FRESH AIR Director Steven Soderbergh had been looking for a way to frame a film about the extravagant entertainer Liberace for years when a friend recommended the book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace. The book — a memoir — is by Scott Thorson, who for five years was Liberace’s lover, though that wasn’t publicly disclosed at the time. Thorson was 40 years younger than Liberace and still in his teens when they met in 1977. Liberace was a huge star, famous for his showy piano playing, his flashy outfits — bejeweled jackets, feathered capes, fur coats — and […]

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: They threw themselves over their students, stayed with them for hours and carried them, bleeding, to safety. The teachers of two devastated elementary schools went far beyond the call of duty when Oklahoma’s horrendous twister wiped out the suburban enclave of Moore. Parents and authorities hailed them as heroes and credited them with saving the lives of students. I was in a (bathroom) stall with some kids and it just started coming down, so I laid on top of them,” said sixth-grade teacher Rhonda […]

FRESH AIR Over the 60 years that Mel Brooks has been in the entertainment business, his name has become synonymous with comedy. He is the man who broke Broadway records for most Tony Award wins with The Producers (an adaptation of his own movie), who satirized Westerns and racism in Blazing Saddles, and who poked fun at monster movies with Young Frankenstein. Before the films, there was his TV career: Brooks was a writer for Your Show of Shows, one of the most influential comedy series in television history and a precursor to Saturday Night Live, and he was the […]

Sometimes you don’t realize how much you missed somebody until they come back.

THE TELEGRAPH: Across the state, 21 people were injured, not including those who suffered bumps and bruises and chose not to visit a hospital, said Keli Cain, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. “You can see where there’s absolutely nothing, then there are places where you have mobile home frames on top of each other, debris piled up,” Pottawatomie County Sheriff Mike Booth said after surviving damage in the Steelman Estates Mobile Home Park. “It looks like there’s been heavy equipment in there on a demolition tour. “It’s pretty bad. It’s pretty much wiped out,” he said. […]

Italian Market Fest, 9th St. 12:02 pm by JONATHAN VALANIA

EDITOR’S NOTE: The arrests begin around the 49 second mark. The audio is completely blown out, so you might want to turn down the volume. PHILLY NORML: Federal Park Rangers and Philadelphia City Police disrupted the monthly “Smoke Down Prohibition” protest at the Liberty Bell calling for marijuana legalization and made several dramatic arrests. On Saturday May 18, 2013 a crowd about 150 gathered in front of Independence Hall. At 4:20PM, the moment when much of the crowd participates in civil disobedience by openly smoking cannabis, dozens of aggressive law enforcement moved into the crowd. Those on stage speaking to […]

  VARIETY: The sounds of the early 1960s folk music revival float on the air like a strange, intoxicating perfume in the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a boldly original, highly emotional journey through Greenwich Village nightclubs, a bleak New York winter, and one man’s fraught efforts to reconcile his life and his art. A product of the same deeply personal end of the Coens’ filmmaking spectrum previously responsible for the likes of “Barton Fink” and “A Serious Man,” this darkly comic musical drama with an elliptical narrative and often brusque protagonist won’t corral the same mass audience as “No […]