Last year, as crops across the Sahel belt of West and Central Africa
withered, and the sky stubbornly held onto its rain, Kaltuma Brahim
was growing desperate. She knew her tiny son needed help. He'd been

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"This is the best American crowd we've seen in a long, long time."

It only took Kings of Leon frontman and lead singer Caleb Followill 50 minutes to reach that conclusion Friday night at the Hangout Festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Getting almost everyone's undivided attention as the headlining -- and only remaining -- act on opening night of the three-day event, Followill had every reason to throw the audience a bone as they reacted wildly to every move made on the massive Hangout Stage.

For years now, profitable foreign-based airlines have offered newer, more luxurious aircraft than their poorer U.S.-based competitors. British Airways has had sophisticated entertainment systems in all classes and lie flat seats in their premium cabins for years now. But if you flew on American, Delta, or United, it was probably in an aging 757 or 767, maybe with one of those 1980's-era T.V. monitors hanging from the ceiling. Lie flat seats? Good luck.

But finally, the remaining legacy U.S. airlines are stepping up their game to compete with foreign-based carriers. And it can't come too soon. We have suffered long enough with those embarrassing, elderly planes. Now that they've merged and capacity-cut they're buying new planes, refurbishing older models from top to bottom, and adding amenities that used to be found only on British Airways, Singapore, Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa and other aviation icons.


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Person You Choose, 2013
oil on canvas
42 by 36 inches

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Illustration for Coolidge's poem, Kubla Khan

Sarah Polley has been working consistently in film and television since she was a child, and what's most astounding about the multi-hyphenate filmmaker, who spends her days smoothly segueing back-and-forth between actor, writer, and director, is how much enthusiasm she continues to have for the industry as she continually seeks out new, innovative ways of telling stories.

That enthusiasm is ably reflected in her latest directorial endeavor, the appropriately-titled documentary Stories We Tell, in which she offers a peek into revelations from her own life, using those revelations to make some very piquant observations about human nature. The doc is built on a series of surprises that I won't dare to spoil here, but I will say you owe it to yourself to see it knowing as little ahead of time as possible.

I had the opportunity to talk to the multi-hyphenate filmmaker recently, and we discussed the story behind Stories, what moves her to choose the projects she does, and more. Check out the full text of our chat below:

With a workforce of more than one million, the electronics giant Foxconn has enough workers in its Chinese factories to fill a small country. So it's fitting that the company has vowed to make its manufacturing kingdom a bit more democratic by encouraging union elections.

But although the company announced its push for union democracy in February, a subsequent study by academics in Hong Kong and mainland China reveals that many workers don't even know whether they're in a union, and many others don't have a clear idea of what their union does or how it works. And that actually makes perfect sense, since China's unions are ill-defined, bureaucratized institutions --politically ineffective by design.

The union plan is part of a host of promised reforms that followed public scrutiny of Foxconn's premiere client, Apple. The Apple brand has come under fire from advocacy groups and the media for profiting from the exploitation of young Foxconn workers -- underscored by a series of employee suicides stretching from 2010 to just a few weeks ago.

Francois Ozon almost charmed me into liking his new film Young and Beautiful which premiered this week at Cannes, what with his easy grin, quick wit, and snazzy outfit (navy jacket and chic blue-white scarf tossed around his neck), but the subject matter--voluntary prostitution-- is too charged a subject to switch-hit.

Young and Beautiful tells the story of a stunning 17 year old girl, Isabelle, from a typical classy bourgeois family in Paris (i.e. Henri IV high school, vacations on the Riviera, BCBG life in the cinquieme), who decides to become a prostitute to much older men, not because she needs the money, "but because it is a way to test the limits of adolescence," the director told us.

LA Phil President Debra Borda and Music Director Gustavo Dudamel

On 9/11, Islam jihadists turned four U.S. airlines into weapons of mass destruction and killed almost 3,000 people. Within a month the George W. Bush administration had convinced themselves, and much of America, that Iraq, while not the source of the 9/11 attacks, nevertheless was holding "weapons of mass destruction" intended for America, and he launched the United States' first unprovoked war against a foreign nation in our history. Within weeks his administration established the Patriot Act, giving his government wide-ranging powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps (parts of which were recently extended under the Obama Administration).

Since then, trillions upon trillions of dollars have been spent on "counter-terrorism" efforts. An alphabet soup of governmental agencies have come (TSA, DNI, DHS, NCTC, CVE, NSI, ICE, NCC) and gone (TTIC, INS). NSA, the government's eavesdropping agency, is building a $2 billion facility in Utah capable of capturing trillions of emails, web searches and business transactions. A second, similar unit is to be built in San Antonio. Our defense budget has doubled in the last decade. And our government now deploys more tools than ever to monitor its citizens -- to prevent another attack.

U.S. air travelers are subjected to heightened security scrutiny -- required to remove belts, hats, jackets; discard water bottles; gather remaining 3-ounces-or-less containers of liquid into separate bags for screening; random full-body scans; required to place computers, cell phones, Kindles and iPads in separate trays, et al. A failed shoe bomber prompted an additional requirement to remove our shoes, pre-screening. It's a wonder the failed underwear bomber didn't provoke further scrutiny, because some of this has reached ridiculous stages: In Florida a couple of years ago, a gravely ill, 95-year-old woman was forced to remove her wet diaper before she could pass security.

Welcome to Barre None, my new video blog exclusively on Huffington Post. I'm Sara Mearns and I hope to be your tour guide into the world of classical ballet. You might ask yourself, "Why a video blog that goes behind the scenes of a classical ballet dancer's daily life?" Because what you see on the stage does not begin to capture what ballet or our lives are all about. You see the performance, but what you don't see -- the rehearsals, the costume designs, the frazzled nerves, the learning of a new ballet, the constant travels around the world, the injuries and the oftentimes long, painful road to recovery that lead us to wonder if this is the injury that can end a career -- it's all a part of what we do and who we are.

I'm only one dancer, but I hope that by giving you a window into my life as a principal ballerina at New York City Ballet, a door will be opened to more interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm for this artform that I, and so many others, love and work so hard for. So come on in, pull up a seat, and join me every Friday. You'll have a great time. I promise. Barre None.

Ballerina With A Twist

It's always Howdy Doody time in music producer Hal Willner's workspace at the Film Center building in Manhattan. Best known for producing music for Saturday Night Live, Willner shares his lair with many antique puppets, Jackie Gleason memorabilia including a Ralph Cramden bus driver's suit, as well as DVD's of Shoah and other Holocaust films. He jokes, "My work sounds like a Warner Brothers cartoon or the soundtrack to a movie about Dachau."

The ability to live comfortably with these juxtapositions may be why he was tapped to work on the Jazz Foundation of America's annual benefit at the Apollo Theater on Friday night, his third year in a row. Celebrating Quincy Jones' birthday, and offering tribute to people who are about to leave us, like Clark Terry, Elvis Costello, Paul Schaffer, Macy Gray, and many others will perform. Jeffrey
Wright will introduce an act or two.

by guest blogger Coach Mark Smallwood, Rodale Institute executive director

Read my review of 2009's Star Trek here

2009's hugely successful sequel/prequel/reboot Star Trek did a lot more than apply the paddles to the moribund Trek brand after a brief, apathy-induced interregnum. It also opened the franchise up to a wider, more diverse audience than it ever enjoyed in the previous four decades, through ten feature films, six TV series, and mountains of licensed memorabilia. Given that Star Trek practically invented the pejorative perception of geekdom, that's quite the feat, and given that considerable feather in his cap, it's understandable that director J.J. Abrams would leverage that success to go bigger and wider with his follow-up, Star Trek Into Darkness.

What's less understandable is why, given the sky's-the-limit free rein offered by the time-twisting, alternate reality shenanigans of the previous film, which effectively took a phaser-beam to the Gordian Knot of accumulated Star Trek continuity and "canon," Team Abrams instead assembled a patchwork pastiche for their curtain call, one that gleefully scavenges familiar moments from prior iterations of the brand, but with none of the accrued emotional heft. If the previous film was your entrée into the franchise, then you'll likely find this the perfect sequel. But for anyone with any knowledge of or fondness for Trek pre-Abrams, Into Darkness is a decidedly mixed bag that strives mightily to achieve a resonance it hasn't earned.

We've read a lot lately about the AP "scandal." In short, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press released a story that disclosed classified details of a CIA operation in Yemen that prevented an airliner bombing around the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In an effort to determine the identity of the government employee who leaked the classified information to the AP, the Justice Department, after conducting an extensive investigation without success, subpoenaed from the AP's phone company the records for more than twenty telephone lines used by the AP and its journalists. The hope was that, by examining the incoming and outgoing phone numbers, it could identify the leaker and prevent him or her from releasing additional classified information in the future.

According to the media (to say nothing of Republicans and Fox News), in pursuing this investigation the Obama administration brutalized the Constitution and flagrantly violated the law. The hysteria of the media's response is predictably self-involved and self-interested and the reaction of Republicans is predictably hypocritical.

This Buddha Doodle is available as a limited-edition archival print. Click this link to order: http://bit.ly/18Gk4eZ