There is a note on the front door of Lord Snowdon's huge Kensington home. "Please use the side door. 9am-5.30pm," it says. Ah, of course - the tradesman's entrance. A young woman who seems to be of east European extraction answers the door. She asks me to follow her into Lord Snowdon's office. The house is grand and dark. It's a funny hybrid - part English castle, part hacienda. We go through the kitchen and past a row of his lordship's hats and caps, through an alley of iconic framed photographs (Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward), past a pristine studio and a toiletful of honorary doctorates, and finally on to his study. There in the corner, sitting on a swivel chair with castors, handsome and shrunken, is Antony Armstrong-Jones, aka Lord Snowdon.

He has had an amazing life, and has so many stories to tell, it's difficult to know where to start: Eton; childhood polio; the failed architecture student who became the establishment's photographer; marriage to Princess Margaret; their tempestuous relationship; their children, Viscount David Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto; the affairs; his second marriage (five months after divorcing Margaret) to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, and his daughter by her, Lady Frances; the suicide of long-term mistress Ann Hills; photography; his design of the aviary at London zoo; the affair with Country Life features editor Melanie Cable-Alexander, which resulted in the collapse of his second marriage and the birth of "secret love child" Jasper in 1998.

But there is also his famous discretion. So many people have said the marvellous thing about him is that despite everything, he has remained wonderfully discreet through the years.

Snowdon, 75, looks me up and down when I shake his hand. "Are you English?" he says. I have a slight tan. Do I not look English? I ask.

"No, no, no," says a tall man with Victorian sideburns and a Welsh accent. "I don't think Lord Snowdon means it like that. He means as opposed to Welsh or Scottish or whatever." This pleasant, conciliatory chap is Rhodri Ellis Owen, a publicist promoting Snowdon's appeal to raise £2.2m for the construction of a new £9m building on top of Snowdon (the mountain, not the man). Ellis Owen has offered the Guardian this interview. But Snowdon doesn't know why I'm here. More alarming, he doesn't know why Ellis Owen is here.

I tell him I'm here to interview him. He nods silently. When did he realise he was a good photographer? "I haven't yet." He smiles and his blue eyes twinkle. It's a lovely, mischievous smile that gives just a hint of the charm he has employed on so many women over the years.

Can he remember the first photograph he took? "No." The smile has gone. He makes no effort to think it through. I sense he is waiting to be amused, and I'm already failing.

Can he remember, roughly, when he started to enjoy taking photographs? "I always liked taking photographs. I should think I was seven or eight." What camera did he use? "There's one over there on the shelf." He sends me out of the room into the gloomy hallway to look for it. I pick up an old camera and bring it back.

"There's an earlier one as well. A box camera." I return with another, but it's the wrong one. Snowdon is getting irritated. "A little tiny one. No , not that one. A tiny little box. Sammy Davis Jr gave it to me."

Eventually, I find the right camera. "It's lovely, isn't it?" he says.

Blimey, I say, Sammy Davis Jr just dropped in to give you a camera? How come? "He just gave it to me."

What was he doing at your house? "I can't remember. He just sent it to me. I never met him."

Have you never been curious how you got a camera from Sammy Davis Jr without having met him? "No, I can't remember. I really can't remember."

It was his uncle, theatre designer Oliver Messel, who knew all the stars. He worshipped Messel. He tells me how, when he was in hospital with polio as a boy, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich would visit him and sing songs. They sang to you?, I say, amazed. "Yeassss. Yeassssss ." He is transported - momentarily.

Did he call her Auntie Marlene? "No, I didn't. I still call her Miss Dietrich." What did she sing? "Boys in the Backroom." He sings a line. "Do you remember that one?" he says nostalgically, looking at Eamonn the photographer.

Hospital, he says, taught him so much. In what way? "By seeing people and being with people who were much worse off than I was." Perhaps, I suggest, this is what gave him an interest in taking pictures of patients in mental hospitals and people with spina bifida. "Well, my grandfather was a doctor," he says, keen to contradict me.

How old was he when he was in hospital? "God knows! I should think 16, what!" Was he in a children's ward? "No." With adults? "No. I was on my own most of the time."

In front of Snowdon is a desk full of photographs, some taken by him, some not. They tell his life story. There is Margaret, bare-shouldered and lovely, her half-moon face fading to black, his astonishingly beautiful mother Anne-Armstrong-Jones in Cleopatra headgear, his grandmother looking like Peggy Ashcroft, his children, the Queen in her majesty, Prince Charles in hysterics, Diana of course, even the Duke of Edinburgh looking unusually civil. Snowdon's critics say that as a photographer he doesn't have a distinctive style. Others have suggested that his skill, whether witting or unwitting, lies in showing the carapace of royal life - there are no inner depths, all is surface. Snowdon likes the idea that he doesn't have a style. That's how it should be, he says, otherwise the photographer becomes more prominent than the subject.

He seems rather lonely here, surrounded by his photographs and doctorates and nameplates.

After Eton, he went to Cambridge to study architecture. He gave up two years into his course to pursue photography. Was that because it was easier? "Yeassss. You see, photography isn't an art." What are photographers if not artists? "Snappers." For the first time in a while, the boyish smile resurfaces.

I tell him that I read he wouldn't get out of bed for less than four figures. "Oh, bollocks!" he says. "Try working for Vogue. Yah ... no money at all. Fifty pounds a page, which was maximum. I didn't make much money when I designed the aviary either." Snowdon's aviary at London zoo is probably his proudest creation. "I got paid £143, and it took me three years." Lucky you had the family around to subsidise you, I say. "Well, yes."

In 1960, when he was 30, he married Princess Margaret. It was a controversial wedding - not only were there suggestions that Margaret was on the rebound (she had been told she couldn't marry Group Captain Peter Townsend because he was a divorcee), but Tony Armstrong-Jones was a commoner. There's not much common about you, I say. "Oh, I don't know." He smiles. It's amazing that they dismissed you as a down-at-heel tradesman when you had lived such a privileged life, I say. The smile disappears. "What a snob you are," he says sniffily.

Dylan, his assistant-cum-servant, lifts him out of his chair and half-carries him into another room to have his photo taken. Suddenly he looks so slight, so vulnerable, like a rag doll. His polio has left him with an increasingly painful lameness. While he is away, I look at a photograph he took of Damien Hirst - Hirst has been elevated to a work of art, surrounded by fish in one of his shark tanks.

Dylan returns Snowdon to the room and lifts him into his seat. I tell him I like the Hirst picture. "Oh God! Yah," he says. Did he not get on with Hirst? "I don't really know him. The thing is, when you take photographs, you meet a lot of people but you don't actually know anybody. It is very quick, in and out, in a concentrated way."

Perhaps that's what appeals to him about photography. So how does he create instant intimacy? "It's being as straight as you can." Honest? "Yes. And it's not always flattery." Though it has to be said he has flattered a good many people over the decades.

Does he have a favourite portrait here? "No," he says brusquely. Anyway, he doesn't like the word portrait. "Too pompous."

What does he think of when he looks at his famous snap of Princess Margaret? "She was incredibly beautiful. Incredibly beautiful." He trails off. "I don't like photographs anyway. There aren't any in the house except here. I don't like them in the house. I would rather have paintings." Despite his insistence that he is lucky and has had a wonderful life, behind the smile and twinkling eyes, there seems to be a bitterness, even self-loathing.

I'm staring at the photograph of Margaret. She looks so mellow, I say, it's hard to believe she was so fiery. Snowdon asks me what I mean. Well, I say, their relationship was famously intense - didn't Lord Lichfield say that when they argued, it was like an exchange of gunfire? Snowdon explodes. "Well, Lichfield would know fuck all about it, so you can tell him to piss orf."

I get the feeling I'm running out of time. So I look at the signed picture of Diana, say it is beautiful and that she was obviously very fond of him. He doesn't respond. So I read him a quote from Diana on the back of Brian Hoey's biography of Snowdon. "Tony is one of the warmest people I know, but like me, he knows what he wants out of life and is determined to get it. He's nobody's fool and his gentle exterior hides a toughness that he has had to learn, again like me."

"I wouldn't go by too many quotes. Now we must go on. Dylan! " Dylan arrives.

"Are we going to be late?" he says to Dylan, beseechingly.

Dylan gives him a look. "Ah yes," he improvises, "we're going to be very late, yes ... "

He is showing me the way out. Rhodri is panicking because we've not yet talked about the Snowdon building. Meanwhile, I'm desperately trying to stop myself being chucked out. Snowdon has invented quirkly little things through his life. Has he got any here? "Oh yes," he says. All hostilities cease. "They're not inventions," he says. "I've done a few optical things. That's one. "He passes me a trompe-l'oeil object - a glass ball. "You're holding it the wrong way," he says with a grin. "You're still holding it the wrong way." I turn it again. "Be inquisitive," he says.

Within seconds, the humour has turned to anger. " No! " he bawls. I ask him if it has been designed to make people feel stupid. "No, most people do it quicker than you. What is it?"

I tell him I can see the world upside down? "Now you're vereh stupid."

Please tell me, I say. I feel like an idiot.

"Well, it's a clock, isn't it?"

Why is it a clock? "Well you're incredibleh stupid."

I feel humiliated. He calls Eamonn to look at the ball. Eamonn spots the clock instantly. And still Snowdon is rubbing it in. "You took longer than anybody else. See how stupid you were."

Please, I say, perhaps there's another optical thing I can look at to show I'm not quite so stupid. "No, not really," he says. "Now I must go. Are we going to be late?"

"We're going to be very late, yes," Dylan says.

Somehow, Dylan has ushered me to the back door without me even saying goodbye. He then leaves to uncork a bottle of wine. "I'm sure you'll be wanting a glass of wine after that, Lord Snowdon," he calls out. It's almost 11.30am.

I return to the study to fetch my bag and shake hands with Lord Snowdon.

"Lovely meeting you," he says, flashing the smile and the eyes.

· The Snowdonia Society is a charitable organisation. Contributions towards the appeal can be made by calling the Snowdon Summit Appeal Hotline on 0800 915 8695, or online by credit/debit card at www.snowdon-summit.co.uk

Summary: He was married to Princess Margaret, romanced many others and made a career as a celebrated photographer. Lord Snowdon can look back on an amazing life. But he seems a little tetchy ... By Simon Hattenstone.


06/01/2014 at 11:00 AM EDT

's latest controversy is no laughing matter.

Newly unearthed footage has surfaced that shows the singer, 20, telling a racist joke and repeatedly using a derogatory slur.

has released the offensive clip, reportedly taken while Bieber, then 17, was filming his 2011 documentary

In the scene, the teen idol wears a smirk on his face as he asks, "Why are black people afraid of chainsaws?" He then follows up with the slur-laden punchline "Run n––, n––, n––, n––, n––."

The regretful clip comes on the heels of the star's multiple and continued

A rep for the singer had no comment at this time.

Summary: The pop star is seen and heard repeatedly using a derogatory slur


06/13/2014 at 09:20 AM EDT

Attention, all dads! Your day is approaching and it's time to get footloose.

In celebration of Father's Day, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie stopped by the

to get down with the "Evolution of Dad Dancing."

Christie and host Jimmy Fallon put on their best high-waisted pants and blue polos for the occasion, breaking out moves like "The Belt Grabber" and "The Republican Convention."

, the pair had no trouble tapping into the caché of embarrassing steps all dads seem to know.

This isn't the first time Fallon has goofed on how parents behave on the dance floor. During his time on

Watch the complete Christie-and-Fallon routine below.

Summary: The New Jersey governor and Fallon don their best high-waisted pants and blue polos for the occasion


Duty is never a good reason for doing anything. It is certainly not a good reason to look at art. Looking at the list of the photographers in Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph, about to open at Tate Modern, the burden of duty, in the end, is all I felt. So many, I would have to look at so many.

Even reading to the end of the exhibition's title feels like a chore. I would have to be troubled by Diane Arbus, moved by Walker Evans, aware of the immense contemporary influence of Stephen Shore, shocked and embarrassed by Boris Mikhailov. I can't face it; I'm not going.

To be bored in advance seems rude. But recently I've had to admit something to myself. I find photography in art galleries, framed and hung on the wall, almost entirely unrewarding. It was never my favourite, but I always thought it was, you know, modern and progressive, something to be taken seriously. The rot set in while looking at an exhibition of classic photographs of New York at the city's Jewish Museum. Here was a great Weegee image of people at the beach at Coney Island in the 1940s. A wonderful picture that I first saw in a magazine or somewhere years ago, and always loved. Here it was, a silvery print, on the wall. It was disappointing.

In frames on the wall is the opposite of the way we experience photographs in real life. In real life, there are photos everywhere. Their significance is unflagged. You read the paper, a picture on page eight catches your eye. You look at someone's holiday photos, one seems touching. Perhaps none of the many photos you see each day means anything to you at all: nobody is saying they have to.

Many would agree that photography is wonderful precisely in its ordinariness, its availability, its functional honesty, and that those who want to set it up as art are the snobs, the enemies of photography. But photography's "democracy" is an illusion. Photography lends itself to pretension of all kinds. Ever since it was invented, photography, the child of science, has been experiencing an "artistic" adolescence.

Even William Henry Fox Talbot couldn't resist giving his account of his discoveries the sub-poetic title The Pencil of Nature. Before you could finish holding the pose for a Victorian photograph, middle-class dilettantes were making sickly sweet religious art and taking pictures of children in the nude. Then came Alfred Stieglitz, the father of American modern art and photography's most pompous prophet: for Stieglitz, there was a fixed gulf between the banality of everyday photography and the preoccupation with light shadow and form of the photographer-artist.

Today, that modernist idea of high art made with the camera has vanished, and the old forms of lens-snobbery along with it. Photography is praised precisely for its lack of distinction, its ease of access, its universality. And yet the pretensions are grander than ever. There is a widespread belief that photography has an apocalyptic destiny in the history of art.

When the camera was invented, the old forms of art - those hallowed hand-made arts of painting and sculpture - were exposed as relics of privilege and stale tradition, dead, ritualised, essentially class- and faith-bound practices, doomed to be displaced by the mass medium of photography. The German Marxist Walter Benjamin argued something like this in the early 20th century.

Today it has become the small change of conversation, an idée reçue, a truth universally acknowledged. We now accept that photography "ended" the cults of painting and sculpture and, I suppose, medals and engraving, and brought about a new, more democratic, more truthful art, one that is appropriate to our culture, that speaks to us. Routinely, people will say that paintings of modern warfare by Dix, Beckmann or Picasso are feeble and deceitful compared to the immediacy of a photograph - even though we have copious evidence going back to the American civil war that war photographs are not unmediated truths but manipulated visual statements.

It bothers me that even after photography has marginalised every other kind of image, even when our culture is saturated by unquantifiable varieties of photographic information, we feel we ought to be speaking up for the photograph, for its invincible superiority to other media. There is a bullying, unquestioning crassness to today's hegemony of the photograph, expressed in a constant need to declare the camera's unique art-historical mission to eradicate all previous art forms. Even when it comes to the great modern exponents of high art, we want to reduce them to photographers. Thus exhibitions have been dedicated to the photography of Degas and Picasso. Neither Degas nor Picasso believed that their photography was high art. Not even Warhol believed his photos were his real art - when he talked about "my art", including giving it up, he meant his paintings. Warhol was the last modernist. That is, he was the last great exponent of a type of 20th-century art profoundly hostile to the photograph. Modernism hated photography. It wanted to be the opposite of photography. The cult of photography today may even be the reason it is currently impossible to make modern art.

Today we can scarcely even grasp what modernism was in visual art- how ambitious, revolutionary, high, how beyond old and new. We want to make modernism more like us, and we do this by reinventing it as photography. Jackson Pollock allowed his neighbour Hans Namuth to photograph him at work in 1950. Namuth's photos have become 20th-century classics, an interpretation, an iconic remaking, of Pollock as artist. In a disturbing way, these photographs have displaced Pollock's paintings: we can't think about Pollock without thinking about the photographs. And yet, they were never more than a record at best, a footnote, with very slight explanatory power. They tell us almost nothing about Pollock the painter. Looking at One or Autumn Rhythm is not made any easier by the existence of these photographs; nor would anyone at the time have expected it to be.

Modernist artists were good at posing for the camera. There are wonderful pictures of Picasso in his old age, like the funny one by Robert Doisneau where he poses at lunch with bread rolls arranged to look like giant hands. This is a nice sub-cubist joke - but you cannot replicate the complexity and richness of a Picasso in a photo. No photograph has ever been made that is as modern, as revolutionary, as the cubist paintings Picasso made almost 100 years ago. Nor will there ever be such a photograph.

Those stumbling attempts at abstract photography, the Rayograms, the photomontages, look so strained. Our art history, corrupted by the lens, gives far too much credence to the flimsy and naive attempts by 20th-century photographers to reproduce the innovations of 20th-century painting. That woman with a cat's face, that other woman who looks like a violin - would anyone really trade any avant-garde snapshot for the least work of Matisse, the most tentative Pollock?

Modern art was not, as we kid ourselves, empathetic with photography. On the contrary, the artists who assimilated and imitated photography were 19th-century academics; Gérôme's paintings of ancient Rome with their chilly verisimilitude are flatly photographic; Bouguereau's titillating nudes have the pallor of the photographer's studio. Banally reproducing appearances while indulging lazy fantasies, "contemporary" in its tackiness while deeply conservative in its emulation of what it thought was Renaissance pictorialism, this is the art that modernism set out to destroy.

Modernism - Seurat's perforated classicism, Cézanne's broken essays - began in the 19th century as an attack on appearances, the received, the apparent. On the photographic.

Photography cannot rival the visual and intellectual fullness of high modernist painting and sculpture. It ends up looking silly. Modernist photography is a curio at best. In truth, photography's great seduction is its verisimilitude, its power of imitation - that is, it does, better than painting, the most conservative thing that painting can do. It is this aspect of photography, I suppose, that Tate Modern means by "the real in the 20th-century photograph". The instant sublimity of Andreas Gursky, the frank exploitation of Boris Mikhailov. What we want from a photograph is what we used to get from painting: a plausible picture of the world. This is great, but modernism denied that it was the function of high art. The dominance of camera-based art today is a confession of our inability to continue, or to face, the revolutionary art of modernism.

It is photography that has reduced our expectations of art to a few stock, one-dimensional reactions: shock and horror, or pity, or lust. In the end, photographs don't deliver more than information - here's something grotesque, here's something funny, here's something austerely impressive. The mysterious and utopian possibilities of Picasso or Pollock are nowhere to be found as you walk through a photography exhibition.

· Cruel and Tender is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 from June 5. Details: 020-7887 8000.

Summary: We tried to get Jonathan Jones  to go to an exhibition of the world's most wonderful photographs. Here he explains why it is his idea of a nightmare.


As a quarter of the electorate, single women are critical to November’s midterm elections.

They could decide where control of the Senate lands this year. Or not. They could show up to vote. Or not, which has been their historical pattern in midterm elections.

Millennials are also crucial to this election. In 2012, they helped Obama nudge his way to the top; their votes flipped four key states to his favor—including Florida. By 2016, they’re expected to make up a third of all voters. Like single women, bands of millennials aren’t expected to vote in this year’s midterm elections.

Single, young and female, I sit at the crucial intersection of these very powerful voting groups. And I’m worried about their nonchalant concessions of power.

But my peers remain indifferent. When I ask them why they aren’t voting, I hear a mix of responses: “What good is my vote?” “It’s just one vote.” “I can’t affect change from here.” “I don’t really trust politicians.” “ I don’t really feel confident enough to make an informed decision.” (That last one is certainly more specific to women.)

I undoubtedly believe that my generation and single women care about what’s happening on Capitol Hill. We’re a vocal and caring group—but we utilize channels beyond Washington: We start movements, non-profits and companies (like I did).

But that’s not enough. We should be voting.

Scratch that. We need to be voting.

Our representatives are deciding on policies that will impact our lives. Many young women will one day become working mothers and workplace policies (as well as institutional incentives to better benefits) will shape how they integrate the two roles. My generation carries crippling education debt and how the government handles that will shape our financial futures.

But ultimately, we don’t have a say if we don’t vote.

By voting, we help elect representatives who can actually represent our interests. Of course there’s the common complaint, “What good will my vote do?” But we have power in numbers—if, and only if, we show up to the polls.

Change isn’t always monumental. It can be incremental, such as a single vote. I started reaching out to women in my network, encouraging them to vote this fall. So far, six are newly registered and promise me they will vote.

Though not huge, it’s a start—and a simple step toward amplifying my, my generation’s and my gender’s vote.

Amanda Pouchot is a social entrepreneur working on a new venture in the education space. She is the co-founder of Levo League, a professional women’s network, launching in its 30th city this fall. Pouchot began her career in the Organization Practice at McKinsey and Company in NYC and currently serves as a Member of the Board of Directors for the UC Berkeley Cal Alumni Association.

Summary: A millennial entrepreneur works to rally her peers to get to the booths during November's midterm elections.


TORONTO — There’s something of a British invasion shaping up this awards season, led by Eddie Redmayne in his first leading-man role as iconic astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”

As the votes start tallying, Redmayne likely will be competing against friend and fellow classically trained actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays another real-life British historical figure (Alan Turing) in the World War II drama “The Imitation Game.” There’s a reason that both are being mentioned in the same Oscar buzz-heavy breath.

“We both play geniuses,” smiles Redmayne, 32, in an interview after “The Theory of Everything” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September (it opens in Boston on Friday). “It’s lovely for me because I keep bumping into Ben [on the festival circuit]. When it’s so crazy, it’s nice to see old friends.”

The two first met when both had minor roles in 2008’s “The Other Boleyn Girl.” In true six degrees fashion, Cumberbatch played Hawking in a 2004 BBC-TV movie (Redmayne elected not to see it so it wouldn’t influence his own performance). It was directed by Philip Martin, who directed Redmayne in the BBC miniseries “Birdsong” (2012).

Redmayne’s oeuvre — he won a Tony for the 2010 play “Red,” starred opposite Michelle Williams in 2011’s “My Week With Marilyn,” and didn’t embarrass himself singing as heartthrob Marius in 2012’s “Les Miserables” — has earned him praise and a teen following (Redmayniacs, in Internet parlance). Still, it didn’t indicate he’d be able to deliver a tour de force performance as Hawking, which recalls Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot.” Redmayne plays Hawking from his days as a Cambridge grad student who woos and marries Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones). It’s a portrait that changes dramatically, of course, when Hawking develops motor neuron disease due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that leaves him paralyzed and unable to speak. And eventually that portrait includes triumph, with the publishing of Hawking’s landmark book, “A Brief History of Time,” which leads to international acclaim.

Redmayne studied art history at Cambridge, and recalls glimpsing professor Hawking there.

“I was lucky enough to go to Cambridge so I’d actually seen Stephen from a distance — the silhouette in a wheelchair — and I’d heard his voice,” he says. “But I gave up science when I was 12 or 13. Then I read this script, about this extraordinary woman [Wilde] and an unconventional love story behind the icon. Every page was a revelation, so I fought hard to get the part. It was a privilege; I mean, a real privilege.”

“The Theory of Everything” is based on Jane (Wilde) Hawking’s 2008 memoir “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen,” which details the joys and complexities of their 25-year marriage. “I didn’t audition,” says Redmayne. “But I had many conversations with [director James Marsh] on the phone. Finally we met for lunch in a pub. I had several pints and I got the part. When Felicity auditioned, he wanted me to be there and I knew all the executives were going to see it. So even though he said I had the part, the audition with Felicity felt like an audition for me.”

Liam Daniel / Focus Features

Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in “Theory of Everything.”

When did panic set in? “It was a millisecond of euphoria followed by nine months of fear,” says Redmayne. “The stakes were high.”

He prepared for five months, working with a team that included a vocal coach, choreographer, makeup artist, and Dr. Katie Sidle, an ALS specialist. Without film footage of young Hawking, who was stricken at 21, Redmayne brought vintage photos to Dr. Sidle and she explained the pace of Hawking’s deterioration.

“There’s both wilting and rigidity with ALS, and it varies from person to person,” Redmayne says. “So she would look at the photos and ascertain where [Hawking] was by the way he was holding his hand or his foot. I charted my way through, and I also met others suffering from the disease and saw the reality of their day-to-day lives. ... Stephen has the most expressive face, even though there’s loss of muscle. I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror next to the iPad trying to access muscles I haven’t used before. So the memory of Stephen is now in my face.”

Marsh, director of the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire,” says he never considered making a Hawking documentary.

“This isn’t a biopic of Stephen Hawking; it’s actually about a marriage. Jane gets the same amount of screen time and a point of view. It’s a portrait of two people and an interesting relationship, that’s the focus. I was intrigued by the emotional lives of the characters. Most of us think we know Hawking — the iconic image of the man in the wheelchair with the strange, robotic voice. But I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know he had children. That’s rich territory for drama.”

For both director and star, one of the most daunting moments of the shoot came when Hawking, 72, visited the set in England. “We sought his approval before we started and, tacitly but not effusively, he wasn’t going to get in our way. But it was conditional,” says Marsh. “He came to the set on day two, which raised the stakes for Eddie. He was already dealing with difficult stuff and then Stephen shows up like a spaceship coming down to land, his face lit by this strong LED monitor. But I think [Hawking] enjoyed the spectacle of it and when we showed him [footage], I know he was moved. He may say he wasn’t, but you could see it had an impact. And he let us use his [computer-generated] voice. He said the film was ‘broadly true.’ I’ll take that.”

For Redmayne, “The Theory of Everything” remains, above all, a love story.

“It’s about passionate love, love of science, love of family, but at same time the cost, the foibles, the complications of love. It’s uplifting but it’s not glossed over. That was important to me,” he says. “When Jane and Stephen saw it and approved and were so generous to us, that meant the world.”

- An emotionally satisfying experience in Toronto

- In Toronto, what they’re talking about at the festival

- Fall movies aim high

Summary: Eddie Redmayne is generating early Oscar buzz for his first leading-man role as iconic astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”


Back during the great Ebola Panic of October 2014, I read the following tweet from Silicon Valley academic Vivek Wadhwa:

Imagine if SV focused on detecting Ebola and developing cures for infectious diseases. Big data, Syn bio, sensors, …all can be combined

— Vivek Wadhwa (@wadhwa) October 16, 2014

To which I immediately thought: Wait a minute. Didn’t venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins try to do this very same thing in 2006, when it raised $200 million for what it called the Pandemic and Bio Defense Fund? According to a press release, its goal was to “accelerate innovations for worldwide pandemic preparedness and global health over the next three years, with a focus on surveillance and detection, diagnostics, vaccines and drugs.”

The fund launched with the announcement of an investment in publicly-held BioCryst BCRX , which later had an emergency-use swine flu drug approved in 2009, and also has been working on an Ebola vaccine. It later would back such companies as flu-focused NovaVax NVAX , which also has an Ebola drug in the pipeline, and Trius Therapeutics, a developer of superbug antibiotics that was acquired for more than $700 million by Cubist Pharmaceuticals CBST .

But that three-year investment period is long past, and Kleiner Perkins never raised a follow-on fund. So what happened? Is this stuff just too hard and/or unprofitable for Silicon Valley venture capitalists to pursue? Must they instead occupy themselves with the bits side of these problems, and leave the molecules to someone else?

To get some insights, I spoke with Beth Seidenberg, a healthcare-focused partner with Kleiner Perkins who helped to manage the Pandemic and Bio Defense fund. Here were some takeaways:

Seidenberg says that she has not backed a pandemic-type company in the past couple of years, as some of her focus has shifted toward healthcare IT, but adds that any future deals would follow the same investment strategy as was used for the Pandemic and Bio Defense fund. “To focus an entire company around a single pandemic is just too risky, even from a venture capital perspective. They are too dependent not only on the pandemic occurring, but also on governments for choosing to purchase their product. They key is still finding a great company that can help fight a pandemic is it occurs but, if it doesn’t, will still do fine.”

Sign up for Dan’s daily newsletter on deals & dealmakers: www.GetTermSheet.com

Summary: Back in 2006, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins set out to help fight pandemics.


Kelly Clarkson performing in 2004

11/16/2014 AT 01:45 PM EST

It's been 10 years since

's "Since U Been Gone" was released on Nov. 16, 2004, which was many, many post-breakup car ride sing-alongs ago.

And as far as broken-hearted power anthems go, we are

never moving on from this Clarkson classic, a glorious homage to the singer's early career – and the many chart-toppers to come.

It's no easy feat keeping up with Clarkson's powerhouse vocals. Trust – we've tried (reference: the aforementioned car rides). But many artists have taken on her Grammy-winning hit, so we're revisiting our favorite covers (mashups included) in honor of a song we can truly listen to again and again (and again and

: You weren't alive when this song was released, but you may need it later.

Summary: We're so never moving on from this Clarkson classic, which was released on Nov. 16, 2004


CEO: Sally Smith Headquarters: Minneapolis Employees: 20,000 corporate, 40,000 franchise The business: Sports bars and grills

You’ll notice the televisions first — no fewer than 40, often topping 60, lining the walls, above the bar, everywhere. The ubiquitous screens are there to make sure you get what you’ve come here for, which is the game, of course. You’ll have two types of servers, a food-order waiter and a “guest experience captain.” The captain will make sure you and your friends can see whatever game you came to watch — even soccer. If you wish, the captain can set up trivia to play. “At Buffalo Wild Wings,” says Conrad Lyon, an analyst at B. Riley & Co., “the food is secondary. The games are the event.” And games tend to last longer than your typical meal, so the average Wild Wings BWLD patron ends up lingering over wings. (Indeed, during the 2011 NCAA basketball tournament patrons consumed some 70 million Wild Wings.) Such consumption is fueling a rapid expansion: CEO Sally Smith says that the chain will nearly double its number of restaurants in the next seven years, with outlets in Dubai and Mexico arriving in time for the World Cup.

This story is from the July 22, 2013 issue of Fortune.

Summary: How to make an event out of a restaurant chain.


I wasn’t on the A-list.

My former brother-in-law recently called me to discuss a housing-related question. During our conversation, he said he was going to refinance his house with a local lender and wanted to know if my office would handle the closing. I said “sure,” but told him he needed to request my law office. We hung up, and I assumed we were all set. I was just waiting for the title order from the lender.

“The bank won’t let you do the closing,” he announced on the phone later that day.

“Why? Let me guess. We are not on their list.”

He affirmed what I had already suspected, so I got the bank’s contact information from him.

The lender’s response was the standard “You are not on our approved-attorney list.” When I asked to be added, I was told, “No, our list is closed.”

“You cannot do the closing since you have no relationship with the bank.”

Mindful of the law on this subject, I explained to her that since the customer was paying the bank charges, it was my understanding that I could do the closing because he requested my office. I told her of our relationship and that my office was going to do the closing for free (I still like the guy). She wouldn’t budge. She did, however, explain that we could review the documents. No kidding.

I’m still annoyed by this, so I wanted to delve into it for you. If you have an experienced real estate attorney, I don’t see why he or she could not do a closing for you regardless of whether that person is on the list. It is my understanding that if you are paying the bank fees, you can chose your own provider of service. In Massachusetts, a loan file must be supervised and closed by a licensed practicing attorney.

Brian Koss, executive vice president at Mortgage Network Inc. in Danvers, said his firm allows one-time approvals if the customer is requesting a particular attorney to close a loan.

But what if your lender denies this request? You have two choices: You can ask for its list of approved attorneys and pick one, or you can find another lender.

If you chose the former, I would call all of the providers, within reason, and ask about their pricing. Although there is some standardization, usually a set fee, I would probably use the provider whose price was right in the middle. I would also inquire about the location of the closing; do they provide in-home service?

In short, if you have an experienced attorney, tell the lender you want to use that office. If the bank denies the request, I would strongly consider taking your business somewhere else.

Summary: Lenders sometimes have lists of approved attorneys. What do you do if your lawyer’s name isn’t on there?


01/22/2015 AT 08:20 PM EST

pleaded not guilty Thursday to allegedly stabbing a man at a bar in Port Washington, Wisconsin, according to his attorney, Thomas Alberti.

Diamond, 37, who's best known for playing nerdy Samuel "Screech" Powers in the early 1990s sitcom, was charged with second-degree recklessly endangering safety, disorderly conduct and carrying a concealed weapon after he admitted he was armed with a knife during a fight at the Grand Avenue Saloon on Dec. 25.

"I'm feeling very positive about the outcome [of the trial]," Alberti tells PEOPLE. "The deeper we dig the more confident we feel about the outcome. The police and the prosecutor provided us with video and witness reports and everything we see completely supports what we said all along happened so we feel very good about it."

Diamond told police the bar fight started after he refused to shake hands with a woman who was bumping into his 27-year-old fiancé. The couple was arrested a short time after they left the bar.

His fiancée, Amanda Schutz, was charged with disorderly conduct and released, according to

Alberti says Diamond is taking everything in stride. "They moved to Wisconsin because they wanted to have a family," he says. "They felt Wisconsin would be somewhere they wouldnât have to deal with their notoriety. They decided at Christmas to go out and then this all happened."

During the hearing, the judge also reduced Diamond's bail amount from $10,000 to $5,000.

Summary: Dustin Diamond's attorney says the actor is staying positive about the outcome


updated 03/09/2015 AT 12:55 PM EDT

•originally published 03/09/2015 AT 12:20 PM EDT

Are you currently phoning it in at your job, groggy and useless after being robbed of an hour of your precious sleep time by the cruel joke known as daylight saving time?

If so, you're not alone, and

is here to expose the lies.

Turns out the practice has nothing to do with farmers, which the show confirms is a thing that most people seem to believe despite there being no actual evidence to support that. Daylight saving time was actually started during World War I as a fuel-saving measure by the Germans.

"That's right," the segment's narrator intones. "You lost an hour of sleep this morning thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm."

And as the show points out, traffic accidents and workplace injuries increase the week after daylight saving, as a nation of already sleep-deprived workers struggles to make ends meet with even less shut-eye.

Fight the real enemy. Fight daylight saving.

Summary: Fight the real enemy – fight daylight saving time


Ever since fast-food workers walked off their jobs in New York City in November 2012 to demand $15 per hour, that dollar figure has been the rallying cry of the low-wage worker movement.

The campaign has had some notable wins lately, as Wal-Mart, Target, T.J.Maxx, and McDonald’s announced increases to their minimum wages.

Despite of all the talk about $15 per hour, there hasn’t been a lot of conversation about who precisely earns less than that figure.

The National Employment Law Project, an organization that supports raising the minimum wage and the unionization of workers, aims to change that on Monday, with the release of a new study that paints a more detailed picture of the worker who takes home less than $15 per hour—or $31,000 annually for full-time work. Here’s what NELP discovered:

1. They’re more common than you might think

It’s easy to assume that workers earning less than $15 is a small subset of the workforce. But, in fact, 42% of all workers in the United States fit this bill. Just over half of all African Americans earn less than $15 an hour, and nearly 60% of Latinos make that hourly sum.

2. They are disproportionately female, African American, or Latino

Even though women make up less than half of the overall U.S. workforce, they constitute 55% of all sub-$15 per hour wage earners. You find a similar misalignment for African American workers, who constitute almost 12% of the workforce but 15% of earners who make less than $15. Latino Americans are overrepresented in the sub-$15 category as well; they account for 23% of sub-$15 per hour earners in the U.S. but only 17% of all workers.

Workers who earn less than $15 per hour are also older than you might expect: 46.3% of them are 35 or older.

3. They likely work in a service industry

Fast-food and retail sales reps have led the push for a $15 per hour minimum wage, and for good reason. A combined 7.7 million workers in retail sales and food preparation jobs earn less than $15 per hour. The occupations that are flush with sub-$15 per hour earners may not be all that surprising, but it’s worth noting that six of the 10 largest occupations with median wages less than $15 are also among the jobs projected to grow the most by 2022: retail salespersons, combined food preparation and serving workers, laborers and freight movers, janitors and cleaners (except maids and housekeeping cleaners), stock clerks and order fillers, nursing assistants, and personal care aides.

The results of NELP’s report—that nearly half of all U.S. workers are making less than $15—”challenge us to think about the future of this country,” says Irene Tung, a senior policy researcher for NELP. Many of the jobs that pay $15 or less are not going away; they’re not going to be outsourced, Tung says. “So either we figure out how to raise wages—a cornerstone to rebuilding the middle class—or continue on the path that we’re heading down, where those workers are impoverished.”

Summary: Turns out it's 42% of all U.S. workers.


The high cost of borrowing continues to deter many companies, particularly industrial enterprises, from selling bonds at this time. Even though it costs 15 percent or more to borrow in the commercialpaper market and a prime-rate bank loan costs 18 1/2 to 19 percent, many corporate treasurers prefer to borrow short-term money and wait for long-term interest rates to decline before selling bonds or debentures.

Consequently, less than $400 million of new corporate issues are scheduled for sale this week. Interest rates for long-term corporate issues are at or near their highest levels ever, and so are Treasury issues that come due in more than five years. Yields on long-term corporate issues are scaled upward from the 13.04 percent yield on outstanding 30-year Treasury bonds.

After a month of heavy Treasury borrowing, which helped increase interest rates for intermediate and long-term maturities, analysts expect the Treasury to confine its financing to the bill market until late in March when two-year and four-year notes will be sold.

Today the Treasury will sell $8.6 billion of bills, evenly divided between three- and six-month maturities. On Wednesday it plans to sell $3 billion of cash management bills due in 38 days. These short-term bills, which are intended to carry the Treasury through its low cash period before the March 15 and April 15 tax payment dates, are sold in minimum denominations of $1 million.

Agency financing this week includes a $500 million issue of fouryear Federal National Mortgage Association debentures, to be priced tomorrow.

In the tax-exempt market, analysts note that last week's new issues sold well, though record high yields were required to attract investors. For example, Aaa-rated Illinois bonds carried yields ranging from 7 percent in 1982 to 8.45 percent in 1991, 9.7 percent in 2001 and 9.85 percent in 2004-06. Analysts say Illinois bonds typically trade with yields that are about the same as New Jersey bonds, or a shade lower for longer-term maturities.

Curiously, while yields increase with longer maturities in the taxexempt market, exactly the opposite is true for Treasury securities. Yields there decline as maturities lengthen. For example, three-month Treasury bills at a discount rate of 14.4 percent have a bond equivalent yield of nearly 15.1 percent, compared with 14.07 percent for two-year Treasury notes and 13.04 percent for 30-year Treasury bonds.

Buyers of short term tax-exempt paper will have a good supply tomorrow, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development sells $1.5 billion of Government-guaranteed local housing project notes. On Friday, according to analysts at Smith Barney, outstanding sixmonth H.U.D. notes were yielding about 7.1 percent.

The following new fixed-income securities are scheduled this week: TAXABLE TUESDAY

Pacific Power and Light, $100 million of first mortgage bonds, due 1991, rated Baa by Moody's. Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. Burlington Northern, $26.3 million of equipment trust certificates due 1982-96, Aa rated by Moody's, competitive. WEDNESDAY

Florida Power and Light, $125 million of first mortgage bonds, due 2011, rated A by Moody's and A+ by Standard & Poor's. Salomon Brothers. TENTATIVE OFFERINGS DURING WEEK

Manufacturers Hanover Corporation, $100 million of notes, due 1991, rated triple-A. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. Fisher Scientific Company, $30 million of convertible subordinate debentures, due 2006, rated Ba by Moody's and BB+ by Standard & Poor's. First Boston Corporation. TAX-EXEMPT TUESDAY

New Jersey, $150 million, rated triple-A. Competitive. Jackson County, Ore., School District 549C, $35 million, rated A by Moody's. Competitive. Orange County, Fla., $22 million, rated A1 by Moody's and A+ by Standard & Poor's. Competitive. THURSDAY

San Antonio, $75 million, rated double-A. Competitive. Harris County, Tex., $28.3 million of general obligation bonds and $20 million of flood control bonds, all rated triple-A. Competitive. Mobile, Ala., Water and Sewerage Commission, $15 million, rated A by Moody's. Competitive. TENTATIVE OFFERINGG DURING WEEK

Kentucky Turnpike Authority, $150 million, rated A by Standard & Poor's. First Boston Corporation. Sebring Utilities Commission, Fla., $90 million, rated cond. A by Moody's and BBB by Standard & Poor's. Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb.


STAMFORD, Conn., March 8— They are each thought to be absolute wizards with words, and last year, as more than 100 of them gathered for the third annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at the Marriott Hotel here, one of the hotel managers got up to explain a few housekeeping rules.

He made two of his four points and then came to the third. ''Next to lastly,'' he began, and then stopped. ''There must be a better way to say that,'' he said.

''Penultimately!'' the puzzlers seated in the grand ballroom shouted at once. And with its usual exacting humor, the contest got under way.

This weekend, with some new additions, they were back for the fourth annual tournament, the nation's largest public competition in what is, for most of them, a private obsession with the witty and pedantic possibilities of the English language. At least, most of them were back.

Daniel Pratt, who won first place last year, did not return to defend his championship. He was said to be at a Scrabble contest, a report of disloyalty that produced mixed emotions.

''To me, that's hilarious,'' said B. J. Krintzman, who had come from Massachusetts, where she is managing director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. She was having a drink with some others in the hotel bar. Revered for Her Puns

''To me, that's insulting,'' said Maura Jacobson, smiling thinly. A constructor of puzzles for New York magazine and an author of puzzle books, Mrs. Jacobson is revered among puzzle devotees for her puns. She constructs puzzles for this national contest and is still remembered for one in which there was this clue: ''post-Watergate Nixon.''

Answer: ''Mopy Dick.'' Mrs. Jacobson is one of only five or fewer people in the whole country who successfully make a living from the construction of their favorite hobby, the crossword puzzle. This fact emerged at lunch yesterday, between rounds of competition, when someone asked how many people were able to make puzzling their vocation. ''Don't you mean their livelihood?'' she said. ''There's a difference, you know.'' Mrs. Jacobson and such puzzluminaries as Will Shortz, who persuaded Indiana University to let him construct a major in, and take a degree in, Enigmatology - the study of puzzles - like to mention a Gallup Poll in 1974 that found that more than 40 million Americans work at least an occasional crossword puzzle.

According to Doug Heller, a puzzle magazine editor, crossword and other word puzzles published in newspapers, magazines and books are constructed by a volunteer assortment of perhaps 600 people of various interests, ranging from a state judge in Arkansas through convicts in various prisons to at least some atomic scientists.

Many of them do it free, just for the satisfaction, an ardor that tends to cool the commercial possibilites of puzzle-making. The eight puzzles by which the creme de la creme was separated here this weekend were commissioned for a total of just $490. A Challenge for Most

And even among people who claim to solve The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in from five to 35 minutes - and who came from as far as California to compete - some of these puzzles were a challenge.

The tournament took place at 48 green-clothed tables in the ballroom in a competitive atmosphere so intense that only the noiseless rush of the air-conditioning could be heard along with the rub of erasers from those who are accustomed to penciling in their words. But there are some who sniff at pencils, spurning them for the glide and challenge of a pen.

''I find that I can't maintain my interest when I use a pencil,'' said Joel Darrow, a Westchester County resident who works as a money manager and computer programmer in New York. ''With an eraser, it's like working with a net.''

And so Mr. Darrow, who wears large-framed glasses with his hair in an explosion of cloud gray curls, searches out particular pens for their ''speed, clarity of line, and ability to write legible letters with small hand movements.'' Some Caught by the Clock

On the fifth puzzle, a 20-minute stumper ridged with vague clues and obscure terms, Mr. Darrow had been finished for seven full minutes and was comfortably propped up with a book of science fiction when Mr. Shortz, the moderator, called out, ''Time's up.'' But Herbert Norman, of Cedarhurst, L.I., and Vicki Scher, of Flushing, Queens, were caught.

''Ooohhh,'' the crowd groaned when Mr. Shortz called time. ''That was brutal,'' said Mr. Norman. ''What happens is you think you're so bright and then you come here, and everyone else is so bright you begin to wonder about yourself.'' He had not thought of ''alsike'' for ''pink clover'' and he couldn't figure what five letters should have gone in 13 Down, for ''kind of martini.''

''I put 'olive,' '' Mr. Norman said to Miss Scher. ''I don't know,'' he sighed. ''Very dry? What did you put?'' ''Vodka,'' she said. Vodka it was. There was another puzzler yesterday afternoon, one of Mrs. Jacobson's. It was 24 Across, ''squeaky-voiced czar,'' for which the answer was ''Ivan the treble.'' Field Narrowed to Three

And then, after the last general elimination puzzle this morning, there were just three of them left competing for the championship: Mr. Darrow; John V. Chervokas, the executive vice president of a Park Avenue advertising agency, and Phillip M. Cohen, of Aliquippa, Pa., a computer consultant and devotee of British cryptic word games.

Working on transparent plastic sheets projected onto screens for the audience's benefit, the three strained silently through ''tuque,'' ''xenia,'' ''swab'' and ''houyhnhnms'' (''the horses in 'Gulliver's Travels' '') and on into ''CDVI,'' for which the clue was simply ''a fifth-century date.''

Mr. Cohen, who said he did not work American puzzles and had never entered a tournament before, could not get that last one. But he got most of the rest, and won. Mr. Darrow was second and Mr. Chervokas third.

Margaret Farrar, who for decades was the first crossword editor of The New York Times and who maintains a working eminence in the field, gave out the awards, and this closing comment, based on something another old hand had told her: ''Norton Rhoades is in his 70's, and he said he thinks puzzles are nutrifying. Well, so do I, because I'm way ahead of him. I'm going to be 84, any minute.''

Illustrations: Photo of Phillip M. Cohen, working on puzzle Photo of helicopters being manufactured


STOCKHOLM, Dec. 10 (AP) - Nine of this year's 10 Nobel Prize winners have sent a cable to Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, expressing concern over the fate of Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and human-rights activist, the Swedish news agency T.T. said today.

To ease Dr. Sakharov's conditions ''would become an important step in restoring normal scientific relations between East and West,'' the cable read.

The cable was signed by the winner in economics, James Tobin; the winner in literature, Elias Canetti; the physic laureates, Kai Siegbahn, Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Schawlow; the winners in chemistry, Raoul Hoffman and Kenichi Fukui, and by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel, two of the three medicine prize winners.

There was no explanation why the third medicine laureate, Roger W. Sperry, did not sign the appeal. Dr. Sakharov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his human-rights work. ----

OSLO, Dec. 10 (UPI) - King Olav V presented the 1981 Nobel Peace Prize today to the office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, whose chief, Poul Hartling, said the $181,000 prize money will go toward medical equipment for disabled refugees.

Illustrations: 6 photos of nobel prize winners from America (Page A1)

Summary: NOBEL WINNERS SUPPORT SAKHAROV   STOCKHOLM, Dec. 10 (AP) - Nine of this year's 10 Nobel Prize winners have sent a cable to Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, expressing concern over the fate of Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and human-rights activist, the Swedish news agency T.T.  said today.   To ease Dr. Sakharov's conditions ''would become an important step in restoring normal scientific relations between East and West,'' the cable read.


PRINCETON, N.J.— Clyde Woody, who has lived in the historic black neighborhood here for 36 years, was chatting recently about the latest offer for his two-and-a-half-story house.

''A white man came by the other day and offered something in the 60's for it,'' recalled Mr. Woody, a retired auto worker, as he sat on the narrow portico of the white clapboard house at 13 Green Street. ''I told him I wasn't interested. He asked would I be interested if the offer was in the 70s. I told him no because, I've got nowhere else to go.''

Mr. Woody is one of a number of black homeowners in the area known as Witherspoon-Jackson who in recent years have been offered sizable sums for their homes by whites.

At least 15 white families have purchased homes in the area in recent years. And some in Princeton, both black and white, fear this will mean irreversible changes in the neighborhood, which was home to Paul Robeson, and the disappearance of a black presence in Princeton that dates to the Colonial era. Search for Middle-Income Homes

Unlike ''gentrification'' efforts by those who restore deteriorating buildings in their search for inexpensive housing, the white influx into Witherspoon-Jackson, with its small, neat homes, stems from a desire for affordable middle-class housing in this increasingly expensive university center, about 50 miles from New York City.

Those concerned with the change emphasized that they had no desire to keep whites out of Witherspoon-Jackson, since there has always been a minority of white homeowners in the neighborhood.

They also say they have no evidence of a concerted effort to remove blacks from the area. But they fear that as the number of elderly black homeowners decreases by death and as more sell to the highest bidders - who, most often, are white - the neighborhood will lose its character.

''It is really a matter of economics,'' said Joan Hill, a Princeton native who is president of the Witherspoon-Jackson Development Corporation, which is helping blacks finance the purchase of homes in the neighborhood. ''People want single-family homes, and this neighborhood has the lowest-priced housing in Princeton.'' Community Viewed as Magnet

Princeton, which is within relatively easy commuting distance of New York and Philadelphia, ''is a magnet community that draws many affluent people,'' said James Floyd, a former Township Committeeman who in the early 1970's became Princeton's first black Mayor and also its first Democratic Mayor.

''Unfortunately,'' he went on, ''few of those affluent people are black.'' The demand for homes in Witherspoon-Jackson (named for two of its original boundary streets) developed in the mid-1970's as the pace of business development in Princeton accelerated and as the average price of homes in other parts of the borough and township soared past $125,000.

Offers for homes in the black community, which are primarily of the two-story wood clapboard or stucco style, have been between $50,000 and $70,000, according to Mrs. Hill and several real estate agents.

Adding to the demand is the fact that the neighborhood is just north of the Nassau Street business district and Princeton University.

Blacks constitute about 10 percent of Princeton's combined population of 26,000. Princeton is made up of Princeton Borough, a 1.7-square-mile area that includes the Nassau Street business district and the university, and Princeton Township, a larger and more suburban surrounding area.

In a recent article, The Princeton Packet, a weekly newspaper that has reported extensively on the changes in town, noted that the 1980 census had shown an increase in blacks in the total Princeton area but a decline of 32 percent in Witherspoon-Jackson.

''The cost of housing here has gone up tremendously,'' said Ellen Clark, an agent of the Henderson Realty Company in Princeton. ''The demand is for the central borough area, and that demand is going to change neighborhoods.''

Mrs. Clark, who lives in a moderate-income apartment development in Princeton Township, added, ''I don't want to see the black community disappear, but anybody who has the money has the right to buy.'' A Sale to White Family

Myrna and Peter Bearse, who are white, bought their home in Witherspoon-Jackson, at 110 Leigh Avenue, for $36,900 six years ago. Most of the longtime homeowners on Leigh Avenue are black, but there are several white families that have lived there for years. The Bearses bought from a white family.

Mrs. Bearse is an advertising copywriter for a local advertising agency. Mr. Bearse is director of economic development for a Philadelphia corporation. They have two girls, aged 7 and 10.

Asked why they had chosen the home, Mrs. Bearse said that after considering its price and proximity to the center of Princeton, ''we had positive feelings about the community and the people.''

''It seemed like a good place to raise our children,'' she said. ''Our positive feelings have proven to be correct. ''We knew were moving into a predominantly black community, but it wasn't anything we saw as a problem. The people who sold us our home said they had had a fine relationship with their neighbors, and so have we. We're all neighbors here.''


By Anatole Broyard HOW IT FEELS WHEN A PARENT DIES. By Jill Krementz. Illustrated. 110 pages. Knopf. $9.95.

''I WAS playing a game with my three sisters in the living room when we heard a loud bang.'' This is an 8-year-old boy telling us how his father shot himself at the age of 29. He is one of about 20 children Jill Krementz photographed and interviewed for ''How It Feels When a Parent Dies.''

The boy, whose name is Jack, said that his father must have known he was going to shoot himself because he had paid all the bills the day before. Jack's family thinks his father is in heaven, but he's not sure. His grandmother and his aunt say that his father shot himself for their sake, because he was sick, but again Jack is not convinced.

For three months, he didn't talk to anyone, and then one day he said to himself, ''Jack, you might just as well relax and don't think about him and just live your life.'' He does keep his father's colognes in his room, though, because he liked the way he used to smell. Heartbreaking Things

Miss Krementz has a way of inducing, or allowing children to say heartbreaking things. One girl of 15 did all of her crying secretly, on horseback. A boy of 8 went around the house turning out all the lights after his father died. A girl of 6 says that, after she lost her mother, she didn't like going to the bathroom all by herself in restaurants or museums.

''I know what you must be going through - here, have some brownies'': This is what adult friends said to an 8-year-old girl whose father was killed in a car crash. She believes it would have been easier if he had had a long sickness so that they could have grown used to the idea of his dying. A 13-year-old girl whose mother died when she was 6 admits that she resents people who keep telling her how well they knew her mother, as if it were a competition. Once, this girl says, she dreamed that her mother was lying at the bottom of a closet. A 15-year-old boy thinks it's worse to have a parent who hates you than to lose one.

Many of the children interviewed by Miss Krementz feel ashamed in the face of bereavement, as if it were a personal deformity. They talk about being teased or stared at and they have a sense of embarrassing their friends. A common complaint is that friends don't seem to be able to act natural with a child who has lost a parent. Surrounding by silence and constraint, the child feels doubly isolated in the world.

A boy of 16 whose mother died asks his father to stop smoking, observing that ''there's no one else after you.'' A 15-year-old boy who lost his mother says, ''Now I know I can take just about anything.'' A 16-year-old girl remembers that when she was 11, her paralyzed mother was so thin that she would go with her mother to stores and try on dresses intended for her. Differing Attitudes

Some parents protect their children against the last stages of terminal illness by not letting them go to the hospital. Some even keep children away from the funeral. Families seem to differ widely in their attitudes toward cemeteries. One girl feels that the cemetery is not a fair representation of her mother. She would rather recall happy scenes. Another family finds the cemetery a lovely place and picnics there.

A common complaint of these children is that the surviving parent doesn't talk enough about feelings. It seems that death almost always leaves children groping for words. In ''How It Feels When a Parent Dies,'' Miss Krementz has helped them to find and pronounce the words. Reading them, we are reminded once again how much children know and how well they can tell it if we will listen.

Illustrations: photo of Jill Krementz


WASHINGTON, April 25— Richard Richards, the Republican national chairman, wants his party to start changing the mechanics of Presidential campaigns, especially to shorten them and to curb ''independent expenditures'' by anyone other than candidates or parties.

Mr. Richards said in an interview that he would soon appoint a special committee to look into several problems with the existing system and to consider some possible solutions. The panel would report to the Republican National Committee later this year, he added.

Mr. Richards indicated that his efforts were aimed not only at making specific changes in the political process but also at ending the Democrats' near monopoly on changes in the system.

Either through changes in their own party rules or through their control of Congress, Democrats have been almost entirely responsible for the ways in which the Presidential election system has changed in recent years. Republicans have generally gone along without significant protest, sometimes turning the Democratic-inspired changes to their advantage. Independent Expenditures Opposed

One of the changes that has helped his party's candidates was singled out by Mr. Richards for criticism when he attacked the ''damned independent expenditure system.''

According to preliminary figures of the Federal Election Commission, independent groups and individuals spent about $15 million on the 1980 elections, most of it on the Presidential campaign and nearly all of it in support of Republicans.

''Sure, we benefited more than the Democrats did,'' he said. ''But if it's not a good system then you can't justify it by who benefits.''

Mr. Richards said that the system, under which such groups as the National Conservative Political Action Committee spent more than $3 million last year, was ''fraught with mischief'' and contended that candidates could be hurt when uncoordinated spending designed to help them was overdone or done badly.

Moreover, he said the independent groups did not make it clear enough that they were not formally associated with the candidate. ''I think candidates and parties ought to be responsible for running their own campaigns,'' he added. Shorter Campaigns Favored

The party chairman said he had no particular ideas about how to curb such expenditures, which have mushroomed since recent Supreme Court decisions treated them as constitutionally protected free speech.

But on another complaint, the duration of the Presidential campaign, he said the special committee should consider such alternatives to the prolonged primary system as regional primaries and the greater use of state party conventions to pick delegates for national Presidential nominating conventions.

He contended the current system was ''just a killing pace for candidates and for everyone else.'' Among the other topics he identified as worth a hard look by Republicans were open primaries, in which voters of any party and independents can vote in any party's Presidential primary that they prefer; the $1,000 limit on individual campaign contributions, which has not been changed since 1974 despite rising inflation rates, and the practice by television networks of ''forecasting results before the polls have closed.''


CANTON, Nov. 6— There is a huge amusement park here, with half a dozen outdoor theaters, a roller-skating rink, shooting gallery, Ferris wheel, aquarium, and in the trees hang gaudy lanterns. Young lovers can be seen kissing in the dark and groups of men kibbitz excitedly around players of Chinese chess.

People are trying to have fun again in China. Canton is special, practically a border town touched by all kinds of foreign influences not yet felt in the interior. But the scene is a startling show of how much things have turned around in a couple of years.

It is still almost impossible to grasp the enormity of what the Cultural Revolution and the preceding fits and starts of radicalism alternating with a little relaxation did to this country. Yet that is the background against which the attempt is now being made to stabilize the nation and focus on producing, with a minimum of ideology.

No one knows for sure, but some experts say that 3 million people died in the Cultural Revolution, including suicides as well as killings. Even worse in terms of national ability to move forward is the loss of human skills and training - older people rejected and incapacitated, youths who learned nothing but shouting and abuse.

''All the old cliches are gone,'' said a Western veteran of Peking. There are flies again, though not many; there is crime; there is unemployment, becoming particularly worrisome in this society where a person's whole life is regulated and administered by his or her place of work.

One sight is unchanged, though. The children still look wonderful, healthy, well-tended. I never saw a ragamuffin anywhere, nor a child with sores. That is extraordinary in a poor country, even in the poorer parts of rich countries. Fathers coddle their offspring in public as never before. The injunction against more than one child per couple seems to be taking hold, at least in the cities, and it is changing emotional habits.

Families can be seen taking their ease. They go sightseeing. Thousands of foreigners plod through palaces and gardens daily, but now they are hugely outnumbered by Chinese on outings to admire old monuments and famous scenic views. You have to leave Peking at dawn to get to the Great Wall without being stopped in a day-long traffic jam. The past gives pride again.

Many Chinese have acquired cameras and they pose stiffly for one another alongside a latticed window or a stone lion. Damaged sculptures and crudely defaced ancient inscriptions bear witness to how recently all that was old, refined and cultured was anathema. But there is so much, and now it is cherished.

At the Historical Museum in Peking, a guide apologized that the only catalog available in English was ''obsolete'' and has to be rewritten. It was published in 1976 and the text is largely a diatribe against Confucius throughout the ages. He hasn't been rehabilitated yet, but much else has, including foreigners, whose role in China has described as much of a zigzag as that of Confucius.

It is amusing to find pale-faced, long-nosed figurines from the early medieval T'ang Dynasty in the delightful provincial museum of Xian, alongside the superbly modeled courtiers, maidens, horses and camels. They represent merchants from Asia Minor who plied the Silk Road, and one curly-haired fellow looked remarkably Greek. The Chinese-Western relationship goes back very far, and it has been stormy.

Invariably, Western visitors are addressed as ''friends'' now. But in the classic Chinese opera, which has been fully revived, the makeup for heroes and heroines is rosy, for villains stark white, and for clumsy ne'er-do-wells a patch of white around the nose and mouth shading into darker tones at the edge of the face. Tradition dictates the meaning of color.

The handful of Americans and other Westerners who were early sympathizers with the Communists and stayed to live through it all seem a sad vestige of sour illusions now. One couple, Sol and Pat Adler, who established themselves in Peking during the Joe McCarthy witch-hunts in the United States, still seemed hard-put to grasp their experience.

Said he, with a toss of his long yellow-gray hair, ''It was easier to know from outside. We knew nothing.'' Her large, round blue eyes shining, she said, ''Well, partly one wanted to believe. It was progressive.''

There are no more ready absolutes in or about China for those with a yen for certainties. On the day news of Ronald Reagan's victory reached Peking, a Chinese newspaperwoman asked, with bewilderment in her voice, ''But if he is so much against Soviet expansion, why doesn't he care more for the alliance with China?''

She was reminded that there is no U.S.-China alliance. That was taking things too far. She persisted, ''Good relations, that is.'' It seemed to her that Americans had to choose, and their dislike of any style of Communism could only be secondary.

The sights and sounds of China are extremely varied once again. The monolithic veneer has cracked.


TANGLEWOOD On Thursday night, the Cleveland-based Baroque ensemble Apollo’s Fire makes its Ozawa Hall debut with “A Night at Bach’s Coffee House”; Friday night, the BSO opens its summer season with an all-American program that includes Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” with Jessye Norman narrating, and Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F with Kirill Gerstein (above) as soloist (Jacques Lacombe conducts); Sunday afternoon, Keith Lockhart leads the Pops, joined by Bernadette Peters; and Sunday evening the TMC Orchestra has works by Britten, Brahms, and Sibelius. Lenox. 617-266-1200, www.tanglewood.org

ASTON MAGNA In a program titled “Wind Power,” the festival offers works by Schubert, Boccherini, and Mozart. With Eric Hoeprich (period clarinet), Stephen Hammer (oboe), Andrew Schwartz (bassoon), Todd Williams (natural horn), and Daniel Stepner (Baroque violin). July 2, 7 p.m., Brandeis University’s Slosberg Auditorium. 800-875-7156, www.astonmagna.org

Summary: Jeremy Eichler’s picks for noteworthy classical music events in Boston and the surrounding area this week.


FORTUNE — To gauge the striking revival in the Big Apple’s economy, you could pick from a wide variety of statistics or symbols, from the ascending graph of Manhattan coop prices to the throngs of foreign tourists packing the 7 subway line to the U.S. Open. We modestly suggest a more telling barometer: what we’ll call “The Steakhouse Index.” That’s our take on how those great, extremely pricey, expense-account-sensitive purveyors of prime aged beef and creamed spinach are faring a half-decade after the onset of the financial crisis.

This writer’s survey is more atmospheric than scientific, as it consists of witnessing the traffic and ambience while dining in late August at three renowned Midtown steakhouses and interviewing their owners and maître d’s. The institutions, ranking among the top-grossing restaurants in America, are Del Frisco’s DFRG Double Eagle Steak House, the ultimate hangout for financial power-players across from Rockefeller Center; Porter House New York, a virtual neighborhood canteen for the corporate elite in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle; and Smith & Wollensky, a bastion of tradition in a turn-of-the-last-century, white-and-green lattice home at the nexus of the ad industry on Third Avenue.

The managers and owners of all three steakhouses agree that business still hasn’t returned to the heady levels of the mid-2000s and perhaps never will. “We’ve just seen too many controls on spending by companies to get back to the heyday,” says Scott Gould, regional manager for Del Frisco’s Restaurant Group. Still, the spending at these culinary landmarks has rebounded strongly since the financial crisis — retracing at least half the distance from the bottom — and they’re thriving even though Midtown now supports several more steakhouses than during the boom times.

MORE: Energy’s unexpected jobs boom

The sizzle is back for two reasons. First, big banks, ad agencies, and law firms are finally, though judiciously, re-loosening their wallets for entertaining. Second, hordes of affluent foreign tourists, lured by the weak dollar, are filling tables on weekends and late at night following an evening at a Broadway show.

Among Manhattan business folk, the steak dinner is as much a staple for entertaining clients as the power breakfast. And tourists have long prized a visit to the Palm or Smith & Wollensky as a must-dine experience. But in the bubble years, the extravagance buried all tradition. “Groups of four investment bankers would order five bottles of sparkling water, and six appetizers, along with $250 bottles of Bordeaux,” recalls Gould. Servings of Del Frisco’s Royal Ossetra caviar flew off the menu. “It was a time for huge shellfish bouquets, colossal stone crab claws, and oversized steaks,” marvels Michael Stillman, president of Fourth Wall Restaurants, manager of Smith & Wollensky.

In late 2008, the unbridled revelry stopped. “It happened really quickly, over a couple of months, and business dropped around 20%,” says Stillman. At Del Frisco’s, it wasn’t that the number of customers dropped, it was what they spent. “The difference was in the drop in orders for high-end luxury items,” recalls Gould. “Diners would get glasses of water instead of bottles, and three appetizers instead of five.” It was clear that companies were getting frugal, imposing tight limits on what they’d pay for each person for an expense-account dinner. For Del Frisco’s, the problems plaguing the banks weren’t entirely bad for business, since the law firms handling their new regulatory problems started spending more freely than ever on its prime strip steaks and crispy Shanghai calamari.

MORE: The death of private equity’s fee hogs

Porter House opened at the height of the party, in late 2006. “Diners would be looking out through our big windows at 15 Central Park West, one of the world’s most expensive residences, being built. The new owners would come in to celebrate the closings,” says Michael Lomonaco, the restaurant’s executive chef and managing partner. Then, the world changed, and so did the menu. Steakhouses sell lots of expensive red wines. In the downturn, says Lomonaco, “we dug deep to find more value in wines.” He introduced an array of Argentinian, Spanish, and Italian offerings at far lower prices than the traditional Bordeaux. “Malbec became the grape of the day,” he says. Porter House even appealed to newly budget-conscious patrons by adding tasty-but-plebian hanger steak and skirt steak to the menu.

At Smith & Wollensky, Stillman’s biggest worry was that the whole celebratory appeal of the steakhouse experience had disappeared. “We’re not a health food restaurant,” he says, “people come in for small celebrations, like closing deals.” He refers to the steakhouse élan with the Italian term “abbondanza,” for abundance or extravagance. “Part of steakhouse lore took a hit,” Stillman continues. “People felt uncomfortable indulging, they had a new sense of propriety because of troubles in the economy. It’s a meal to let loose, and letting loose felt uncomfortable. That takes the edge off the classic steakhouse devil-may-care atmosphere.”

Today, the élan is back. At 6:30 on a recent Tuesday evening at Del Frisco’s, the place was packed, with most diners in suits and ties, and surely on expense accounts. Gould notes that though business clients still aren’t spending as much per person as at the peak, the tourists from nearby hotels fill the tables on weekends and after Broadway performances.

MORE: KKR vets get more time to raise new fund

At Porter House, the clientele is less business folk entertaining clients and more the affluent who live nearby. On an evening there late last year, this writer spotted Goldman Sachs GS chief Lloyd Blankfein, former Citigroup C chairman Dick Parsons, ex-Barclays BCS CEO Bob Diamond, and political pundit Dick Morris circulating among fellow luminaries. “Business really picked up in the fourth quarter of 2012,” says Lomonaco. “It was a double-digit improvement over the bottom.” Foreign visitors who shop their way to the Time Warner Center’s fourth floor discover the Porter House and walk in sans reservations. “I’ve never seen this level of foreign diners, especially steak lovers from Brazil and Argentina,” says Director of Operations Anthony Mardach. Lomonaco has even dropped the bargain hanger steak and added a $53 boneless strip.

Stillman says Smith & Wollensky is holding more corporate parties for the thirtysomething set who work for private equity firms and tech companies that recently arrived in Midtown. And individual diners are spending a lot more than three years ago — a tribute to the durability of steakhouse allure. “They’re more sophisticated diners,” he says. “They want to know about how long the steaks have been aged. They want to know about high-end Spanish wines, and wines from Oregon. They’re a lot more savvy about how they spend their money. They want to know whether we’re using local ingredients.” It wasn’t the same sense of whirlwind, shared experience when folks were settling for a small Caesar salad, he says.

That old steakhouse spirit, and most of the spending, is back. The steakhouse splurge means New York is back. And if the Big Apple is back, well, that’s got to be good for the whole steak-and-potatoes country.

Summary: What the sizzle at some legendary chophouses says about the New York economy -- and maybe the nation’s, too.


aren't afraid of a challenge – or a battle. And for their new daytime talk show,

, the hip-hop supercouple are coming out swinging.

"Our family motto is we never attack but we retaliate," says Ice, 57, making that message to the competition clear: Watch your backs next week. Just like in the hard-edged rap lyrics that made him famous, the

star even name-checks a few of his. It's only fair that Ice and Coco feel like they've earned their stripes for a little constructive trash-talk – they had to attend daytime boot camp before getting the greenlight for the Fox series.

Below, the couple – who announced Monday that they are

– reveal what goes on in talk-show basic training, plus how their dog's and of course Coco's formidable derrière will play into the new show.

I was really anti-reality [before

], so they were like, "Let's do a talk show." Then before we got to do the talk show, they talked me into doing a pilot for the reality show, and it came out so good that I was like, 'As long as we don't have to be mean and do dumb stuff, we'll do it.' The reality show was good and at the end of three seasons, I was like, 'Okay, enough, let's get back to our real life,' and they were like, 'Look, you're so hot on television, let's do ... a talk show.' Everybody believes that Coco and I can really pull this off. We went to talk-show boot camp out in L.A. where they gave us some pointers and stuff, and we're just going to take a swing at it. We're just going to take a go. It's really, a lot of people believe we can pull this off, so now they got me believin' it. [

They kind of sit you down like a school, and you have to run through all the talk shows that are on TV. You run down everything from cue cards to teleprompters. I didn't know how detail-oriented talk shows were. You think you just go up there and you just ramble and you just talk, but it's a little more than that. They had us actually in front of a camera doing our thing. We had fun!

I've been on hundreds of talk shows, I've just never hosted 'em. So you do learn there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. Once again, we just went there and did our thing, and they were like, 'You did incredible, it was amazing.' Okay? Cool.

I'm glad you think so!

I think it's funky just because of who we are you know like we're not a normal couple. It's more like a rock n' roll marriage, you know. It's a lot of flavor, it's a lot of coolness that you might pick up from the show that you don't get from

or one of your normal talk show hosts. I think it's gonna be a little more interesting especially with me because I'm off the chain, nobody knows what I'm going to say say next.

We compare ourselves to Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne a lot.

Yeah, that's one of my idols, Sharon. She does it all, she's a very powerful woman, you know she doesn't do what I do, but she does the business side of it, which I like to do. And I model myself after her, you know she has a crazy husband that's totally off the wall, and she just sticks by him no matter what – that's me too.

Ozzy's the illest guy in rock n' roll, you know. I'm on the top 10 of the craziest people in hip-hop, so we got a very similar type edge going there. But I don't watch daytime television, I have a job, I work and, you know, I think daytime television is really for women. I've never seen a guy in the audience, for somebody like Wendy [Williams] or something, so I'm gonna try to bring a male edge to it. I watch Steve Harvey, he does his thing and stuff, so I think it's good to have a counterpoint now with a married couple just going out there having fun, and I think the key with Coco and I is our chemistry.

I'm pretty open book, I'm also the kind of person that will say, 'That's none of your business,' too, you know. What we're going to do is we're going to continue some of the stuff that you didn't see in reality show – we're gonna take you in and let you see the house now that it's complete. We're going to let you see Coco's shoe closet–

That no one has seen before, I've been keeping that a secret.

Our second bulldog Maximus is now huge, he has a daughter. You're going to see a lot of people from the reality show you'll see Soulgee, you'll see the dogs, you'll see Coco's sister, little Ice. The reality show still had one level of separation, we're going to drop that level so now you're not only watching

– you're talking to them.

Oh it could be a whole episode, I could tell you that.

They're going to be roaming around on the set. You'll see them as we tape. We wanted to make the same vibe as the reality show and transfer it to a talk-show vibe. You're going to see the dogs and Maximus' daughter is Marco Andretti's dog, which is a good friend of ours, so he's going to be on the show. [It's] very family-oriented, anybody can watch the show.

The cool thing about it is the people that are actually helping us do the show actually come from

– imagine that. They're really trying to break the walls and do something totally different and something that's crazy and fun with us. The dogs are just going to roam and do what they do because you can't control a dog. If you're guesting and a dog gets into your lap, we're going to see how you handle that.

As long as they don't say nothing crazy about us on Twitter, we are very positive. Our family motto is, "We never attack but we retaliate." Spartacus and Max are very very cool dogs and we would much rather be friends than foes, so have 'em come on the show and they can share a bone.

Well I think everything that I bring to the table is Coco-fied, you know, naturally. With me, I just, like, do radical things. Ice is kind of the onlooker, and he just kind of watches while I do, like,

-type things. I'm the adventurer, I'll try everything out. I'm the crazy one. I always Coco-fy it in some type of way. So whatever they bring to me activity wise, I'm going to go Coco-fy it.

Well we are going to talk a lot about fitness and what I do, but I think I really need to touch on that because that's the No. 1 question I get on my website, and I'm trying to take everything that I get on my website and take it to the talk show and really make segments out of them so I'm sure the ass thing will come up many times. [

You know what, we've gotten over the

hump – when she first came out that was the big thing, and then she did the doctors and they sonogrammed it and stuff, and after everybody realized that Coco is a f---ing fitness freak so they just gave in. Now they've gotten past that and they've just gotten into her fitness regimen. Either way, we're gonna see what happens! We're ready. We hope you are.

premieres Aug. 3 on Fox stations in select markets (check local listings).

Summary: The reality veterans bring their quirky marriage to the new show Ice & Coco, starting Aug. 3


07/28/2015 AT 08:00 PM EDT

Nepotism usually works the other way around.

But when it came time to cast actors to play his parents on his new Netflix comedy

found no one who could do the job better than his own mother and father.

"I found my father to be uniquely funny in the role. [And] no one else felt like my real mom," Ansari told reporters of his mother, Fatima, and father, Shoukath, at a Television Critics Association panel at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on Tuesday.

"[Executive producer Mike Schur] pulled me aside one day when we were shooting and said, 'Hey, we have this thing for your parents. Do you think your dad and mom would want to do it?' And my mom was just, like, 'No. I would never do it.' And my dad was, like, 'I'm in,' " Ansari said.

But this isn't the first time Ansari's father, a gastroenterologist, had expressed a desire to become an actor.

Shoukath had visited the set of Ansari's last show,

numerous times and bent the ear of

"Whenever I would leave the room, my dad would pull Alan aside and be, like, 'Hey, what about writing, like an old, Indian gastroenterologist into the world of

Ansari said his father did a "great" job and is featured "a lot" in three episodes of the upcoming series, but there may be one downside to Ansari's dad becoming a working actor.

"There are a lot of people in North Carolina with stomach trouble going, 'Where is my doctor?," joked Schur.

is slated to debut Friday, Nov. 6 on Netflix.

Summary: "I found my father to be uniquely funny in the role. [And] no one else felt like my real mom," Ansari said


07/27/2015 AT 11:45 PM EDT

On Monday night's season finale of

's two final suitors picked out a ring and prepared to propose.

, and the two made their public debut as an official couple on the live

This wasn't Viall's first time making it to the final two on

: He also came in second place while courting

on the show last spring.

The two-time runner-up sat down with Bristowe on Monday night on

for the first time since she sent him home.

"You know, that day you wake up and you think you have all these reasons to be confident," said Viall of how he felt going into the proposal day. "I don't know when you finally knew [that you were sending me home] but you certainly knew when I got out of the limo. And I show up, and I start talking and I pause – and you kind of let me continue."

"I just felt like those words that I said to you, once you knew, they were no longer meant for you. They were meant for someone that felt the same way that I felt about them," he added. "That moment I had – those words I said to you – I will never get that back."

While Viall said he knows that Bristowe didn't "mean anything malicious by it," he was still open about his confusion.

"I just don't quite understand what the heck you were thinking," he said. "Like, 'Well there's no good way but this is the best way to break his heart'?"

Bristowe said she completely understood where Viall was coming from.

"I did [care for him deeply] and it was excruciating," said Bristowe. "A part of me thought, should I go to you in the morning? Or will it be just as hard five hours later? I didnât really know. â¦ When I look back, I'm like, should I have done it a different way?"

When Viall asked her how she feels now, she acknowledged that she thinks she should have handled the break up differently.

"Yes, I probably should have," she said. "But at the same time I had so many thoughts going through my head."

Clearly still searching for answers, Viall did circle back in their conversation to ask if Bristowe thought allowing him to pick out a ring, think of a proposal speech and go through the whole speech was the best thing to do when she knew she was ultimately going to send him home – but when time began to run out on the live show, Viall made a point to cut himself off and end the talk on a more positive note.

"I do want to wish you the best," he Viall.

Bristowe thanked him and the two shared a hug.

As for the newly engaged and now former Bachelorette, Bristowe was all smiles and giggles when fiancé Shawn Booth sat back down with her to conclude the show.

"Honestly, we woke up this morning just being like, 'it's Christmas!'" exclaimed a giddy Bristowe.

"We honestly just want to start living life," she continued. "Being around family, being around people that we love, being around that love us."

Shawn Booth and Kaitlyn Bristowe on the cover of PEOPLE

Summary: The Bachelorette's Kaitlyn Bristowe sat down with her runner-up on Monday for the first time since sending him home


The low rates, however, were not enough to boost mortgage volumes: applications to refinance a loan fell a seasonally adjusted 3 percent on the week, and are down nearly 57 percent on the year, according to the mortgage bankers survey. Applications to purchase a home—a closely watched indicator of the housing recovery—fell 4 percent on the week and are 17 percent below year-ago volumes. This does not bode well for home sales as the market moves from the traditionally robust spring season to the slower summer months.

"The lack of movement on mortgage applications even with a significant drop in rates confirms what we have seen for much of the past five years. Namely, that lower rates alone are not enough to generate home purchase activity," said Guy Cecala of Inside Mortgage Finance. "Home prices, mortgage underwriting, employment, and a basic belief that it is a good time to buy home are major factors that seem to influence home buying more than rates."

Read MoreUK housing boomcools amid 'mortgage prison' fears

Spring was a disappointment for home sales due in part to bad weather. Some believed pent-up demand would surface later, but signed contracts to buy existing homes in April were essentially flat from March and down about 9 percent from April 2013. It begs the question, why are more Americans not taking advantage of lower rates to buy homes?

The answer may be that many people are struggling with their personal finances. A new survey from the MacArthur Foundation, conducted by Hart Research Associates, found that while the public may believe the housing crisis is improving, many respondents do not feel personal relief with their monthly housing costs: seven in 10 believe the U.S. housing market is still in the middle of the crisis or that the worst is yet to come.

Summary: Mortgage rates fell last week, and in an unusual convergence, so did applications for refinances and home purchase loans.


Netflix, Amazon.com and other shares with high multiples and high growth have recently retreated, a negative sign for the market going forward, strategists said.

Investors should rotate out of these momentum stocks and into steadier, more value-oriented names, according to Savita Subramanian, head of U.S. equity and quantitative strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

"Momentum, by definition, tends to work very well until it breaks," cautioned Subramanian, noting that going back to 1986, peaks in momentum stocks were followed by bigger losses over the next 12 months.

Since reaching an all-time high in May, the S&P 500 is off by 3 percent.

But, Netflix and Amazon, two of the market leaders this year, have seen their shares fall 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively, from their highs.

Below is what to buy instead...

Summary: A drop in "momentum" stocks is flashing a warning signal for the whole market, according to strategists.