Americans tend to associate “modern slavery” with illiterate girls in India or Cambodia. Yet there I was the other day, interviewing a college graduate who says she spent three years terrorized by pimps in a brothel in Midtown Manhattan.
Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary — and especially men who pay for sex — should listen to her story. The men buying her services all mistakenly assumed that she was working of her own volition, she says.
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ON Wednesday, Kim Kardashian is going to die a little. So is her sister, Khloé, not to mention Lady Gaga, David LaChapelle, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Serena Williams and Elijah Wood.
That day is World AIDS Day, and each of these people (as well as a host of others - the list keeps growing) will sacrifice his or her own digital life. By which these celebrities mean they will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.
"Dry your eyes, everybody," Ryan Seacrest, the "American Idol" host and another participant in this cyberstunt, says in a videotaped "Last Tweet and Testament" that will be posted on his Facebook profile - and appended to a final post on Twitter - sometime after midnight on Tuesday night. "I don't plan to be dead for too long." He adds, "Please buy back my life."
"Come on, y'all," the actress Jennifer Hudson says in a similar videotaped plea. "Buy my life back. Go on a shopping spree and buy as much of it as you can."
It's all part of the latest gambit by ...
Fred Durst gave fans a peek at the progress of Limp Bizkit's fifth album 'Gold Cobra' during a live web chat yesterday (November 24).
The singer played a number of tracks, including one the band have recorded with Wu Tang Clan rapper Raekwon.
Durst prefaced the track by saying, "You guys might not be able to handle it because it's not rock shit. It's some fuckin' cock your fuckin' gun shit."
He referred to the tracks as "non-album tracks", but the songs played were described as ... ...
If you're acting stupid because you're a stoner, you might just be playing to type. That is, it may be your expectations about marijuana's long-term cognitive effects — rather than any real effect of the drug itself — that is to blame, particularly if you're male, according to new research. The study, which was published in the journal Addictive Behaviors, explored the effect of "stereotype threat" — the idea that performance is affected by conventional images of minorities — on marijuana smokers.
Earlier studies of stereotype threat have found that when African Americans are asked to identify themselves by race before being tested, they tend to score worse than blacks who weren't reminded of their race — in line with racist stereotypes about blacks doing poorly in school.
Explains study co-author Mitch Earleywine, professor of psychology at the University of Albany–SUNY: ...
It is not uncommon for people to react with awe to their first up-close encounter with a balloon from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But when Takashi Murakami saw his contributions to Thursday’s event, he bowed. Twice.
On Wednesday afternoon, on a stretch of West 81st Street in Manhattan where brightly colored, 30-foot-tall inflatable versions of his characters Kaikai and Kiki were wriggling and writhing underneath a huge net, Mr. Murakami, the Japanese pop artist, held a brief Shinto ceremony for purity and luck. He stood at a table where he ...