Straight Up | Jan Herman

The revised plans for “Memory Foundations” at Ground Zero are out. Architect Daniel Libeskind and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation made them public yesterday. Here’s a quick news summary, and here’s a more thorough report (free registration required). The plans still call for the world’s tallest structure but also for slimmer office buildings and boxier designs than the angular […]

By Jan Herman The bad news for anyone who followed it was that David Jiranek, founder of The Rwanda Project: Through the Eyes of Children, was only 45 when he died last month in a swimming accident. The good news has been that the Rwanda Project continues, thanks to a devoted tribe of friends and […]

By Jan Herman Your brain is hard wired in such a way as to recognize potential matches to familiar objects; this is how optical illusions work. But did you konw taht aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is […]

The life of David Hicks is nothing to write home about. He doesn’t get to write home much anyway. He’s been detained for 20 months at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the U.S. military. He used to be held in Camp X-Ray. But they closed that place down — something to do with inhumane conditions — […]

What is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing making bigger news than ever? This guy was yesteryear. For me, he has built-in nostalgia. I recall an interview I did with him in Chicago in 1982. It began: Arnold Schwarzenegger, budding film stars, puffs on his pipe like a banker on holiday and sends leisurely little clouds of smoke […]

So < FONT color=#003399>what about those acoustics? More verdicts are in, all tentative of course. “Clearly, the acoustics are excellent,” writes Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News. Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times, following up his first piece, writes this morning that “the discretely amplified Kenny Barron Quintet, a jazz ensemble, sounded […]

I guess I don’t have to read Paul Krugman’s new book, “The Great Unraveling,” a selection of his op-ed columns, to know what he’s been writing. I’ve read him faithfully ever since his column began, and a morning doesn’t go by when I don’t wish he wrote daily instead of just twice a week. If his […]

The nation mourns. Gee Dubya Shrub exploits. That, in so many words, is the gist of a report in today’s Washington Post: In the past six weeks, Bush has cited “9/11” or Sept. 11, 2001, in arguing for his energy policy and in response to questions about campaign fundraising, tax cuts, unemployment, the deficit, airport […]

A bit of groundling music criticism seems in order. Even if it’s not a view from the Ivory Tower, it might be worth two-and-a-half cents. Frankly, Carnegie Hall’s spanking new venue, the 650-seat Zankel Hall, seems like a knockout to me. Maybe I should equivocate, as the Ivory Tower boys do, by pointing out that […]

In a world bent on destruction, preservationists have fought to save everything from the wilderness and natural resources to linguistic and cultural heritages. Artistically, the “early music” movement for historically informed performance of works from the Medieval, Rennaisance and Baroque periods is probably the best-known example of the preservationist ethic. It also has a counterpart in […]

The publication of Bernard-Henri Levy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl? in English translation “has raised some questions about the facts surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Danny Pearl,” The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, Paul Steiger, wrote today in a memo to the WSJ newsroom. Steiger’s lengthy memo, obtained by Straight Up, reports “what we know […]

The nerve of them! First People magazine steals an idea from a lowly New Orleans author. Or so he alleges. And now Star magazine steals an idea from lowly me. Or so I allege. Thanks to Jim Romenesko on Poynter.com, I learned that Abram Shalom Himelstein sent People a review copy of his book, “What […]

So this morning I was watching the debut of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” and I thought: “Now I have a reason not to go to work.” Actually, I can think of many reasons. But this one was dressed in pink and white and told jokes. The sensation was something like a daytime Letterman talk show […]

By Jan Herman With the second anniversary of 9/11 almost upon us, we’re about to be inundated again by television documentaries on the World Trade Center, the attacks on it and the Pentagon, and even by a fictionalized replay of those events–although public officials and the news media have made less extensive plans to mark the […]

“The intelligence community has imperfect visibility.” That’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assessing U.S. confusion on the terrorist threats in Iraq, as quoted today in The New York Times. Doncha love the way he slaughters the language? He doesn’t just drain it of meaning, he sucks the life out of it. And how about his judgment on security in Iraq? […]

Simon Beaufoy, the British producer who wrote “The Full Monty,” is bringing out his new movie “This Is Not a Love Song.” The big deal about that is, it will be “the world’s first Internet premiere,” as the U.K. Film Council terms it. The flick, written by Beaufoy and directed by Bille Eltringham, is being screened […]

Maybe I shouldn’t have doubted Tom Friedman when he claimed that “Superstar,” the Arabic version of “American Idol,” was a force for democracy in the Middle East. Today comes word that another reality TV show, “Big Brother Africa,” has roughly 30 million viewers in across that continent. From Nigeria to Botswana, Kenya to South Africa, the […]