Name	The New York Times
Caption	The front page of The New York Times on July 29, 1914
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Foundation	1851
Price	USD 1.25 Monday-SaturdayUSD 4.00 SundayUSD 4.00/5.00 Special Editions
Owners	The New York Times Company
Political position
Publisher	Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.
Editor	Bill Keller
Staff	350
Circulation	876,638 daily1,352,358 Sunday
Headquarters	The New York Times Building620 Eighth AvenueManhattan, New York
Issn	0362-4331
Website	NYTimes.com

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded, and continuously published in New York City, since 1851. The Times has won 104 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization. Its website was the most popular American online newspaper website , receiving more than 18 million unique visitors in that month.

Although the print version of the paper remains both the largest local metropolitan newspaper in the United States as well the third largest overall, behind The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, its weekday circulation has fallen since 1990, along the lines of other newspapers, to fewer than one million copies daily for the first time since the 1980s. Nicknamed "The Gray Lady" and long regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record", the Times is owned by The New York Times Company, which also publishes 18 other regional newspapers including the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe. The company's chairman is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose family has controlled the paper since 1896.

The paper's motto, printed in the upper left-hand corner of the front page, is "All the News That's Fit to Print." It is organized into sections: News, Opinions, Business, Arts, Science, Sports, Style, and Features. The Times stayed with the eight-column format for several years after most papers switched to six columns, and it was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography. The Times was made available on the iPhone and iPod Touch in 2008, and on the iPad mobile devices in 2010.

History

, The New York Times headquarters from 1913 to 2007]] The New York Times was founded on September 18, 1851, by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond, who was then a Whig and who would later be the second chairman of the Republican National Committee, and former banker George Jones as the New-York Daily Times. Sold at an original price of one cent per copy, the inaugural edition attempted to address the various speculations on its purpose and positions that preceded its release:

The paper changed its name to The New York Times in 1857. The newspaper was originally published every day except Sunday, but on April 21, 1861, due to the demand for daily coverage of the Civil War, The Times, along with other major dailies, started publishing Sunday issues. One of the earliest public controversies in which the paper was involved was the Mortara Affair, an affair that was the object of 20 editorials in The Times alone.

The paper's influence grew during 1870–71, when it published a series of exposés of Boss Tweed that led to the end of the Tweed Ring's domination of New York's City Hall. In the 1880s, The Times transitioned from supporting Republican candidates to becoming politically independent; in 1884, the paper supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in his first presidential election. While this move hurt The Times readership, the paper regained most of its lost ground within a few years. The Times was acquired by Adolph Ochs, publisher of the Chattanooga Times, in 1896. The following year, he coined the paper's slogan, "All The News That's Fit To Print";

In the 1940s, the paper extended its breadth and reach. The crossword began appearing regularly in 1942, and the fashion section in 1946. The Times began an international edition in 1946. The international edition stopped publishing in 1967, when The Times joined the owners of the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post to publish the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The paper bought a classical radio station (WQXR) in 1946. In addition to owning WQXR, the newspaper also formerly owned its AM sister, WQEW (1560 AM). The classical music format was simulcast on both frequencies until the early 1990s, when the big-band and standards music format of WNEW-AM (now WBBR) moved from 1130 AM to 1560. The AM station changed its call letters from WQXR to WQEW. By the beginning of the 21st century, The Times was leasing WQEW to ABC Radio for its Radio Disney format, which continues on 1560 AM. Disney became the owner of WQEW in 2007. winners, 2009]] The New York Times is third in national circulation, after USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper is owned by The New York Times Company, in which descendants of Adolph Ochs, principally the Sulzberger family, maintain a dominant role. In March 2009, the paper reported a circulation of 1,039,031 copies on weekdays and 1,451,233 copies on Sundays. According to a 2009 The New York Times article circulation has dropped 7.3 percent to about 928,000; this is the first time since the 1980s that it has fallen under one million.

In 2009, The Times began production of local inserts in regions outside of the New York area. Beginning October 16, 2009, a two-page "Bay Area" insert was added to copies of the Northern California edition on Fridays and Sundays. The Times commenced production of a similar Friday and Sunday insert to the Chicago edition on November 20, 2009. The inserts consist of local news, policy, sports, and culture pieces, usually supported by local advertisements.

In addition to its New York City headquarters, The Times has 16 news bureaus in New York State, 11 national news bureaus and 26 foreign news bureaus. The New York Times reduced its page width to from on August 6, 2007, adopting the width that has become the U.S. newspaper industry standard.

Because of its steadily declining sales in recent decades, The Times has been going through a downsizing for several years, offering buyouts to workers and cutting expenses, in common with a general trend among print newsmedia.

The newspaper's first building was located at 113 Nassau Street in New York City. In 1854, it moved to 138 Nassau Street, and in 1858 it moved to 41 Park Row, making it the first newspaper in New York City housed in a building built specifically for its use. The paper moved its headquarters to 1475 Broadway in 1904, in an area called Long Acre Square, that was renamed to Times Square. The top of the building is the site of the New Year's Eve tradition of lowering a lighted ball, that was started by the paper. The building is also notable for its electronic news ticker, where headlines crawled around the outside of the building. It is still in use, but is not operated by The Times. After nine years in Times Square, an Annex was built at 229 West 43rd Street. After several expansions, it became the company's headquarters in 1913, and the building on Broadway was sold in 1961. Until June 2007, The Times, from which Times Square gets its name, was published at offices at West 43rd Street. It stopped printing papers there on June 15, 1997.

The newspaper remained at that location until June 2007, when it moved three blocks south to 620 Eighth Avenue between West 40th and 41st Streets, in Manhattan. The new headquarters for the newspaper, The New York Times Building, is a skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano.

Times v. Sullivan

The paper's involvement in a 1964 libel case helped bring one of the key United States Supreme Court decisions supporting freedom of the press, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. In it, the United States Supreme Court established the "actual malice" standard for press reports about public officials or public figures to be considered defamatory or libelous. The malice standard requires the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove the publisher of the statement knew the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and difficulty in proving what is inside a person's head, such cases by public figures rarely succeed.

The Pentagon Papers

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers, a secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971, were given ("leaked") to Neil Sheehan of The New York Times by former State Department official Daniel Ellsberg, with his friend Anthony Russo assisting in copying them. The Times began publishing excerpts as a series of articles on June 13. Controversy and lawsuits followed. The papers revealed, among other things, that the government had deliberately expanded its role in the war by conducting air strikes over Laos, raids along the coast of North Vietnam, and offensive actions taken by U.S. Marines well before the public was told about the actions, and while President Lyndon B. Johnson had been promising not to expand the war. The document increased the credibility gap for the U.S. government, and hurt efforts by the Nixon administration to fight the on-going war.

When The Times began publishing its series, President Richard Nixon became incensed. His words to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger included "people have gotta be put to the torch for this sort of thing..." and "let's get the son-of-a-bitch in jail." After failing to get The Times to stop publishing, Attorney General John Mitchell and President Nixon obtained a federal court injunction that The Times cease publication of excerpts. The newspaper appealed and the case began working through the court system. On June 18, 1971, The Washington Post began publishing its own series. Ben Bagdikian, a Post editor, had obtained portions of the papers from Ellsberg. That day the Post received a call from the Assistant Attorney General, William Rehnquist, asking them to stop publishing. When the Post refused, the U.S. Justice Department sought another injunction. The U.S. District court judge refused, and the government appealed. On June 26, 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take both cases, merging them into New York Times Co. v. United States 403 US 713. On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court held in a 6–3 decision that the injunctions were unconstitutional prior restraints and that the government had not met the burden of proof required. The justices wrote nine separate opinions, disagreeing on significant substantive issues. While it was generally seen as a victory for those who claim the First Amendment enshrines an absolute right to free speech, many felt it a lukewarm victory, offering little protection for future publishers when claims of national security were at stake.

In 1935, Anne McCormick wrote to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, "'I hope you won't expect me to revert to "woman's-point-of-view" stuff.'" Later, she interviewed major political leaders and appears to have had easier access than her colleagues did. "Even those who witnessed her in action were unable to explain how she got the interviews she did." Said Clifton Daniel, "["[A]fter World War II",] I'm sure [chancellor of West Germany Konrad] Adenauer called her up and invited her to lunch. She never had to grovel for an appointment." Covering world leaders' speeches after World War II at the National Press Club was limited to men, by a Club rule. When women were eventually allowed in to hear the speeches, they still were not allowed to ask the speakers questions, although men were allowed and did ask, even though some of the women had won Pulitzer Prizes for prior work. Times reporter Maggie Hunter refused to return to the Club after covering one speech on assignment. Nan Robertson's article on the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, Ill., was read aloud as anonymous by a professor, who then said, "'It will come as a surprise to you, perhaps, that the reporter is a girl, ' he began. . . . [G]asps; amazement in the ranks. 'She had used all her senses, not just her eyes, to convey the smell and feel of the stockyards. She chose a difficult subject, an offensive subject. Her imagery was strong enough to revolt you.'" The Times "hired" Kathleen McLaughlin after "ten years" at the Chicago Tribune, where "[s]he did a series on maids, going out herself to apply for housekeeping jobs."

Ownership

620 Eighth Avenue]] The Ochs-Sulzberger family, one of the United States' newspaper dynasties, has owned The Times since 1896.

The Ochs-Sulzberger family trust controls roughly 88 percent of the company's class B shares. Any alteration to the dual-class structure must be ratified by six of eight directors who sit on the board of the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust. The Trust board members are Daniel H. Cohen, James M. Cohen, Lynn G. Dolnick, Susan W. Dryfoos, Michael Golden, Eric M. A. Lax, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and Cathy J. Sulzberger.

Turner Catledge, the top editor at The New York Times for almost two decades, wanted to hide the ownership influence. Sulzberger routinely wrote memos to his editor, each containing suggestions, instructions, complaints, and orders. When Catledge would receive these memos he would erase the publisher's identity before passing them to his subordinates. Catledge thought that if he removed the publisher's name from the memos it would protect reporters from feeling pressured by the owner.

Content

Sections

The newspaper is organized in three sections, including the magazine. # News: Includes International, National, Washington, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Sports, The Metro Section, Education, Weather, and Obituaries. # Opinion: Includes Editorials, Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor. # Features: Includes Arts, Movies, Theatre, Travel, NYC Guide, Dining & Wine, Home & Garden, Fashion & Style, Crossword, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Week in Review

Some sections, such as Metro, are only found in the editions of the paper distributed in the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut Tri-State Area and not in the national or Washington, D.C. editions. Aside from a weekly roundup of reprints of editorial cartoons from other newspapers, The Times does not have its own staff editorial cartoonist, nor does it feature a comics page or Sunday comics section. In September 2008, The Times announced that it would be combining certain sections effective October 6, 2008, in editions printed in the New York metropolitan area. The changes folded the Metro Section into the main International / National news section and combined Sports and Business (except Saturday through Monday, when Sports is still printed as a standalone section). This change also included having the name of the Metro section be called New York outside of the Tri-State Area. The presses used by The Times allow four sections to be printed simultaneously; as the paper had included more than four sections all days except Saturday, the sections had to be printed separately in an early press run and collated together. The changes will allow The Times to print in four sections Monday through Wednesday, in addition to Saturday. The Times announcement stated that the number of news pages and employee positions will remain unchanged, with the paper realizing cost savings by cutting overtime expenses. According to Russ Stanton, editor of the Los Angeles Times, a competitor, the newsroom of The New York Times is twice the size of the Los Angeles Times, which currently has a newsroom of 600.

Style

When referring to people, The Times generally uses honorifics, rather than unadorned last names (except in the sports pages, Book Review and Magazine). The newspaper's headlines for major stories tend to come with subheadings giving further details, although it is moving away from this style. It stayed with an eight-column format until September 1976, years after other papers had switched to six, and it was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography, with the first color photograph on the front page appearing on October 16, 1997. In the absence of a major headline, the day's most important story generally appears in the top-right hand column, on the main page. The typefaces used for the headlines are custom variations of Cheltenham. The running text is set at 8.7 point Imperial.

Joining a roster of other major American newspapers in recent years, including USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, The New York Times announced on July 18, 2006, that it would be narrowing the size of its paper by one and a half inches. In an era of dwindling circulation and significant advertising revenue losses for most print versions of American newspapers, the move, which was also announced would result in a 5 percent reduction in news coverage, would have a target savings of $12 million a year for the paper. The change from the traditional 54-inches broadsheet style to a more compact 48-inch web width was addressed by both Executive Editor Bill Keller and The New York Times President Scott Heekin-Canedy in memos to the staff. Keller defended the "more reader-friendly" move indicating that in cutting out the "flabby or redundant prose in longer pieces" the reduction would make for a better paper. Similarly, Keller confronted the challenges of covering news with "less room" by proposing more "rigorous editing" and promised an ongoing commitment to "hard-hitting, ground-breaking journalism". The official change went into effect on August 6, 2007.

The New York Times printed a display advertisement on its first page on January 6, 2009, breaking tradition at the paper. The advertisement for CBS was in color and was the entire width of the page. The newspaper promised it would place first-page advertisements on only the lower half of the page. The website had 555 million pageviews in March 2005. The domain nytimes.com attracted at least 146 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study. The Times Web site ranks 59th by number of unique visitors, with over 20 million unique visitors in March 2009 making it the most visited newspaper site with more than twice the number of unique visitors as the next most popular site. Also,, nytimes.com produced 22 of the 50 most popular newspaper blogs.

In September 2005, the paper decided to begin subscription-based service for daily columns in a program known as TimesSelect, which encompassed many previously free columns. Until being discontinued two years later, TimesSelect cost $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year, though it was free for print copy subscribers and university students and faculty. To work around this, bloggers often reposted TimesSelect material, and at least one site once compiled links of reprinted material. On September 17, 2007, The Times announced that it would stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight the following day, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site. In addition to opening almost the entire site to all readers, The Times news archives from 1987 to the present are available at no charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. Access to the Premium Crosswords section continues to require either home delivery or a subscription for $6.95 per month or $39.95 per year. Times columnists including Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman had criticized TimesSelect, with Friedman going so far as to say "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it's cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience."

The Times is also the first newspaper to offer a video game as part of its editorial content, Food Import Folly by Persuasive Games.

reCAPTCHA is currently helping to digitize old editions of The New York Times.

Mobile presence

The Times Reader is a digital version of The Times. It was created via a collaboration between the newspaper and Microsoft. Times Reader takes the principles of print journalism and applies them to the technique of online reporting. Times Reader uses a series of technologies developed by Microsoft and their Windows Presentation Foundation team. It was announced in Seattle in April 2006 by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., Bill Gates, and Tom Bodkin. In 2009 the Times Reader 2.0 was rewritten in Adobe Air.

In 2008, The Times created an app for the iPhone and iPod touch which allowed users to download articles to their mobile device enabling them to read the paper even when they were unable to receive a signal. In April 2010, The Times announced it will begin publishing daily content through an iPad app. , The New York Times iPad app is ad-supported and available for free without a paid subscription, but will transition to a subscription-based model in 2011. After that, selected responses of Russian bloggers are being translated into English and published at The New York Times site among comments from English readers.

Pricing

The paper's prices are, except Sundays, $2.00 for the Metro and National editions and, on Sundays, $5.00 for the Metro edition and $6.00 or $7.00 for the national edition.

The paper announced on January 20, 2010, that starting in January 2011 it would charge frequent readers for access to its online content. Readers would be able to access a fixed number of articles each month without charge. However any reader that wanted to access more would have to pay a flat fee. This plan would allow free access for occasional readers, but produce revenue from heavy readers. Details have not been decided yet. Subscribers to the print edition of the newspaper would get full access without any additional fee.

Missed print dates

Due to strikes, the regular edition of The New York Times was not printed during the following periods:

December 9, 1962 to March 31, 1963. Only a western edition was printed.

September 17, 1965 to October 10, 1965. An international edition was printed, and a weekend edition replaced the Saturday and Sunday papers.

August 10, 1978 to November 5, 1978. A multi-union strike shut down the three major New York City newspapers. No editions of The Times were printed. Two months into the strike, a parody of The Times called Not The New York Times was given out in New York, with contributors such as Carl Bernstein, Christopher Cerf, Tony Hendra and George Plimpton.

No editions were printed on January 2 of 1852–1853 and of 1862–1867. No editions were printed on July 5 of 1861–1865.

Issues over coverage

Political persuasion overall

The Times has been variously described as having a liberal bias or described as being a liberal newspaper, or of having a conservative or center-right bias on certain issues.

According to a 2007 survey by Rasmussen Reports of public perceptions of major media outlets, 40% believe The Times has a liberal slant and 11% believe it has a conservative slant. In December 2004 a University of California, Los Angeles study gave The Times a score of 73.7 on a 100 point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most liberal. The validity of the study has been questioned by various organizations, including the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. In mid-2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), Daniel Okrent, wrote a piece in which he concluded that The Times did have a liberal bias in coverage of certain social issues such as gay marriage. He claimed that this bias reflected the paper's cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City. Okrent did not comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of "hard news", such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties, but did state that the paper's coverage of the Iraq war was insufficiently critical of the George W. Bush administration.

On nations and ethnicities

Iraq War

Reporter Judith Miller retired after criticisms that her reporting of the lead-up to the Iraq War was factually inaccurate and overtly favorable to the Bush administration's position, for which The Times was forced to apologize. One of Miller's prime sources was Ahmed Chalabi, who after the U.S. occupation became the interim oil minister of Iraq and is now head of the Iraqi services committee. However, reporter Michael R. Gordon, who shared byline credit with Miller on some of the early Iraq stories, continues to report on military affairs for The Times.

Israel and the Palestinians

For its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some have claimed that the paper is pro-Palestinian; and others have claimed that it is pro-Israel. A controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by political science professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, alleges that The New York Times sometimes criticizes Israeli policies but is not even-handed and is generally pro-Israel. On the other hand, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has criticized The Times for printing cartoons regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that were claimed to be anti-Semitic.

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt concluded in his January 10, 2009, column, "Though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job — and has largely succeeded."

Central America in 1980s

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive media criticism organization, has accused The New York Times of following the "Reagan administration's PR strategy" in the 1980s by "emphasizing repressive measures in Nicaragua [by the leftist Sandinista government] and downplaying or ignoring more serious human rights abuses elsewhere in Central America" (namely in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, countries with governments backed by the Reagan administration).

World War II

On November 14, 2001, in the New York Times 150th anniversary issue, former executive editor Max Frankel wrote that before and during World War II, the Times had maintained a consistent policy to minimize reports on the Holocaust in their news pages. Laurel Leff, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, concluded that the newspaper had downplayed the Third Reich targeting of Jews for genocide. Her 2005 book "Buried by the Times" documents the Times' tendency before, during and after World War II to place deep inside its daily editions the news stories about the ongoing persecution and extermination of Jews, while obscuring in those stories the special impact of the Nazis' crimes on Jews in particular. Professor Leff attributes this dearth in part to the complex personal and political views of the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, concerning jewishness, anti-semitism, and zionism.

During the war, Times journalist William L. Laurence was "on the payroll of the War Department". Another serious charge is the accusation that The Times, through its coverage of the Soviet Union by correspondent Walter Duranty, intentionally downplayed the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s.

Ethics incidents

In May 2003, Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign from the newspaper after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories. Some critics contended that Blair's race was a major factor in The Times initial reluctance to fire him.

The Times has been criticized for its "credulous" coverage of the charges of rape against Duke lacrosse players: "at the head of the guilt-presuming pack, The New York Times vied in a race to the journalistic bottom with trash-TV talk shows."

In the mid to late 1950s, "fashion writer[s] . . . . were required to come up every month with articles whose total column-inches reflected the relative advertising strength of every ["department" or "specialty"] store ["assigned" to a writer]. . . . The monitor of all this was . . . the advertising director [of the Times] . . . ." However, within this requirement, story ideas may have been the reporters' and editors' own.

In February 2009, the newspaper was accused of using "chintzy" ad-hominem allegations in an article on British Tamil music artist M.I.A. concerning her activism against the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka. M.I.A. joined others in criticizing the paper in January 2010 after a glowing travel piece about Sri Lanka was printed in it. In 2010, The New York Times Magazine was forced to publish a correction on the published online interview with M.I.A. after the interview conducted by current W editor and then The New York Times Magazine profiler Lynn Hirschberg contained various fabrications, misquotes and recontextualizations. In response to the piece, M.I.A. broadcasted Hirschberg's number and secret audio recordings from the interview via her Twitter and website following publication. Critics such as Robert Christgau and Dorian Lynskey of The Guardian mocked the obviousness of Hirschberg's and the paper's defamatory intentions, questioning why the magazine "adjudged Arulpragrasam such a shallow person that it granted her 20 of its 56 pages, adding a fashion spread to an interminable, skillfully "balanced" hatchet job by a Hollywood journalist whose last musical subject was Rick Rubin in 2006." Asked as to why she thought to record the interview and her reaction, M.I.A. noted: "They put me on the cover on Memorial Day weekend and the last person they'd had on the cover was Bill Clinton. They were putting me on the cover with eight extra pages than Clinton got. You knew something was about to go down." Ignorance and inconsistency within the New York Times was blamed as a factor, with critics such as Miranda Sawyer of The Observer, and M.I.A. herself, pointing out the irony of news items on the conflict printed by the newspaper itself.

See also

List of newspapers in the United States

List of The New York Times employees

List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times

Periodical publication

The New York Times Best Seller list

References

External links

Official website

Official mobile website

New York Times Timeline 2001–Present at The New York Times Company

Talk to the Newsroom: Executive Editor, The New York Times, January 28, 2009

Category:Investigative news sources Category:Media in New York City Category:Newspapers published in New York City Category:National newspapers published in the United States Category:Publications established in 1851 Category:Pulitzer Prize winning newspapers Category:Worth Bingham Prize recipients

Name	Taylor Swift
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Taylor Alison Swift
Birth date	December 13, 1989Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, United States
Instrument	Vocals, guitar, piano, ukulele
Genre	Country pop, pop, teen pop, country
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, musician, actress
Years active	2006–present
Label	Big Machine
Notable instruments	Custom-built Taylor acoustic guitars
Url
Associated acts	Nathan Chapman, Liz Rose

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American country pop Fearless topped the Billboard 200 for 11 non-consecutive weeks; no album has spent more time at No. 1 since 2000. Swift was named Artist of the Year by Billboard Magazine in 2009. Swift released her third album Speak Now on October 25, 2010 which sold 1,047,000 copies in its first week.

In 2008, her albums sold a combined four million copies, making her the best-selling musician of the year in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Forbes ranked Swift 2009's 69th-most powerful celebrity with earnings of $18 million and 2010's 12th-most powerful celebrity with earnings of $45 million. Swift was ranked the 38th Best Artist of the 2000–10 decade by Billboard. In January 2010 Nielsen SoundScan listed Swift as the most commercially successful country (or country/pop crossover) artist in music history with over 28 million digital tracks sold. , she has sold over 16 million albums worldwide.

Early life

Swift was born on December 13, 1989, the only daughter of Andrea Gardner (née Finlay), a homemaker, and Scott Kingsley Swift, a stockbroker. She was born and raised in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. Her maternal grandmother, Majorie Finlay, was an opera singer. Swift has a younger brother, Austin.

When she was in fourth grade, she won a national poetry contest with a three-page poem entitled "Monster In My Closet". When Swift was 10, a computer repairman showed her how to play three chords on a guitar, sparking her interest in learning the instrument. Afterwards, she wrote her first song, "Lucky You". She began writing songs regularly and used it as an outlet to help her with her pain from not fitting in at school. She was a victim of bullying, and often wrote songs to express her emotions. Swift also started performing at karaoke contests, festivals, and fairs around her hometown. When she was 12, she devoted an entire summer to writing a 350-page novel, which remains unpublished. Her first major show was a well-received performance at the Bloomsburg Fair. Swift attended Hendersonville High School but was subsequently homeschooled for her junior and senior years. In 2008, she earned her high-school diploma.

Swift's greatest musical influence is Shania Twain. Her other influences include LeAnn Rimes, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, and her grandmother. Although her grandmother was a professional opera singer, Swift's tastes always leaned more toward country music. In her younger years, she developed a love for Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. She also credits the Dixie Chicks for demonstrating the impact you can make by "stretching boundaries".

Music career

2000–05: Musical beginnings

At age 11, Swift made her first trip to Nashville, hoping to obtain a record deal by distributing a demo tape of her singing with karaoke songs. She gave a copy to every label in town, but was rejected.

After Swift returned to Pennsylvania, she was asked to sing at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, where her rendition of the national anthem received much attention. Swift started writing songs and playing 12-string guitar when she was 12. Swift began to regularly visit Nashville and wrote songs with local songwriters. By the time she was 14, her family decided to move to an outlying Nashville suburb.

When Swift was 15, she rejected RCA Records because the company wanted to keep her on an artist development deal. After performing at Nashville's songwriters' venue, The Bluebird Café, she caught the attention of Scott Borchetta, who signed her to his newly formed record label, Big Machine Records. At age 14, she became the youngest staff songwriter ever hired by the Sony/ATV Tree publishing house.

guitar in June 2006. Swift continues to perform with custom-made Taylor guitars.]]

2006–08: Taylor Swift

Swift released her debut single, "Tim McGraw", in mid-2006, reaching #6 on Billboard magazine's Hot Country Songs chart. Her self-titled debut album was later released on October 24, 2006. Debuting high on the Billboard 200, the album sold 39,000 copies during its first week. It peaked at #1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums and #5 on the Billboard 200. Her debut album spent eight consecutive weeks at the top of the Top Country Albums charts and remained at the top for 24 out of 91 weeks. The only other country artists this decade to achieve the number-one sales position for 20 weeks or more are The Dixie Chicks and Carrie Underwood.

The music video for "Tim McGraw" won Swift an award for Breakthrough Video of the Year at the 2007 CMT Music Awards. Her pursuit of country music stardom was the subject of "GAC Short Cuts", a part-documentary, part-music-video series airing since the summer of 2006. On May 15, 2007, Swift performed "Tim McGraw" at the Academy of Country Music Awards. Swift has been an opening act for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill on their Soul2Soul 2007 tour. She has opened in the past for George Strait, Brad Paisley and Rascal Flatts as well.

The second single from the Taylor Swift album, "Teardrops on My Guitar", was released February 24, 2007. In mid-2007, the song peaked at #2 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart and #33 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was re-released with a pop remix that brought "Teardrops on My Guitar" to #13 on the Hot 100 and #11 on the Pop 100. In October 2007, Swift was awarded Songwriter/Artist of the Year by the Nashville Songwriters Assn. Intl., making her the youngest artist ever to win the award.

Her third song off her debut album, "Our Song" spent six weeks at #1 on the Country charts, peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100, and rose to #24 on the Billboard Pop 100. Swift recorded a holiday album, , which was released exclusively at Target in late 2007. Swift was nominated for a 2008 Grammy Award in the category of Best New Artist, but lost to Amy Winehouse. Swift's successful single, "Picture to Burn", was the fourth single from her debut album. The song debuted and soon peaked at #3 on the Billboard Country chart in spring 2008.

HQ in 2007.]]

"Should've Said No" became Swift's second #1 single. In Summer 2008, Swift released Beautiful Eyes, an EP sold exclusively at Wal-Mart. In its first week of release, the album sold 45,000 copies, debuting at #1 on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart and #9 on the Billboard 200. With her self-titled debut album sitting at #2 during the same week, Swift became the first artist since 1997 to hold the Top 2 positions of the Top Country Albums chart. In October 2008, Swift performed a duet with best selling rock band Def Leppard in a taped show in Nashville, Tennessee, and their collaboration was up for both Performance of the Year and Wide Open Country Video of the Year at the CMT Music Awards in 2009.

2008–09: Fearless and MTV VMA incident

Swift's latest studio album, Fearless, was released in the United States on November 11, 2008. The album debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 Album Chart. Its sales of 592,304 were the highest debut of any country artist in 2008. This is also the largest opening U.S. sales week in 2008 by a female artist in all genres of music, and the fourth biggest overall behind Lil Wayne, AC/DC and Coldplay. Its lead single "Love Story" became a hit on both the country and pop charts. During the first week of release, more than 129,000 of Swift's sales were sold digitally. This gives Swift the best online start for any country album in history. It also makes Swift the fourth biggest week for a digital album since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking them in 2004. Through its eighth week of release, Fearless has sold more than 338,467 downloads, making it the bestselling country album in digital history. In second place is Swift's debut Taylor Swift with sales of 236,046 downloads as of April 18, 2009.

In its debut week, seven songs in total on Fearless were charted on Billboard Hot 100, tying Swift with Miley Cyrus for the most by a female artist in a single week. With "White Horse" charted at #13, this gave Swift her sixth top 20 debut of 2008, a calendar year record for any artist in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. Of the 13 tracks on Fearless, 11 have already spent time on the Hot 100. The song was also featured as part of the soundtrack of NBC's broadcast package of the Olympics.

The lead single from the album, "Love Story", was released on September 12, 2008. The Fearless album includes the "Love Story" music video which is based on Romeo and Juliet. The song has reached #2 on iTunes Store Top Downloaded Songs and #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Fifteen weeks after being added to pop radio, "Love Story" also became the first country crossover recording to hit number one on the Nielsen BDS CHR/Top 40 chart in the 16-year-history of the list, as well as number one on the Mediabase Top 40 Chart.

The second single from Fearless, "White Horse", was released on December 8, 2008. The music video for the song premiered on CMT on February 7, 2009. Though it missed the #1 spot on Billboard's Hot Country Songs as of the week April 11, 2009, "White Horse" claimed the #1 spot atop the USA Today/Country Aircheck chart (powered by Mediabase) in that week. "Forever & Always", another song from the album, was based on Swift's relationship with singer Joe Jonas.

She was the first artist in the history of Nielsen SoundScan to have two different albums in the Top 10 on the year end album chart.

Swift is Billboard's Top Country Artist and Hot Country Songwriter of 2008; she is also country music's best-selling artist of 2008. Swift ranked seventh on Nielsen SoundScan Canada's top-10 selling artists across all genres in 2008. Fearless and Taylor Swift took the #1 and #2 slots on 2008 Year-End Canadian Country Albums Chart. Swift sang the Star-Spangled Banner at game three of the World Series in Philadelphia on October 25, 2008.

in Prince Edward Island, Canada.]] In January 2009, Swift announced her North American Fearless Tour planned for 52 cities in 38 states and provinces in the US and Canada over the span of 6 months. The tour kicked off April 23 in Evansville, Indiana. In the same month, Swift made her first musical guest appearance on Saturday Night Live. On February 8, 2009, Swift performed her song "Fifteen" with Miley Cyrus at the 51st Grammy Awards.

As of the week ending February 8, 2009, Swift's single "Love Story" became the country song with the most paid downloads in history. Since the release of Swift's second album, Fearless, she has released one new song "Crazier" for the of the feature film . At the 44th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards, Swift picked up Album of the Year honors as a performer and producer for Fearless.

Swift is the youngest artist in history to win the ACM Album of the Year award. The Academy lauded her for career achievements including selling more albums in 2008 than any other artist in any genre of music, the breakthrough success of her debut album, and the worldwide crossover success of her #1 single "Love Story". The Academy also cited Swift's contribution to helping country music attract a younger audience. As of late April 2009, Swift has sold more than 14 million downloads, as well as three Gold Mobile Ringtones.

On April 28, 2009, Swift gave a free, private concert to students at Bishop Ireton High School, a small Catholic school in Alexandria, Virginia after the school won a national "TXT 2 WIN" contest from Verizon Wireless. The students sent over 19,000 text messages to Verizon during a roughly one month long contest. Swift played for about an hour during the school's field day, an annual day-long recess with games and activities. On October 8, 2009 Swift's official website announced that her sold-out Fearless Tour would return to North America for 37 additional dates in 2010.

Scheduled to perform on September 13, 2009, Swift attended the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.

This was her first VMA performance, where she became the first country music artist to win an MTV Video Music Award. During the show, as Swift was on stage accepting the award for Best Female Video for "You Belong with Me," singer/rapper Kanye West came on stage and took the microphone from Swift, saying that Beyoncé's video for "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", nominated for the same award, was "one of the best videos of all time," an action that caused the many audience members to boo West. He handed the microphone back to a stunned and reportedly upset Swift, who did not finish her acceptance speech. When Beyoncé later won the award for Best Video of the Year for "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", she called Swift up on stage so that she could finish her acceptance speech.

Following the awards show, West apologized for his verbal outburst in a blog entry (which was subsequently removed). and even by President Barack Obama in an "off the record" comment. He later posted a second apology on his blog and made his first public apology one day after the incident on the debut episode of The Jay Leno Show. She said West had not spoken to her following the incident.

On the chart week of November 14, 2009, Swift set a record for the most songs on the Billboard Hot 100 by a female artist at the same time with eight singles from the re-release of her 2008 album Fearless namely five debut new songs in the top 30: "Jump Then Fall" at #10, "Untouchable" at #19, "The Other Side of the Door" at #22, "Superstar" at #27 and "Come in With the Rain" at #30 and three already-charted songs that were released as singles—"You Belong with Me" (#14), "Forever & Always" which re-entered the chart at #34, and "Fifteen" (#46).

In addition, the song "Two Is Better Than One" by Boys Like Girls which features Swift, debuted at #80 in the same issue. This gives Swift six debuts in one week, the biggest number of debuts by any female artist of all time. It also lifts the number of her simultaneously-charting songs to nine, setting another record for the biggest number of charting songs by the same female artist in the same week. When "Fifteen" reached #38 on the chart week of November 21, 2009, Swift became the female artist with the most Top 40 singles this decade, surpassing Beyoncé. "Fifteen" became Swift's twentieth Top 40 single overall. "Two Is Better Than One" by Boys Like Girls and John Mayer's "Half of My Heart" both featured Swift, peaking at #40 and #25 respectively. The two songs are her 21st and 22nd Top 40 singles.

Fearless was the best-selling album of 2009 in the US with more than 3.2 millions copies sold in that year. Swift claimed both the #1 and #2 positions atop Nielsen's BDS Top 10 Most Played Songs chart (all genres), with "You Belong With Me" and "Love Story," respectively. She also topped the all format 2009 Top 10 Artist Airplay chart with over 1.29 million song detections, and the Top 10 Artist Internet Streams chart with more than 46 million song plays.

2010–present: Speak Now

Swift released the track "Today Was a Fairytale" as a digital download on iTunes on January 19, 2010. The song was featured on the soundtrack for the film Valentine's Day, in which she made her feature-film acting debut. The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 2, becoming her sixth Top 10 and 23rd Top 40 single on that chart. According to Nielsen SoundScan, with sales of "Today Was a Fairytale" more than 325,000 in its first week, Swift has broken the record for first-week download sales by a female artist. The song also debuted at number one on the Canadian Hot 100, making it Swift's first number one hit in Canada.

In February 2010, Swift brought her Fearless Tour to 5 cities in Australia. Opening acts included Gloriana.

In mid-July 2010, Billboard revealed that Swift's new album is called Speak Now. It was released on October 25, 2010. She has written the album completely by herself in Arkansas, New York, Boston and Nashville with Nathan Chapman serving as co-producer. On Wednesday, August 4, 2010, the lead single from the album, "Mine," was leaked onto the internet. Big Machine Records decided to rush the release of the song to counteract the leak.

Taylor Swift appeared at the 44th Annual Country Music Awards on November 10, 2010.

Songwriting style

Swift's lyrics are highly autobiographical; she has said that "If you listen to my albums, it’s like reading my diary." For example, the song "Forever & Always" was inspired by her relationship with Joe Jonas, while the song "Hey Stephen" was written about a boy who she toured with in the past. She has also indicated that she tries to write so her fans can relate to the lyrics, saying "My goal is to never write songs that my fans can't relate to." She parodied her confrontational style of songwriting during her appearance on Saturday Night Live; during her opening monologue, she performed an original song that featured lines such as "You might think I'd bring up Joe, that guy who broke up with me on the phone/ Hey, Joe, I'm doing real well, tonight I'm hosting 'SNL'" referring to her highly publicized relationship with Joe Jonas.

The intensely personal nature of the songs has drawn her attention in the music industry. Swift once said, "I thought people might find them hard to relate to, but it turned out that the more personal my songs were, the more closely people could relate to them."

The autobiographical nature of her songs has led some fans to research the songs' origins. Swift once said, "Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans." The New York Times described Swift as "one of pop's finest songwriters, country’s foremost pragmatist and more in touch with her inner life than most adults".

Other work

Acting

In 2008, Swift made her acting debut in Brad Paisley's music video "Online". In that same year Swift filmed a documentary for MTV entitled MTV's Once Upon a Prom and a documentary with Def Leppard for CMT entitled CMT Crossroads, which premiered on November 7, 2008. Swift collaborated with the Jonas Brothers in their 3D Concert Film, . The film was released on February 27, 2009 in North America and brought in $12.7 million on its opening weekend. Swift made her primetime television acting debut on CBS's "Turn, Turn, Turn" as Haley Jones on March 5, 2009 in the U.S. and Canada. The episode was watched by 20.8 million viewers. Swift made a cameo appearance in Kellie Pickler's music video "Best Days of Your Life". Swift also appeared in credited as "woman singing in the barn". The film was released on April 10, 2009 in North America. The television show Dateline NBC showcased an hour on Swift on May 31, 2009. The episode titled Dateline NBC: On Tour With Taylor Swift included scenes from her tour bus, concert footage, and rehearsals. Swift both hosted and performed as the musical guest for the November 7, 2009 episode of Saturday Night Live. In 2010, Swift made her feature film acting debut as Felicia in the film Valentine's Day. For this role she won the Teen Choice Award for Movie Female Breakout.

Cover model and recognition

Swift has been featured on the cover of a number of magazines. She has been a cover girl for Blender, for which she was one of two country artists during the magazine’s fifteen year run to be a cover subject. She was included in People's annual "100 Most Beautiful People" 2008, 2009, and 2010 lists. Additionally, she was named number fifty-seven on Maxim's sexiest women of 2008, and number thirty-one on the 2010 list. CosmoGirl voted Swift as the "2008 Girl of the Year". Swift was named by Rolling Stone magazine as one of "The RS 100: Agents of Change". She was nominated as a candidate for Times "2009 The Time 100 Finalists" list, which is determined by online voting. People magazine named Swift one of 25 Most Intriguing People of 2009.

Merchandise

Jakks Pacific released a celebrity doll of Swift in late 2008. Taylor Swift has been the face of L.E.I. Jeans (Life Energy Intelligence) since 2008. Swift and the L.e.i. Clothing Line made a deal to create a line based on Swift's style of dressing, which will appear in Wal-Mart in the coming months. However, Swift said she does not want to be called a designer. Instead, she says she will inspire the clothing company's dress line based on her own style. "I don't look at it like I'm branching out as a designer... It's not the Taylor Swift designer line." In 2009, Swift became the National Hockey League's newest celebrity spokesperson. She appears in commercials for the Nashville Predators.

In May 2009, Swift filed a lawsuit (kept sealed until August 2010) against numerous sellers of unauthorized counterfeit merchandise bearing her name, likeness, and trademarks, where she demanded a trial by jury, sought a judgement for compensatory damages, punitive damages, three times the actual damages sustained, and statutory damages, and sought for recovery of her attorney's fees and prejudgement interest. Nashville's U.S. District Court granted an injunction and judgment against the sellers, who had been identified at Swift's concerts in several states. The court ordered merchandise seized from the defendants to be destroyed.

Philanthropy

]] On September 21, 2007, Swift helped launch a campaign to protect children from online predators. She has teamed up with Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen to combat internet sex crimes.

Swift donated $100,000 to the Red Cross in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to help the victims of the Iowa flood of 2008. Swift has teamed up with Sound Matters to make listeners aware of listening "responsibly". Swift supports @15, a teen-led social change platform underwritten by Best Buy to give teens opportunities to direct the company's philanthropy through the newly-created @15 Fund. Swift's song, "Fifteen", is featured in this campaign. Swift lent her support to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal by joining the lineup at Sydney's Sound Relief concert, reportedly making the biggest contribution of any artist playing at Sound Relief to the Australian Red Cross. Swift donated her prom dress, which raised $1,200 for charity, to DonateMyDress.org. On November 20, 2009 after a live performance on BBC's Children in Need night Swift announced to Sir Terry Wogan she would donate £13,000 of her own money to the cause.

On December 13, Swift's own birthday, she donated $250,000 to various schools around the country which she had either attended or been involved with. Taylor Swift has donated a pair of her shoes - a gently-worn pair of black Betsey Johnson heels with her autograph on the sole - to the Wish Upon a Hero Foundation's Hero in Heels fundraiser for auction to raise money to benefit women with cancer.

In response to the May 2010 Tennessee floods, Swift donated $500,000 during a flood relief telethon hosted by WSMV, a Nashville television station.

Personal life

In 2008, Swift was in a relationship with pop singer Joe Jonas which ended in November of that year. Swift indicated that her heartbreak song, "Forever & Always", on her album Fearless was inspired by Jonas. The song "Back To December" off her album Speak Now, which Swift has described as an apology song, has been widely speculated to be dedicated to Lautner.

Filmography

Discography

Taylor Swift (2006)

Fearless (2008)

Speak Now (2010)

Awards and nominations

References

External links

Category:1989 births Category:Living people Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:American child singers Category:American country singer-songwriters Category:American female guitarists Category:American female singers Category:American film actors Category:American television actors Category:Big Machine Records artists Category:English-language singers Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Musicians from Pennsylvania Category:People from Berks County, Pennsylvania Category:Ukulele players Category:American Christians

Caption	Rudd at Hollywood Life magazine's 8th Annual Breakthrough Awards, December 2007
Birth name	Paul Stephen Rudd
Birth date	April 06, 1969
Birth place	Passaic, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Actor, screenwriter, producer
Years active	1992–present
Spouse

Paul Stephen Rudd (born April 6, 1969) is an American actor and screenwriter. He primarily appears in comedies, and is most well-known for his roles in the films Clueless, Wet Hot American Summer, , The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Dinner For Schmucks, Role Models, I Love You, Man and How Do You Know. On television, he is also well known for his role on the NBC sitcom Friends, playing Mike Hannigan, Phoebe Buffay's boyfriend and later husband.

Early life

Rudd was born in Passaic, New Jersey. His parents, who emigrated from Britain, were Jewish, and Rudd had a bar mitzvah. His family's original surname, "Rudnitzky", was changed by his grandfather to "Rudd". Rudd's father, Michael, was a historical tour guide who was formerly the vice president of World Airways, while Rudd's mother, Gloria, was a sales manager at the television station KSMO-TV. When he was ten, Rudd's family moved to Overland Park, Kansas, where he was raised. He attended high school at Shawnee Mission West and college at the University of Kansas, where he was a member of Sigma Nu fraternity. For one semester, he studied Jacobean drama at the University of Oxford.

Career

Rudd made his breakout performance in the 1995 film Clueless, which turned him into a minor teen idol. Additional early-career credits include Wet Hot American Summer, , The Cider House Rules, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and The Object of My Affection. He also garnered recognition with a recurring role on Friends as Mike Hannigan, who married Phoebe Buffay. Rudd's Broadway credits include The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), Twelfth Night (1998), and Three Days of Rain (2006). He guest-starred as a has-been 1990s rock star, Desmond Fellows, on the television series, Veronica Mars, in an episode titled "Debasement Tapes". He has also appeared in the audiobook recordings of John Hodgman's books The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require. In 2006, he appeared in several episodes of Reno 911! as "Guy Gerricault" (pronounced "jericho"), the coach of a lamaze class, and portrayed a drug lord in the film .

Rudd became a full fledged comedy star with his co-starring roles in Judd Apatow pictures The 40-Year-Old Virgin (directed by Apatow) and (produced by Apatow). In 2007, he starred as frustrated husband Pete in Knocked Up, his third collaboration with Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen. That year he also starred in indie favorite The Oh in Ohio and The Ten, which reunited him with David Wain and Michael Showalter. The former film was a box-office and critical disappointment as was his next starring vehicle, Over Her Dead Body opposite Eva Longoria. He quickly bounced back with a memorable supporting role as Kunu (Hawaiian for "Chuck") the drug-addled surf instructor in Nicholas Stoller's Forgetting Sarah Marshall which also starred Jason Segel and was produced by Apatow. The film was a hit, as was his next comedy Role Models, where he starred opposite Sean William Scott as a depressed energy drink salesman forced to perform community service at a child mentoring program. Rudd also cameoed in , Year One and Night at the Museum.

co-stars Jason Segel and Rashida Jones at the premiere in March 2009]]

In 2009, he starred with Jason Segel in I Love You Man. He lent his voice to the star studded Dreamworks computer animated hit Monsters Vs. Aliens. In 2010, Rudd reunited with Steve Carell for the first time since Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and for the Jay Roach-directed comedy Dinner for Schmucks, also starring Zach Galifinakis and Ron Livingston.

Rudd has become one of the most popular and marketable stars of Judd Apatow's films and others in the same vein, starring often with other Apatow regulars like Seth Rogen (four films), Jonah Hill (three films), Leslie Mann (three films), Kristen Wiig (three films), Jason Segel (three films), Steve Carell (four films), and less noticably Joe Lo Truglio (five films).

Running gags on television

As part of a running gag during his appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rudd has brought clips from the film Mac and Me, where the wheelchair-using Eric (Jade Calegory) flies off a cliff while Mac watches on, instead of showing clips from the actual film he is there to promote. He also has appeared on stage for Conan O'Brien's live tour.

Personal life

In 2003, Rudd married his girlfriend of five years, Julie Yaeger; the two have a son, Jack Sullivan, and a daughter, and live in Manhattan, NY. Rudd frequently travels to Overland Park, Kansas, where he went to high school. He is a fan of the National Football League's Kansas City Chiefs, for whom he narrated the HBO special Hard Knocks in 2007.

Filmography

Film

Television

References

External links

Category:1969 births Category:Actors from Kansas Category:Actors from New Jersey Category:American film actors Category:American Jews Category:American actors of English descent Category:American stage actors Category:American television actors Category:American people of British-Jewish descent Category:Jewish actors Category:Jewish writers Category:Living people Category:People from Overland Park, Kansas Category:People from Passaic, New Jersey Category:University of Kansas alumni

Name	Michael Pollan
Caption	Pollan speaking at Yale University
Birth date	February 06, 1955
Birth place	Long Island, New York, USA
Occupation	Author, Journalist, Professor
Spouse
Website	www.michaelpollan.com

Michael Pollan (born February 6, 1955) is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biography

Early years

Pollan was born on Long Island, New York to author and financial consultant Stephen Pollan and columnist Corky Pollan. Pollan received a B.A. from Bennington College in 1977 and an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1981.

Career

Books

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan describes four basic ways that human societies have obtained food: the current industrial system, the big organic operation, the local self-sufficient farm, and the hunter-gatherer. Pollan follows each of these processes from a group of plants photosynthesizing calories through a series of intermediate stages and ultimately to a meal. Along the way, he suggests that there is a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry, that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world, and that industrial eating obscures crucially important ecological relationships and connections. On December 10, 2006, The New York Times named The Omnivore's Dilemma one of the five best nonfiction books of the year. On May 8, 2007, the James Beard Foundation named The Omnivore's Dilemma its 2007 winner for the best food writing. It was the book of focus for the University of Pennsylvania's Reading Project 2007, and the book of choice for Washington State University's Common Reading Program in 2009-10. An excerpt of the book was published in Mother Jones.

community.]]

Pollan's discussion of the industrial food chain is in large part a critique of modern agribusiness. According to the book, agribusiness has lost touch with the natural cycles of farming, wherein livestock and crops intertwine in mutually beneficial circles. Pollan's critique of modern agribusiness focuses on what he describes as the overuse of corn for purposes ranging from fattening cattle to massive production of corn oil, high-fructose corn syrup, and other corn derivatives. He describes what he sees as the inefficiencies and other drawbacks of factory farming and gives his assessment of organic food production and what it's like to hunt and gather food. He blames those who set the rules (i.e., politicians in Washington, D.C., bureaucrats at the United States Department of Agriculture, Wall Street capitalists, and agricultural conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland) or what he calls a destructive and precarious agricultural system that has wrought havoc upon the diet, nutrition, and well-being of Americans. Pollan finds hope in Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia, which he sees as a model of sustainability in commercial farming. Pollan appears in the documentary film King Corn (2007).

In The Botany of Desire, Pollan explores the concept of co-evolution, specifically of humankind's evolutionary relationship with four plants — apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes — from the dual perspectives of humans and the plants. He uses case examples that fit the archetype of four basic human desires, demonstrating how each of these botanical species are selectively grown, bred, and genetically engineered. The apple reflects the desire for sweetness, the tulip beauty, marijuana intoxication, and the potato control. Pollan then unravels the narrative of his own experience with each of the plants, which he then intertwines with a well-researched exploration into their social history. Each section presents a unique element of human domestication, or the "human bumblebee" as Pollan calls it. These range from the true story of Johnny Appleseed to Pollan's first-hand research with sophisticated marijuana hybrids in Amsterdam, to the alarming and paradigm-shifting possibilities of genetically engineered potatoes. in 2007]] Pollan's book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, released on January 1, 2008, explores the relationship with what he terms nutritionism and the Western diet, with a focus on late 20th century food advice given by the science community. Pollan holds that consumption of fat and dietary cholesterol do not lead to a higher rate of coronary disease, and that the reductive analysis of food into nutrient components is a flawed paradigm. He questions the view that the point of eating is to promote health, pointing out that this attitude is not universal and that cultures that perceive food as having purposes of pleasure, identity, and sociality may end up with better health. He explains this seeming paradox by vetting then validating the notion that nutritionism and, therefore, the whole Western framework through which we intellectualize the value of food is more a religious and faddish devotion to the mythology of simple solutions than a convincing and reliable conclusion of incontrovertible scientific research. Pollan spends the rest of his book explicating his first three phrases: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He contends that most of what Americans now buy in supermarkets, fast food stores, and restaurants is not in fact food, and that a practical tip is to eat only those things that people of his grandmother's generation would have recognized as food.

In 2009, his most recent book, "" was published. This short work is a condensed version of his previous efforts, intended to provide a simple framework for healthy and sustainable diet. It is divided into three sections, further explicating the principles of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." It includes rules such as "let others sample your food" and "the whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead."

Pollan has contributed to Greater Good, a social psychology magazine published by the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley. His article "Edible Ethics" discusses the intersection of ethical eating and social psychology.

In his 1998 book A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, Pollan methodically traced the design and construction of the out-building where he writes. The 2008 re-release of this book was re-titled A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams.

Other work

Pollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a former executive editor for Harper's Magazine, and author of five books: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008) The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001), A Place of My Own (1997), and Second Nature A Gardener's Education (1991).

His recent work has dealt with the practices of the meat industry, and he has written a number of articles on trends in American agriculture. He has received the Reuters World Conservation Union Global Awards in environmental journalism, the James Beard Foundation Awards for best magazine series in 2003, and the Genesis Award from the American Humane Association. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2004), Best American Essays (1990 and 2003), The Animals: Practicing Complexity (2006) and the Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990).

Pollan co-starred in the documentary, Food, Inc. (2008), for which he was also a consultant. In 2010 Pollan was interviewed for the film "Queen of the Sun: What are the bees telling us?", a feature length documentary about honey bees and colony collapse disorder.

Personal life

He is married to landscape painter Judith Belzer; the couple met while both attended Bennington College. They have a son, Isaac. Pollan's sister is actress Tracy Pollan, the wife of Michael J. Fox.

Criticism

Writing in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine, Blake Hurst argues that Pollan offers a shallow assessment of factory farming that does not take cost into account. Daniel Engber criticized Pollan in Slate for arguing that food is too complex a subject to study scientifically and blaming reductionism for today's health ills, while at the same time using nutritional research to justify his own diet advice. He compares Pollan's "straight-forward" anti-scientific method based on only rhetoric to that used by health gurus of history who have peddled diet scams.

See also

Food studies

Bibliography

; Books

; Essays

; Interviews

References

External links

Official site

(video) Michael Pollan on the Politics of Food from UC Television (UCTV)

"The omnivore's next dilemma" at TED Talks

"In Defense of Food" at The Free Library of Philadelphia, January 10, 2008

Skewed View from the Berkeley Hills: Why Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit celebrating food-price hikes by Tom Philpott, Grist, April 4, 2009.

Food and Fossil Fuels by Melissa Moser, UNC News 21 Project, , June 25, 2009

Why are Farmers Afraid of Michael Pollan? by Jim Goodman, Counterpunch, Sept 25 2009

(video) Michael Pollan on: "Deep Agriculture," at The Long Now Foundation , May 5, 2009

">Michael Pollan on "Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual" - video report by Democracy Now!

Category:1955 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of Mansfield College, Oxford Category:American botanical writers Category:American food writers Category:American journalists Category:American magazine editors Category:American non-fiction environmental writers Category:American science writers Category:American Jews Category:Bennington College alumni Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Journalism teachers Category:Agrarian theorists Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty

Name	Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Caption	Gordon-Levitt at a promotional event for (500) Days of Summer
Birthname	Joseph Leonard Gordon-Levitt
Birthdate	February 17, 1981
Birthplace	Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	actor, musician, singer
Yearsactive	1988 – present

Joseph Leonard Gordon-Levitt (born February 17, 1981) is an American actor whose career as both a child and adult has included television series, theatrical films, and stage performances.

Beginning in commercials as a young child, he went on to appear in a number of television films and series, including a lead role in a television revival of Dark Shadows and a film debut in 1992's Beethoven. An appearance in A River Runs Through It followed, along with a starring role in the 1994 movie Angels in the Outfield, as Roger Bomman. Gordon-Levitt subsequently co-starred in the television sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996-2001) as the young Tommy Solomon, and had a major supporting role in the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You.

After a hiatus during which he attended Columbia University, Gordon-Levitt abandoned television but returned to film acting as an adult, appearing in various independent films, beginning with the 2001 film Manic, followed by the acclaimed roles in 2004's Mysterious Skin and 2005's Brick. In 2009, he played the lead role in the well-reviewed (500) Days of Summer, which gained him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. In 2010, he starred in the Christopher Nolan film Inception. He runs an online collaborative production company titled HitRECord.

Early life and family

Gordon-Levitt was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in Sherman Oaks. His family is Jewish. His father, Dennis Levitt, was once the news director for the Pacifica Radio station, KPFK-FM. Gordon-Levitt had an older brother, Dan, who was a photographer and fire spinner; He was born in 1974 and died in October 2010.

Gordon-Levitt joined a musical theater group at the age of four and played the Scarecrow in a production of The Wizard of Oz.

Gordon-Levitt was attending Van Nuys High School while acting on 3rd Rock from the Sun. During the 1990s, he was frequently featured in teenage magazines, something he resented. He entered in 2000 and attended from 2001 to 2004, studying history, literature, and French poetry in General Studies. Gordon-Levitt has received praise and positive reviews for his performances. Observing Gordon-Levitt's acclaim from critics and audiences alike, Showbiz notes that he has "defied the cliched fates that befall most underage actors when they grow up,"

His films include 2001's drama Manic, which was set in a mental institution, Mysterious Skin (2004), in which he played a gay prostitute and child sexual abuse victim, and Brick (2005), a modern-day film noir set at a high school, in which he had the lead role of Brendan Frye, a teen who becomes involved in an underground drug ring while investigating a murder. Brick received positive reviews, with The Minnesota Daily's critic commenting that Gordon-Levitt played the character "beautifully," "true to film’s style," "unfeeling but not disenchanted," and "sexy in the most ambiguous way." Another reviewer described the performance as "astounding." His roles in Mysterious Skin and 2005's Brick prompted Salon.com to describe him as "one of the most interesting leading men in independent film, a thoughtful performer, simultaneously outspoken and introverted, who specializes in playing troubled characters at war with themselves and the world." In 2005, he also had roles in the youth drama Havoc and the critical failure Shadowboxer, while New York magazine stated that he is a "major tabula rasa actor ... a minimalist," and that his character worked because he "doesn’t seize the space ... by what he takes away from the character." The San Francisco Chronicle specified that he "embodies, more than performs, a character's inner life." Several critics suggested that his role in The Lookout would turn Gordon-Levitt into a mainstream actor. Varietys Todd McCarthy praised his performance, saying he "expressively alternates between enthusiasm and forlorn disappointment in the manner Jack Lemmon could". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said the movie "hits you like a blast of pure romantic oxygen" and credited both lead actors for playing "it for real, with a grasp of subtlety and feeling that goes beyond the call of breezy duty." He was subsequently nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

The same year, he appeared in Uncertainty, which details about a couple who thrust into two alternative realities by the flip of a coin, and his first blockbuster, portraying villain Cobra Commander in , a live-action film of the toy series. In G.I. Joe Gordon-Levitt wore a mask and prosthetic makeup underneath it. After seeing concept art of the role he was being offered, he signed on saying that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. He later explained that the film was a welcome relief after the heavy films he filmed in between 2007 and 2008. The movie grossed over 300 million, but received mixed reviews, with Stephen Whitty of Newark Star-Ledger calling it "incredibly silly". On November 21, he hosted Saturday Night Live.

In 2010, Gordon-Levitt starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Christopher Nolan's science fiction thriller Inception, replacing James Franco in the role of Arthur, who is the "Point Man", Dom Cobb's (DiCaprio) partner and the person responsible for researching the team's targets. Inception received critical acclaim and was number 1 at the US box office for 3 consecutive weeks and has made over $800 million, becoming his most successful film to date. His other 2010 films include Hesher, an independent drama co-starring Natalie Portman in which he plays the title character who becomes a mentor and tormentor to a young boy. Other films he will appear in are Live with It, opposite Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick, which is a dramedy about an adult male's struggle with cancer and Premium Rush, where Gordon-Levitt plays a bicycle messenger who is pursued by a dirty cop for information. While filming the latter he crashed into the back of a cab while riding a bicycle; the injury required 31 stitches. In addition, he will play the younger version of Bruce Willis' character in the time-traveling thriller Looper.

Stage

In 2001, Gordon-Levitt made his stage acting debut in the off-Broadway premiere of Austin Pendleton's play, Uncle Bob opposite George Morfogen at the Soho Playhouse.

Gordon-Levitt was one of the producers of the Broadway show Slava's Snowshow, a job he shares with, amongst others, Jared Geller, who acted as the stage manager during the production of Uncle Bob. In 2009, he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event as one of the show's producers.

Other projects

Gordon-Levitt's side project, hitRECord.org, is an online collaborative production company. According to the hitRECord website, "we create and develop art and media collaboratively here on our site; we use my position in the traditional entertainment industry to turn that creativity into money-making productions; and then we share any profits with the contributing artists". Gordon-Levitt has owned the website hitrecord.org since 2004, when it hosted six videos and short films. Beginning in 2009, he opened the website to host films by others. In a 2007 interview in Salon, he was attributed as describing his website as "[an] alternative outlet of where [he] get[s] to be a little less professional and just freak out a little bit." The site has since expanded, with more than 10,000 participants collaborating to make songs, images, stories, and short films. According to a 2010 article in Details magazine, Gordon-Levitt oversees the site from a bank of computers in his home studio. In August 2010, Gordon-Levitt directed another short film, entitled Morgan and Destiny’s Eleventeeth Date: The Zeppelin Zoo, which he also acted in with his G.I. Joe co-star Channing Tatum.

He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Sundance Institute founded by Robert Redford.

Gordon-Levitt is one of GQ Magazine's 2010 Men of the Year, as "Rising Star of the Year".

Filmography

{| class="wikitable sortable" |+ Actor |- ! Year ! Film ! Role ! class="unsortable" | Notes |- |1988 | Stranger on My Land | Rounder | TV movie |- |1988 | Family Ties | Dougie | Episode: "Sign of the Times"Episode: "Father, Can You Spare a Dime?" |- | 1989 | Settle the Score | Justin | TV movie |- |1990 | Dark Shadows | David Collins | TV movie |- |1990 | Murder, She Wrote | Boy #1 | Episode: "Shear Madness" |- |1991 | Dark Shadows | Daniel/David Collins | Series regular |- |1991 | Changes | Matthew 'Matt' Hallam | TV movie |- |1991 | Hi Honey — I'm Dead | Josh Stadler | TV movie |- |1991 | Plymouth | Simon | TV movie |- |1991 | China Beach | Archie Winslow, Age 9 | Episode : "Quest" |- |1991 | Quantum Leap | Kyle | Episode: "Permanent Wave"Nominated — Young Artist Award for Best Young Actor Guest Starring in a Television Series |- |1991 | L.A. Law | | Episode: Lose the Law |- | 1992–1993 | The Powers That Be | Pierce Van Horne | Series regularNominated — Young Artist Award for Best Young Actor in a New Television Series |- |1992 | Beethoven | Student #1 | |- |1992 | A River Runs Through It | Young Norman |Young Artist Award for Best Actor Under Ten in a Motion Picture |- |1993 | Partners | |TV movie |- |1993 | Switching Parents | Gregory Kingsley | TV movie |- |1993 | Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman | Zack Lawson | Episode: "The Secret" |- | 1993–1995 | Roseanne | George | Episode: "Daughters and Other Strangers"Episode: "I Pray the Lord My Stove to Keep"Episode: "Follow the Son"Episode: "Single Married Female" |- |1994 | Holy Matrimony | Ezekiel | |- |1994 | Roadkillers | Rich Lerolland | |- |1994 | Angels in the Outfield | Roger Bomman |Nominated — Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor |- | 1995 | The Great Elephant Escape | Matthew | TV movie |- | 1996–2001 | 3rd Rock from the Sun | Tommy Solomon | Series regularYoungStar Award for Best Performance by a Young Actor in a Comedy TV Series (1997, 1998)Nominated — Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series (1997, 1998, 1999)Nominated — Teen Choice Award for Choice TV Actor (1999) Nominated — Young Artist Award for Best Performance in a TV Comedy – Supporting Young Actor (1997) |- | 1996 | The Juror | Oliver Laird | |- |1998 | Sweet Jane | Tony | |- |1998 | | Jimmy Howell | |- | 1998 | That '70s Show | Buddy Morgan | Episode: "Eric's Buddy" |- | 1999 | 10 Things I Hate About You | Cameron James | Nominated – YoungStar Award for Best Performance by a Young Actor in a Comedy Film |- | 2000 | The Outer Limits | Zach | Episode: "Something About Harry" |- |2000 | Picking Up the Pieces | Flaco | |- |2000 | Forever Lulu | Martin Ellsworth |TV movie |- |2001 | Manic | Lyle Jensen | released in 2003 |- | 2002 | Treasure Planet | Jim Hawkins (voice) | Animated film |- |2003 |Latter Days | Elder Paul Ryder | |- |2004 | Mysterious Skin | Neil McCormick | Golden Space Needle Award for Best ActorNominated — Gotham Breakthrough Award |- | 2005 | Numb3rs | Scott Reynolds | Episode: "Sacrifice" |- |2005 | Brick | Brendan Frye | |- |2005 | Havoc | Sam | |- |2005 | Shadowboxer | Dr. Don | |- | 2007 | The Lookout | Chris Pratt | |- |2008 | Stop-Loss | Tommy Burgess | |- |2008 | Miracle at St. Anna | Tim Boyle | |- |2008 | The Brothers Bloom | Bar Patron | uncredited cameo |- |2008 | Killshot | Richie Nix | |- |2009 | Big Breaks | Todd Sterling | |- |2009 | (500) Days of Summer | Tom Hansen |Nominated — Detroit Film Critics Society Award for Best ActorNominated — Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or ComedyNominated — Independent Spirit Award for Best Male LeadNominated — People's Choice Award for Favorite Breakout Movie ActorNominated — Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Actor: Romantic Comedy |- |2009 | Uncertainty | Bobby | |- |2009 | Women in Trouble | Bert Rodriguez | |- |2009 | | Cobra Commander |Nominated — Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie: Villain |- |2011 | Live with It | Adam | Post-Production |- |2012 | Premium Rush | | |- |2012 | Looper | | |}

References

External links

Category:1981 births Category:Actors from Los Angeles, California Category:American child actors Category:American film actors Category:American Jews Category:American musical theatre actors Category:American soap opera actors Category:American stage actors Category:American television actors Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Jewish actors Category:Living people Category:People from the San Fernando Valley Category:YouTube video producers

Caption	Theron in February 2008
Birth date	August 07, 1975
Birth place	Benoni, Gauteng, South Africa
Years active	1995–present
Occupation	Actress, producer, director
Partner	Stuart Townsend (2001–2010; separated)
Website	CharlizeTheron.com

Charlize Theron (; born August 7, 1975) is a South African actress, film producer and former fashion model.

She rose to fame in the late 1990s following her roles in 2 Days in the Valley, Mighty Joe Young, The Devil's Advocate and The Cider House Rules. She received critical acclaim and an Academy Award for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the film Monster, for which she became the first African to win an Academy Award in a major acting category. She received another Academy Award nomination for her performance in North Country.

Early life

Theron was born in Benoni, Transvaal Province, South Africa, the only child of Gerda Jacoba Aletta (née Maritz; born January 27, 1953) and Charles Jacobus Theron. Her mother is of German descent and her father was of Occitan and Dutch ancestry; Theron is descended from early Huguenot settlers, and Boer War figure Daniel Theron was her great-grandfather's brother. She changed the pronunciation when she moved to the US.

Although fluent in English, her first language is Afrikaans. She grew up on her parents' farm in Benoni, near Johannesburg. Her father died in 1990 when he was shot by Theron's mother after Theron's father, who suffered from alcoholism, had physically attacked her mother while being drunk. The incident was viewed as an act of self-defense by her mother, however.

Theron attended Putfontein Primary School (Laerskool Putfontein). At the age of 13, Theron was sent to boarding school and began her studies at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg.

Career

At the age of 16, Theron travelled to Milan on a one-year modeling contract, after winning a local competition. She went to New York with Pauline's Model Management. She decided to remain after her contract ended, attending the Joffrey Ballet School, where she trained as a ballet dancer. A knee injury closed this career path when Theron was 19.

Unable to dance, Theron flew to Los Angeles on a one-way ticket her mother bought her. She later fired him as her manager after he kept sending her scripts for films similar to Showgirls and Species. After eight months in the city, she was cast in her first film part, a non-speaking role in the direct-to-video film Children of the Corn III (1995). Her breakout role was a supporting but significant part in 2 Days in the Valley, but larger roles in widely released Hollywood films followed, and her career skyrocketed in the late 1990s with box office successes like The Devil's Advocate (1997), Mighty Joe Young (1998) and The Cider House Rules (1999). She was on the cover of the January 1999 issue of Vanity Fair as the "White Hot Venus".

at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival]] After appearing in a few notable films, Theron starred as the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). Film critic Roger Ebert called it "one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema". For this role, Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 76th Academy Awards in February 2004, as well as the SAG Award and the Golden Globe Award. She is the first South African to win an Oscar for Best Actress. In the same year, she starred in the financially unsuccessful science fiction thriller Æon Flux.

Theron received Best Actress Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for her lead performance in the drama North Country. She also received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for her role of Britt Ekland in the 2004 HBO movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

In 2008, Theron was named the Hasty Pudding Theatricals Woman of the Year. That year she also starred with Will Smith in Hancock, a film that grossed $227.9M in the U.S.A. and $396.4M internationally, and in late 2008 she was asked to be a UN Messenger of Peace by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

On November 10, 2008, TV Guide reported that Theron will star in the film adaptation of The Danish Girl alongside Nicole Kidman. Theron will play Gerda Wegener, wife of Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe (Kidman), the world's first known person to undergo sex reassignment surgery. In October 2009, Theron was cast to star in a sequel to the Mad Max films, titled Mad Max: Road Fury, which will commence filming at Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia in late 2010.

On December 4, 2009, Theron co-presented the draw for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa, accompanied by several other celebrities of South African origin. During rehearsals she drew an Ireland ball instead of France as a joke at the expense of FIFA, referring to Thierry Henry's handball controversy in the play off match between France and Ireland. The stunt alarmed FIFA enough for it to fear she might do it again in front of a live global audience.

Personal life

Theron still resides in her Los Angeles home, though her ex-boyfriend Stuart Townsend (with whom she starred in the 2004 film Head in the Clouds, as well as in the 2002 film Trapped) has moved to their co-owned property in Malibu. The couple split up in January 2010.

Theron became a naturalised citizen of the United States in May 2007.

Theron signed with William Morris Endeavour in 2009 and is represented by CEO Ari Emanuel.

Health concerns

While filming Æon Flux in Berlin, Germany, Theron suffered a herniated disc in her neck, which occurred as a result of her suffering a fall while filming a series of back handsprings. This required her to wear a neck collar for a month.

In July 2009, Theron was diagnosed with a serious stomach virus, thought to be contracted while travelling outside the United States. She was hospitalised at Cedars-Sinai Hospital and she finished convalescing in her own home.

Promotional deals

Having signed a deal with John Galliano in 2004, Theron replaced Estonian model Tiiu Kuik as the spokeswoman in the J'ADORE advertisements by Christian Dior. Galliano has reputedly cited her as a muse and has been creating couture dresses for her to wear to formal red carpet events such as the Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards.

From October 2005 to December 2006, Theron earned $3,000,000 for the use of her image in a worldwide print media advertising campaign for Raymond Weil watches. In February 2006, she and her loan-out corporation were sued by Weil for breach of contract. The lawsuit was settled on November 4, 2008.

Activism

Theron is involved in women's rights organizations, and marched for abortion rights.

Theron is a supporter of animal rights and active member of PETA. She appeared in a PETA ad for their anti-fur campaign. She is also an active supporter of Democracy Now! and Link TV. She is a supporter of same-sex marriage and attended a march in Fresno, California on 30 May 2009.

In July 2009, it was announced that Charlize Theron's Africa Outreach Project (CTAOP) would form a coalition with LAFC Soccer Club to give soccer fields to rural areas in South Africa. LAFC Chelsea, one of the United States's most successful and prominent youth soccer clubs, made a three-year commitment to help build a community-wide soccer programme for the schools in the Umkhanyakude District. This help includes uniforms, cleats, balls and equipment, along with professional training for local coaches, referees and administrators. The soccer league training will also include life-saving health education administered through a CTAOP-funded mobile health program. With the 2010 FIFA World Cup on African soil for the very first time, CTAOP wants to put a spotlight on the urgent need to provide sustainable health, education and recreational resources to remote areas where HIV/AIDS rates are unacceptably high.

Don Sheppards, president of LAFC Chelsea said:

Filmography

{| class="wikitable sortable" |+ Films |- ! Year ! Title ! Role ! class="unsortable" | Notes |- | 1995 | | Young Woman | Uncredited |- | 1996 | 2 Days in the Valley | Helga Svelgen | |- | 1996 | That Thing You Do! | Tina Powers | |- | 1997 | Hollywood Confidential | Sally | TV film |- | 1997 | Trial and Error | Billie Tyler | |- | 1997 | | Mary Ann Lomax | |- | 1998 | Celebrity | Supermodel | |- | 1998 | Mighty Joe Young | Jill Young | Nominated—Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress |- | 1999 | | Jillian Armacost | |- | 1999 | | Candy Kendall | Nominated—Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama MovieNominated—Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture |- | 2000 | Reindeer Games | Ashley Mercer | |- | 2000 | | Erica Stoltz | |- | 2000 | | Adele Invergordon | |- | 2000 | Men of Honor | Gwen Sunday | |- | 2001 | Sweet November | Sara Deever | |- | 2001 | | Laura Kensington | |- | 2001 | 15 Minutes | Rose Heam | |- | 2002 | Trapped | Karen Jennings | |- | 2002 | Waking Up in Reno | Candy Kirkendall | |- | 2003 | | Stella Bridger | |- | 2003 | Monster | Aileen Wuornos | Academy Award for Best ActressBroadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best ActressCentral Ohio Film Critics Association Award for Best ActressChicago Film Critics Association Award for Best ActressDallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award for Best ActressGolden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture DramaIndependent Spirit Award for Best First FeatureIndependent Spirit Award for Best Lead FemaleLas Vegas Film Critics Society Award for Best ActressNational Board of Review Award for Best Breakthrough Performance by an ActressNational Society of Film Critics Award for Best ActressSan Francisco Film Critics Circle Award for Best ActressSatellite Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture DramaScreen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role - Motion PictureSilver Bear for Best Actress (tied with Catalina Sandino Moreno for Maria full of Grace)Vancouver Film Critics Circle Award for Best ActressNominated—BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading RoleNominated—London Film Critics Circle Award for Best ActressNominated—Irish Film & Television Award for Best International Actress |- | 2004 | | Britt Ekland | Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress In A Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for TelevisionNominated—Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress - Miniseries or a MovieNominated—Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie |- | 2004 | Head in the Clouds | Gilda Bessé | |- | 2005 | North Country | Josey Aimes | Women Film Critics Circle Award for Best ActressNominated—BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading RoleNominated—Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best ActressNominated—Academy Award for Best ActressNominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture DramaNominated—Satellite Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture DramaNominated—Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role - Motion PictureNominated—Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress |- | 2005 | | Æon Flux | |- | 2007 | In the Valley of Elah | Det. Emily Sanders | |- | 2008 | Sleepwalking | Joleen | Also producer |- | 2008 | Hancock | Mary Embrey | |- | 2008 | Battle in Seattle | Ella | Stuart Townsend directing |- | 2009 | | Sylvia | Nominated—Saturn Award for Best Actress |- | 2009 | | Wife | |- | 2009 | ''Astro Boy | Narrator | 'Our Friends' |}

{| class="wikitable sortable" |+ Television |- ! Year ! Title ! Role ! class="unsortable" | Notes |- | 2005 | Arrested Development | Rita | 5 episodes |- | 2006 | Robot Chicken | Daniel's Mom / Mother / Waitress | 1 episode |}

{| class="wikitable sortable" |+ Music Videos |- ! Year ! Title ! Role ! class="unsortable" | Notes |- | 2010 | Crossfire | Mysterious and dangerous rescuer | Song by Brandon Flowers |}

References

External links

Charlize Theron at AskMen

Charlize Africa Outreach Project (CTAOP)

Category:1975 births Category:Living people Category:People from Benoni Category:Afrikaner people Category:South African people of Huguenot descent Category:South African immigrants to the United States Category:American film actors Category:South African actors Category:South African film actors Category:South African female models Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners Category:Best Drama Actress Golden Globe (film) winners Category:American actors of German descent Category:Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead winners Category:White South African people Category:South African people of German descent Category:South African people of Dutch descent Category:American people of South African descent Category:California Democrats Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:American activists Category:United Nations Messengers of Peace

Name	Aron Ralston
Caption	Ralston in 2008
Birth date	October 27, 1975
Birth place	United States
Alma mater	Carnegie Mellon University
Occupation	Motivational speaker, mountaineer

Aron Lee Ralston (born October 27, 1975) is an American mountain climber and public speaker. He gained fame in May 2003 when, while canyoneering in Utah, he was forced to amputate his lower right arm with a dull knife in order to free himself after his arm became trapped by a boulder.

The incident is documented in Ralston's 2004 autobiography Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and is the subject of the 2010 film 127 Hours.

Personal life

Ralston, a graduate of Cherry Creek High School and a mechanical engineering and French student at Carnegie Mellon University, was a member of the honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. At Carnegie Mellon, he served as a Resident Assistant, studied abroad, and was an active intramural sports participant. He left his job as a mechanical engineer with Intel in 2002 to climb all of Colorado's "fourteeners", or peaks over 14,000 feet high during the winter season. In August 2009, Ralston married Jessica Trusty, and their first child (Leo) was born in February, 2010.

Accident

In 2003, while he was on a hiking trip in Blue John Canyon (near Moab, Utah), a boulder became dislodged, crushing his right forearm and pinning it against the canyon wall. Ralston had not told anyone of his hiking plans and knew no one would be searching for him. Assuming that he would die, he spent five days slowly sipping his small amount of remaining water while trying to extricate his arm. His efforts were futile as he could not dislodge his arm. He eventually ran out of water and began to drink his own urine, carved his name, date of birth and presumed date of death into the sandstone canyon wall, and videotaped his last goodbyes to his family.

After five days of trying to lift and break the boulder, the dehydrated and delirious Ralston prepared to amputate his trapped right arm below the elbow in order to escape. Although he never named the manufacturer of the tool other than to say it was not Leatherman, he did describe it as "what you'd get if you bought a $15 flashlight and got a free multi-use tool". After freeing himself, he was still seventeen miles from his stick shift truck, and he had no cellular phone. He had to rappel down a sheer wall, then hike out of the canyon in the hot midday sun. While hiking out, he encountered a couple on vacation from The Netherlands, Eric and Monique Meijer, and their son, Andy, who gave him water and then alerted the authorities. He was ultimately rescued by a helicopter search team six hours after amputating his arm. His arm was removed from under the boulder and retrieved by park authorities. It was cremated by Ralston. He then returned to the accident scene with Tom Brokaw six months later, on his birthday, for two reasons: to film the Dateline NBC episode of his accident, and to scatter the ashes of his arm there. Where he says, "they belong."

Aftermath of accident

Mountaineering and adventuring

Ralston still climbs mountains prolifically, including a 2008 expedition to climb Ojos del Salado in Chile, and Monte Pissis in Argentina. In 2005, Ralston became the first person to climb all 53 of Colorado's mountains over 14,000 feet in elevation, solo in winter, a project he started in 1998 and resumed after his amputation in Blue John Canyon.

In 2008, he solo-climbed Denali and skiied from the 20,320' summit.

In 2009, he led an expedition with his friends on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

While Ralston still intends to climb Mount Everest some day, he did not go along with polar explorer Eric Larsen on his "Save the Poles" expedition in 2010, as was previously reported.

Media appearances

After the accident, Ralston made numerous appearances. on October 6, 2005, Ralston appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. On September 10, 2004, Ralston's story was featured on a two-hour edition of Dateline NBC called "Desperate Days in Blue John Canyon." Ralston has appeared twice on The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and The Late Show with David Letterman. In 2006, Ralston was also featured as a panelist in Miller Lite's "Man Laws" ad campaign. He also starred on the Australian interview show Enough Rope.

Ralston was also named GQ Man of the Year and a Vanity Fair Person of the Year in 2003.

Other projects

As a corporate speaker, Ralston commands an honorarium of $25,000 per domestic speaking appearance, and up to $37,000 for international speeches. On May 4, 2007, Ralston appeared at Swiss Economic Forum and gave a speech about "how he did not lose his hand, but gained his life back." He is exclusively represented by Keppler Speakers Bureau based in Arlington, VA.

Ralston documented his experience in a book titled Between a Rock and a Hard Place (ISBN 0-7434-9281-1), published by Atria Books on September 7, 2004 which reached #3 on The New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction list, hit #1 in New Zealand and Australia, and is the #7 best-selling autobiography of all-time in the UK. Filming took place in March and April 2010, with a release in NYC and LA on November 5, 2010. Fox Searchlight Pictures funded the film. Actor James Franco played the role of Ralston. The movie received standing ovations at both the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Some members of the audience in Toronto and, more recently, at Upstate, NY, fainted without injury due to the realistic amputation scenes. The film was well-received by film critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 93% of 143 professional critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 8.3 out of 10.

References

External links

Redux: A Climber's Survival Tale

Aron Ralston: in his own words

The story on BBC-Outlook (26min)

The Official 127 Hours UK Facebook Page

The Official 127 Hours UK Twitter Page

Category:1975 births Category:Living people Category:American amputees Category:American autobiographers Category:American motivational speakers Category:American mountain climbers Category:Carnegie Mellon University alumni

Caption	Caricature of a youthful Rozakis by Dave Manak(c. 1976)
Birthname	Robert H. Rozakis
Birth place	New York, NY
Spouse	Laurie Rozakis
Children	Charles Rozakis and Samantha Rozakis
Nationality	American
Write	y
Edit	y
Alias	The Answer Man
Notable works	'Mazing Man
Website	http://bobrozakis.blogspot.com
Sortkey	Rozakis, Bob
Subcat	American
Yob	1951
Mob	4
Dob	4

Robert "Bob" Rozakis (b. April 4, 1951) is a comic book writer and editor known mainly for his work in the 1970s and 1980s at DC Comics, as the writer of 'Mazing Man and in his capacity as DC's "Answer Man".

Biography

Rozakis is well known as DC's Answer Man, answering trivia questions from readers in the Daily Planet promotional page in many late-1970s comics. He has also had an online presence in that capacity since the mid-1990s.

Rozakis got his start in the comics industry through his many letters to comic book letter columns. Among his earliest credits is that of editor (both managing and contributing) on DC Comics "Pro-zine" ("Professional fanzine") The Amazing World of DC Comics between 1974 and 1978. In addition to editing, Rozakis wrote for the bi-monthly publication and also oversaw the letters page.

DC Comics

Comics credits

His first comics credit was in Detective Comics #445 (Mar, 1975), as writer of the back-up feature "The Touchdown Trap", with back-up stories in Action Comics, The Flash and Batman Family (among others) soon following. He was co-editor (with Julius Schwartz) on the landmark issue Superman #300, and also served editorially on issues of Action and Detective Comics. His writing credits consist largely of back-up features and, in particular, dozens of "Action Comics Featuring:..." (Air-Wave, Hero Hotline, Aquaman, etc.), between #461 and 640, but he also wrote the 1985 four-issue miniseries Superman: The Secret Years (with art by Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger), and the comics adaptations of such diverse movies as (1987), Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer (1985). Rozakis was also the writer of the syndicated comic strip The Superman Sunday Special for two years.

Arguably, his most well-known writing came in the twelve-issue 1986 series 'Mazing Man, featuring the misadventures of self-declared homemade hero Sigfried Horatio Hunch III, which Rozakis co-created with artist Stephen DeStefano. The two returned to the character for three specials and, most notably for June 1987's Secret Origins #16, to tell "The Closest Thing To A Secret Origin of 'Mazing Man You Will Ever Get". Rozakis also co-created the series Hero Hotline with DeStefano, on which Rozakis also provided the coloring, a job he also undertook on the "Action Comics Featuring: Hero Hotline" back-up features.

Among his other creations are Mister E, the Bumblebee and Duela Dent (of the Teen Titans, created during his run on the Teen Titans title in the late 1970s), and The Calculator (a character who later played a major role in DC's Infinite Crisis event). Overall, during his 25-year career with DC, his credits total "almost four hundred stories" featuring most DC characters, "plus dozens of features, puzzles, and activities pages".

In 2003, Rozakis announced his retirement from the comic book industry.

Personal life

Rozakis is married to prolific author Dr. Laurie E. Rozakis PhD, "a professor of English", grammar-expert and "author of more than 100 books", and Rozakis' co-writer on Detective Comics #464 (Oct, 1976). The two have collaborated on The Complete Idiot's Guide to Office Politics (Alpha Books, 1998) (ISBN 0028623975).), and daughter Samantha "Sammi". In 1974, Laurie and Bob drove the DC Comic-mobile, a van that served as a lending library for comic books.

Rozakis has also taught creative writing courses for the Farmingdale (NY) Youth Council and CTY, a Johns Hopkins University summer program for gifted students.

Notes

References

Bob Rozakis at the DC Database Project

External links

Category:People from New York City Category:Living people Category:American people of Greek descent

Caption	Faris in 2007
Birth date	November 29, 1976
Birth place	Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Birth name	Anna Kay Faris
Spouse	Ben Indra (2004–2008) Chris Pratt (2009–present)
Occupation	Actress, singer
Years active	1991–present

Anna Kay Faris (born November 29, 1976) is an American actress. She is known for her recurring role in the Scary Movie film series, as well as her lead roles in The Hot Chick (2002), Lost in Translation (2003), Just Friends (2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Smiley Face (2007), and The House Bunny (2008). She also provided voice acting in the animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009).

Early life

Faris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Karen, a former special education instructor, and Jack Faris, a sociologist who worked at the University of Washington and headed the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association. She has a brother, Robert, who is also a sociologist and teaches at the University of California, Davis. Faris grew up in Edmonds, Washington. Her parents encouraged her to pursue acting when she was young, and she gave her first professional acting performance at age 9, at the Seattle Repertory Theater.

Film career

Her first significant film role was in the independent production Lovers Lane (1999). Her breakout role was in the horror film parody Scary Movie (2000). The 5'4" Faris, a natural blonde, dyed her hair black for the filming of Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, so that her character more closely resembled Neve Campbell, who played the corresponding character in Scream, the main film that Scary Movie parodied.

Faris gained further popularity after she received the role of the recurring character Erica, the mother whose baby is adopted by Chandler and Monica Bing, in the final season of the American sitcom Friends. She also appeared in the critically acclaimed film Lost in Translation, in which she plays an actress promoting an action movie.

Faris appeared in the film Waiting..., with Ryan Reynolds and Justin Long. In 2005, she appeared again with Reynolds in Just Friends, playing a supporting role as a pop-diva singer named Samantha James. Faris's role as LaShawn Malone in Brokeback Mountain (2005) brought her to the attention of a much wider audience. Faris starred with Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson in the feature film My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006). In 2008, she appeared in the comedy Take Me Home Tonight, playing Topher Grace's twin sister, in addition to, Mama's Boy, with Jon Heder, Jeff Daniels and Diane Keaton and in Smiley Face, with Adam Brody and John Cho. In 2007, she produced and starred in The House Bunny, a film with Happy Madison Productions about a retired Playboy bunny.

Faris co-starred as the cosmetic counter employee on whom Seth Rogen has a crush in Jody Hill's 2009 comedy, Observe and Report. She received a MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Comedic Performance for her movie, The House Bunny. After that, she, alongside Bill Hader, provided voices for the animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs where she played weather reporter, Sam Sparks.

She appears in What's Your Number?, set to be released in 2011. The film is a romantic comedy based on Karyn Bosnak’s book 20 Times a Lady. Faris next appears in Yogi Bear; in the film she plays the character Rachel, a nature documentarian who follows the antics of a bear in fictional Jellystone Park.

In the media

Faris has appeared on the covers of Raygun, Playboy, Self, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines. She was listed as #57, #39, and #42 in Maxim magazine's "Hot 100" in 2004, 2009, and 2010 respectively. In 2009, she was ranked #60 in FHM's "100 Sexiest Women in the World", and ranked #96 in 2010. Ask Men featured her as #78 on "100 Most Desirable Women in the World" in 2009.

In 2010, Cosmopolitan magazine named her "the Cosmo’s Fun Fearless Female of the Year" – stating that “She makes us laugh – and cringe – by pushing the limits of comedy in a way no other actress can."

Personal life

Faris met her future husband Ben Indra, during filming of the 1999 independent horror Lovers Lane. They began dating in 1999, and were married in June 2004. She filed for divorce in April 2007, citing irreconcilable differences. As part of their divorce agreement, Faris agreed to pay Indra $900,000 in addition to other property and acting royalties. Her divorce was finalized in February 2008

Faris began dating actor Chris Pratt, and they became engaged in 2008. She met Pratt when they were filming Take Me Home Tonight. The couple married in a small ceremony in Bali on July 9, 2009. In an interview, Faris said of Pratt, "He's awesome. He's a great, great guy. I feel really lucky."

Filmography

{| border="2" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaa solid; border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 90%;" |- bgcolor="#CCCCCC" align="center" ! colspan="4" style="background: LightSteelBlue;" | Film |- bgcolor="#CCCCCC" align="center" ! Year !! Film !! Role !! Notes |- | 1996 | Eden | Dithy | |- | 1999 | Lovers Lane | Janelle Bay | |- | 2000 | Scary Movie | rowspan="2"| Cindy Campbell | Nominated — MTV Movie Award for Best KissNominated — MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance |- | 2001 | Scary Movie 2 | |- | rowspan="2"| 2002 | May | Polly | |- | The Hot Chick | April | |- | rowspan="3"| 2003 | Winter Break | Justine | |- | Lost in Translation | Kelly | |- | Scary Movie 3 | Cindy Campbell | |- | rowspan="4"| 2005 | Southern Belles | Belle | |- | Waiting... | Serena | |- | Brokeback Mountain | Lashawn Malone | Nominated — Gotham Award for Best Ensemble CastNominated — SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture |- | Just Friends | Samantha James | Nominated — MTV Movie Award for Best KissNominated — Teen Choice Award for Choice Hissy FitNominated — Teen Choice Award for Choice Liplock |- | rowspan="3"| 2006 | Scary Movie 4 | Cindy Campbell | |- | My Super Ex-Girlfriend | Hannah Lewis | Nominated — MTV Movie Award for Best Fight |- | Guilty Hearts | Jane Conelly | |- | rowspan="2"| 2007 | Smiley Face | Jane F. | |- | Mama's Boy | Nora Flanagan | |- | 2008 | The House Bunny | Shelley Darlington | Also producerNominated — MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance |- | rowspan="4"| 2009 | Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel | Cassie | |- | Observe and Report | Brandi | |- | Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs | Sam Sparks | Voice role |- | | Jeanette | Voice role |- | 2010 | Yogi Bear | Rachel | |- | rowspan="2"| 2011 | Take Me Home Tonight | Wendy Franklin | |- | What's Your Number? | Ally Darling | Also executive producer |- |- bgcolor="#CCCCCC" align="center" ! colspan="4" style="background: LightSteelBlue;" | Television |- bgcolor="#CCCCCC" align="center" ! Year !! Title !! Role !! Notes |- | 1991 | Deception: A Mother's Secret | Liz | Made-for-television film |- | 2002–2004 | King of the Hill | Lisa / Stoned Hippie Chick / Teen Girl Hippie | Episode 6.17: "" Episode 8.12: "" |- | 2004 | Friends | Erica | Episode 10.09: "The One with the Birth Mother" Episode 10.13: "The One Where Joey Speaks French" Episode 10.16: "The One with Rachel's Going Away Party" Episode 10.19: "The Last One: Part 1" Episode 10.20: "The Last One: Part 2" |- | 2005 | Blue Skies | Sarah | Made-for-television film |- | 2007 | Entourage | Herself | Episode 4.09: "" Episode 4.10: "" Episode 4.11: "" |}

Discography

{| class="wikitable sortable" |- ! Year ! Title ! Album ! class="unsortable" | Label |- | 2003 | "Nobody Does It Better" | Lost in Translation (soundtrack) | Emperor Norton Records |- | rowspan="3" | 2005 | "Forgiveness" | Just Friends (soundtrack) | New Line Records |- | "Love From Afar" | Just Friends (soundtrack) | New Line Records |- | "Just A Guy" | Just Friends (DVD) | New Line Records |- | 2007 | "Olf-Fashioned Girl" | Mama's Boy (soundtrack) | Lakeshore Records |}

References

External links

Onion A.V. Club interview

Category:American film actors Category:American child actors Category:American television actors Category:American voice actors Category:Actors from Maryland Category:People from Baltimore, Maryland Category:People from Seattle, Washington Category:University of Washington alumni Category:1976 births Category:Living people

Name	Andrew Klavan
Birthplace	New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Writer
Website	http://www.andrewklavan.com}}

Andrew Klavan (born 1954) is an American author and screenwriter of "tough-guy" mysteries and psychological thrillers. Two of Klavan's books have been adapted into motion pictures: True Crime (1999) and Don't Say A Word (2001). He has been nominated for the Edgar Award four times and has won twice. Playwright and novelist Laurence Klavan is his brother.

Early life

Klavan was born in New York City. His father was Gene Klavan, a New York City disk jockey and one-half of the radio show "Klavan and Finch." He grew up on Long Island with his three brothers.

He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Ellen Flanagan. He dropped out of school temporarily to work in local radio news. He then worked as a reporter for a small Putnam County, New York newspaper, as a reader for Columbia Pictures, and as a news writer for both WOR Radio and the ABC Radio Network.

Political philosophy

Identifying himself as a political conservative, Klavan has expressed the view that "rightists" are the victims of discrimination in Hollywood. In his view, people in the American arts are not fulfilling their inherent role of "speaking truth to power", since they are not willing to criticize those of the political left in power. The article set off a firestorm of criticism.

Klavan has said,

Bibliography

Face of the Earth (1977)

Agnes Mallory (1985)

Mrs. White (1987) (as Margaret Tracy, with Laurence Klavan)

There Fell A Shadow (1988) (as Keith Peterson)

The Rain (1988) (as Keith Peterson)

Darling Clementine (1988)

The Trap Door (1988) (as Keith Peterson)

Son of Man (1988)

The Scarred Man (1989) (as Keith Peterson)

Rough Justice (1989) (as Keith Peterson)

Don't Say a Word (1991)

The Animal Hour (1992)

Corruption (1993)

True Crime (1995)

Suicide (1995)

The Uncanny (1998)

Hunting Down Amanda (1999)

Man and Wife (2001)

Dynamite Road (2003)

Shotgun Alley (2004)

Damnation Street (2006)

Empire of Lies (2008)

The Homelanders: The Last Thing I Remember (2009)

The Homelanders: The Long Way Home (2010)

The Homelanders: The Truth of the Matter (2010)

The Identity Man (2010)

The Homelanders: The Final Hour (2011)

Schizophrenia (2012)

Filmography

White of the Eye (film) (1987)

A Shock to the System (1990)

True Crime (1999)

Don't Say a Word (2001) (Co-Producer)

''One Missed Call (2008) (Screenplay)

References

External links

Klavan, Andrew Crime Time Interview

Apuzzo, Jason. Liberty Film Festival

Curtis, Brian. "Do You Fear Me Now?" Slate, February 2006

Klavan, Andrew. "Clinton Doth Protest Too Much." Los Angeles Times, September 2006

Category:1954 births Category:American novelists Category:American bloggers Category:American Jews Category:American screenwriters Category:Converts to Christianity from Judaism Category:Converts to Protestantism from Judaism Category:Former atheists and agnostics Category:Jewish writers Category:Living people Category:People from New York City Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni