York.
With Up, Pixar continues to show why it's the Disney of the 21st century. The Daily Beast's Tom Shone reveals the secrets to their success and what Hollywood could learn from the maverick studio.
The First Summer Blockbuster?
Caryn James is a cultural critic for The Daily Beast. She also contributes to Marie Claire and The New York Times Book Review. She was a film critic, chief television critic and critic-at-large for The New York Times, and an editor at the Times Book Review. She is the author of the novels Glorie and What Caroline Knew. As a film commentator, she has been a guest on Charlie Rose, Today, CBS Sunday Morning and MSNBC.
Christian Bale's hotly anticipated Terminator Salvation opened Thursday-with an unexpected cameo by the Governator. But in an era of war, torture and terror, its popcorn movie clichés seem strangely off base.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's Chief Investigative Reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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